Page 19 of The Bone Doll (The Ruthenian Chronicle #1)

Baba Les

Viktor stumbled outside. What had he done?

Overhead, murky clouds threatened rain, and the trees stirred with a light breeze.

He turned in a circle but found no direction to go.

He couldn’t stay here. Syra was here, and she never wanted to see him again.

She had asked him, on the road, whether he wanted to see Khirzan.

Maybe now was the time. At least it was a long walk away from her, so he could make her happy and at least do one useful thing with his life.

And maybe he would grow so tired while walking that he eventually forgot about her.

Right now, he doubted it was possible. It felt like he would always want her.

Viktor punched the nearest tree. His knuckles split open. He truly ruin everything he touched. Just like the Bone Doll said.

Hissing through the pain, he shook out his hand.

He wasn’t thinking straight. He staggered through the trees and brush, trying to put some distance between himself and the manor.

The forest pressed in around him. A pair of birds screeched at each other, but otherwise he was alone.

He winced at the sight of his broken knuckles.

Just another thing he ruined. He wiped his face on the back of his sleeve.

As he leaned against a tree, his breathing ragged, he heard a wooden creaking noise. Not trees, but like a makeshift door rattling in the wind. He frowned. He had thought the leshy had destroyed the servants’ quarters years ago.

Against his better judgment, he walked towards the sound.

Amidst the trees, a ramshackle hut perched on stilts and was surrounded by a fence made of branches. Chickens pecked in the yard, oblivious to Viktor’s arrival; and a thin curl of smoke came from the chimney, smelling of pine and horseradish. Viktor hesitated. He didn’t remember this place at all.

The door opened and an elderly woman stuck her head out as though she was expecting a visitor. She wore a patterned scarf on her head, wisps of iron gray hair poking from beneath it, and had two shining green eyes. She gestured to him. “Come, traveler, I have beet shchi on the fire.”

Though his mind told him to be wary of strangers in the forest, his legs had other thoughts. Viktor stepped beyond the gate.

Her house was one room, with the fire on the northern side and a cot with a patchwork quilt on the southern side.

And it was filled to the brim with all manner of things: vegetables like beets, cabbage, onion, sorrel; clay jars of every shape and size, some labeled and others not; a stack of blankets and a pile of rags; a spindle and a row of sewing needles strung on a thread; a collection of broken and unbroken stools; an array of spoons, ladles, and knives; the bones of squirrels and birds; and much more that Viktor couldn’t catalog.

For the strangeness of her house, the old woman gave him a very ordinary bowl of shchi – beet soup flavored with horseradish and dill.

“I don’t remember your house being here,” Viktor said slowly.

She picked up a needle and began stitching two rags together. “Does the lord’s son know every person on his father’s land?”

Viktor licked his lips. “You’re only two dozen feet from the manor house.”

“You walked farther than you think,” she said.

Viktor sat silently, then, unsure of what to say. The shchi was better than any of the food his family served; and it wasn’t soured by his family’s presence. His guilt only seemed to make him hungrier, and he finished it quicker than was polite. The woman didn’t offer him more.

“You betrayed someone,” she said, not looking up from her needlework.

Viktor flinched. “How do you know?”

“Your guilt is written in your eyes and draped like a cloak around your shoulders.” She stabbed her needle into the ratty fabric with a certain cruel efficiency. “Did you lie to them out of love or cowardice?”

He swallowed. And though he wanted to get up and leave, his legs stayed rooted to the chair he sat in.

“You want to be like Dobrynya in the fairytales,” she said. “But you are the zmey, stealing and burning whatever you see.”

The zmey. A scaly, slithering, greedy thing. Perhaps a hero should come along and slay him.

Setting aside her needlework, the old woman slipped her withered hand into her apron pocket and pulled out a flat piece of glass. She settled in the palm of her hand and stared at it as though it were a mirror, though Viktor was certain all she could see was her palm.

“When you leave me, be careful which road you choose,” she said. “In one direction is your fate. In another, your destiny.”

Viktor scowled, standing. “Both paths lead to the same place?”

“The gods twist your fate from many fibers into a great rope,” she said. “You can change what the threads are made of.”

“Which way is which?”

She smiled and shook her head.

His skin prickled, and her magic finally released him. He jumped from his stool and backed towards the door. Then through it. He climbed down the front steps and trotted through the flock of chickens. The old woman didn’t follow.

He glanced back.

The house on stilts, its yard, and the chickens were gone.

Only trees and thorn bushes remained. The hairs on the back of Viktor’s neck stiffened as he wondered if the woman and her house had been there at all.

But the smell of horseradish and burning pinewood remained.

Shaking himself, he turned away again, the forest shrinking closer.

What did it matter if the woman was real or a trick of his desperate mind?

Maybe if she was a spirit, she should have eaten him or taken him captive.

Then, Syra would never see him again – and Viktor wouldn’t have to walk away himself.

Just as he thought of her, a bright blue light flickered across the sky. He turned, his guts twisting. In the north, that bright blue light shone upward through the trees and into the sky.

“Syra,” he whispered.