Page 107 of One For my Enemy

And I for winking at your discords too,

Have lost a brace of kinsmen; all are punish’d.”

The Prince (5.3.308–311)

V. 1

(The Patriarch.)

People believe shadows represent darkness, but that isn’t technically true. For one thing, a shadow can’t exist without light. A shadow, which is itself a slice of darkness, can only be seen when light persists, which is to say it can only be seen in the context of something brighter.

To claim the man known as Koschei the Deathless spent most of his life as a shadow is not an unreasonable conclusion; Lazar Fedorov had certainly been a shadow when he was born. His father had been a working-class witch, a cog in the workings of New York’s Witches’ Boroughs, who had scraped together all of his hard-earned money (through favors, odd jobs, and loans, most of them made by other pilgrims who’d sought Lady Liberty’s torch) to buy a dilapidated apartment building, which he turned into a slightly less dilapidated building until the occasion of his death in Lazar’s mid-teens. The year Lazar’s father died was a particularly bad one, for him and Lazar both, as it turned out. Lazar’s eldest brother, who had never been particularly strong, died shortly after their father. It was an infection in his lungs; something as inconsequential as breathing. Lazar, who had adored his clever brother, found himself alone, now the inheritor of their father’s only two possessions: his good name and his apartment building. His needy tenants, too, whose oppressive needs continued even after his death.

Lazar began as his father had, with favors for the lowly, and if karma were a game to be played, Lazar approached the table with a winning hand. At only fifteen years old, Lazar Fedorov commenced what would become a complex system of favors, all of which began with a genuine intent to do good: A patched roof here. A repaired wall there. Oh, Lazar, thank heavens you were here, can you lend an eye to this problem I am having? In exchange I can offer you little, but here, take this: a trinket from our home. From our family. From our past. Something meaningful to me.

Lazar would nod, accept the gift, and store it somewhere. In his mind, largely. He learned value came less with a dollar sign than with an expression of gratitude that meant, unequivocally,I now owe you everything.What could I do with this? he would think, and then someone else would need a favor. And then he would think: Would this person not benefit from my offering? And would I, in turn, not benefit from their loyalty?

Before long, Lazar Fedorov was eighteen years old and in possession of a great number of favors. He was meticulous about them. Some nights he went hungry, but still, better to starve than to call in a favor before he knew how it was most wisely spent. Later in life, he would eat some expensive meal and inevitably think how it could never compare to the extravagance of having nothing. In the early days of his business, food was tinny and metallic, something out of a can, but crucially, it might have come paired with a realization:Aha—I know how so-and-so can procure me the thing that I want.

The first thing Lazar cast off from his past was the apartment building. He kept the ownership, of course, but hired a manager. His business would not be rooted in the happiness of others, he thought. If he wanted to prosper, he would invest in thesufferingof others. He would find those who wanted more and offer them a means by which to get it. He learned many things in his teenage years; namely, how to recognize the face of desperation, which came in many different forms. It came hungry, tired, homeless. But it also came in the shapes of the wealthy, the privileged. Desperation was a well that never emptied. Even the powerful had pockets of it, and they had far more to offer Lazar, and thus, disastrously more to lose.

The second thing to go was his family name, at least when it came to business. The problem with names, Lazar thought, is that they are themselves a shadow. The wearer bears his father’s name, and if his father is nothing worth remarking, then neither is he, by default. Lazar, on the other hand, would not be as inconsequential as his father.

The nameKoscheihad slipped out from one of the Borough witches; the first of the Borough witches to recognize Lazar’s talent for usefulness, whose first big favor had been the price of a Borough election. “I know you carry quite a lot of influence with the witches in the Brooklyn Borough,” the witch had said, “and I hear you are owed something by one of the union leaders.”

The witch had not needed to tell Lazar that he knew he would lose without the unions. In return, Lazar had not needed to tell the witch what the favor was, or how he had procured it. All that mattered was at the end of the week, every witch in the Brooklyn Borough had committed their vote to the requesting candidate, and in retrospect, the election itself was unimportant. The Borough witch would be forgotten. The only important thing would be the story of how he had come to a thin young man who was in possession of a great amount of secrets; who could not be bought by traditional methods, and therefore could not be easily destroyed.He is like Koschei,they would say.He is deathless and immortal, like Koschei, and you can only find him among the shadows.

If anyone had asked Lazar how he did it, he would have laughed and said,Have you not heard of a whisper campaign? Not everything is witchcraft—but nobody asked. They feared him too much by then. After all, nobody trusts something they cannot see.

By the time Lazar had any interest in taking a wife, he was getting close to middle-aged. He’d already lived longer than his father, owning considerably more than a single crumbling building. Lazar ownedseveralbuildings, in fact, and collected rent from all of them, though that wasn’t his primary business. He was a dealer in many things; in everything. If there was something to be had, Koschei had it, or he could get it. It was only when the Borough witches began to resent his success that Lazar knew he had finally come far enough. Once he owned a persuasive piece of every witch from every Borough, he finally determined he could permit himself to rest.

“A wife?” his friend Antonov had asked doubtfully, half-laughing. Antonov was a relatively young, low-ranking Borough witch whom Lazar had approached (first as Koschei, and then, gradually, as himself) when it became obvious Antonov was far more a witch than a politician, and therefore more promising than his more senior counterparts. Buying Antonov a beer typically paid off tenfold in terms of what he would offer Koschei by the end of the night; some bit of spellwork, some magic that came easily to him, which came easily to no one else.

“Somehow I doubt your bed is cold, Koschei the Deathless,” judged Antonov.

“Just looking for my Princess Marya, I suppose,” Lazar said, always happy to indulge a reference to the fairytale for which he was named. Like usual, he sipped his beer quietly while Antonov drained his.

“I have a Marya, in fact,” Antonov chuckled to himself. “Quiet little thing. Get yourself one of those.”

In truth, Lazar had little interest in a wife. What he needed, however, was an heir. A good one. Someone to carry on his legacy. A strong boy; someone he could raise who would be stronger than his own father’s heir, who had outlasted his father by only a handful of breaths. Lazar needed a son of Koschei. Someone to carry on a dynasty, an empire.

“Quiet is fine,” Lazar said. “Quiet I can work with.”

So Antonov found him Anna, a pretty blonde slip of a thing who obviously found Lazar terrifying. Not like Antonov’s wife, Lazar thought jealously. Unlike Anna, Antonov’s Marya was always listening; her gaze was always sharp and keen and curious, unlike Anna’s. Where Anna grew rabbity with nerves at the sight of him, Marya—who was at least the same age, if not younger; barely a woman, still with a girl’s narrow limbs—fixed her gaze on Lazar with such questioning intensity he instinctively began to conceal himself from her. Unlike Antonov, who spoke freely of his dealings in front of his young wife, Lazar kept his secrets to himself.

Lazar and Anna lived separate lives, mostly, outside of the time it took for her to conceive a child. By then, Antonov had already had his firstborn; a girl named Marya. A fitting name, Lazar thought, though he didn’t say so. A beautiful baby girl, Antonov’s Marya. Like her mother, little Marya had sharp eyes from birth, and Lazar had the strangest feeling when he looked at her. She was her father’s favorite (“Princess Marya,” Antonov would coo to the baby in his arms, “my Masha, my little princess!”) and while Lazar had no such connection to her, he had the feeling she would somehow be significant. That his life and hers, and the life of her too-quiet, too-clever mother, would forever be intertwined.

Then Dimitri was born.

Dimitri was born, and Lazar knew for the first time what it was to love something more than he had ever loved himself. From the very first cry that tore from his son’s little lungs, the man called Koschei the Deathless had found his purpose. He had wanted an inheritor for everything he had built, but that day, he realized his calling was something much, much larger.

His life’s purpose would be to create something that would be worthy of his eldest son.

Lazar found he had been right to befriend Antonov, not because the other man was in any way helpful, but because he wasuseful.Antonov seemed to have absolutely no concept of how valuable his skills were; he lacked any sort of drive, either, to be of any threat to Koschei’s business, which meant that for once, rather than seeking a tool by which to destroy him (just in case), Lazar considered Antonov something of a pet. Lazar named his second son, Roman, after Antonov, knowing that such a gesture would mean considerably more to the younger man than it would to him. Antonov, a proud sort of man, aspired only to comfort, to camaraderie. But he was talented, and he doted on Lazar’s son Dima, and it became obvious to Lazar that it would take very little effort at all to make sure Antonov was loyal to Koschei for all of his days.

“I’ll name my own son after you,” Antonov promised him, looking exuberant with the prospect, but Lazar watched Antonov’s face fall in disappointment each time his wife Marya bore him a daughter. And another daughter. And another. Seven daughters in total, with little Masha, her mother’s perfect miniature, at the helm. Each time, Antonov grew more deeply disappointed, and on the day his wife Marya told him she could bear him no more children, he succumbed to something of a listless melancholy, turning his attention to Lazar’s sons.

By the time Anna died—a surprisingly crushing blow to Lazar, who had grown fond of his wife in the years since she’d become a mother to his sons—it had become clear that Antonov was not only a fool who’d misjudged his own talents, but also a fool who’d misjudged the army of beautiful young witches in his house. When Antonov began bringing his daughter Masha on his visits to Lazar’s home, it struck Lazar that perhaps there was still more to gain from Antonov’s friendship. Masha was an intensely capable witch, and what Antonov thought were little party tricks, Lazar could see were signs of magical prowess to rival her own father’s. It occurred to Lazar that perhaps Masha had even been schooled not to let too much of her power show, and just as he thought it, he knew where that lesson must have come from.

---