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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
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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
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 22: Greyback
“I am on the cheering team now, Greyback, and now I do backflips like Wonder Woman!” Anya said as she raced on the back of the great silver vucari. The looming gray wolf with golden eyes barked with laughter. They came to a witches’ hollow where warmth never fled the land despite the harsh winter cold and fern flowers always grew fever-bright and splendid.Anya picked some and made a flower crown for the vucari. He lay beside her, and with her witch-light and pine kindling and birch branches, she started a bonfire.“As you grow, so does your magic, and as your magic grows, he grows hungrier in the darkness, waiting to catch you like a moth to a blinding light. Never go to the deathless lands, dear Anya,” Greyback growled, twitching his ear.Anya leaned against him. “You always speak of awaiting danger. Baba Yaga says that you are the woods come to life, dear Greyback. I think you are m
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 23: In My Wooden Bones
Dmitri woke Anya in the hidden away bedroom in the banya bright and early one Saturday morning come spring.“Da? Ugh. I was out late last night cheering on the Friday night game. Please let me sleep just five more minutes.”“Anya, you are spending so much time with your friends and young men, I fear that you are forgetting your family. That is why today, I am taking you out hunting, just like old times!”“But daaaa, it is nighttime-Dmitri chuckled, a quiver of arrows over his shoulder, handmade bow in his broad blue hands. “No, my dear, it is eleven in the morning, one of the best times to catch game, when prey are lazing. Let your old man take you on a hunting trip like we used to before you grew too busy with high school and football games and homework.”Anya groaned, burying her face in her pillow. “Five more minutes?”&ldq
Jack Frost's Bride Chapter 24: Sorely Needed Peace
Winter turned to spring, spring to winter, and round again like a carousel until Anya entered her sixteenth year. She ripened like an apple, rosy-cheeked and freckled with curves that her sarafan clung to. Her hair reached her waist, a thick black rope perfect for braiding, or perhaps for hanging a man by his own liar’s throat.Baba Yaga glanced up from her simmering chicken kiev, surveyed Anya, and clucked: “Annushka, you are not so little anymore, no longer a dumpling, more like a choice cut of elk. Like a sprouting white birch, you have grown too fast. Soon cherti will come seeking your magic rich blood.”“Whatever do you mean?” Anya asked, pausing from stirring a bubbling potion of rosemary and rue. “I have never met a cherti that was not bound to you or another witch. I have yet to attract a wild one. Why would my familiar come now?”“They are the denizens of Hel
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