Page 151 of One For my Enemy

“Liliya,” she whispered, perching at the side of her fifth daughter’s bed. “Lilenka, are you dreaming?”

Liliya’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hi, Mama,” she said sleepily, as Yaga brushed her forehead, smoothing her thumb over the crease of concern. “What is it?”

“Shh, nothing,” Yaga told her. Nothing that couldn’t wait until morning. “I just wanted to hear about your dreams, Lilenka. You know I always like the things you see.”

Liliya nodded, lying on her back and considering the request. Her hair, dark like her sisters’, spread out in waves across the silky lightness of her pillowcase.

“I did have a dream,” Liliya said eventually, frowning into the darkened space of her bedroom. “I dreamt last night of our inheritance. But it was the strangest thing,” she said, turning on her side to face her mother. “I could see nothing, because it was locked inside a box.” She paused, chewing lightly at her lip. “What would I have found, Mama, if I had opened it?”

At once, Yaga’s chest tightened, and then released.

She says you’ll understand.

Oh, Mashenka, Yaga thought sadly. You always understood too much.

“Mama?” Liliya asked, watching her expression change. “Is everything okay?”

Yaga took a breath and bent her head, brushing her lips against Liliya’s forehead.

“Of course, Lilenka,” she said. “Go back to sleep. Everything will be fine in the morning.”

V. 27

(Heaven Finds Means.)

When Lev and Sasha arrived, it was too late. By the time they’d pieced together enough of her mind to know what she must have done, Marya Antonova already lay with her long dark hair across the unmoving chest of Dimitri Fedorov, and all was said and done.

More was said, in fact, than anyone but Lev and Sasha had any knowledge of, because Marya Antonova had put it in a letter.

On the evening Marya Antonova and Dimitri Fedorov died, the Borough witches received two important envelopes. One, as Marya had truthfully informed Roman and his father, was from Dimitri Fedorov, which included a lengthy series of records in Dimitri’s own hand detailing the crimes of Koschei the Deathless. At the bottom of a letter urging the Borough witches to act on their consciences, he stipulated firmly that his brothers were blameless. He detailed the location of every creature Koschei the Deathless had ever bought or sold or traded, and signed ownership of Koschei’s rents over to the Boroughs themselves. Then he’d said,It’s over. This is all there is. Let his kingdom fall.

The other, from Marya Antonova, was something so similar as to be a mirror image. Even her handwriting was strangely reflective of Dimitri Fedorov’s, leaning slightly left to the same degree his had leaned right. Hers was a similar confession of evidence, and included a signature at the bottom:Baba Yaga.

She had shrugged on her mother’s title and worn it comfortably for the first and last time.

There is money,Marya Antonova wrote.A lot of money, in fact, and in anticipation of my own reparations, I have seen fit to distribute it among the Boroughs. Consider it a gift. You will notice, I imagine, there is still a reasonable sum unaccounted for. This is intentional. I warn you not to be greedy. Do not look for it. I am gone now and so is Koschei, so let this be the end.

“Well?” the Borough witches asked Jonathan Moronoe. “What will we do?”

“You read the letters,” he said, shrugging.

In Jonathan Moronoe’s mind, Dimitri Fedorov and Marya Antonova had kept to their ends of the deal. Evidence had been compiled. Sins had been confessed. Wrongs had been righted. Reparations had been paid. Life would go on unhindered.

The Borough Elders arrived to arrest Lazar Fedorov, a witch long-suspected of being Koschei himself, but the warehouse belonging to Koschei the Deathless had been emptied, nothing left in its place. He’d been there, of course, waiting for them, and had been vacantly surprised when they turned away empty-handed. Unbeknownst to him, the shadow creatures he’d employed had hidden him from sight, briefly, as the first of their unrestricted acts.

After the Borough witches left, Koschei went downtown for a much-needed drink, where he ran into a man named Ivan.

“I need a favor,” Koschei said, and Ivan turned his head, considering him.

“Depends,” Ivan said. “What is it?”

“Let’s discuss it over a drink,” Koschei suggested.

Later that night, two men parted ways. One would be known in whispers for the rest of his life as Koschei the Deathless, though he had taken on a drastically new enterprise from what he had done before. He protected the small, a purveyor of aid to the underprivileged, and offered council to those in need. Later, people would remark he had something of a mild-mannered air to him. He had, as many people noted, a soldier’s presence.

The other man left as Lazar Fedorov, who never appeared in the Manhattan Borough again.

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