Baba Yaga's Daughter and Other Stories of the Old Races Page 2

  I lifted wet fingers to wet hair, remembering the rose Eliseo hadn’t given me, and wondered what my mother would make of that.

  “I would give you all his trove save one piece,” Janx offered. His head tilted, gaze gone to the crimson pendent, and a quickness came into his voice; an urgency that I hadn’t heard as missing when he’d wanted me, but now that I knew its sound, it left me cold and alone with regret. “All but the piece that keeps him here, and that one would be mine.”

  “Spoils of war are no fit gift,” Mother said dismissively. She raked him with a glance and a fit of avarice came into her eyes, a look I knew well enough, for it had been my own not so long ago. I opened my mouth to whisper a warning, but the words stuck in my throat, and that was no doing of my own.

  “I know little of witches,” Janx said, “and less of how your magics work. But I have three books, taken from three sisters three hundred years ago. Perhaps they’d suit your tastes.”

  “The grimoires of Birnam Wood,” Mother murmured, and bumps stood up on my skin in the cooling water. I knew those books, as anyone who was my mother’s daughter might. As any of the old ones might, but there are few of them left now, and their daughters are not what their mothers might have hoped.

  “Yes,” Mother whispered, “that will do. Come, red lord, let me grant you thanks in exchange.” The jeweled wire glittered again, and Janx walked forward, a king to be crowned, and bent his head so she might drop the shining thing around his neck. “A ruby,” she said, “bled white in my fist and filled with color again by a virgin’s blood.”

  Janx lifted the stone from against his naked chest and admired it in the moonlight. “I’m no unicorn to be caught by a maiden, old mother.”

  “Not,” my mother said, and the weight of it shivered cold out of the air, “unless the maiden is a witch.”

  Tension sluiced into Janx’s shoulders, and not until it arrived did I realize how little worry he carried in his body. Men were not like that; they moved with strain that belied natural grace, but nothing of concern had marred his form until now. Then something more happened, something unlike any I had ever seen, and that even without it coming to pass properly enough to see.

  For a violent instant two beings occupied the space he stood in. One was the slim long-legged man whose beauty had caught my eye; the other was a savage thing, impossible in size, struggling to burst through the shape I’d come to know. It was a thing of fire and fury, of burnished color and changeable smoke, blurring, vibrating, unseeable in its struggle to change. Fear should have wakened in me, but instead my breath caught and I knew I had learned nothing of the serpent, after all.

  Then the attempt was over and Janx flinched toward me, panting, agape with disbelief and anger. He clawed his fingers at the necklace, and though strain pulled the muscle in his arm, the chain refused to break. “You were no—”

  Shame filled my chest. “Not now, but I was once, and my mother does not waste what tools she has at hand.” I stood and called my clothes to me with a whisper of power, much less than it took to ride a coal shovel across the edges of a city, and shivered into layers and furs before looking to Janx again. His jade eyes were wide, no longer drinking me up, but searching for answers in my hidden form.

  “It was not a trap,” I said heavily. “I thought we might steal a while without my mother knowing. But we are beneath her house, and nothing passes here that she doesn’t see.” Gaze lowered, I stepped past him, but he caught my arm with a fingertip touch. Compulsion brought my eyes to his, and if he had not been chained by my mother’s will I might have thought that compulsion to be one he laid on me. But no: it came from within, burgeoned by apology, seeking forgiveness.

  Humor and confidence shone in his face: an obvious lie. I was my mother’s daughter, and could see fear tight against his bones, could see anger burning emerald in changeable eyes. But there was nothing of falsehood in the words he breathed: “Some things are worth risking all.”

  His smile left a mark in my mind, a scar that would never fade, and as I climbed the ladder into my mother’s house, I heard her whisper, carried on the thin winter air: “And now you know why White Rumi has never left this place. You, though, will go. Change your form and fetch me my grimoires. I command it.”

  An infuriated roar and an upheaval beneath it sent the house to scrambling, looking for safe ground to stand upon, and when I looked out the window it was to see a blazing fiery arrow climbing into the sky.

  ***

  A slash of white flew upward, a meteorite falling in reverse. It slammed into the streak of red that was Janx, and Daisani, sitting at the forest’s edge hundreds of feet below, sighed and put his palm to his forehead.

  The dragons alone fought territory wars. They alone knew when another of their kind took their Old shape nearby, tasting it as a challenge in the air. The youthful among them—when there had been young—transformed often, struggling to steal or win a scrap of land for their own, and then to hold off other comers. It was the way of the young.

  Janx, though, had not been young for a long time.

  Knowing what he’d see, Daisani dropped his hand and turned his attention to the stars again. They fell, the two dragons in the sky: they fell writhing and spitting and tangling with each other, toward rooftops that housed men sleeping for the night. That was lucky: mankind’s population grew too quickly for red Janx, for white Rumi, for any of them to take the kind of risk these two did now, and its only saving grace was that the hour was small and only drunkards would be out in the frozen morning. Daisani wished the moon away and instead watched it catch the brilliance of Rumi’s wings as he finally pulled out of the fight to gain altitude again. Janx twisted after him, larger wings driving him higher more rapidly, and even from the distance, Daisani winced as one of Janx’s huge clawed feet smashed Rumi in the head and sent the smaller dragon tumbling.

  And, against every natural tendency, flew higher still, and cut his way across the night, darkness swallowing him whole. Daisani stared after him, relieved and bewildered. Something had gone wrong with the witch’s daughter; that much was clear, but then, that much had been all but promised in the moment she’d called the coal shovel to herself and flew out of the pub. He was no stronger in the face of astonishing events or beautiful women than Janx was: curiosity was a cat to kill them both, though he, at least, he had more sense than to romance the girl at her mother’s house.

  Fascination bit all the harder with Janx’s departure: he couldn’t catch a sky-bound dragon, but the other might have answers, and he was still falling toward the earth.

  Daisani reached the crash site before Rumi himself did.

  Snow smashed upward and caught in the air, fragile glittering bits of light under the moon. Daisani brushed his shoulders clear and climbed a hill of displaced snow, crouching on its crest to examine the fallen dragon.

  Blood leaked over the behemoth’s eye, a wintery scale torn loose from Janx’s kick, and the white whiskers around his mouth looked like silver drool against the snow. He was smaller than Janx, who was of an impossible size, but the same in general form: serpentine, winged, legged, long and slender in all ways. Not even Daisani had often studied a dragon in repose, and he thought the form admirable, if impractical for a world growing more and more populated by man. “Wake up and change back. You idiots may have woken someone, and whatever treasure keeps you here, it won’t be worth a dragon hunt.”

  One of Rumi’s eyes peeled open—complex double lids, like a snake—to reveal ice blue before it shuttered closed again. He pushed up on a foreleg with aching care, then rumbled a wordless curse and transformed. Wind rushed by Daisani, knocking his clothes askew, and the echo of transformation left his ears ringing. A white-haired man as tall and slim as Janx sat in the middle of a dragon-shaped depression, and as he stood a ruby pendant on a silver wire slid from beneath his shirt. He tucked it away again, and Daisani watched the impression it made. “I thought the purpose of a hoard was to hide it away unseen.”


  Rumi scowled, uncertain, then scowled more deeply still. “Vampire.”

  “And a curious one at that. I’ve known Janx for more centuries than you’ve been alive, and in all that time I’ve never seen him wear decorations. Dragons,” Daisani said with easy confidence, “don’t. So tell me the story of your silver chain, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Anger worked the dragon’s thin mouth, pulling his lips back to show too-long, inhumanly sharp teeth. “I can’t,” he finally said, and then, more bitterly, “Ask the witch’s daughter.”

  Daisani’s eyebrows lifted. “And why would she answer me?”

  “She might not.” Against all good sense, Rumi slammed back into his dragon form, sound and shockwave powerful enough to send Daisani staggering. “But I can not, and so if you want answers, vampire, seek them with her.” He flung himself into the air, leaving Daisani still curious and now blanketed in snow.

  ***

  A week of waiting: not so much time, for one such as Eliseo Daisani. He was a patient predator, though many—most—of his kind were not. The witch and her daughter would go nowhere until Janx returned: that was Daisani’s bet, even without a taste of blood to tell him which way the wind blew.

  He didn’t expect the dragon to return with a leather satchel grasped in gold-dipped talons, nor for Janx’s wisdom to have left him altogether. The terrible crimson beast that he was came winging out of hard winter sunshine, scattering so rough a landing that Baba Yaga’s house leapt aside to keep from being toppled. That was not Janx; in uncountable centuries Daisani had no memory of the dragonlord risking exposure so blatantly. Under cover of night; under cover of smoke and fog and war: those were the times when a dragon might return to his elemental form and trust that mankind’s eyes wouldn’t see. They were too large, too dangerous, too obvious a threat; Daisani and his kind could take far greater risks, and as for the others, well: the selkies were drowned, the djinn bound to their deserts, and the gargoyles were night-time creatures and cautious besides. That was the price of being birthed of solid steady stone, though by that logic, fiery dragons might well be the most reckless of all the surviving races.

  Janx transformed to human shape entirely naked in the snow, dressed in nothing but an expression of rage and a glint of gold at his throat. The daughter came out from the chicken-legged house to take the satchel from Janx’s hands, and the human-formed immortal softened, some of his fury bleeding away at the girl’s presence. Daisani, hunched in a tree like an over-sized raven, didn’t try to hide his grin: this would be fodder for centuries to come.

  “Drowned by water,” an old woman’s voice whispered in his ear, and all around him, snow splashed to meltwater below the sound of chains rattling. Branches, freed of their heavy white burden, sprang upward and snaked toward him, and rushing water bared black dirt between the tree’s toes. “Staked by wood, bound by iron, buried in earth.”

  Janx’s wisdom had fled: Daisani’s had not. He dove from the tree and sped across the forest, racing a specter whose words followed him: “Forget the serpent’s son, Eliseo Daisani, and I shall pursue you no more.”

  ***

  There was no joy in bedding a man bent to my mother’s command. Under her whim he was a lap-dog, not a firebrand, his color leached and his eyes dull except when anger moved him. Then he was stirred to beauty, but the red gem at his breast would flare and he would subside again, leaving me aware that I was a fool and red-haired Janx was lost to me. Emboldened by curiosity and loss, I peeked at the pages of my mother’s oldest grimoires, the books of magic which lay down the laws of the world. She might have told me herself, had I asked; might have told me of the serpent at the heart of the world, but I disliked the thought of offering her more power over me. My interest was a thing of my own, and I had little enough of that to want to hoard it. That, and I knew now that dragons were real, and so clinging to precious bits of knowledge had a sweeter taste, as though I could make myself closer to the one I’d inadvertently betrayed by collecting and keeping what wisdom I could.

  I let myself pretend I was fooling my mother. It’s possible I was, but the heart of me, where I was fully her daughter, said I lied to myself as I’d done when I’d stolen an hour with a dragonlord. That time had not been stolen, no more than my dredges of scholarship were: they were granted me by a witch whose foresight ran far beyond mine, and who would find a way to use what little I could eke out and take for my own.

  I knew this, and still I didn’t care, because what I learned was beautiful.

  I had known, of course, that those such as my mother sprang from those places in the earth where confidences were whispered and offerings burnt. They rose up from ashes and secrets, rose up stench-ridden with death and burdened under the promise of silence for sly things shared. They rose up mad things, shaped by their making, greedy for knowledge won at any cost. Frightened peasants told tales that water would not drown a witch but that fire would burn her, and that gave them comfort, false as it was. Only one thing could condemn a witch, and that was exposure of the secret that gave her life. Her first secret: that, and that alone, would undo my mother or any witch. The few old ones who remained had long-since outlived those who’d whispered the first secrets, so long-since that I had thought no one in this world might have been there to watch them birthed.

  But now I knew of the Old Races.

  If I had been my mother I could have sunk my fingers into the grimoires and drawn the knowledge in through my blood. But we daughters are not what our mothers hoped, and I could only turn page after page, reading hungrily. They were fables, these stories, legends written by the hopeful and the lonely, but they were written in books of magic, and they were written in words of blood.

  Dragons. Oh, dragons I knew, in the slim sweet form of the red-haired man my mother held under lock and golden chain. They were born of the hot places in the world, far from my frozen Russia. Like the witch my mother was, they were greedy for precious things, and this is how dear the knowledge of how to hold a dragon was to my mother’s heart: it remained unwritten, even in the pages of her own grimoires. In all the world, she may have been the only witch to bind a dragon, and that, that was deep magic indeed.

  Vampires. Their gift was speed, and answered for me how Eliseo Daisani had come to stand at my side even after my coal-shovel escape. They, too, could be bound; all of the Old Races could be, though none of them easily, and vampires with the most difficulty of all. Unlike the dragon charm, a vampire’s confinement was written in the book, proof enough that amongst the ancient crones it was a spell well-known. What lay unmarked in the history of vampires was their genesis: not even my mother knew where they came from, though someone in the writing of this book had hinted that they were not of this world at all.

  There were others, though, so many others. Gargoyles, which my people might have called golems, and seal-folk called selkie which were only stories from the ice-bound hunters who lived even further north than my mother’s hut chose to go. Mountain-men called yeti, and water-born sea folk whom popular tales called mer , but who were written in these pages as siryn who swam with sea serpents. Djinn, which were the living wind, and winged angry women named harpies . These were creatures of the darkness, all the dreams and fears of humanity given form, and they were dying.

  Some had died to fill these pages. Words wrapped around drawings, and more than one of those scrawled pieces of art writhed when my gaze slipped away. Magic pinned them in place, secrets draining their vitality and preserving them forever, though they would remain known only to a few.

  There were wonders in the world; that, I had always known. How could I not, when I was my mother’s daughter? But they were greater than I had imagined, and I felt the first stirrings of lust in me as I read my mother’s grimoires. Not lust for men, or even dragons, but the burning need to learn more. I wanted to tear the living drawings from the book itself and eat them up, to chew them and taste what they were, to learn it and have it in me for all time. That, then, wa
s the witch in me, and wisdom told me to keep my curiosity’s flame low. Baba Yaga is jealous of her knowledge, and if my child’s interest turned to active desire in her eyes, she would eat me up and make all my thoughts and questions her own.

  A week passed while I read, then two. The light began to return, though winter grew more bitter yet. I thought of Janx at times, but more often I thought of the imaginary rose, and wondered that I had been so wrong, that the man called Daisani could so easily leave his partner behind.

  When I left the hut it was to discover I could find no jobs that would have me, now that it was known whose daughter I was. I walked muddy frozen streets, listening for what was to be heard, and this is what I heard: Moscow rumbled with discontent, with too many stories of witches and magic. The poor and superstitious spat when they saw a black-haired woman of beauty, while the rich and fanciful cut those same women deep curtseys and bows, just in case they were Baba Yaga’s daughter.

  Mother had her grimoires and no other cares: she even put the dragon to sleep, that his grumblings should not bother her. Her other pet, the sullen icy Rumi, came calmer at that, and with his calm the city calmed, as though it had become so much a part of him the one could affect the other. Then only I was left with discontent, hungry for a touch that my mother had neutered and searching for the one who might make it whole again.

  When he came it was from the wealthy quarter, and there was a determination beneath the artful lightness of his voice. He played at being Janx, I thought, but Eliseo Daisani was that coin’s other side, and the act sat badly with him. Still, he spoke with a touch of romance the dragon hadn’t pretended to, and my ears were good enough to hear that there was no pretense as he murmured: “You still wear my rose in your hair.”

  My fingers flew to the nothingness tucked above my ear, the gesture enough to say his words were truth. We were in a square, broad and empty for all that daylight shone down, and he offered me his elbow like a gentleman. “I have been around the joined continents these past two weeks. Would you like to know what I’ve learned of witches in that time?”