The Language of Thorns Read online

  When she glimpsed the glow of light filtering through the trees ahead, for one delirious moment she thought she’d somehow made it home. But as she burst into the clearing, she saw that the hut silhouetted before her was all wrong. It was lean and crooked, with lights that glowed in every window. No one in her village would ever waste candles that way.

  The hut seemed to shift, almost as if it were turning to welcome her. She hesitated, took a step back. A twig snapped behind her. She bolted for the hut’s painted door.

  Nadya rattled the handle, sending the lantern above swaying.

  “Help me!” she cried. And the door swung open. She slipped inside, slamming it behind her. Was that a thump she heard? The frustrated scrabble of paws? It was hard to tell over the hoarse sobs wheezing from her chest. She stood with her forehead pressed to the door, waiting for her heart to stop hammering, and only then, when she could take a full breath, did she turn.

  The room was warm and golden, like the inside of a currant bun, thick with the smells of browning meat and fresh-baked bread. Every surface gleamed like new, cheerfully painted with leaves and flowers, animals and tiny people, the paint so fresh and bright it hurt her eyes to look at it after the dull gray surfaces of Duva.

  At the far wall, a woman stood at a vast black cookstove that stretched the length of the room. Twenty different pots boiled atop it, some small and covered, some large and near to bubbling over. The oven beneath had two hinged iron doors that opened from the center and was so large that a man might have lain lengthwise in it. Or at least a child.

  The woman lifted the lid of one of the pots, and a cloud of fragrant steam drifted toward Nadya. Onions. Sorrel. Chicken stock. Hunger came upon her, more piercing and consuming than her fear. A low growl escaped her lips, and she clapped a hand to her mouth.

  The woman glanced over her shoulder.

  She was old but not ugly, her long gray braid tied with a red ribbon. Nadya stared at that ribbon and hesitated, thinking of Genetchka Lukin. The smells of sugar and lamb and garlic and butter, all layered upon one another, made her shake with longing.

  A dog lay curled in a basket, gnawing on a bone, but when Nadya looked closer she saw it was not a dog at all, but a little bear wearing a golden collar.

  “You like Vladchek?”

  Nadya nodded.

  The woman set a heaping plate of stew down on the table.

  “Sit,” said the woman as she returned to the stove. “Eat.”

  Nadya removed her coat and hung it by the door. She pulled her damp mittens from her hands and sat down carefully at the table. She lifted her spoon, but still she hesitated. She knew from stories that you must not eat at a witch’s table.

  But in the end, she could not resist. She ate the stew, every hot and savory bite of it, then flaky rolls, plums in syrup, egg pudding, and a rum cake thick with raisins and brown sugar. Nadya ate and ate while the woman tended to the pots on the stove, sometimes humming a little as she worked.

  She’s fattening me up, thought Nadya, her eyelids growing heavy. She’ll wait for me to fall asleep, then stuff me in the oven and cook me up to make more stew. But Nadya found she didn’t care. The woman set a blanket by the stove, next to Vladchek’s basket, and Nadya fell off to sleep, glad that at least she would die with a full belly.

  But when she woke the next morning, she was still in one piece and the table was set with a hot bowl of porridge, stacks of rye toast slathered with butter, and plates of shiny little herring swimming in oil.

  The old woman introduced herself as Magda, then sat silent, sucking on a sugared plum, watching Nadya eat her breakfast.

  Nadya ate till her stomach ached while outside the snow continued to fall. When she was done, she set her empty bowl down on the floor, where Vladchek licked it clean. Only then did Magda spit the plum pit into her palm and say, “What is it you want?”

  “I want to go home,” Nadya replied.

  “So go.”

  Nadya looked outside to where the snow was still falling. “I can’t.”

  “Well then,” said Magda. “Come help me stir the pot.”

  For the rest of the day, Nadya darned socks, scrubbed pans, chopped herbs, and strained syrups. She stood at the stove for long hours, her hair curling from the heat and steam, stirring many little pots, and wondering all the while what might become of her. That night they ate stuffed cabbage leaves, crispy roast goose, little dishes of apricot custard.

  The next day, Nadya breakfasted on butter-soaked blini stuffed with cherries and cream. When she finished, the witch asked her, “What is it you want?”

  “I want to go home,” said Nadya, glancing at the snow still falling outside. “But I can’t.”

  “Well then,” said Magda. “Come help me stir the pot.”

  This was how it went, day after day, as the snow fell and filled the clearing, rising up around the hut in great white waves.

  On the morning the snow finally stopped, the witch fed Nadya potato pie and sausages and asked her, “What is it you want?”

  “I want to go home,” said Nadya.

  “Well then,” said Magda. “You’d better start shoveling.”

  So Nadya took up the shovel and cleared a path around the hut, accompanied by Vladchek snuffling in the snow beside her and an eyeless crow that Magda fed on rye crumbs, and that sometimes perched upon the witch’s shoulder. In the afternoon, Nadya ate a slab of black bread spread with soft cheese and a dish of baked apples. Magda gave her a mug of hot tea laced with sugar, and back out she went.

  When she finally reached the edge of the clearing, she wondered just where she was supposed to go. The frost had come. The woods were a frozen mass of snow and tangled branches. What might be waiting for her in there? And even if she could make it through the deep snow and find her way back to Duva, what then? A tentative embrace from her weak-willed father? Far worse from his hungry-eyed wife? No path could lead her back to the home she had known. The thought opened a bleak crack inside of her, a fissure where the cold seeped through. For a terrifying moment, she was nothing but a lost girl, nameless and unwanted. She might stand there forever, a shovel in her hand, with no one to call her home. Nadya turned on her heel and scurried back to the warm confines of the hut, whispering her own name beneath her breath as if she might forget it.

  Each day, Nadya worked. She cleaned floors, dusted shelves, mended clothes, shoveled snow, and scraped the ice away from the windows. But mostly, she helped Magda with her cooking. It was not all food. There were tonics and ointments, bitter-smelling pastes, jewel-colored powders packed in small enamel boxes, tinctures in brown glass bottles. There was always something strange brewing on that stove.

  Soon she learned why.

  They came late at night, when the moon was waxing, slogging through miles of ice and snow, men and women on sledges and shaggy ponies, even on foot. They brought eggs, jars of preserves, sacks of flour, bales of wheat. They brought smoked fish, blocks of salt, wheels of cheese, bottles of wine, tins of tea, and bag after bag of sugar, for there was no denying Magda’s sweet tooth. They cried out for love potions and untraceable poisons. They begged to be made beautiful, healthy, rich.

  Always, Nadya stayed hidden. On Magda’s orders, she climbed high into the shelves of the larder.

  “Stay there and keep quiet,” Magda said. “I don’t need rumors starting that I’ve been taking girls.”

  So Nadya sat with Vladchek, nibbling on a spice cookie or sucking on a hunk of black licorice, watching Magda work. She might have announced herself to these strangers at any time, pleaded to be taken home or given shelter, shouted that she’d been trapped by a witch. Instead, she stayed silent, sugar melting on her tongue, watching as they came to this old woman, how they turned to her with desperation, with resentment, but always with respect.

  Magda gave them drops for the eyes, tonics for the scalp. She ran her hands over their wrinkles, tapped a man’s chest till he hacked up black bile. Nadya was never sure how much was real
and how much was show until the night the wax-skinned woman came.

  She was gaunt, as they all were, her face a skull of hard-carved hollows. Magda asked the question she asked anyone who came to her door: “What is it you want?”

  The woman collapsed in her arms, weeping, as Magda murmured soothing words, patted her hand, dried her tears. They conferred in voices too low for Nadya to decipher, and before the woman left, she took a tiny pouch from her pocket and shook the contents into Magda’s palm. Nadya craned her neck to get a better look, but Magda’s hand clamped shut too quickly.

  The next day, Magda sent Nadya out of the house to shovel snow. When she returned at lunchtime, she was shooed back out with a cup of codfish stew. Dusk came, and as Nadya finished sprinkling salt along the edges of the path, the scent of gingerbread drifted to her across the clearing, rich and spicy, filling her nose until she felt nearly drunk.

  All through dinner, she waited for Magda to open the oven, but when the meal was finished, the old woman set a piece of yesterday’s lemon cake before her. Nadya shrugged. As she reached for the cream, she heard a soft sound, a gurgle. She looked at Vladchek, but the bear was fast asleep, snoring softly.

  And then she heard it again, a gurgle followed by a plaintive coo. From inside the oven.

  Nadya pushed back from the table, nearly knocking her chair over, and stared at Magda, horrified, but the witch did not flinch.

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Go into the larder, Nadya.”

  For a moment, Nadya hovered between the table and the door, caught like a fly that might still free itself from the web. Then she backed into the larder, pausing only to grab hold of Vladchek’s collar and drag him with her onto the top shelf, comforted by his drowsy snuffling and the warm feel of his fur beneath her hands.

  Magda opened the door. The wax-faced woman stood waiting at the threshold, almost as if she were afraid to move. Magda wrapped her hands in towels and pulled open the oven’s iron doors. A squalling cry filled the room. The woman grabbed at the doorposts as her knees buckled, then pressed her hands to her mouth, her chest heaving, tears streaming over her sallow cheeks. Magda swaddled the gingerbaby in a red kerchief and handed it, squirming and mewling, into the woman’s trembling, outstretched arms.

  “Milaya,” the woman crooned. Sweet girl. She turned her back on Magda and disappeared into the night, not bothering to close the door behind her.

  The next day, Nadya left her breakfast untouched, placing her cold bowl of porridge on the floor for Vladchek. He turned up his nose at it until Magda put it back on the stove to warm.

  Before Magda could ask her question, Nadya said, “That wasn’t a real child. Why did she take it?”

  “It was real enough.”

  “What will happen to it? What will happen to her?” Nadya asked, a wild edge to her voice.

  “Eventually it will be nothing but crumbs,” said Magda.

  “And then what? Will you just make her another?”

  “The mother will be dead long before that. She has the same fever that took her infant.”

  “Then cure her!” Nadya shouted, smacking the table with her unused spoon.

  “She didn’t ask to be cured. She asked for a child.”

  Nadya put on her mittens and stomped out into the yard. She did not go inside for lunch. She meant to skip dinner too, to show what she thought of Magda and her terrible magic. But by the time night came her stomach was growling, and when Magda put down a plate of sliced duck with hunter’s sauce, Nadya picked up her fork and knife.

  “I want to go home,” she muttered to her plate.

  “So go,” said Magda.

  Winter dragged on with frost and cold, but the lamps always burned golden in the little hut. Nadya’s cheeks grew rosy and her clothes grew snug. She learned how to mix up Magda’s tonics without looking at the recipes and how to bake an almond cake in the shape of a crown. She learned which herbs were valuable and which were dangerous, and which herbs were valuable because they were dangerous.

  Nadya knew there was much that Magda didn’t teach her. She told herself she was glad of it, that she wanted nothing to do with Magda’s abominations. But sometimes she felt her curiosity clawing at her like a different kind of hunger.

  And then, one morning, she woke to the tapping of the blind crow’s beak on the sill and the drip, drip, drip of melted snow from the eaves. Bright sun shone through the windows. The thaw had come.

  That morning, Magda laid out sweet rolls with prune jam, a plate of boiled eggs, and bitter greens. Nadya ate and ate, afraid to reach the end of her meal, but eventually she could not take another bite.

  “What is it you want?” asked Magda.

  This time Nadya hesitated, afraid. “If I go, couldn’t I just—”

  “You cannot come and go from this place like you’re fetching water from a well. I will not have you bring a monster to my door.”

  Nadya shivered. A monster. So she’d been right about Karina.

  “What is it you want?” asked Magda again.

  Nadya thought of Genetchka dancing, of nervous Lara, of Betya and Ludmilla, of the others she had never known.

  “I want my father to be free of Karina. I want Duva to be safe. I want to go home.”

  Gently, Magda reached out and touched Nadya’s left hand—first the ring finger, then the pinkie. Nadya thought of the wax-faced woman, of the little bag she’d emptied into the witch’s palm.

  “Think on it,” said Magda.

  The next morning when Magda went to lay out the breakfast, she found the cleaver Nadya had placed there.

  For two days, the cleaver lay untouched on the table, as they measured and sifted and mixed, making batch after batch of batter. On the second afternoon, when the hardest of the work was done, Magda turned to Nadya.

  “You know that you are welcome to remain here with me,” said the witch.

  Nadya stretched out her hand.

  Magda sighed. The cleaver flashed once in the afternoon sun, the edge gleaming the dull gray of Grisha steel, then fell with a sound like a gunshot.

  At the sight of her fingers lying forlorn on the table, Nadya fainted.

  Magda healed the stumps of Nadya’s fingers, bound her hand, let her rest. And while she slept, Magda took the two fingers and ground them down to a wet red meal that she mixed into the batter.

  When Nadya revived, they worked side by side, shaping the gingergirl on a damp plank as big as a door, then shoved her into the blazing oven.

  All night the gingergirl baked, filling the hut with a marvelous smell. Nadya knew she was smelling her own bones and blood, but still her mouth watered. She dozed. Near dawn, the oven doors creaked open and the gingergirl crawled out. She crossed the room, opened the window, and lay down on the counter to let herself cool.

  In the morning, Nadya and Magda attended the gingergirl, dusted her with sugar, gave her frosted lips and thick ropes of icing for hair.

  Finally, they dressed her in Nadya’s clothes and boots and set her on the path toward Duva.

  They ate a small meal of herring and soft eggs to keep up their strength. Then Magda sat Nadya down at the table and took a small jar from one of the cabinets. She opened the window and the eyeless black crow came to rest on the table, picking at the crumbs the gingergirl had left behind.

  Magda tipped the contents of the jar into her palm and held them out to Nadya. “Open your mouth,” she said.

  In Magda’s hand, floating in a pool of shiny fluid, lay a pair of bright blue eyes. Hatchling’s eyes.

  “Do not swallow,” said Magda sternly, “and do not retch.”

  Nadya closed her eyes and forced her lips to part. She tried not to gag as the crow’s eyes slid onto her tongue.

  “Open your eyes,” commanded Magda.

  Nadya obeyed, and when she did, the whole room had shifted. She saw herself sitting in a chair, eyes still closed, Magda beside her. She tried to raise her hands, but found that her wings rose instead.
She hopped on her little crow feet and released a startled squawk of surprise.

  Magda shooed her to the window and Nadya, elated from the feeling of her wings and the wind spreading beneath them, did not see the sadness in the old woman’s gaze.

  Nadya rose high into the air in a great wheeling arc, dipping her wings, learning the feel of them, slicing through the long shadows of the dwindling afternoon. She saw the woods spread beneath her, the clearing, and Magda’s hut. She saw the jagged peaks of the Petrazoi in the distance, and gliding lower, she saw the gingergirl’s path through the woods. She swooped and darted between the trees, unafraid of the forest for the first time since she could remember.

  She circled over Duva, saw the main street, the cemetery, two new altars laid out. Two more girls gone during the long winter while she grew fat at the witch’s table. They would be the last. She screeched and dove beside the gingergirl, driving her onward, her soldier, her champion.

  Nadya watched from a clothesline as the gingergirl crossed the clearing to her father’s house. Inside, she could hear raised voices arguing. Did he know what Karina had done? Had he begun to suspect what she truly was?

  The gingergirl knocked and the voices quieted. When the door swung open, her father squinted into the dusk. Nadya was shocked at the toll the winter had taken on him. His broad shoulders looked hunched and narrow, and, even from a distance, she could see the way the skin hung loose on his frame. She waited for him to cry out in horror at the monster that stood before him.

  “Nadya?” Maxim gasped. “Nadya!” He pulled the gingergirl into his arms with a rough cry.

  Karina appeared behind him in the door, face pale, eyes wide. Nadya felt a twinge of disappointment. Somehow she’d imagined that Karina would take one look at the gingergirl and crumble to dust, or that the sight of Nadya alive and well on her doorstep would force her to blurt out some ugly confession.

  Maxim drew the gingergirl inside and Nadya fluttered down to the windowsill to peer through the glass.