Page 108 of One For my Enemy

“Your daughter,” Lazar murmured to the elder Marya Antonova when her husband was busy playing with Dimitri. “She knows more than she lets on. I wonder where she learned how to do that?”

Marya’s dark eyes cut to his. “She’s a clever girl, my Masha.”

“Mm,” Lazar agreed, watching a young Masha’s cheeks flush as Dimitri turned, gallantly offering her something: a book, a toy, a trinket. Dimitri was never selfish, always bold. Masha turned her face away, made shy by the attention. “Well,” Lazar said, “in my experience, the most precious jewels are usually hidden. Does her father know?”

“Know what?” Marya demurred, her voice carefully light.

“That she’s as good a witch as you,” Lazar said quietly, and Marya stiffened. “That, and what the two of you are up to.”

He’d seen the potions passed quietly in his seedier circles and recognized instantly who had been behind them. Whose potions they were, firstly, but whose hand had rendered them far more desirable.

Hands,he corrected himself, because if Marya was involved, then Masha was certainly close behind.

“Stay away from my husband,” Marya warned in lieu of an answer. “I know who you are. I know you’ll try to use him.”

“Try?” Lazar echoed, laughing. “Is that what you think?”

He knew instantly he’d made a mistake; he’d said too much. He’d established himself as a threat, and the moment Marya turned away, he could feel a pulse of mistrust that forced itself between them. It was years before Marya struck, but Lazar knew he’d planted the seed of her displeasure as early as that little conversation, when he’d meant to impress her but had miscalculated the degree to which she’d already understood what he was.

It was obvious the source of Marya’s sudden break in patience with Antonov was the increasing closeness between her daughter and Lazar’s son. Lazar himself had guessed as much already. He could smell the telling scent of rosewater in the air, lingering behind while Dimitri would stare out his window, smiling faintly into nothing. For all that Dimitri was softly foreign to Lazar—his golden son, who was braver and warmer and cleverer than anyone Lazar had ever known; charming and charismatic and yet loyal, steadfast, dauntless—it was clear enough: Dimitri was in love with Masha. Perhaps Masha even loved him back. If Antonov had lived, perhaps Dimitri would have proposed marriage to Masha, and she would have accepted. Then Masha would be a Fedorov daughter, a daughter of Koschei, as loyal to Lazar as his three capable sons. Perhaps the joining of their families would have meant Antonov’s clever witchery would then belong to Koschei—but as the opportunity grew closer, Lazar could see that Marya had stood silently in the background for long enough.

“I think Marya’s poisoning me,” Antonov said to Lazar, coughing blood into a napkin. “I don’t know why, Lazar—I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done—but can I stay with you?”

Lazar grimaced, then sighed. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said.

Ten minutes later, he called Dimitri into the room.

“Dima,” Lazar said, “you understand you will be Koschei one day, don’t you?”

Dimitri nodded numbly, staring at the body on the floor. Antonov had been like an uncle to him, Lazar knew, but there was no time like the present to learn a doting Borough witch wasn’t the same as blood.

“As Koschei,” Lazar continued, “you will have to do things that are necessary from time to time. You will have to make choices. Decisions are power,” he said, and Dimitri looked up, golden brow solemn with duty. “To be the one to make a decision is to hold power in your hands. But once a decision is made, sometimes you will have to keep secrets.”

“You don’t want me to tell Masha,” Dimitri interpreted correctly. He looked troubled at the thought, but only for a moment. Perhaps he’d already judged for himself that Masha wouldn’t want to know.

Lazar nodded.

“Fetch Maksimov,” Lazar instructed. “The Borough witch. He owes me. Tell him he saw Antonov collapse during one of the Borough meetings. When he has arranged it, have him summon Masha’s mother. Have him tell her to prepare herself.”

“Prepare herself for what?” Dimitri asked.

“She’ll know,” Lazar said. “Do you understand?”

Dimitri nodded grimly. “Yes, Papa,” he said, and turned on his heel, leaving the room. No further questions. A loyal son and a faultless heir, even at fifteen. He did everything precisely as he was told, and nobody suspected a thing of either Marya Antonova or Lazar himself. Roman Antonov died and was buried as the unremarkable Borough witch he was, and his family faded into obscurity until approximately three years later, when the Witches’ Boroughs began to discuss the prominence of a witch with questionable income, who was known only as Baba Yaga.

Lazar, who had expected such a thing to happen, knew precisely what Marya Antonova had done. After all, she’d hidden herself away for over two decades behind her husband, so why not behind some other name? He chuckled to himself over the thought that perhaps she’d chosen it because of him. She knew he was Koschei the Deathless, so of course she was Baba Yaga, and now, of course, they would be rivals.

Though, perhaps that wasn’t precisely what he wanted.

“Marry me,” he told Marya. He hadn’t fully realized how he felt until the words came out. “You are in need of a husband, I am in need of a wife. We can be very useful to each other, don’t you think?”

She told him she could not bear him children. He said he had no need of them, but failed to mention her children were already so valuable he could never imagine a need for any others.

She told him she didn’t need his help. He said she could always use more help, but failed to confess he needed hers. He was aging, getting on in years. He was lonely since Anna died. He wanted a companion, a friend.You do not need my help, but I need yours,he didn’t say, and perhaps that’s what had done it.

He was a man more accustomed to threats than to promises. He said everything wrong, and when he called Dimitri to him that night to tell his son what had happened, he was sure he could already feel the consequences of his mistake tremoring in the air.

“I asked for Yaga’s hand in marriage,” he told his son, whose golden brow furrowed.

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