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Chapter 15: Heartless King
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2021-09-28 01:26:33Baba Yaga whistled.
A stallion red as the sun galloped from the woods to the driveway. Solntse, Morozko thought. Baba Yaga’s pride and joy, whose hooves could leave fields aflame in their tempestuous fury.
Solntse neighed, shifting into the form of a red VW Bug with a shining Slavic sun decal. The nechist and Baba Yaga piled into the car haphazardly, with Baba Yaga at the wheel. She drove like a speed demon past buses and Washingtonians onto the highway and followed the Beltway to Washington, D.C., enchanting her way into not paying at the parking garage. They found themselves strolling along the National Mall, obelisk of the Washington Monument penetrating the sky like a needle.
Baba Yaga doted on Anya, pushing her in a stroller. Anya giggled, pointing at the clouds. Time spun on its axis, and Baba Yaga pushed her through summer and fall, through winter and spring, round and round the years until Anya
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Anya returned the next day in tears and ran straight into Dmitri’s arms in the dining room, her bright pink backpack unzipped: “They made me learn! My teacher made me learn! I do not want to learn! I want to fight Genghis Khan in the woods with my bunnies riding Kolya-the-horse’s back and pick flowers with Liza! Liliya is a good Genghis Khan. Why do I have to learn addition and subtraction? It is awful!”Dmitri bellowed with laughter: “Darling Annushka, tell me, did you make any friends? And math is important: Someday you shall inherit all my verdant fields and rolling forests. There will be grain stores and villagers to keep count of, the royal coffers to keep track of-“But da that is so so boring! Put me down, please.”Dmitri did and sighed. “I suppose elementary school will take some getting used to then, my dear.”
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Anya flourished in school, deftly walking the realms between man and spirits. Keeping the secret of her family was like breathing. She felt like a visitor to the Earth, a cast-off ship of dreams, left to travel the world with sails the lapis blue of things forgotten.Anya often pondered forgotten things, like her beloved nechist and how they had faded from Russian memory, relegated to the realm of myths. No one in America knew of Baba Yaga, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Morozko took her to parks and museums, why, there were no gods at all. Anya wondered if, when the Zoryas shone down on Russia, if their starlight was tears at being forgotten by their humans they so so loved. Dmitri never spoke of when the borders between Buyan and Earth were open, and as Anya grew, her monstrous family took her less to the human world – only Morozko.“So what are the virtues of birch venik? Of oak? Eucalyptus?”
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