Enchantment (51 page)

“How long do you think your husband will live?” she asked. “I think it will be a long time. Hours and hours. I wonder if he’ll still be thinking of you, at the end. Or if he’ll just be wishing Bear would finish up so he can die.”

Katerina had expected some such boast; she barely listened. She was much more concerned about whether her binding would hold. “When you look in the mirror, old woman, do you like the face you see?”

“Of course,” said Baba Yaga. “But I don’t see the same face you do.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Katerina. “Won’t you step over to the mirror and let me see you as you see yourself?”

Baba Yaga laughed. “You’re hoping that I’ll try to step outside this foolish pentagram and I’ll be stopped and then I’ll scream and rail against you and finally plead for you to release me, which you’ll do only after all these nice people are free, and your husband is safely delivered from
my
husband’s wrath, and I’ve renounced my claim on Taina, and . . . oh, what else is it you want?”

“I expected nothing of the kind,” said Katerina.

“You drew this pentagram for exercise?” asked Baba Yaga. “This sort of thing is useless against me, you know. I unmake such spells a hundred times a day, and make others twenty times as strong that I can still unmake with a flick of my fingers.”

“And yet,” said Katerina, “you stay within the pentagram.”

“Why not?” said Baba Yaga. “It’s as good a place as any to stand and watch you writhe. I’m only deciding whether to make these good people tear you limb from limb and eat you raw, or make you watch while I dismember
them.
Which would be more fun to think back on? If only I had one of those marvelous little boxes from Ivan’s country, that remember things for you so you can see them later, as often as you want to watch.”

“You talk and talk,” said Katerina, “and yet you continue to stay within the pentagram.”

“It amuses me to stay here, so you can hope that the spell you cast might be working.”

“You don’t know what spell I cast.”

“You think I can’t smell a binding from a hundred miles away?”

“I’m sure you can.”

“Well, here.” Baba Yaga waved her hands and clapped. “The binding is undone.”

“Well, that was easy, wasn’t it,” said Katerina.

“Everything you fret over and sweat over is easy for me.”

“And yet there you are, within the pentagram.”

Emboldened, Katerina walked over to Baba Yaga’s mirror and looked in it. “It didn’t turn me ugly,” said Katerina. “So it can’t be the mirror’s fault you look the way you do.”

“Get away from that table.”

“Come and make me,” said Katerina.

“Don’t think I won’t, if you provoke me.”

In answer, Katerina began opening boxes and bottles, jars and bags. She took a few of them to the fire and emptied them over the flames.

“You shouldn’t play with things you don’t understand,” said Baba Yaga.

“I’m sure you’re right. Though I do recognize some of these things. This is what you used to make the cloth that brought the airplane here, right?”

“Oh, now look what you’ve done. It will take me
minutes
and
minutes
to get more of that.”

But Katerina knew otherwise. These things were rare and hard to get, dearly bought when they could be found, and treasured by those who had them. Soon all of them were empty.

“Let these people out of their chains,” said Katerina.

“Not likely,” said Baba Yaga.

“If you do, and give us safe passage out of here, I won’t burn your house down over your head.”

“But, foolish girl, that’s precisely the only time you
could.
For as long as I leave them chained here, you won’t do anything to harm my house.”

“I would be sad to see them die,” said Katerina, “but everyone dies eventually.”

“Even your husband,” said Baba Yaga. “I wonder if Bear has taken his eyes yet, or if he’s saving them for last.”

“And still you stand within the pentagram.”

Katerina dashed a chair against the mirror. The glass shattered.

“No!” cried Baba Yaga. “What kind of monster are you! Don’t you know how many slaves I had to kill to give that thing its power?”

“If only you could step outside the pentagram, you could stop me.” She set the ornate chair onto the fire.

“Don’t burn that chair! It has so many spells of comfort on it that—”

“Set these people free, and I’ll let you out.” Katerina was opening larger boxes now, and found one that was filled with books. She walked to the fire, ripped a page from somewhere in the middle of the book, and dropped it into the flames.

Baba Yaga shrieked. But she did not move.

And then she calmed down. “I see,” she said. “I see. You didn’t just cast a spell of binding. You cast a spell of desire. Very clever.”

“So if you’ll just release the captives—”

“I must be tired, for it to have taken me so long to see it. I can’t
want
to leave this space, which holds me far more firmly than if there was more physical restraint.”

“Very good,” said Katerina.

“Clever of you.”

“And yet you stand within the pentagram. Will you release the captives? Start with one, just to show you’re paying attention.”

Baba Yaga glared at her. “No, no, that’s too easy. There’s more to it than that. Perhaps a spell to make it so I can’t even desire to break the spell that keeps me from desiring to leave the pentagram. That’s very circular, isn’t it? But then there might be a spell making me forget how to break such spells, and on and on, when there’s a simple thing you just don’t understand.”

“And what is that?” asked Katerina.

“This is my house,” said Baba Yaga. And with that, the whole section of floor with the pentagram on it dropped out from under her. The witch fell through the trap door, but rose again almost at once, climbing up a ladder. “Oops,” she said. “No pentagram. Even though I never wanted to leave it, now that I’m outside, I can’t understand why I ever wanted to stay. Or why Bear stood still for you while you drew it on the floor. But that’s between him and me, later. Now your precious captives start to die, one for each box of precious powders and each bottle of precious liquors that you ruined. That should take us more than halfway through this crowd, don’t you think?” Baba Yaga strolled over to where the pilot stood, half-dead from the beating she had given him. “For instance, I told poor Ivan a lie—I said I killed this one. I think it’s just about time I made it true, don’t you? We wouldn’t want Ivan to die believing something that isn’t so!”

On the airplane, Ivan did not wait to see where Bear would appear. The moment Baba Yaga was gone, he sprang for the door, tried to open it. But it wouldn’t budge.

A voice behind him said, “Of course she bound them all closed before she switched with me.”

Ivan turned. There was the bear on all fours, his head tilted to one side as he studied Ivan’s face.

“That missing eye,” said Ivan, “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“The eye’s gone anyway, whatever you meant.”

“But it was my job, to save the princess.”

“From what? It seems to me she’s in a lot more danger now than she ever was on that pedestal.”

Ivan sidled away from the door, then began backing down the aisle. “On that pedestal she was as good as dead. Now even if she dies, at least she lived first.”

The bear shambled easily after him. “Same goes for you.”

Ivan slid along a row of seats, then ran headlong up the other aisle toward the front of the plane. Into business class. Into first class.

Bear was singing to himself as he meandered up the aisle. The song was one Ivan had never heard before, in a language that he didn’t understand. “If the old hag thinks she gave you the gift of perfect pitch,” said Ivan, “she was wrong.”

“Singing goes along with speech. I tried it out, I learned a song or two.”

“What language was that?”

“My language. The language of bears.”

“But bears don’t speak.”

“That’s why you never heard it before.” Bear half-stood in the far doorway of the first-class section, his paws leaning on the backs of the last seats. “Baba Yaga thinks I’m going to torture you, but I’m not a cat. I’m just going to kill you, because it isn’t right for someone to put out the eye of a god and walk away.”

Ivan remembered something, trapped as he was. For he happened to be trapped in a particular place. Standing right where he had stood when he first boarded this plane, to put his carry-on bag of books in the overhead compartment.

He opened the compartment door. He pulled down the bag.

“Are you going to read to me?”

As he opened the bag, Ivan knew what he was looking for. What this whole business had been orchestrated in order to accomplish.

He had a message to deliver.

He pulled the slip of paper from the bag. It still said what it had said before. Ivan was disappointed. He had half-expected that when it was in the presence of the one who was supposed to receive it, new words would appear. But it didn’t happen.

Still, this was his last chance. If it wasn’t for Bear, Ivan wasn’t going to live to deliver it to the intended recipient anyway.

“I think this is for you,” he said.

Bear cocked his head to look at it. “I don’t think so.”

“I think it is,” said Ivan. “A message from someone in my time to someone here. The old hag didn’t know it, but she brought this plane here solely so that this note would travel back in time, eleven hundred years, so you could have it here today.”

“What good is a note like that to me?”

“I don’t know,” said Ivan.

“Give it to me.”

Ivan held it out toward one of Bear’s huge paws.

“What, are you blind? Do you see thumbs on my paw? How exactly am I supposed to take that tiny piece of paper?”

“I don’t know,” said Ivan.

“My mouth,” said Bear disgustedly.

Ivan raised his hand, offering the note to the open mouth of the bear, knowing that if he felt like it, Bear would take his hand as well.

Instead, Bear took it between his lips. Then a bit of his tongue came out, tasting the corner of it.

“Delicious,” said Bear.

He sucked the paper into his mouth, chewed it slowly, and swallowed.

Now I’ll never deliver the message, Ivan thought.

Then Bear stood up so suddenly he hit his head on the ceiling of the plane. He roared, and roared again. And again. And again.

Why didn’t he speak?

Bear began slashing the upholstery of the chairs. He rampaged through first class, then back into business class, seemingly oblivious now to Ivan, who followed him, fascinated and appalled by what seemed to be rage. Yet through it all, though Bear roared again and again, he said not a word.

And then, suddenly, he turned toward Ivan and clambered deftly over the seat backs and in a moment he had Ivan pressed to the floor in the aisle, looming over him. He opened his mouth and lowered it toward Ivan’s head.

Katerina, if only you survive, it’s all been worth it.

It was not teeth that touched him. Only a huge tongue lapping his cheek, almost pulling half his face up with it.

And another lick.

He’s saying thank you. He’s thanking me because . . . because . . . the note wasn’t a message at all. It was the spell of unbinding. It was the spell that set Bear free of Baba Yaga. That’s why he wasn’t speaking—he had lost her gifts as well as her chains.

“You’re free, aren’t you,” Ivan said.

Bear roared triumphantly in response, then overleapt him on the floor and began pawing at the airplane door.

Ivan got up, wiping the bear slobber from his cheeks, and made his way to the door. The spell on it was gone. He opened it, but before it was even a quarter of the way up, Bear shimmied out through the opening and landed on the ground, rolling in the meadow.

The door opened the rest of the way. Ivan could see a campfire, then another. Dozens of them in the meadow.

Whose? Baba Yaga’s army? Ivan had seen them run away.

Ivan lowered himself from the airplane and dropped to the ground. Just in time—the moment he got to his feet, he heard a rush of air and a clap of thunder, and the 747 was gone.

He walked across the meadow to the fires. As soon as people saw him, they began coming up to him, touching him, greeting him. We saw you go into the big white house with
her.
We thought you were dead. How did you get away? Is she still there? Where did it go?

“No, she’s not there. She’s back at her fortress now, and Katerina’s there, and we have to go and finish the job, we have to rescue Katerina.”

Now that Ivan had said it, it was the obvious thing to do, no time to waste. They searched for their weapons, picked them up.

“The day’s work isn’t done here yet,” Ivan said, speaking louder and louder. “Not while Katerina is in the witch’s fortress! We drove away the witch’s army! Now let’s have done with her ourselves! Her power is broken, Bear is free, her spells are coming apart—now is the time to strike!”

Then he realized that one of the bloodstained faces that was peering at him was King Matfei, holding Sergei in his arms.

“Look what he did for me,” Matfei said. “It was the crippled one who saved my life!”

Ivan looked with grief on the body of his friend. “Oh, God, no. Sergei.”

“He isn’t dead,” said King Matfei. “But he’s dying.”

“Then that’s all the more reason for us to hurry to the fortress and bring back Katerina. She’ll know how to heal him, if it can be done at all. Where’s Father Lukas?”

“Dead,” said King Matfei.

And then, in unison, because they both realized it at once, Ivan said, “You’re talking!” and King Matfei said, “I can talk!”

That was the final proof, for any doubters, that when Bear was set free, all the spells the witch had created by his power were undone. King Matfei had his tongue. And therefore there was hope that somewhere in that stronghold, Katerina was alive.

They ran along the road, unhindered by any enemy. They all ran, casting away armor, clothing, bucklers, clinging only to their swords and bows and spears and axes. Yet for all their strength in battle, none of them came close to keeping up with Ivan. He approached the gate of the stronghold before any of the others were in sight.