It began to look as though Katerina might be right, that Baba Yaga had disappeared right along with that first plane, back to the ninth century. Which meant that maybe they wouldn't have to worry again until they crossed the bridge.
They were so relaxed, they even slept on the flight. And when they finally got to Cousin Marek's house, exhausted from travel and from too much alertness, he confirmed it for them. "She's no longer in this world. But when she left, she didn't leave alone."
"So she took the passengers with her?" asked Ivan.
"They're all back there, where she is," said Marek. "Poor things."
"What can we do? How can we bring them back?"
"Two ways," said Marek. "First, you persuade old Yaga to send them back."
"All right, we'll do that," said Ivan.
Katerina looked at him as if he were insane.
"I was joking."
"What's the other way?" Katerina asked Cousin Marek.
"Break her power," said Marek.
"Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West," said Ivan.
"What?"
"A movie. The Wizard of Oz. The only way to break her power is to kill her, isn't it?"
Marek shrugged. "That would certainly work. But I can't tell you that it's the only way."
"Do you know of another?"
"I'm only a god, Vanya, not an expert."
With Baba Yaga no longer gunning for them, they didn't have quite the same urgency to get back. Whatever mischief she was doing in Taina, time flowed differently there from here, and so hurrying made no sense, if something could be gained by lingering.
And something could, Ivan hoped. Together Cousin Marek and Ivan and a couple of other farmers from the area worked on making a hang glider out of available wood—some seasoned lumber for the most rigid heart of the frame, but the rest springier, newer wood, thin wands of it. And tightly woven fabric—cotton for now, but rough linen would have to do, when they got to Taina. Unless they could find silk. Katerina remembered that she had once seen a length of imported silk. If it was still there, not cut up into too many smaller pieces, they might be able to use it.
They had sense enough not to make the test flights by jumping off cliffs, and after several tries, they were able to make a glider that worked. Katerina insisted on learning to fly it, too, and while neither of them became brilliant at it, they also didn't die, which was how you graduated from a do-it-yourself hang-gliding school, Ivan figured.
They knew all that they could think of that might be useful. They had done all they could think of to prepare and practice and plan. There was nothing but fear to hold them any longer, and so they decided, as one, that it was time to cross the bridge, this time as rulers of Taina, first to drive the usurpers out of power, and then to strike the blow that would set them free of Baba Yaga once and for all.
Or they'd die trying.
Baba Yaga
It was not until the house-that-flies was in the air that Baba Yaga ventured out of the bathroom to walk the aisles. She had had a shaky moment when the boy stood right outside the door of the restroom where she was hiding. The spells that his mother had prepared for him were powerful, and she could feel how the Aware spell struggled against her Oblivious. When he went away, though, she was sure he hadn't seen her. She only wished she could understand what they were saying.
Seats 2-A and 2-B. Empty.
Were they simply out of their seats? In the bathroom? Visiting the cockpit?
No and no. They had left the plane. They were nowhere on it.
Baba Yaga was filled with helpless rage. All of last night's work had been for nothing. She was sure Ivan had said they had their reservation, and yet their names were nowhere in the computers. Only when she redoubled the spell of helpfulness on the stupid weary ticket agent did he come up with the bright idea that maybe they had flown from a different airport.
Baba Yaga finally found their reservation—but not till they had already taken off from Rochester. As it was, she had to scramble to catch a Syracuse flight that would get her to Kennedy before they embarked on the transatlantic leg of their journey. She was angry that they had tricked her—not just that they had succeeded, but that they had dared to try—but they hadn't eluded her for long. It was the big transatlantic plane that she wanted, anyway.
Now to find that they had gotten off the flight was almost unbearable. She screamed and ranted all the way up and down the plane, spewing nauseating, annoying little curses between screeches. Nobody noticed her, of course, and all the spell-casting left her exhausted. She could barely sustain Shadow by the time she was done. But it didn't matter. In a few minutes she and the plane would be back in her own world—the world where Bear could replenish her strength whenever she needed. And casting the spell to bring it all home would be easy enough. She had the cloth already prepared, hadn't she? And sooner or later, Ivan and Katerina would return to Taina. It would have been nice to destroy them in Ivan's world, but in the end, destroying them in Taina would have the added benefit of demoralizing the entire population of Taina. It was really better this way. They had escaped one trap, but inevitably they would walk into another, sooner rather than later. And in Taina, there'd be no more interference from the mousy little witch Ivan called Mother.
When the seatbelt light went dark and people started moving around again, Baba Yaga began following one of the flight attendants around, filling her with wordless curiosity, along with images of the pilot as the man with the answers. And when the flight attendant finally went to the cockpit, Baba Yaga didn't have to understand English to know what was being said, for she was feeding the girl questions below the level of language.
"What is the head of the plane?" asked the flight attendant.
The pilot looked at her as if she were insane.
Baba Yaga cast Understanding on him, which in her weakened state didn't confer actual comprehension, but did make him listen attentively, setting aside biases and expectations that would have interfered. In the end, the pilot told her, "The thing that leads the plane is me, and the tool I use to do it is this." He pointed to the thing that looked something like a car steering wheel.
At once the flight attendant relaxed, then looked confused. "What am I doing up here? Did you want something?"
"No," said the pilot, laughing. "We didn't want anything."
"Then you shouldn't have called me," she said. She rushed out of the cockpit, embarrassed.
The pilot only had time to say "I think somebody's been hitting the bottle" before Baba Yaga, unnoticeable as ever, leaned over his shoulder and draped a small cloth over the control that he had indicated. Baba Yaga herself might be weak here, but the cloth had been given its power at a time when she had her full strength. It would do its work. The plane and everything in it would follow where the cloth took them.
Home.
One moment they were flying over the Atlantic, still not quite out of the sight of land. The next moment, they were in the air over the deep forest of western Rus'. The panic in the cockpit lasted only until Baba Yaga cast off Shadow and revealed herself. For in the transition from one world to the other, the power of Bear had flooded back into her. She felt like a girl again; all the weariness was gone. And now it was a simple matter to impose Understanding on the pilot, the crew, and all the passengers—not just openness, but real comprehension of every word she spoke, though not one of them spoke her language.
"I have brought you here. Take me to my kingdom!"
They seemed reluctant at first. Not until the copilot and several flight attendants were vomiting or dancing around insanely did the pilot really understand the kind of power he was dealing with. And the pilot didn't actually get cooperative until she had given him a crippling rectal itch, which he had no choice but to scratch at savagely, until finally he persuaded Baba Yaga that yes, he would take her wherever she wanted to go, and no, he would not make any more foolish demands about taking them back to Kennedy at once.