Her legs gave out beneath her and she fell on her side, she forgot how to breathe, and all of her insides turned to ice.
There were two dozen men screaming, and one woman screaming back at them. The men were not standing or sitting in the room. The men were the room. The men were the walls, their bodies melted and twisted and flatted against the logs of the cabin, their bodies turned and bent and leaning at every angle, their heads hanging out into the room to scream. And they were all the same man, the same ugly man with limp black hair and a drooping black mustache and a large crooked nose.
Some of them were blackened with frost and some were white as bone. Some even had bones erupting through their skin as their bodies stretched out across the walls. And Wren realized that there were no candles in the room after all. Every few paces, there was a hand or a foot or a face on fire.
In the center of the room lay Yaga, curled up on the floor with her clawing hands wrapped around her white head. Her screams came from her belly as she kept her face down and did not look up at the tortured men around her.
Wren felt her hands shaking. They felt so thin and fragile and useless, her hands. Her belly felt hollow, and she couldn’t think a single thought, couldn’t form a single image in her mind because the screaming crowded into her ears, drowning out her own thoughts. The only thing that welled up inside her was a single word:
Out.
She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees, trying to cover her ears as she moved and keeping her eyes narrowed to slits so she wouldn’t have to look at the screaming faces on the walls. When she reached Yaga’s foot, Wren grabbed it with both hands, shuffled around, and started crawling back toward the door.
The screaming wormed its way inside her, piercing her head, gnawing at her chest and bones like a thousand hungry locusts. Her heart sank by degrees with each passing moment, from shock to disgust to fear to despair to self-loathing to an all-consuming desire to die, just to escape the screaming.
But still she crawled, and she pulled on the witch’s leg.
When her head struck the door, she reached up and fumbled with the wooden handle, but the door would not open. Tears poured down her cheeks as she pounded on the door, and she moaned wordless prayers for silence, for darkness, for sunlight, for death, for anything but the fiery chamber of screaming faces.
She slammed her hand against the door one last time and it swung out and open, and Wren tumbled out, dragging Yaga with her. The two women spun out into the cold, empty air and Wren had a brief glimpse of the blinding white snow before she struck the ground and lost consciousness.
Wren awoke slowly, her eyes focusing slowly through layers of white blurs, her ears focusing slowly through layers of white noise. Gradually she blinked away the pain and looked across the bright white snow and ice at the old woman lying beside her. The stream gurgled by their feet and the winter wind whistled through the leafless trees. And in the distance, she could hear people talking and boots crunching on snow.
The blood is gone.
The trees all stood tall and stiff again wearing their black and silver bark, and the snow was just snow, and the ice was just ice, all white and silver and hard and cold.
She sat up and knocked the cold wet clumps off her clothes, and then she crawled over to Yaga and rolled the old witch onto her back.
Yaga stared up at the sky, and blinked. “Where am I?”
“Outside.”
“Where’s my Koschei?”
Wren took a deep breath. “The real Koschei is on a Turkish ship. And sooner or later, he’ll be set free or he’ll be rescued, and he’ll come home to you. He’s immortal, just like you. You’ll see him again soon.”
Yaga sat up and looked around the clearing. “I’m home?”
“No. This is a dream. Your dream. You’re not really here, in Rus. You’re in Constantia, in the south. You’re in a tower in the palace.”
“I know you.” Yaga frowned. “Or do I?”
“You do, in the waking world,” Wren said. “I’m a vala, a witch, from Ysland. We met earlier today.”
“I’m dreaming.” Yaga looked at her sharply. “But I’m not asleep.”
“No, and that’s the problem. You need to sleep. And you need to stay out of there.” Wren pointed up at the cabin above them.
Yaga nodded. “I’ll go to the village.”
“Good. I think some of the people are coming to check on you now.” Wren looked over her shoulder at the woods and saw tiny shadows moving among the trees. “So I’m going to go back to the waking world now. Are you going to be all right here?”
Yaga nodded slowly. There was a miserable blankness about her eyes and mouth.
“All right then.” Wren stood up, leaving the old woman sitting in the snow in the shadow of her cabin by the edge of the stream. She hesitated, uncertain of what to do next, and then she started walking upstream, away from the approaching people.
When she was back among the trees and the clearing was out of sight behind her, Wren sat down on a cold stone and looked at the ring on her hand. “All right. I’m ready to go back now. Back to my own body. Back where I belong.”
A soft cackling laughter resounded from her ring.
“Gudrun? Kara? Hrist? Brynhilda? I want to go back to my body now.” Wren glared intently at the ring. “Come on now, I know how this works. Omar told me. You can’t just do whatever you want. You have to listen to me, like when I make the ring glow, you have to do it. I’m in control here.”
The dead witches laughed louder.
Wren tightened her hand into a fist and focused on the little golden ring between her knuckles. “I command you to take me back to my body! I command you! Right now!”
The world fell out from under her and Wren flew up into the air, tumbling out of control into the cold white sky above the silent forest. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the clearing where Yaga’s cabin stood above the stream, and then everything went black.
Wren sat up. She was sitting in the dark again, on the blank patch of cold, smooth earth beneath a pale circle of moonlight in a starless sky. “Gudrun? Kara?”
The eight valas of Denveller stepped out of the darkness, ringing her in on every side.
“You’re just a child,” Rangrid said. She was a bulbous creature of folds and mounds and humps, and she hobbled forward with her little fingers fidgeting together over her huge breasts. “You were nothing as an apprentice, and you’re even less now. You don’t deserve to wear the ring of Denveller. You don’t deserve to command us.”
“Truly the great line of Denveller has failed,” Kara said. “But perhaps it can still be salvaged. Perhaps one of us should return to the world of the living in your place and-”
“Enough!” Wren shouted. “All of you! Shut up! You’re all dead. Do you hear me? Dead! And I’m sick and tired of listening to your insults and your cackling. You’re dead, and you’ll do as I say!”
“You think you can threaten us?” Gudrun hissed. “We are, as you say, dead. You can’t threaten the dead, little one.”
“Can’t I? I wonder.” Wren lunged at her shriveled little mistress, spun the crone about, and wrapped her arm around the old woman’s throat.
Gudrun gasped and wheezed as she clawed feebly at Wren’s arm. “Let me go!”
“Why? I thought I couldn’t threaten you,” Wren said softly.
“What is this?” Kara backed away with a look of horror on her face. “How can you do this? We’re ghosts, we’re invincible here.”
“Remember the corpses in Vlachia?” Wren asked. “Omar said the ghosts were clinging to their bodies. Even though they knew they were dead, they still wanted to be human. Do you see, ladies? The human soul can’t become something else, something more than human. We’re human. We’re always human. We’re only human. Now and forever. Even here, in death, we’re still human. And you can still suffer, like any other human being. We don’t transcend. Humanity isn’t some step toward a higher state. Humanity is our lot in life. And in death.”