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wasn't hard - just time-consuming - to find out which lord-of-the-air had transported them, and where they had gone. It was a simple matter after that to get a ticket to carry her to the same destination.

Conveniently enough, Ivan's address was even listed in the computer. Baba Yaga had the ticket seller write it down for her. Everyone was so helpful. She paid using the prettiest credit card, and then left it with the ticket seller as a gift. Along with a minor curse - a bladder infection and diarrhea - just because she was Baba Yaga, and certain things were expected. Then, familiar now with all the airport routines, she bypassed every one of them without incident, got on the house-that-flies, and sat down in a seat, clutching in her hands the tickets that would take her first to Berlin, then to New York Kennedy, and then to Syracuse. From there she would somehow get transportation - a train, perhaps? - to Tantalus. The place where Ivan and Katerina had gone.

The gods and wizards of this world were no match for Baba Yaga, even in her weakened state. She got the better of every opponent. And every ally, too, for that matter. Even death. Someday she'd find a way around that, too. If feebleminded old gods like Mikola Mozhaiski could do it, so could she.

Chapter 12

Charms

There was no way to explain it all to Father in an orderly way, Ivan realized that at once. No matter what he said, Father was going to pepper him with questions, while the whole picture was salted by Father's utter unbelief.

Mother was a marvel, though, merely nodding from time to time and otherwise holding hands with Katerina and smiling at her at odd moments. The conversation was half in proto-Slavonic and half in Ukrainian, but everyone seemed to understand everything. Except that Father understood nothing.

Ivan hadn't even meant to try to explain anything about the century that Katerina came from, but Father simply knew too much about the language. "There is no way that a pocket of pure proto-Slavonic could survive all these centuries," Father declared as a conversation-opener, almost as soon as they were in the car together. "A language in isolation is conservative, yes, but not that conservative. Even the Basque language is not the same as it was five hundred years ago. So the real question is, is your bride here the result of some weird Soviet language experiment or is this an elaborate practical joke that turned out not to be funny?" That much was in English, but Ivan immediately shifted the conversation to a combination of languages that he figured Katerina and Mother could both understand.

"What does the soviet have to do with language?" asked Katerina.

"There was a government in your country for the past seventy years or so that did strange and terrible things," Ivan explained.

"How isolated is her community?" Father demanded. "They didn't notice the Soviet government?"

With that, there was really no choice. Ivan had to start talking about getting drawn back into the ninth century and thinking he was going to live there forever, so he married Katerina there but then he came back and brought her with him. Father leapt to the conclusion that this was some weird sci-fi gimmick - "An alien abduction through time?" - until Mother patted his arm and said, "Think of it as magic, dear. Think of it as... finding Sleeping Beauty and wakening her with a kiss."

Father gave a sharp, derisive laugh at that.

"Father," Ivan said patiently, "don't think of it 'as if I found Sleeping Beauty and woke her up. Katerina is Sleeping Beauty. The child cursed by an evil witch. By the evil witch, the Widow." He caught himself. To Father, he had to speak her name. He wasn't in Taina now. "Baba Yaga. And her aunts, in an effort to save her from the curse of death, ended up getting her stranded, asleep in the middle of a moat that was patrolled by a giant bear. For about eleven hundred years."

"My how time flies," said Father dryly.

Katerina looked strangely at Ivan.

"What?" he asked her.

"Are you known as such a liar here, that your father doesn't believe you?" Then she winked.

Father didn't see the wink. "Liar? Vanya's no liar. What I'm worried about is his sanity." Only for sanity he had to use the modern Russian word and Katerina didn't get it. To Ivan's surprise, Mother came up with some halting proto-Slavonic.

"My husband thinks Vanya