Catherynne Valente - Deathless

Baba Yaga sucked her tongue. “She’s right! Have her if you still want her, Kostya. I give my blessing with both hands. She’s a sneaking, lying, dog-murdering thief, and she looks just like me! I’ll even dower the bitch.” The old woman sat with a satisfied plop at the map-strewn desk, putting out her cigarillo on a sketch of the countryside.

Hot tears fell down Marya’s face. “I didn’t know where she’d send me. I didn’t know the dogs would be there—”

“But once you got there you killed them all and took the egg,” pointed out Baba Yaga. “Knowing exactly what you did. My poor, bereaved brother raised those dogs from pups.”

“Koschei, say something!” Marya pleaded. “Why don’t you speak to me?”

“What should I say?” Koschei said softly, his voice dark and grinding. “It should be clear that the egg was not my death, since my sister has made lunch of it. Why would I ever have told you where I hid it? Of course you would go after it. You can’t help it. Tell a girl something is a secret and nothing will stop her from ferreting it out.”

“You lied to me.” And she meant it all. The egg, the Yelenas. The insult to her girlhood. Everything.

Koschei’s face betrayed no expression at all. “With good reason, as you can see.”

“You cannot condemn me for betrayal—a betrayal connived by her, contrived by her!—if you lied to me yourself, and about more than the egg.”

Koschei cocked his head to one side curiously, like a black bird. He rose and crossed the room to her, taking her face in his long fingers. He gripped her jaw tightly. “Have I condemned you, Marya Morevna? Have I called you faithless?”

Marya wept bitterly, an unlovely, shattered kind of crying that strained at the bones of her face. When tears slipped over her scar, they sizzled and burned. “You left me alone to do all those awful things myself without seeing you, without talking to you. I saw the factory, but I couldn’t see you to ask how you could keep those girls, what you would do with me if I disobeyed.”

Koschei studied her, his black eyes roving. “Of course I left you alone. Wedding preparations are the province of the bride. Should I have shepherded you like a father, so that anything you did would not be your own deed, but mine? I have no need to prove myself worthy of myself.”

Marya jerked her chin free. “But what have I to prove? It should be you wrapped up in Zmey Gorinich’s coils, proving that you are not a monster, that you are worthy of me !”

“Have I not proven it? Have I not taken you out of your starving city and fed you, clothed you in fine things, taught you how to listen and how to speak, brought you to a place where you are a mistress, a tsarevna adored and worshipped, made love to, your skin dusted with jewels? Did I not dower myself? Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand? And as for those girls, they belong to me, and that should terrify you. It should cow you and keep you gibbering and silent at my feet, like a beaten dog who knows what’s coming to her. Yet you still shout at me and rip your face from my hands and call me unworthy. You come to me dressed like my sister, with my death in your coat. No matter that it is not my death. You thought it was. Why do you do these things, even knowing that those girls sew away at my armies through this very hour?” Koschei wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. Marya shut her eyes against him, her lover, her death, her life. But she was afraid, too, of all of the things he could be. “I will tell you why. Because you are a demon, like me. And you do not care very much if other girls have suffered, because you want only what you want. You will kill dogs, and hound old women in the forest, and betray any soul if it means having what you desire, and that makes you wicked, and that makes you a sinner, and that makes you my wife.”

No. I do care. I will get what I desire by all the tricks I know, and what those girls in the factory desire, too. You are mostly right, my love. But still wrong. She could say none of it, but she saved it in her chest, where it did not need to be spoken.

Baba Yaga chewed off the tip of her thumbnail and spat it at them. “She kissed the leshy, you know. And not a nice kiss, either. She used her tongue and tasted his mud.”

Koschei pushed Marya away to stare at her coldly. “Is this true?”

“Yes.” She felt no shame on this score.

Koschei smiled. His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue. When he pulled away, his eyes shone.

“I don’t care, Marya Morevna. Kiss him. Take him to your bed, and the vila, too, for all it matters to me. Do you understand me, wife? There need never be any rules between us . Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other’s blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts beneath us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death—let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret—and I will serve you a meal of myself, served on a platter of all the world’s bounty. Only do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me, and no empress will stand higher. Forget the girls in the factory. Be selfish and cruel and think nothing of them. I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. I will have you in my hoard, Marya Morevna, my black mirror.”

Marya trembled. She felt something shake free inside her and drift away like ash. She reached up to him and gripped his jaw in her hand, digging her nails into his cold flesh. She would make her gambit; it was all she could do. “If you want me, Koschei Bessmertny, tell me where your death is. Between us there must be no lies. To the world we may lie and go stalking with claws out, but not to each other. It is only fair: You know where my death is, at the point of your knife or between strangling fingers or in a glass of poison. Show me that you can rest in my hand like a chick, small and weak and knowing that I could crush you if I wished it, but that I will not, will never. You owe me this, on the bodies of all those Yelenas, all those Vasilisas—and you owe me their bodies, too.”

Koschei said nothing for a long while. His face floated above her, impassive, unmovable.

“Don’t do it, Brother,” sighed Baba Yaga.

“A butcher in Tashkent guards my death,” he said finally. “I left it in his care when I came for you. It sits in the eye of a needle, which sits inside an egg, which sits inside a hen, which sits inside a cat, which sits inside a goose, which sits inside a dog, which sits inside a doe, which sits inside a cow, and the cow lives with the butcher, very beloved of him and his children. His sons ride upon the cow who contains my death and slap its rump.”

Marya kissed him hard, as if to drag out the truth, and the fringe of her black coat brushed against his chin.

Chairman Yaga sat back in her chair. She lit a new cigar, and spat.

“I guess some people would call those vows,” she grumbled, but the crone smiled, showing her brown teeth, still stained with golden yolk. “Weddings give me gas.”

A cold wind began to seethe through the windowless room. It picked up speed, circling like a racing horse, whirling around and around, riffling through maps and papers, prickling skin, blowing hard and fast until it screamed by Marya Morevna and Koschei and Baba Yaga alike, snatching at their clothes, their hair, stealing their breath. Koschei raised his arms to shield his new wife. Baba Yaga rolled her eyes.