“Hello,” the owner of the eyes said archly. “Aunt. I am Marya Vladimirovna.”
Vasya gaped at the child, and then tried for an older brother’s outraged dignity. She still had her hair tied up in a hood. “This is improper,” she said stiffly. “I am your uncle Vasilii.”
“No, you’re not,” said Marya. She stepped back and crossed her arms. Her little boots were embroidered with scarlet foxes, and a band of silk hung with silver rings set off her dark hair. Her face was white as milk, her eyes like holes burned in snow. “I crept in after Varvara yesterday. I heard Mother telling Uncle Sasha everything.” She looked Vasya up and down, a finger in her mouth. “You are my ugly aunt Vasilisa,” she added, with a fair attempt at insouciance. “I am prettier than you.”
Marya might well have been called pretty, in the unformed way of children, were she not so pale, so drawn.
“Indeed you are,” Vasya said, torn between amusement and dismay. “But not as pretty as Yelena the Beautiful, who was stolen by the Gray Wolf. Yes, I am your aunt Vasilisa, but that is a great secret. Can you keep a secret, Masha?”
Marya lifted her chin and sat down on the bench by the stove, taking care with her skirts. “I can keep a secret,” she said. “I want to be a boy, too.”
Vasya decided it was too early in the morning for this conversation. “But what would your mother say,” she asked, a little desperately, “if she lost her little daughter, Masha?”
“She wouldn’t care,” retorted Marya. “She wants sons. Besides,” she went on, with bravado, “I have to leave the palace.”
“Your mother may want sons,” Vasya conceded. “But she wants you, too. Why must you leave the palace?”
Marya swallowed. For the first time, her air of jaunty courage deserted her. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“I probably would.”
Marya looked down at her hands. “The ghost is going to eat me,” she whispered.
Vasya lifted a brow. “The ghost?”
Marya nodded. “Nurse says I mustn’t tell tales and worry my mother. I try not. But I am scared.” Her voice faded away on the last word. “The ghost is always waiting for me, just as I fall asleep. I know she means to eat me. So I have to leave the palace,” said Marya, with an air of renewed determination. “Let me be a boy with you, or I’ll tell everyone that you’re really a girl.” She delivered her threat with ferocity, but shrank back when Vasya rolled out of bed.
Vasya knelt before the little girl. “I believe you,” she said mildly. “I have also seen this ghost. I saw it last night.”
Marya stared. “Were you scared?” she asked at length.
“Yes,” said Vasya. “But I think the ghost was scared, too.”
“I hate her!” Marya burst out. “I hate the ghost. She won’t leave me alone.”
“Perhaps we should ask her what she wants, next time,” said Vasya thoughtfully.
“She doesn’t listen,” said Marya. “I tell her to go away, and she doesn’t listen.”
Vasya considered her niece. “Masha, do you ever see other things that your family doesn’t?”
Marya looked warier than ever. “No,” she said.
Vasya waited.
The child looked down. “There is a man in the bathhouse,” she said. “And a man in the oven. They scare me. Mother told me I must not tell such stories, or no prince will wish to marry me. She—she was angry.”
Vasya remembered, vividly, her own helpless confusion when told the world she saw was a world that did not exist. “The man in the bathhouse is real, Masha,” Vasya said sharply. She took the child by the shoulders. “You must not be afraid of him. He guards your family. He has many kin: one to guard the dooryard, another for the stable, another for the hearth. They keep wicked things at bay. They are as real as you are. You must never doubt your own senses, and you must not fear the things you see.”
Marya’s brow creased. “You see them, too? Aunt?”
“I do,” Vasya returned. “I will show you.” A pause. “If you promise not to tell anyone I am a girl.”
A light had come into the little girl’s face. She thought for a moment. Then, every inch a princess, Marya returned, “I swear it.”
“Very well,” said Vasya. “Let me get dressed.”
THE SUN HAD NOT risen; the world was subtle and flattened and gray. A sweet and waiting hush lay over Moscow. Only the spiraling smoke moved, dancing alone, veiling the city as though with love. The dooryards and staircases of Olga’s palace were quiet; its kitchens and bakeries, breweries and smokehouses just stirring.
Vasya’s eye found the bakery unerringly. The air smelled marvelously of breakfast.
She thought of bread, smeared with cheese, and then she gulped, and had to hasten after Marya, who was running straight down the screened-in walkway to the bathhouse.
Vasya seized the girl by the back of her cloak an instant before she grabbed the latch. “Look to see if there is no one there,” said Vasya, exasperated. “Has no one ever told you to think before you do things?”
Marya squirmed. “No,” she said. “They tell me not to do things. But then I want to and I can’t help it. Sometimes nurse turns purple—that is best.” She shrugged, and the straight shoulders drooped. “But sometimes mother tells me she is afraid for me. I do not like that.” Marya rallied and hauled herself free of her aunt’s grip. She pointed to the chimney. “No smoke—it is empty.”
Vasya squeezed the girl’s hand, lifted the latch, and they stepped into the chill dark. Marya hid behind Vasya, clinging to her cloak.
Her bath the day before had been too rushed for Vasya to take note of her surroundings, but now she gazed appreciatively at the embroidered cushions, the glossy oak benches. The bathhouse at Lesnaya Zemlya had been strictly functional. Then she said into the dimness, “Banchik. Master. Grandfather. Will you speak to us?”
Silence. Marya poked a cautious head around Vasya’s cloak. Their breath steamed in the chill.
Then—“There,” said Vasya.
Even as she said it, she frowned.
She might have been pointing to a wisp of steam, fire-lit. But if you turned your head just so, an old man sat there, cross-legged on a cushion, his head to one side. He was smaller even than Marya, with cloudy threads of hair and strange, faraway eyes.
“That is him!” said Marya, squeaking.
Vasya said nothing. The bannik was even fainter than that other bannik in Chudovo, fainter far than the weeping domovoi in Katya’s village. Little more than steam and ember-light. Vasya’s blood had revived the chyerti of Lesnaya Zemlya, when Konstantin terrified her people into casting them out. But this kind of fading seemed both less violent and harder to halt.
It is going to end, Vasya thought. One day. This world of wonders, where steam in a bathhouse can be a creature that speaks prophecy. One day, there will be only bells and processions. The chyerti will be fog and memory and stirrings in the summer barley.
Her mind went to Morozko, the winter-king, who shaped the frost to his will. No. He could not fade.
Vasya shook away her thoughts, went to the water bucket and poured out a ladleful. She had a crust in her pocket, which she laid, along with a birch-branch from the corner, in front of the living wisp.