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Chapter 13: A Frost of Sundown
Den' awaited Morozko in the parking lot beyond. The horse-turned-car drove pell mell back to Baba Yaga's. Baba Yaga was in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe as the moon sailed past. The smoke formed wisps of worms and inched off into the horizon slowly.
Den' shifted into a mare and stooped low so Morozko could dismount.
Baba Yaga wrinkled her nose, spotting the red on his teeth. “I can smell the delicious sweat, blood, and soul of a human on you. A hapless young woman, as usual?”
Morozko shrugged, taking the groceries from the horse's back onto his shoulder. “I have my dalliances, just like you. Banniks always love souls, after all.”
“Pah. My dalliances are more of the eating limbs and bone variety, not easy seductions of boring mortal maidens. You kept me waiting, boy! My hut is not just a door you can stroll through at your own leisure. This place is the watcht
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Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 14: The Banya
Morozko made his way to the luxurious banya adjunct to the inn. It was empty. Morozko peeled off his skin and hung it from the rafters between the dangling souls in the predbannik. He spat sparks onto the stove in the washing room and entered the steam room, letting the heat soak into his bones. Stripped of his skin, he was nothing but solidified, skeleton-shaped steam, a horror even Russian poets had not dreamed of, for no mortal had ever seen a bannik’s true form. In the washing room Morozko drew a bucket of water and poured it over heated rocks in the stove.The rocks steamed. He drew a venik and beat himself, driving away the stink of the stables.Finally satisfied, he entered the washing room and plunged into the cold water. Morozko dissolved into steam at the icy liquid's touch, swirling in a cloud round the boiling room. The wood walls creaked from the heat. He seeped through the cracks in the banya, ou
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 15: Heartless King
Baba Yaga whistled.A stallion red as the sun galloped from the woods to the driveway. Solntse, Morozko thought. Baba Yaga’s pride and joy, whose hooves could leave fields aflame in their tempestuous fury.Solntse neighed, shifting into the form of a red VW Bug with a shining Slavic sun decal. The nechist and Baba Yaga piled into the car haphazardly, with Baba Yaga at the wheel. She drove like a speed demon past buses and Washingtonians onto the highway and followed the Beltway to Washington, D.C., enchanting her way into not paying at the parking garage. They found themselves strolling along the National Mall, obelisk of the Washington Monument penetrating the sky like a needle.Baba Yaga doted on Anya, pushing her in a stroller. Anya giggled, pointing at the clouds. Time spun on its axis, and Baba Yaga pushed her through summer and fall, through winter and spring, round and round the years until Anya
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 16: I Do
“Oh, I mean it, and Baba Yaga can turn me into a runt of a bunny for all I care.” Morozko grinned menacingly. “That is right. Elementary school, where you will be disciplined. Dima has done a piss-poor job of it - you do not know your place, and all Baba Yaga does is teach you witchcraft. That is useless in the modern world. What about arithmetic, finance, or poetry? I am sure those are things human girls your age are schooled at by now – they can help run inns on earth and pen songs to be sung round the hearth fire. I do not think you contribute much to our community...”Anya stomped her feet and grabbed her pet rabbit, petting it furiously. “No, you poophead! Babushka's lessons are important! She is teaching me to cast spells - someday, I will be as powerful as her. Do not say that, you horrible bannik.” Anya pounded Morozko's legs with her small
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 17: Your Family Are Your Wings
Anya returned the next day in tears and ran straight into Dmitri’s arms in the dining room, her bright pink backpack unzipped: “They made me learn! My teacher made me learn! I do not want to learn! I want to fight Genghis Khan in the woods with my bunnies riding Kolya-the-horse’s back and pick flowers with Liza! Liliya is a good Genghis Khan. Why do I have to learn addition and subtraction? It is awful!”Dmitri bellowed with laughter: “Darling Annushka, tell me, did you make any friends? And math is important: Someday you shall inherit all my verdant fields and rolling forests. There will be grain stores and villagers to keep count of, the royal coffers to keep track of-“But da that is so so boring! Put me down, please.”Dmitri did and sighed. “I suppose elementary school will take some getting used to then, my dear.”
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 18: Honey Lily
Anya was nine, scrappy and rambunctious, and finally, she was learning to fly.“Ah ah ah, little bird, balance on your broomstick like a steady spindle shaft, not a seesaw. It is not often us witchfolk take to the sky, why, only for Witches’ Sabbaths where we flash our witch marks and dance sky clad in sacred groves while our cherti familiars beat child skin drums.” Baba Yaga chuckled, steadying Anya’s grip on her broomstick outside her hut on chicken legs. Fern flowers bloomed amongst bones. “You are raring to go the Witches’ Sabbath, but how will you get there if you fall off your broom’s tail end like a cluster of eager dust bunnies!”“Why can I not have a mortar and pestle like you, babushka? I could even ride on the back of yours…”Baba Yaga smoothed Anya’s red sarafan. It was summer, never too hot in Buyan as it got in swampy Washington, D.C., and t
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 19: Writhing, Dark, and Hungry
Anya grew like a spring shoot, twelve harsh Russian winters old. The winds molded her into a birch: tall and slender, with skin pale as the white tree's bark. Her hair came to her waist, black as onyx, and Elizaveta took to braiding it with blood red ribbons. It swung so beautifully as she danced the khorovod, a circling peasant dance of song and turning seasons, with village youths. She was like a fishing lure cast into a valley of dreams: one had to watch their feet lest they step on Anya as she ran mad-dash through the world.It was the anniversary of the dozen year truce between Tsar Vladimir the Bent and Tsar Dmitri the Bountiful – two brothers as different in disposition as night and day. Liliya and Elizaveta cooked for days on end, harvesting the finest caviar from the rivers for stuffed blini, and Morozko was in charge of the vodka freshly brewed from the potato fields behind the inn. Anya took it upon herself to decorat
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 20: Warm Like a Furnace
Anya flourished in school, deftly walking the realms between man and spirits. Keeping the secret of her family was like breathing. She felt like a visitor to the Earth, a cast-off ship of dreams, left to travel the world with sails the lapis blue of things forgotten.Anya often pondered forgotten things, like her beloved nechist and how they had faded from Russian memory, relegated to the realm of myths. No one in America knew of Baba Yaga, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Morozko took her to parks and museums, why, there were no gods at all. Anya wondered if, when the Zoryas shone down on Russia, if their starlight was tears at being forgotten by their humans they so so loved. Dmitri never spoke of when the borders between Buyan and Earth were open, and as Anya grew, her monstrous family took her less to the human world – only Morozko.“So what are the virtues of birch venik? Of oak? Eucalyptus?”
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 21: Rising Taiga Sun
Twelve years old, thirteen winters passed – finally fourteen and with her moon’s blood upon her. Anya now danced sky clad at Witches Sabbaths. From her bloody feet, finally, fern flowers sprang in fragrant gore red blossoms. She pressed them and made tinctures and potions out of the mashed fronds and roots. Summer turned, and she was between childhood and womanhood, of two ages, belonging not quite anywhere.Anya’s first day of high school had dawned. She wore a pleated white skirt, a blue blouse and had plaited her long black hair back in a French braid and secured it with a red velvet bow that Elizaveta had sewn.She stood in front of Liliya’s vanity in the vila’s windy room at the top of the inn’s lookout tower, perfect for planning strategic maneuvers and defending Tsar Dmitri’s kingdom. The room was all white birch bark, its walls lined with sabers and long swords, whips, and arrow
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