Author: C. E. Murphy
Category: Vampires
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I said “Hah” beneath my breath, because certainly no daughter of Baba Yaga’s was also a princess, no matter how the old witch might hope it. She would grind my bones and drink my blood, if she thought I was Ana—
I stumbled, spilling water, and Baba Yaga leapt backward with a hiss. Leapt all the way into her mortar, and glowered at me from above. The soil darkened around her pestles and paints, water soaking in. I looked at them, then at the long-nosed hag who was my mother. I was fair, strawberry-haired, blue-eyed, and young. She was as brown as the earth, scraggly-haired, had eyes like black buttons, and was far too old to have birthed a girl my age.
“Forgive me, Mother. I stubbed my toe. Will I grind your paints for you this morning?” I knelt beside them, uncaring of the wet and mud, to continue the dirty work she had begun. My twisted foot, the one I claimed to have stubbed, was easy for her to see. I felt her eyes upon it for a moment or two.
“Clean the house and cook my dinner,” she ordered, and I knew I was safe for another day. I dared not look up, though, not until I heard her mortar whistle through the air and the whssht of her birch broom whisking away her tracks.
Even then I kept my head down, my gaze fixed on the blood and mud that made up Baba Yaga’s paints. Red blood, brown blood, drying blood, flaking and making a sick taste at the back of my throat. I knew that taste, and the scent that rose with it, too well. And yet I could not know it: never in my childhood had I been hurt, never had I slaughtered animals or been present when my mother ate up children or men to satisfy her hunger for fatty flesh, only seen the bones as they danced to their place in the fence around the hut. That she did these things, yes, I knew. Mothers threatened naughty children with Baba Yaga, as I had been threatened in my youth.
My mother, Baba Yaga, would not threaten me with herself. I dropped the pestle and clutched my skull instead. The red iron smell of blood clung to my fingers, and pain seared my belly. A hand went to my ribs, to the soft flesh beneath them. To the scars that lay there, white marks against white skin. Some round, others long and thin.
A child who had never been hurt could have no such scars.
I put my forehead to the ground and clenched my fingers in the dirt. Perhaps Baba Yaga had fed on me. Perhaps she had dug her long nails into my innards and sucked them out, the liver, the kidney, the spleen. Perhaps she had filled those spaces with magic, magic which I had felt stir in me for the first time this morning. Perhaps this was how one became a witch, first be born the daughter of one, then have all the insides eaten up so there is room for the magic.
Baba Yaga had done a poor job with me so far, if that was how it was. I could remember the number of summers I had seen: eighteen, and this was the nineteenth, and it seemed to me a witch should come into power with her woman’s blood.
But the only blood I had now was in the paints I mixed, and those must be done before my mother returned. I lifted my face from the soil, feeling it stick and choosing not to brush it away. I would be dirty with the land of my mother, and perhaps draw more magic from that than she had given me of her own.
In summer the sun climbed the sky forever, shadows growing short but never disappearing underfoot. Nor did the sun ever reach an apex as it does in storybooks. It always offered an angle, a slant that made light softer here than I had read about it being in southern lands. But it reached its noon height with the same confidence in Russia’s summer as it might anywhere else. I looked up, rubbing a mud-bloody hand across my face, and saw a flash of crimson on the sun.
A rider, like the white man this morning. A rider in red, all red, his horse a battlefield steed, and the man with a cloak that spread wide like flaming wings. He reeked of power, of the strength of a mid-day sun, and I drew that strength down into myself until it filled my chest and burned my lungs.
I knew the air, then. Knew the air and the wind and the breezes of Russia, knew them as they climbed the tall cold mountains and as they swept across the eastern steppes. Knew them as they carried cold from the far wintery north, and knew them from the distant sandy south. They carried to me all the knowledge of my country, all of its sorrows and joys, and that knowledge nestled within me, making a place for itself in the heart of the white strength that had come on me with sunrise.
I pressed a hand to my chest and gasped. When I could breathe easily again I lifted my eyes, but the red rider was gone. I had not expected him to be there, but I thought my mother would have expected it even less. I stood from the paints that I had mixed and went to the chicken-legged hut to clean, to cook, to mend, and to wonder at the power that contracted with every beat of my heart. Power that I felt was natural to me, though of course it would be: my mother was Baba Yaga, after all. But this was different from just the magic coming to life. This was confidence born and bred in my soul, trained under the loving and hard eyes of a Mama and Papa who believed that even—perhaps especially—those who ruled must also serve.
A papa. Baba Yaga would never suffer a father in her hut, and everyone knew that her children were the children of men she later ate. I stopped washing the dishes I was washing and turned away, eyes closed so my soul alone could guide me. One step, two steps, five, and that was as many as could be taken in Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut without finding something to lay hands on.
A blanket. Ugly, worn, used and washed a thousand times, it had a name stitched into it: Grigori.
I spoke without thought, for I remembered the name, almost. “My dear friend. Our dear friend. Oh, we have missed you, dear Grigori!” Passionately said, though I barely remembered the wild-eyed man it belonged to. I could hardly recall why such sadness rose in me at the thought of his death. I did not know him, did not know why thinking of his dying made me fear my own. As if they were linked somehow, Baba Yaga’s daughter and—
—and Baba Yaga’s son. I gazed at the blanket in my hands, shocked by the knowledge. The scrap of cloth had not belonged to one I would call brother, but one I thought of in a very different way indeed. I had been a young woman when he died, no more than five years ago now, and I had wept as though my heart was broken. No, that had not been the death of a brother, that pain which I had felt.
Beyond the hut’s windows the afternoon sun faded into twilight as I stood unmoving with Rasputin’s blanket. I looked out a final time as grey shadows crept free of the trees, and this time was unsurprised to see a third rider leading the edge of those shadows.
A black rider this time, all in black, his steed a magnificent shade of night. He rode toward me swiftly, more swiftly than sense could say, and in the last moment his horse leapt the bone gate and the chicken-legged hut and he disappeared above me, but winter’s darkness fell in his wake.
Its chill settled in my bones and crackled them from within, as the frozen lakes might crack, or as a tree invaded by frost could burst. That too was of my land, so much of it desolate and wild, and it belonged inside of me as much as the wind’s whispers or the long days of summer did. It completed me, finished filling empty spaces I had not known were empty, and as those spaces swelled and cracked, so too did the thickness of thought which had hidden all my memories from me.
“Alexei.” The name was a moan in my mouth. My brother Alexei, precious child, so dangerously ill. Shot in the head, as were my sisters, because the nightmares were no nightmares at all, only memory forcing its way through the spells Baba Yaga had cast.
There was no question of why, as I began to remember myself. Perhaps a white dragon came in the night to save me from the Bolsheviks, or perhaps that too was a story told to me by Russia’s mother witch. Either way, it did not matter. I had nearly died, and I lived now because of her. She was a mother to me as much as Alexandra had been, and perhaps she had been wise to wash away my memories. They came on me hard now, a remembrance of things I had done and moments we had shared: the snowball I had thrown at Tatiana, after packing it around a stone. My cousin Nina, younger than me but also taller, for which I could not forgive her. How at the opera I had stained my
white gloves with chocolates, too eager for them to remove the gloves.
And how my sisters and mother and I had wept over Grigori Rasputin’s murder; how as a small child I knew I was loved and yet not the son my parents had prayed for; how Maria, two years my elder, and I had run together as The Little Pair; how we had put on plays during our captivity to make the family laugh and forget our troubles. How in defiance I stuck my tongue out at Yurovsky, our captor, when he turned his back and left our room.
How the next night we were murdered, all of us, and only I survived.
There was no dinner cooked when Baba Yaga returned home, only me, her daughter Anna, once known by another name, now standing alone in a small room and holding the baby blanket of a man I had loved. I had thought she would be angry, but she swept in and the door banged behind her. When I did not flinch she said, “Ah,” and took the blanket away from me.
No. Did not take it away, but wrapped it about my shoulders like an embrace. Thus held, I found a seat and huddled in it, imagining the blanket to be Grigori’s arms. He had been so kind to us, our dear friend. He had come to us when Alexei’s bleeding would not stop, and he had saved our beloved little brother time and time again. He had extolled us to the virtues of prayer, of lady-like behavior, of, and only now did I think this strange, only now did I see it as the influence of his mother and not of Christ, of a passion for the earth and growing things and the connectedness of life in one thing and another.
I had been young when he died, only fifteen. Young, but not unaffected by his appeal. Not his beauty: he was wild-eyed and wild-bearded, but also wildly charismatic, attractive far beyond the physical attributes he had been granted. I would have stayed in his arms more happily than I hunched in his blanket, but the blanket was something: it was something. Baba Yaga left me be, making dinner herself, ground bone in dry bread, marrow and mutton to soften it. In time I ate what I was given, drank what there was to drink, and wondered at the dryness of my eyes. There should be tears, not hollowness, but perhaps time had muffled that as well.
“What did you see in the sunrise, daughter?”
“A rider.” There was no sense to be had in not answering: Baba Yaga saw all, and I could not hide that I had seen something indeed. “A white rider, and at noon a red one and at night a black one. Who are they?”
Her black button eyes were wicked with interest. “They are my rising dawn, my love. My blazing sun and my darkest midnight, and they travel with me through all of my days.”
“Why have I never seen them before?”
She clacked her iron teeth together and through them chattered, “You were a child.” Then she pushed a book into my lap. A grimoire, bound by brass and locked with magic. She touched its lock and it snapped open, pages thickening and rustling as they were freed from compression. Power sparked within them, life and magic and secrets, all the things that I had known they contained, but had never felt in my bones. I had read this book and many others while I had lived in the chicken-legged hut, but they had been storybooks to me then. Now as I turned the pages they spoke to me, stirred me in my belly and beneath my skin. They told me how to draw power from the elements, from the wood and the metal and the sun and the stone, and with each turning page the emptiness inside me filled.
Filled with magic and with memory, clarity returning to me so that I knew the life I had led, so that I knew the faces and thoughts and touches of those who had shaped my childhood years. Again and again Grigori Rasputin, Baba Yaga’s son, came to my mind, touching, guiding, caressing, so that I became a vessel for the power that he and his mother wielded. For the power that I too would wield, when my studies were done.
Baba Yaga left me again at dawn, but I did not care. I watched her go, saw the white rider in the sunrise again, then clutched Grigori’s blanket around my shoulders and read further on. At noon I became hungry and set the book aside to find a meal.
And to see the red rider coming to me across the stream and over the fence of bones. He rode beautifully, as if he and his horse were one creature flowing sinuously toward me, until the horse was gone and the man was at the door, knocking thrice, and offering an insouciant grin when I opened it.
No. He was not a man on a horse at all, and I laughed that my eyes had ever seen him that way. There had been no horse, not ever, only the illusion of a creature too large to be a man for all that he walked in a man’s shape. A man on a horse was all I had known to see him as at noon yesterday, but I saw more clearly now. He was red, though, red-haired with jade eyes, and a warm burnish to golden skin, and when I opened the door he said, “You are a jewel, the crown of the Russian empire, and I would like to woo you.”
I could not help myself: I laughed. No man had ever said such a thing to me before, nor did I think one ever would again. “Would you, now?”
“I would,” he said quite cheerfully, then looked back over his shoulder, returned his gaze to me, and still pleasantly, said, “but hastily, my dear, because Baba Yaga will eviscerate me if she finds me here.”
I put my hand on his chest, keeping him from entering. I felt the heat in his blood, though his skin beneath his red red clothes was cool, and I said to him, “How does a witch, even such a witch as Baba Yaga, eviscerate a dragon?”
The sweetest pain I had ever seen crumpled the red dragon’s face. Only for an instant, and then his jade eyes were merry again, and his sweet voice breathless: “The daughters of Baba Yaga will be my undoing. Let us say I don’t care to risk it, my sweet. She’s captured me once, and I’m still fool enough to cross the ocean and Russia’s borders for the girl she calls her own. You are Ana—”
“Anna,” I said firmly, because the other name belonged to a girl who had died and was not yet resurrected.
A beat of silence before he agreed: “Anna. You are not meant to have survived, Anna, so I couldn’t resist returning when I learned Baba Yaga had another daughter.”
“I am her only daughter.”
Sorrow wrenched his face again. “Yes. Now you are.”
Wariness crept up in me and I was glad I had not let him in. “What happened to the first?”
“I’m afraid I did. Myself and a friend of mine. But she happened to us first,” and he spoke it not as an excuse, but as a matter of fact. “On the other hand, we sought her out, so we may have gotten what we deserved. Baba Yaga’s daughters are not to be messed with.”
I remained wary, but could not be afraid. “And still you came to me?”
He smiled, full of rue. “My heart demands it.”
“You cannot possibly love me. We have never met.”
“No,” he said, so forthrightly it was impossible to be offended. “Love? No. But I can want you just for being what and who you are.”
“A jewel in your hoard.”
“A crowning jewel.” He was a dragon: I knew that from my mother’s grimoires, and from the new magic coming to life within me. He had no reason to apologize for that, nor, I found, did I have any reason to be affronted. I had no wish to be his jewel, but a certain delight pounded my heart and warmed my hands.
“Take me into the sky, then, my Blazing Sun. Fly me through the sun’s arc and we shall see what you may have of me then.”
A breath left him, quick and eager. He fell away from the door of Baba Yaga’s hut, and the force of his transformation knocked the bone fence to the earth. He offered a great clawed hand, and I leapt from the door to his palm, then scrambled up to hold a red dragon between my legs.
He surged, flung himself skyward, and in a beat or two of mighty wings I saw the edges of mighty forests, the small villages nestled within them, the distant smudge of Moscow on the horizon. Higher, higher, he took us still, until all of Russia spread beneath me, and I thought the other one did not fly so high. That dream came back to me, the same powerful muscles beneath my body, the same rush of cool air tangling my hair. But he had been cautious, the white dragon who had taken me from the Bolsheviks and to Baba Yaga, whereas this red dragon flew as though
he had no care in the world. He was power, raw and ready, where my white rider had been gentle and circumspect. I leaned forward, pressing my hands against and into flexing scales as though I could draw forth the heart of him, take the blazing sun’s very heat into my hands and own it. Warmth flushed me, built inside me, and sizzled my skin. I raised my eyes to see that we flew so near the sun I could capture it in my hands. I reached, I stretched, I took it into me, a hot burst of pain and pleasure, and when we tumbled to the distant earth I lay tangled with a dragon, his cool flesh rich and gold against my milky white. He touched my breasts, my belly, kissed me and sought the pounding warmth between my thighs with eager fingers, but I caught his shoulders and held him away with the strength of a farm girl when he sought to put himself where his fingers had explored.
And then he was wary, though even in caution, humor lit jade eyes. “You do not,” he enquired politely, “happen to have a red diamond necklace that you wish me to give me first, do you? No? That’s something, at least.” He rolled away when I pushed him, and lay beside me with an expression of curious interest. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a woman fly with me and then refuse me.”
“Will you eat me now?”
A sly look came over his face, and though I had not lain with a man, an idea of what he was thinking came over me, and I laughed. Then he stood and offered his hands, and we flew together back to Baba Yaga’s hut, where the burning sun faded toward the twilight hour. “I’ll wait as long as I dare,” he said to me as I climbed the chicken legs up to the hut. “I’ll come again tomorrow at noon, and perhaps you’ll have me then.”