Excerpt: Not an Excerpt, a Whole-Ass New Deathless Story (Patreon)

Well, see, we were going to do this whole thing with Deathless this year to mark the...11th anniversary as we couldn't swing it in time for the 10th and thought it was funny in our own weird way to have an 11th anniversary anything. 

But then Russia became a thing no one felt great about and we shelved the idea for what I expect is probably ever. 

Which means I wrote this whooooole new story in the Deathless universe and never got paid and it's probably not going to be in anything. But I don't want to publish it officially in case someday we DO want to do an anniversary thing. 

So I'm just gonna give it to you. The whole thing, complete and finished.

Is it good? I have no idea. It was very hard to get back into the headspace, and that was before the invasion. 

But it's yours now. And I hope you like it.

***

The Girl Who Kept Time in a Samovar

In a village in the mountains that was once called Buyan, then the Country of Life, then Irkutsk, then, much later, the Country of Death, but that everyone whose blood answered truly to those mountains simply called Home, there stood a long, thin house on long, thin legs.

It is a very old house. It is a very famous house. But it is still just a house, as a story is just words and a tsar is just flesh.

And every house has a domovoy.

Even this one.

Listen to me, for my name is Zavarka, and my hat is grey, and I am older than all your grandparents who are not domovye and therefore suspicious. I am smarter than any human, because my soul is a house, and when your soul is not a house, the snow can always find you, no matter how you try to run.

I have been sawing over the boards of my brain for a long time on the subject of what story to tell you. Everyone else has had their chance to talk. Some were clever, some were not so very clever as they imagined themselves to be. If you don’t know which was which, pshaw, it is not my problem.

But now it is Zavarka’s turn, and what will she say? She has seen much, much more than any of the other sad milk-guzzlers in this book. She knows much more. But she does not caremuch more, because when you get this old, you get an exemption from caring about mortal things in the post and everything is much easier and less stressful for you from then on. I am small. I do not have much room in me for the ache that comes with caring so much about so much.

Oh! Her? Don’t you worry about that! Only one babushka here and lucky for you, it is Zavarka.

The mistress of this house is not at home.

Between you and me and the hollows under the floorboards, she hardly ever sleeps in her own bed anymore. Of course we miss her, she’s great fun. But we understand. Why wait for a fool with the scent of Russian on him to stumble upon your magic hut when you can sit behind a desk in Minsk and a hundred will fall over themselves begging you to swallow them whole? Besides, it is not so wise to let on you have a house in the country nowadays, no? You are safe enough for now. If the house hears her hoofbeats approaching, you will know. It will shiver all over and turn pink with delight from sill to rafter and immediately start sudsing the flagstones and polishing the brass so she will love it again and never leave.

Disgusting. You never tidy up for me.

Oh, very well. Also I will make a sound like a teakettle if my mistress crosses the treeline. I don’t know what you’re so frightened of. Is your name Yelena? Vasilisa? Ivan? Then hush it and stop getting in between an old lady and her long-winded blathering. I won’t get to the point any faster if you keep whining about wanting to live and see your family again and not get eaten by Baba Yaga. Boo-hoo! Only thinking of yourself.

Where was I?

The morning was crisp as rye bread to-day, the day when I went up to the roof of my beautiful darling house to ask my friends what story is most important to say to people, who cannot even manage to stay in this world long enough to know the difference between virtue and a bowl of free soup. If I had my way I would talk of nothing at all but the marvelousness and coziness and cleverness and toothsomeness of my house!

But that is very frivolous. I know it. You needn’t shame me. Zvonok did not go on and on about the handfeel of the taps on her sink. Yes, yes, she is better than me. I have gotten too wild out here where there are no neighbors and my house moves through the woods like a wolf. There was a war. There is a war. I did not fight. Shut up. What right have you to ask? It is a dirty sentence, full of curse words and spittle: what did you do in the war?

I lost everything. I died with everyone else and now I have to live like everyone else. What the devil did you do?

And now what?

Now what?

Now there is such loneliness. We all turn in our ration card at the dispensary and collect our daily share. It makes a sound, if your ears are not stupid. A sound like thick ice cracking and moving in the dark. I never go to the city where it is so specially loud, but I hear it still, all the way across the mountains and the rivers and the marshes. It keeps me waking in the night, like cicadas.

But oh, come, come, you are my guest, so you must indulge me a little, or there will be no tea for you and you will deserve your thirstiness. The roof of the Izbushka, the house on hen legs, is luxurious like a horsewoman’s gown. Plenty of fresh straw, but over that, a nice thick slab of moss with violets and trout lilies and rose roots nodding in the breeze like obedient students in school. The chimney crooks up like a broken branch, but it is not in the least broken. It puff-puff-puffs the rich cologne of birchwood smoke. Sniff it! Sniff deep! Nothing better in any city-factured shop! But then, my ears tell me there are not so many perfumes on the shelves just now. Too bad. Sniff while you can.

Zavarka has lived all her life in this house. Naturally. How could it be otherwise, when I am what I am and not some other beast? Ah, look! A little apple sapling is trying to grow out of the peak of one gable. Silly, brave thing. Doesn’t it know the axe is coming? It is only that I am very lazy. Give up now, tree. I will get to you some January or another.

I sit and smoke my pipe on the roof. Puff goes the chimney; puff goes the me. I enjoy the soft breathing of the Izbushka, the gentle shuffling of its chicken feet. You would not believe how this hut can run. But not to the city. Never to the city. So how can I know so much about so much?

Ah, well, no great mystery. It is the birds who carry the world to Zavarka like a tiny squirming screaming mouse in their claws. I will tell you something now if you tell me something later: in any story (and everything is a story) you must always watch for the birds. They’re always behind it all. Now that you know you will see them everywhere, peeking, rustling, their eyes flashing in the dark between the pages.

So I sit and I puff and I say to the lark: what story can I tell that will matter now?

And the lark opens its little brown wings and answers: the people want stories of love. Give them a little silver-and-ruby trinket containing a time when Koschei and Marya Morevna were so happy they almost forgot the hurt with which they bought that bauble.

Pfft, get off my roof, I tell the lark. Those two had one bed where their two brains should have been. Besides, to hell with love. Love is the fool of every tale. The youngest of three sons, and the elder two are Bravery and Wisdom. Both worth more by nine in the morning than their no-account brother all day.

So I sit and I eat a mushroom off the moss and I say to the grouse: what story can I tell that will mean anything to a human? You know they only want to hear about themselves.

And the grouse shakes its round fluffy belly and answers: the people want stories of battle. Give them a patriotic hymn about the Great Victory that will remind them to die when they are told to, and die singing.

Tscha, throw your fat rump out! I tell the grouse. I used to think like that, when I was a child and life was a toy and death a joke. Now I think the only part of a war story it is not obscene to tell is what came after. How it was cleaned up. How it was buried. How it was used. How its bones and its organs and its ashes were made into soup to feed the next era. How it was made savory enough to do all over again sooner than not.

So I sit and I stick out my tongue for raindrops and I ask the blue thrush: what story can I tell that will stay when this hut is cut up and made into both holodets and doors for collective apartments and I am nothing but a nursery song?

And the blue thrush preens its sleek feathers and says: the people want stories of magic. Tell them how Koschei the Deathless was born, spill all his secrets, how he learned to hide his death when no one else can.

Gah, bake yourself in a pie, I tell the blue thrush, you’re not even Russian, what could you know about anything? What are you doing here? I’m serious, get in this crust, I don’t need advice from pie-filling.

So I sit and I pick my toenails and the birds keep coming, more and more of them, butting their beaks in to my big moment.

Tell them my life with Olga, said the rook. Everyone loves tales of the countryside at peace.

Tell them my life with Tatiana, said the plover. Everyone loves tales of rich ladies’ misadventures on their estates.

Tell them my life with Anna, said the shrike. Everyone loves tales of fairness and correct thinking.

Did you know, I tell them all, and shoo them with both hands, quite a number of things have actually happened which have no connection to any of them? Or you? Go drink from the swamp I piss in! What was the point of anything we have suffered but to learn once and for all to share?

You can’t listen to birds. All they want is to lay their eggs in the nest of yourstory. They carry their lies right into your parlor so you can’t tell them from your own good thoughts. Once a teeny tiny rosefinch flew all the way from Moscow and sat in my good chair like an inadequate throw pillow for three months, just so I would get used to the thing. Then it finally told me that I, myself, Zavarka the domovaya, was to be Premier and should depart at once to serve my duty. Well, what was I to do? Throw pillows don’t lie. I was halfway across the meadow before my head came off, spun around, and got itself back in position.

And perhaps that would have been the end of our acquaintance. Perhaps I’d have seen you off and waved my wrinkled old hands and told you I had no stories of the old days, not really, none of any worth, just a mad old roof-beam barely holding up the works. Ask somebody important. Ask somebody who knows less.

But the starling comes to save us. So small and black, as though it’s burnt down from a great size.

What should I do, I say to the starling. I am tired. Everyone took all the good bits already and left nothing for Zavarka. But what if this is my last chance to meet a mortal and trick them into listening to me until the goats of night, noon, and morning come in from the fields to devour them? I’ll be sorry if I don’t take it.

Tell the story of the girl who kept time in a samovar, said the starling. Of the firebird and the chest of jewels and the daughter of this house. It has a little of all of that. If you want my opinion.

But it all happened so long ago, I protest. And some of it hasn’t happened yet.

The starling shrugs its charcoal feathers. Time and grain are the greatest of all resources. It is unjust that a few swim in silos of each while so many scrape for so little of either. Redistribution is the only remedy. If we start making exemptions now, everyone will want one.

I told you. You can’t listen to birds.

But their songs are so sweet.

My ears have snatched a rumor that human beings are born out of the bodies of other human beings. Born screaming and covered with blood and other very drippy substances that do not come out no matter how much lye you use.

I have never been in a position to ask. I cannot let the chance escape now.

So if you please, I would like you to tell me this is not true. It is too horrible to be true. How can they go to the market or the counting house or the municipal courts or cafes, tip-tap-tapping their feet along the earth knowing this? That is how monstersare made! It is not so for domovye. When the first fire is lit in the hearth of a house, we unfurl from the stack of embers. The hearth gives life to the home, so it makes sense, yes? At first we are only hands. Everyone has to grow. We hammer and thatch the rest of ourselves together; nothing is wasted. Nothing drips.

And it is not so for huts.

Don’t look so surprised. You saw the legs a mile off. Did you guess the house was a rooster? We’d never get a pinch of sleep.

One day long ago and longer still, a lovely swan flew across the sea to nest in the soft moss of the roof of the house on hen’s legs.

Baba Yaga’s scalp nearly blew off. She tried everything to get him to leave. But he would not go, despite the gnashing of the goat of midnight’s teeth, despite the many brooms broken on its back, despite the moon herself coming down as a favor to tell this bourgeois goose to absent the facilities at once, despite the poisoned potato peels and water beetles left out so enticingly for him at suppertime, despite the great lady layering curse after curse on his back like winter furs. The swan was not a young human person with bad parents. Baba Yaga had no particular power over him, and he was not afraid of her, because swans are not afraid of anything unless it carries a rifle or a cage. There was no scent of gunpowder for miles and miles, for in those days, my mistress still much preferred to do her work by hand. So the swan settled fatly in and the house blushed chimney-smoke and having no attention whatever paid to her vast powers drove such a red-hot needle through the cosmic brainpan of Baba Yaga that within the week she packed her things to travel into the cities of men, where rifles and cages and modern ideas concerning both crammed the shops full to bursting.

Almost as soon as the soft thwocking of her mortar and pestle smoothed away into the quiet breeze, the swan puffed his feathers and took off toward Useless Shit-Hearted Abandoner Fathers Oblast and I have never been there but I bet it is a very poorly run province without up-to-date infrastructure.

You have heard me say the word father, and so you will not be surprised at what I will say next. The Izbushka began to get broody. Its rafters softened and bowed, the wood of its walls warped, its cabinets and chairs got up and paced in the night, its leathery ankles swelled up painfully. The house got sullen and suspicious. Without waiting for its mistress to return, it stamped it talons in the black dirt, growled at the universe generally, and retreated deep into the woods, into a thicket of shadows cast by shadows cast by shadows.

So I, Zavarka, only small, all alone in a forest no better than a stranger to me, with no boss and no poultry-doctor or architect to help, had to help the hut on chicken legs lay its egg.

By moonlight the house groaned and creaked and puffed quick, whimpering tufts of smoke through its chimney. Fruits and nuts and flowers burst out of the straw of its roof. Then the cellar doors caved open and a single great egg plocked out onto the half-frozen mud. It was so pretty and so made of porcelain, with pastel patterns all over it just like the plates and cups and teapots in Baba Yaga’s cabinets. The hut crooned and tutted and snuggled its egg, and I did too, because I was very excited about this very unprecedented event in the history of houses. The idiot ball on top of Zavarka’s neck filled itself up with visions of little tiny huts to snuggle in swaddling by the hearth, padding across the floor on tiny chick-legs, learning to open and close their curtains and menace passing heroes and maidens in the grand tradition of the family.

But life hates the living and never misses a chance to prove it. So when the egg cracked open on Easter there wasn’t a house in there at all, it was just a girl, and maybe Adam in the garden was more disappointed than me, but I doubt it. If he’d’ve stopped being lazy and made his own dinner, we’d have been saved all this trouble, so I don’t feel sorry for him.

I feel sorry for ME. Stuck with a girl to raise, as if I knew a thing about people other than which end the talking came out of. Tscha, why is Zavarka cursed so specifically? Where was Baba Yaga? She would know what to do. Drown it, maybe, drowning things usually sorted them out. In the river or the wine glass, it’s all the same. It wouldn’t be a normal girl, either, would it? Whose father was a swan, whose mother was a house, who came out of an egg made of teapots?

I knew from the moment I saw her, one day that child was going to have the absolute audacity to drip, and there would be nothing I could do to stop it.

Remember how I was a good host and gave you good advice and told you how stupid and shiftless and unpatriotic love is? Make room in your head for my smarts: this is how I know.

Most domovye rejoice at the arrival of children. Children mean the family will go on, which means the house will go on. Cause for filling bellies and toasting glasses sloshed over with bubbly laundry soap. But no other house has given birth before, nor ever again if we are all fortunate. I won’t be blamed. No one named Zavarka should ever have been expected to be anybody’s mother all by herself with no governing directive from the authorities, and if that’s not true nothing is.

But she was so small and pale and delicate and half of her was the hut that is my own soul and her eyes were black and she had little fine curly white hairs all over her head and she looked at me like the end of a story looking at the beginning, and I loved her. I loved her like a match striking. It is so so wicked. To make someone love you. Skinny little chicken baby. I didn’t ask to love her. I was busy, with many important things to do, like smoking my pipe alone and reading the latest Turgenev and thinking big, fancy thoughts about it. But you see, she looked at me. It’s not my fault! Didn’t anybody ever look at you? If they did, you would understand me.

I sat down next to the child.

“I hope you are ashamed of yourself,” I said. She tried to eat her fingers all at once, because babies are as dumb as old ice. “What am I supposed to do now? What is it you expect me to do with this love? I don’t even have a vase for it.”

The baby giggled, because she was not ashamed to interrupt my happy life, and never would be, and that is the curse done on parents from the start.

This is very secret but I almost trust you: domovye can get big if they want. If they need. If their house tells them they have to because it hasn’t got hands. So that is what Zavarka did, and nobody saw, and when I carried that little unashamed burden across the threshold, I saw that the Izbushka had pushed up the floor before the oven into a cradle with its own wooden chicken legs rocking it already from side to side.

I named her Chashka, which is a domovye name and not a person’s name, thank you I am well aware. If a person had had the decency to turn up and take her off my hands, they could have named her Tanya or Yelena or Vasilisa or Marya or whatever else is fashionable among those that drip these days. But they didn’t, because they are all bad at heart, so the baby is called Chashka, and I don’t care what you think.

I have no patience for the small stories of motherhood. They bored me by happening, so I will not bore you by telling. It is enough to say: the child ate, the child cried, the child excreted, the child did not sleep, the child broke and stained and threw up on many, many things. And time went by as it must. Baba Yaga did not return. The city was too full of opportunities for someone of her skills.

I said she wouldn’t be, couldn’t be normal. And my baby hurried up to prove how smart I am.

Chashka was a magician.

At least.

But her magician nature made itself unignorable very early. When she was small, she came toddling to me across a meadow where the Izbushka was pecking in the grass, holding something blue in her arms.

“What is that now, my burden in life?” I sighed.

Chashka held up a rich, round blue-glass pitcher to me, and only the devil knows where she got it, for she would be forty-two before my daughter met a single human soul.

“It is a vase, Mamochka,” the adorable curse of my world said. She grinned and her grin had sharp little wolf teeth in it. “To hold your love.”

After that, she was forever putting things into other things, which I was later told by a red-breasted goose is a perfectly normal phase of human development, like crawling or capitalism. But I didn’t know that then, I only knew that every day Chashka had crammed all her stockings into a milk bottle, or her hair ribbons into the butter churn, or her paintbrushes into the chimney.

Then one day, the beautiful burden of my soul interfered with the mistress’s samovar.

I suppose I should have beaten her, but the truth is I am very soft in my heart and, perhaps a bigger problem, extremely short. Chashka was already as big beside me as a footstool to a field horse, so I could not have done a good beating, and you should not do things you are not good at if you can help it. Additionally, the house on hen’s legs would have split itself in half if I tried, so you can see how I was stymied as a parent by everyone and everything.

I caught her crouching in front of the great silver-and-lacquer samovar like a gargoyle on a church roof. It was night. The stars were administering the province of the sky. Her eyes looked like big coins and I was so angry with her I could have bitten off her nose for my roast.

“Get away from there! You rotten beet of a child, what have you done to it? It does not belong to us, it is not a thing of the house, it is a thing of the mistress, and if you touch the mistress’s things, she will touch you.”

But Chashka didn’t know how to be afraid of anyone, because she had grown so big only knowing me and the Izbushka and sometimes birds, which makes a strange wild creature out of someone already born strange and wild. There was never any danger of raising a modest, quiet girl in that wood, at that time, between all these beasts.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Mamochka?” Chashka said without turning around.

“No, I would like a cup of you doing what I tell you with no arguing, butterbrains. What have you stuffed in the samovar? And don’t try to lie, I know you like the winter knows the spring.”

“Time,” said the scourge of my golden years.

“Time? What is this senselessness? You can’t put time in a teapot. Wipe your mouth, you’re dribbling stupidity everywhere.”

Chashka shrugged. “You can’t. I can.”

“Oh? And you are so much smarter than your Mama now? Where did you get it then? All of time, to squoosh into our mistress’s beautiful kettle?”

“Not all of time. Just a piece of it. Like an apple isn’t the whole of the tree, but still, it isan apple. I asked the moon if I could borrow a cup of time. We are neighbors after all.”

This is what it means to live with a magician. Nonsense and more nonsense, and then when you think you have had all the nonsense, why, look! There is still more in the cupboards.

“Oh, wonderful, now I can’t even leave you alone with the moon. What a gift for your old mother.”

“Look, Mama,” whispered my clever little disaster. “If I turn the spigot this way, the past pours out into my cup. But if I turn it this way, the future fills it to the brim. Please be proud of me. It was hard.”

Chashka turned the silver spigot to the left, and tea so thick and oversteeped it looked almost black. But the surface shone like shoe polish. We could see ourselves looking back into our own gawping eyes.

And then the eyes were not ours but someone else’s, someone handsome and well-fed. I did not know her. Her cheeks were red like two hard slaps, her braids hung down her back like silk ropes, and her stare had a wicked excitement twinkling away in them. The excitement for life and experience that only the young and the rich possess. We watched as she kissed the man in her bed, a tall, thin, pale and dark one whose cheek-hollows were full of secrets and shadows. Silently, she stole away, out into a gnarled, thick, and ancient forest with a gleaming silver axe. She had but to show her axe to the aspen, the pine and the birch, and those trees fell down before her, obediently splitting themselves into logs, then smooth boards ready for nails.

Then the stranger went further into the forest. She walked so proud, like nothing bad had ever happened to her, or ever would. Even the sun was afraid to sit too heavy on her shoulders. And then a chicken crossed her path, walking just as proud, big and black and fat and nimble, probably thinking about all the whole tragic history of chicken-kind or at least where it could find more insects and worms that day. The woman saw the chicken and grinned hungrily. But it was not a hunger for food. It was a hunger for art. She showed the hen her axe and as the daylight sparkled on its blade she said:

“Come here, kuritsa. This is a lucky and unlucky moment for you. But don’t be afraid or run off! I am going to make you immortal. Well, at least part of you.”

“That’s enough!” I cried. “Pour it out in the grass! Bad enough you have vandalized Baba Yaga’s samovar, now you use it to spy on her maidenhood? For what? the past is the past. It is done, it is burnt already in the oven, there is no eating it now for you or for me or for anyone. Only the future matters. Only the future is still useful.”

“Of course, Mama, as you wish,” smiled my darling calamity.

“No, no, I wish for nothing! Do you think she cannot hear us just because you have never met or seen or smelled her? Go to bed, Chashka, your skull is full of kefir instead of smarts. Don’t defy me, I’ll set the goat of midnight on you!”

But the Izbushka loves her daughter more than its own hearth. The walls began to quiver and shake, the floors began to rattle, the rafters bowed angrily toward me—me, who was born with this place and will die with it, me! Nothing in this world knows gratitude, that is the truth if you have a place for it at your table. Serve a house and adore it for five hundred years or a thousand? Fine, the house will take and take and take. But threaten one little girl with a goat and pah!Out with you!

Oh, but my Chashka knew she was favored. Never let a child know you love it that much, it turns them into demons with skinny souls. What a fool my dear old house was.

The tiny magician turned the spigot on the samovar to the right. Tea full drunk with cream tumbled out, the color of pages in old books. Slick and shining. Smelling of nothing, for the scent of the tea had not yet arrived from the future to meet its source.

I said love was stupid. But nothing is as stupid as time.

We looked into the cup, though I knew it was wrong. I knew we shouldn’t. I knew we’d be punished. But I am only a domovaya. Only gods can resist knowing how life will turn out.

That first night, we saw a girl with long black hair and less meat on her bones than a vulture’s breakfast riding in an incomprehensible machine with two glowing eyes and four black wheels. It made a terrible sound as it passed through the mountains with this girl inside. This girl, and the man from Baba Yaga’s bed. We saw her come to Buyan trembling and sickly as a yellow leaf. We saw her with a crown on her head before a rich table, in the arms of the tall thin man, and we did not understand any of it, any of it at all.

But of course, you do. You must.

“I love her,” said Chashka. She stared into the cup so intently, so brutally. “I do not know why. She is nothing and I love her anyway. It is like her existence is magnetized, and draws out all the iron in my blood toward her, and all the iron makes a kind of love so hard and heavy you can only carry it with you until you meet her, and can lay it down.”

“She is not nothing. That is a human. Don’t ever go near one. They are only tenants in this world. They don’t stay long enough to collect dust or virtue.”

“Yes, Mama,” said the ruin of my peace.

Every night after that, we turned the spigot on the samovar to the left.

What? Tscha, as if you could resist such a thing.

We saw many things. I think Chashka poured more tea than even myself, in secret while I slept or cut wood or milked the goat of the morning. She grew wiser and stranger and quieter by the day, by the hour. By the minute and second of the great, grand clock. My little sprig of dill was born a magician, but the samovar made her a sorceress.

What might anybody learn, if they could drink the future while it’s still hot?

I will tell you three things we witnessed in the teacup, for this is a fairy tale, and in fairy tales, three is the tsar of the numbers. These three things concerned a wolf, a a bird, and a chest of jewels.

Because there is always a bird. Remember what your Zavarka said.

The first was the wolf. I cried out like a silly child when I saw him lope through the great city at night, so soft on his feet the Muscovites thought his coming was only snow falling.

“I know him, Chashka,” I crowed. “That is the trickster Master Grey Wolf, he is a friend of my mistress!”

“Like the tall, thin man with shadows in the hollows of his face?”

“Not quite like. He is not the Tsar of Life or Death or Luck or Birds or any of their little fiefdoms. Master Grey Wolf is more like a rebellious tsarevitch, who refuses to do what he is told and instead sets out to make his own name and have his own adventures and annoy everyone who has ever met him simply by being himself.”

Master Grey Wolf reached the heart of the city. His furry ears pricked and turned to catch rumors and whispers. He waited and waited. The moon passed overhead. Finally a grand carriage rolled across the cobblestones, drawn by horses more beautiful than starlight. A woman looked out of the window, and she was more beautiful even than the horses. The carriage-drivers and guards bolted as soon as they saw Master Grey Wolf, for he stood nine feet high at the shoulder if he stood an inch. But the woman did not. She looked him levelly in the eye. A vein in her neck pulsed delicately.

Master Grey Wolf asked her name.

Alexandra, she said in a voice so expensive I could never hope to buy such a one for my own child, and neither could you. I have come from Germany to marry the Tsar.

Alexandra, Master Grey Wolf repeated with satisfaction.

Then he ate her all in one gulp.

As Chashka and I gazed into the days yet to come, Master Grey Wolf turned, as if to look at us, still stuck like bears in the steel trap of the past. As if to say: Are you impressed? Then hold your heart tight in your hands, or you will not survive what follows.

Master Grey Wolf scratched himself behind the ear with one grey paw. And as he scratched, his fur shook and wriggled and wriggled and shook until it shook off entirely and slipped to the street like a dropped handkerchief.

There was no more nine-foot wolf standing in the Moscow road. There stood instead a woman more beautiful than starlight or horses, identical to poor, sad, wolf-devoured Alexandra in every way. From the warmth of the past we watched her pick up the cast-off fur, drape it round her shoulders and lift it over her head as a rich fur cloak and hood. Then the new Alexandra howled to the moon so piercingly gooseflesh prickled Chashka’s arms a hundred years before it happened.

Not mine, of course. I don’t have flesh.

Deep in the teacup, Master Grey Wolf, wearing Alexandra’s skin, turned and walked through the cold and glittering night toward the palace and her wedding day.

“What will happen to the Tsar?” Chashka whispered. “I cannot see how this will turn out well for him.”

“Tscha, what do you care? First, he is the tsar and you are a naughty fatherless swan. Tsars don’t care for people, so if you care for them, the books will never balance in your favor. Second, that Tsar hasn’t even been born yet. So who cares? Look after yourself. Do not ask: who is to rule and how? Because the answer will never be you, so spend your time on more useful things, like soup.”

Many weeks passed, and soon enough we knew all about the Tsar and his bride and many other things besides. Chashka did not lie. But neither did I. Near the end of summer, we turned the spigot again and my poor beloved little waste of time shrieked horribly. But you cannot blame her. I won’t stand for it. She’s half-swan. Shrieking is her birth-right.

In the milky tea-mirror we saw four young girls with hair like bundled wheat. We saw a little boy with delicate hands. We saw their Mama and their Papa. Their Papa had a thick mustache. Their Mama was more beautiful than starlight or horses.

And they were all lying dead in a hole in the ground miles and miles from anyone who would weep. Not so very far from where we crouched by the samovar decades before the hole got dug.

The body of the Tsarina Alexandra wriggled and shook and shook and wriggled until it melted into the mud like rain and Master Grey Wolf lay in its place. He opened his ancient yellow eyes. The wolf rolled to his feet, kicking carelessly at the bodies on either side of him. He scrambled out of the hole, his back legs scraping for purchase on the pebbles, and pulled himself up onto the dead tundra grass. He shook out his fur and stretched his forepaws, first one, then the other. He looked back down one more time at the babies he had borne and the man he had married.

Their clothes had been torn by his claws. Under the fine fabric, the girls wore vests of jewels covering their chests. Emeralds and rubies and diamonds and onyxes, a kingdom’s price and more. But it hadn’t done any good. Enough bullets will defeat anything.

“Tscha,” said Master Grey Wolf as he watched the first snowflakes of winter fall onto the lidless eyes of the last Tsar and his heirs as they passed into the Country of Death, “Life is like that.”

“Were they so bad?” Chashka asked. “So bad that they deserved such deaths?”

Master Grey Wolf looked up, sniffing the air like he could smell a far-off deer. He looked right at us, right into us, right into our bones and the marrow within.

“No more or less bad than most,” the wolf said. “They did not deserve their deaths, but nor did they deserve their lives. Life and Death come for you no matter what you deserve, and this century you see full of snow and bodies needed to eat them to grow strong. To become. Just as you eat a little cake and a slice of meat on dark bread. There is no more morality here than you find on your own plate. Remember this, volchitsa, when you are grown.”

Shouts broke the shocked silence between the past and the future. Men coming, soldiers coming, bellowing get out of here old wolf! Get off! Let us do our work! I’ll be the devil himself if I let a mangy wolf eat the little princesses’ bones. This is a wretched enough business as it stands.

Master Grey Wolf bounded away over the hills, swinging his tail like laughter. The soldiers stood at the brink,scratching their heads under their hats, the chests of jewels glinting in the last light of day, then descended into the hole to take what they could so that they could put slices of meat on the bread of their children.

I will tell you the last thing that came out of the samovar. The last thing I care to tell you. Chashka poured cup after cup. She began to go into the forest alone. She stayed away for days upon days. She betrayed me by growing tall and lovely and strong and severe. She knew what she was doing to me, to my poor soft heart, and she did it anyway. She did it on purpose, if you want to know what I think. She began wearing charcoal around her eyes, scraped off the hearth. And perfume made from boiled roses. And lipstick she mixed up from cranberries and bear fat. Did I deserve that, I ask you? I never hurt anybody! But she did that to me.

It was autumn and we sat in shawls by the oven’s heat. Chashka turned the spigot on the samovar. She looked like a city girl in the hearth-light. I had a pain in my gut like a mouse was busy chewing a hole in Zavarka instead of stale bread.

The black-haired girl was in the tea again. That bitch. She stood in a strange grey place, cold and yet not cold, barren and yet not barren, empty and yet full. The outskirts of a town, a grassland, but full of roads and tracks and the evidence of life.

A tall thin man with shadows in the hollows of his cheeks approached her. He put his hand on the side of her face. The wind whipped the color from her, she nestled grey as the dead in his palm. They kissed in the wasteland. She pressed her forehead to his. Chashka gritted her teeth, though she had never yet seen or met the girl, and all this was so far yet to come we could not even smell the seed of the tree that bore it from where we sat. But that is the young. Full of feeling and passion and wrongness about everything.

“I have heard there is a beautiful firebird living in a walled garden to the east,” the man said. “All the rulers of all the nations in the Country of Death desire it for themselves. They have sent all their promising young men to trap it.”

“So it goes,” the black-haired girl said. “Again and again. Every story lining up to repeat the grief of the world in new costumes, as though that will change the ending. I suppose some of those poor boys are even named Ivan.”

“Do you not believe endings can be changed, volchitsa? Monsters can be made men, men can be made birds, birds can sing and sing again until somebody, somewhere listens?”

The black-haired girl looked past her lover’s shoulders. She saw something in the distance. Flickering, red. A firebird, dragging itself over the grassy plain. Broken, hobbled, its eyes boiling, its legs sending up jets of steam wherever it stepped.

But we could see it too, from the cozy oven of the past. And we knew it was not fire as we knew it. This fire would not fit in a hearth, no matter how deep or wide. It was molten, liquid, too hot to look at, dropping onto the earth in splatters, in blinding flashes, in a swirl of ash. The firebird burned, and deep in its burning the tiny atoms of the beast split and collided and split again, and wherever it walked, the earth died, but it was beautiful, just as the tall man said, the most beautiful creature in the Country of Death.

“Perhaps,” said the black-haired girl as the firebird lurched toward them. “But deathless is deathless. And I do not think it will be this time. How can it be, when that poor beast has only now escaped its garden? It will find its fool to try to seize it by the tail, and trade its feathers for a kingdom, and it will all happen again. So will you and I, and all the others, and if there is a change in the song of the birds that once were men and monsters, it will be long and long from now.” She smiled an exhausted smile. “But life is like that, yes? And so is death. And love, too. There is fresh bread at your sister’s stolovayatoday. We should get it while it’s there to get.”

And I thought that would be the end of that grotesque, confusing scene, the end of the tea, thank the moon and the stars. But like the others, the black-haired girl turned toward us, her black eyes soft and bright. Then—softer and brighter still.

“Oh!” she gasped. “It’s you.”

Chashka straightened on her stool. I could hear her drippy heart beating faster.

“I didn’t recognize you. You’re so young.”

“Hello, Marya,” my daughter and the daughter of this house whispered. So you see I know she was drinking tea behind my back. I didn’t know that sneaky mink’s name.

“Oh, Madame Lebedeva,” the black-haired girl sighed. “I have missed you so. Meet me at tomorrow. I’ll wait as long as it takes. Forever.”

Well, she left me the next day.

For Buyan, for the Tsar of Life’s palace, for her future full of black hair and incomprehensible rubbish nonsense.

What did I tell you about love! Love is worthless! Stick to the house, Zavarka! Love only punches you in the nose and kicks you in the knee. Love is a cat who’s been hit on the head and dragged through the trashpile. Love cannot do anything for itself, and usually ends up drowned in old bathwater. What use is it, I am asking? Love ENDS. It can be ended with a word. Houses only by fire or demolition crew. What is the use of something like that? I loved someone and I didn’t get anything out of it but pain. It’s not fair. Where is my revolution to rectify that? Nowhere, and never. Well. I won’t let love in my house again. Learn from your comrade and lock your own door.

You’ve stayed long enough anyway. And I know the whole time you’ve been judging me for hanging back, hiding in the Izbushka, not march-march-marching with the rest of them to fight. So you can keep your top lip buttoned to your lower one, you don’t know anything.

You can only fight if you can love what needs saving. And what I love? I found leaning against the wall of a magicians’ cafe with a hole in her heart.

“Oh, Chashka,” I sighed. “You are dripping. I told you not to. I told you. My darling. My beautiful undoing.”

I am small. But I can carry a lot. I brought her home. She is buried by the river. The black-haired girl comes to visit sometimes. We take tea down to the shore and say nothing to each other.

My mistress is coming home soon. For the first time in all this while. I have heard her footsteps a thousand miles off. She will laugh at my pain, but she will comfort me too. She will milk the goat of noontime. We will bake new bread and talk about everything that has happened. I will show her the samovar stuffed full of time and if she is angry? I will take my baby’s punishment. Then we will eat. We will pretend only good things can happen from now on, and that will feel very good to both of us.

We are a story, after all. Just characters and a setting. We have worked so hard to be a good story. We deserve a rest and a little treat before we must start all over again. With once upon a time, and the beginning of the world.

But if she catches you here, she’ll feed you to all the goats.

So I would run, if I were you. Back to your drippy uncomplicated world where people come out of other people like matryoshka dolls and love lasts forever and wars are triumphant glorious tales of valor.

Zavarka? She will stay in her house. And soon enough, that house will stretch its legs and begin another long journey away from humans and their griefs, into the safety of mountains and the moonlight and the dark of the end of the tale.