Babayaga

She awoke to the sound of evening birds, the sun was beginning to fade. She gazed up at the crowded shelves above them, all stuffed with jars and books, sheaves of papers and piles of dried fungus and root. These were all Elga’s, though Zoya knew them by heart. For years the old woman had hauled her odd collection around, fashioning potions, cures, and curses as needed, hawking them, for money or for luck whenever they were running short on good fortune. When events were rushed and times uncertain, they traveled light and Elga would hide the lot of it away in dank sewers, attics, damp catacombs, or old root cellars, hexing and stashing them for years, even decades at a stretch, but always finding them again, digging up and hauling away the cache whenever the coast was clear. Zoya felt uneasy lying there now, she could almost sense the old woman’s presence and imagined the crone muttering to herself as she searched for ointments, balms, powders, or merely those green tins of crispy grasshoppers she liked to snack on. The priest had said Elga was locked up in a jail back in the city, and while Zoya knew they wouldn’t hold her long, she believed they would detain her at least long enough for Zoya and Will to rest some before they ran again.

Looking at Will, she whispered the tiniest of spells and touched his ear to keep him asleep a little longer. They had crawled into bed exhausted soon after Oliver had left that morning. He had departed with a promise to “sort things out proper” with the authorities. “Don’t worry, I’ll go to the embassy first. I have a bit of pull there.” Putting on his hat, he said he would send word when the coast was clear. “Head south,” he suggested, “to Antibes. There’s a little hotel down there that Scott and Zelda used to stay at. The Hotel Belle Rive. Lovely spot, right by the water’s edge. Shut yourselves in your suite, find some dance music on the radio, and order up room service till you hear from me. Shouldn’t be long.” Then he smiled a perfectly confident smile that reminded her of a lawyer leaving his client at the gallows, promising a pardon that never comes.

She was quite sure she would never see him again, not because he was a bad man, but because men like Oliver, though sincere in their dedications, also suffered from a squirrel’s tendency to be distracted by any random acorn that fell on their path. These were the men who committed their betrayals casually and effortlessly, letting people down with little malice and less concern. Promises were simply nice solid-sounding words to them, and so, as Oliver’s car drove off, she was relieved to see him go. After all, he had been useful, but he was used up. She did not mean to judge him, she merely observed. But what she saw was what she had seen all too often, a silly, vain creature who had been raised to believe the universe spun around him, when in fact he was the one spinning in the darkness, circling truths he could never hope to perceive.

Besides, she recalled, he was so lazy in bed.

Will stirred in his sleep; she let him rest. When they first climbed up to the loft she had arranged their pallet, laying the priest’s spare sheets and blankets over straw and filling buttoned shirts with clean stable rags for makeshift pillows. He sat on a stool, watching her work, telling her of Bendix, the drugs, and the vivid dream he had been chased through. While she was intrigued to hear about the hallucination’s landscape and the mystery man who had saved him, she was more interested to hear about this scientist who, she learned, had once hunted her and killed her friend and stolen their secrets. A rage swelled inside her but she bit her tongue: this was not something she could share with Will. “Oliver is right,” she said, lying down on the sheets, “we need to go south.”

“Where to?”