reminder that she was no wife of his, and never would be.
"Where's Cousin Marek?" asked Ivan.
Thoughtlessly, he had spoken in modern Ukrainian, but the question wasn't hard to grasp for Katerina, and before Sophia could answer, she laughed rather nastily and said, "You still call him that?"
Ivan didn't want a fight with her, though he thought it might have been more appropriate if she had remembered just a little of how she clung to him yesterday as the truck passed by.
"Don't be annoyed, Vanya," said Sophia - could she read his mind? "The princess is angry with my husband, not with you."
"What good does it do to be angry with an immortal?" asked Katerina.
"None at all," said Sophia cheerfully. "But there's no accounting for tempers. I'm surprised you slept through all the shouting last night, Vanya."
"Nobody was shouting at me, I figure, so I didn't care," said Ivan. "Still don't."
"Well, you will," said Sophia.
"No he won't," said Katerina. "He never cared about anything. Long ago he wished he had never fought the bear and kissed me awake."
Well, that was true enough. Though there had also been moments where he was glad of it, too. No need to mention that right now, however.
"That business with the bear," said Sophia. "We always wondered how that happened, and we weren't about to ask."
"What happened?"
"How Bear lost his eye, of course. Never would have imagined it was our little Vanya."
"That bear is still around?"
"He's not laying for you, if that's what you're wondering. He stays well to the north and east of here these last few centuries. It's Moscow where he has his den, where the winter still is his. But he mostly lies low. Came out to give a hard blow to Napoleon, and again to stop Hitler. Armies wake him up, but otherwise, he doesn't much care about the doings of human beings."
"So her bear is still alive," said Ivan. "Does that mean she is, too?"
"Thank you for not saying her name in this house," said Sophia. "And I have no idea where the old bat might be. Not a trace of her in many a year. But my husband has some idea that she might have followed you here. That's why he's out looking over the land."
"Did he do that when I disappeared?" asked Ivan.
"He knew where you were going - into the enchanted place where he couldn't see."
Ivan snorted. "Are all the immortals around here half-blind?"
Sophia looked at him sharply. Katerina seemed not to breathe.
"Oh, I see, now that I know who he really is, I can't tease."
Sophia laughed. "Marek sees as well as ever. But into a strange place like that, no one sees."
"Except me."
"You walked in there."
"So what stops him?"
"He can't, that's all. He walks straight toward it, then finds he's walked past it, and his path was straight, but still it bent."
Ivan shook his head. "And yet I walked in as easy as could be."
"You walked in because wherever you ran, it was always nearby," said Sophia. "It was calling to you."
"It," echoed Ivan. "What is the it that was calling me?"
"The place."
"Someone made the place. Or made it what it is. Didn't they?"
Katerina spoke up. "Maybe no one made the place, Ivan. It follows no plan. The enemy cursed me to die; my aunts cast spells to leave me somewhere short of death, and set rules by which I could be saved again, but where the place was, they couldn't choose and didn't know."
"And the Widow, she didn't choose, either?"
"Maybe she did," said Sophia. "But she didn't make the place. She only used it."
"So who made the chasm? Who built the bridges?"
"The chasm is how the Widow's curse expressed itself," said Sophia. "Bear ended up trapped in it, because it was by his power that her original curse of killing was made. By her plan, Bear was supposed to appear and tear Katerina cruelly apart. But instead he went round and round under the leaves. Katerina and Marek and I talked this out this morning, before you were awake."
"I see I wasn't important enough to include," said Ivan, unable to keep a nasty edge out of his voice.
"What did you know about it?" asked Katerina. Perhaps she meant no insult by it, but all he heard was scorn.
"We're including you now," said Sophia, soothingly.
"Look, I've never had any power," said Ivan, "so I don't even want to know. Cousin Marek can fix things now, have it out with the old witch. Then Katerina can have the