The girl did not move.
“Yelena, Yelena, you’re the only ones like me in all the world. What will happen to me? What has happened to you? To all of you? Yelena, every spring I march out with all these soldiers, and when I touch their shoulders, I think of you, all of you. I can’t help it. And it strikes such awful fear in me, because I seem to see terror and uncertainty in their woven eyes, and they are not meant to be alive. But they cry out when they are shot, as if they were alive, and I shiver. Speak to me, Yelena. Or Vasilisa—is it Vasilisa? I feel my heart draini
ng from me, every day, in every cold tent, in every inch of half-dead earth where blood spills like thread. I am so afraid, Vasilisa. I fear the war is going badly.”
But the weaver did not look up, and all around them the machines whirred on, without a care for either of them. Marya wiped her tears and stood up. Her knee popped and creaked, having been bashed in during the first battle of Skorohodnaya Road, one they had won, but barely, oh, just barely.
The weaver, Yelena or Vasilisa, turned her head slowly, without moving the rest of her body. She stared blindly at Marya’s stomach, at the height where her face had been a moment before.
“The war is always going badly,” the girl said, and picked up her shuttle once more.
Marya Morevna pulled at the girl’s arm. She hauled as hard as she could, but it was like pulling stone. She went from girl to girl, pleading, crying, her face hot and shamed, forgetting, for once, all about herself, knowing only that one had spoken, and so they must all be alive. But no Yelena budged, and no Vasilisa spoke again, and none of them would go with her, even when she fell into a heap in the center of the whirring factory’s floor, hopeless and defeated.
* * *
“Is he a vampire?” asked Ivan Nikolayevich, sitting uncomfortably in the red sea of her bed, unconcernedly naked, ignoring the black nightshirt Koschei had provided.
“What an odd thing to say,” said Marya, standing by her mirror. She watched herself as she brushed out her long, ruined hair with long strokes of a boar’s bristle brush—one which called no strange old woman, which brought no fate to bear. The boar’s hair passed through Marya Morevna’s hair, glistening. She liked her body, liked looking at it, even—especially—scored with the tiger stripes of welts across her naked heavy breasts, her belly. She did not have a girl’s body anymore; her hips were a lion’s hips, her chest strong and muscled, her legs trained to leap and run and kneel to fire. Scars marked her skin like constellations, leading all the way up to the first, Zmey Gorinich’s mark, which still stood on her cheek like a streak of black paint.
“He licked the blood on your hand,” Ivan said. “And he is old, and pale, and his teeth are like tusks. I know he looks young, but he’s not, really. Sitting next to him is like sitting next to some impossibly ancient statue in a museum. So I think it’s a logical question, really.”
“He is the Tsar of Life, and blood is life. So is soup and vodka and baths and fucking. But I don’t think he’s a vampire. At least, not the kind you bury upside down at crossroads.”
Ivan frowned and ran a broad brown hand through his hair. “You keep calling him that. The Tsar of Life.”
“That’s what he is.” And am I the Tsaritsa of Life, then? half her heart asked. The other half answered, Not even for a moment were you ever queen.
“But it’s a certain kind of life, isn’t it?” Ivan leaned forward, his sunburned head catching the candlelight. He looked like a wonderful dog, huge and hearty, who had found a bone. “It’s … mushroom-life. The pale, rooty kind that grows in blackness. I’ll bet in all your years here he has never given you a fresh apple to eat. Everything he loves is preserved, salted … pickled. I suppose it’s alive, but it’s kept alive, forever, in a glass bell. And he is, too. A pickled husband, that’s what you have.”
Marya turned from the mirror, scowling. “And you are fresh, is that it? Right off the tree? But then you will brown, and turn mealy, and there will be worms in you, someday. Koschei will never wilt.”
Ivan shrugged bashfully. “I would not presume.”
“Of course you will. You presume already.”
“You are a human woman,” he said quietly. “You do not belong here, with all this blood, all this pickling. And their brine is seeping into you, bit by bit. You can even disappear like they can. And who knows what else!”
“Well.” Marya laughed gently. “I can’t really, not like they can. I’m not very good at it. I can only do it in certain places, where the boundaries are quite thin. We had to walk to the place where I spun around and carried you off, remember? I do not know so many of those places. Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date. But you could probably do it, too, in the thin places. If you practiced. It isn’t hard.”
“I don’t want to do it.” Ivan Nikolayevich began to roll a cigarette. Without her asking, a bronze tray had quietly appeared, set neatly with papers and crisp, curling tobacco. Ivan thought the stuff hers, but Marya knew better—Koschei had inserted himself here, between them, even when he was gone.
“Why not?” She shrugged. “It’s fun. It feels good.”
“Not to me. You feel good, and sunlight on wheat, and fresh butter and eggs and cigarettes like these, which I roll myself, just as I like them. Magic feels like stripping off my skin and putting it on again, backwards.”
Marya put down her brush and crawled onto the bed, reveling in the feeling of stalking him, catlike, hungry. Of knowing more than he did. It was how Koschei felt, she guessed. All the time.
“Well,” she purred, “I like all of those things, too. I don’t want to choose between them. Koschei doesn’t make me choose.”
“Yes,” Ivan said softly, stroking her face with his hand. “He does. It’s only that he makes stripping off your skin taste like fresh butter and feel like sunlight on wheat.”
Marya frowned. If he would only ask her, if he would only behave like a bird, like a man in black, she would find all this so much easier. “Ivan, you do not understand us. A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.”
Ivan kissed her, hesitantly, sweetly, as a boy kisses a girl on the schoolyard. Her mouth flowed with warmth.
“Look how you kiss me, Marya Morevna,” he whispered, “while you tell me what marriage is!”
“It is selfish to hoard resources, Ivan Nikolayevich, when we might share, each according to need. Why can I not have both? Both of you, Leningrad and Buyan, pickled and fresh, man and bird?”