Naganya sighed dramatically. “I ought to go to Petrograd myself!” she wailed. “What use has a rifle imp out here where the best diversion for my sort is common hunting? How I long for real utility, to hunt out enemies of the People and put holes in them!”
Madame Lebedeva yawned and stretched her long arms. Her beauty was impossibly delicate and pointed, birdlike and nearly colorless, save for her dark, depthless eyes. “When is he going to marry you, Mashenka? How tiresome for you, to wait like this!”
“I don’t know, Lebed, my love. He is so occupied with the war, you know. All day and night in the Chernosvyat, poring over papers and troop allotments. Hardly a good time for a wedding.” In truth, Marya was tired of waiting. She squinted in the frosty sunlight, wishing to be Tsaritsa, to be safe here, to know she would not have to go home, back where she did not have a horse or firebirds to hunt, where she did not have such friends.
“Maybe he doesn’t love you anymore.” Naganya shrugged, her mouth half-full of pirozhki.
“Squirrel crap! Smashed snail’s got more sense than you,” growled Zemlehyed. “Papa can’t marry nobody. Not ’til she approves. Not ’til Babushka comes.”
“I wish she’d get a move on!” sighed Madame Lebedeva. She nibbled a bit of blackened onion. “I want to apply for the magicians’ dacha this summer. It’s quite competitive, and I can’t concentrate on my application while I’m worried half to death over Masha?
?s trousseau. The entrance essays are brutal, darlings.”
Naganya sniggered. “What’s a Petrograd girl’s trousseau? Horse shit and half a pint of Neva washing water?”
“I’m sure it’s no business of an imp,” Lebedeva snarled. “Leave it to those of us with a teaspoon of refinement to spare.”
“As if a vila witch knows anything but hair curlers and squinting for fortunes in a cup of piss!”
Naganya narrowed her monocled eye and spat. A neat little bullet erupted out of her mouth and punched through Madame Lebedeva’s swan feathers, blowing her hat quite off her head. She shrieked in indignation, her ice-white hair singed black at the tips. Madame scrambled after her hat.
“You beast! Marya! You must punish her! You made her swear not to shoot anyone this morning, and just look at her thwarting you!”
Marya Morevna pulled on a very solemn expression. She beckoned the vintovnik to her side with a crooked, jeweled finger.
“Nasha, you know you ought not to disobey me.”
Naganya fell silent. Her hands trembled; her ironworks clicked nervously in her cheek.
Suddenly, Marya’s hand flashed out and caught Naganya’s mouth and nose. With the other hand she grabbed the back of the vintovnik’s head. Naganya’s chest heaved, searching for breath, but Marya did not let go. She forced the imp to the ground, clamping her face in her fierce hand, leaping astride her, the better to pin her to the forest floor. Marya’s heart leapt and exulted in her. All unbidden she thought of a book of poems tossed into the snow, and a red scarf torn in half. She bore down harder. Slowly, black, oily tears pooled in Nasha’s eyes and trickled down over Marya Morevna’s knuckles as Nasha struggled, squirmed, and finally went still beneath her. Marya grinned, her braids brushing her friend’s walnut arms. Finally, she let Naganya up. The imp gasped and spluttered, chagrined and hoarse, wiping at her tears.
“Let that be a lesson,” Marya Morevna said cheerfully. “Mind your trigger in mixed company! When I tell you to do something you must do it.” Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding. Marya thought these thoughts, her breath and pulse calming. Of late, she had felt that coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.
Naganya sat shaking. Her breath came in gulps. She sniffed pitifully and pawed at her nose.
“Oh, Nasha!” Marya cried, feeling suddenly not cold at all and a little embarrassed. Perhaps she had gotten carried away—but imps listened to no one who could not thrash them soundly. A good Tsaritsa speaks her subjects’ language, after all. “Don’t be sad! I’ll find you a nice rusalka to snatch out of her lake in the middle of the night and throttle for information! Won’t that be lovely?”
Naganya smiled a little, mollified. A high walnut-colored blush rose in her cheeks, and Marya knew that she had enjoyed being punished, if only a little. She turned to the leshy.
“Now, Zemya—oh, give me back that book! You’ve bitten it half to pieces! Zemya, who is this Babushka you mean? I thought I had met everyone here!”
At that moment, a high, gorgeous cry echoed through the forest. An orange flame circled the clouds, so far up in the air that it seemed little more than a speck of fiery dust. Before Naganya could shout, Marya had snatched up her rifle, knelt, and fired.
With a searing, crackling crash, a firebird fell from the sky.
* * *
“Why do they call this place the Isle of Buyan?” Marya mused as the four of them strode back down Skorohodnaya Road. The sun set over the city ahead, spilling light over warm white cupolas carved from smooth, gleaming bone. The first dusting of snow glinted on the road, promising the sweetness of winter to come. “It’s not an island at all, as far as I can tell.”
“Used to be one,” said Zemlehyed, who was by far the oldest of them. “The unstopping salt sea. Your Lake Baikal? Tscha! Puddle! Our sea had fists, back in the yore.”
“It continues to be a marvel to me,” said Madame Lebedeva, her musical voice causing even her white horse to step lighter, “that leshiyi ever learned to speak. What sort of process was it, I wonder? Did a lonely hedgehog bash on a rock until it made noises?”
“Leshiyi learned from trees singing songs what birds taught, what birds learned from worms, what worms learned from dirt, what dirt learned from diamonds. Pedigreed, that’s us.”
“Well, I’m sure you were a very poor student, Zemya. You haven’t got the vocabulary of a salamander. In any event, Masha, darling, the Isle of Buyan was once, indeed, an island, in a great sea where fish the size of galleons swam in golden waves. They sang, those fish, such songs at sunrise. If you had a hundred balalaikas and a thousand gusli, you could not play a song equal to the least of theirs.”
“What happened?” Marya Morevna coaxed her black horse on ahead. He pulled a silver net behind him. Flaming feathers tufted out of it at every angle, scorching the earth beneath it as it dragged along.