"Are you a fool, to say her name right out? Even here. Even in this place." So it was Baba Yaga. If unconsciously he was looking for fairy tales, he had stumbled onto the mother lode.
She took her hand away from his mouth.
"Sorry," he said. "For saying her name, and I'm sorry about your kingdom, too. But..."
"But what? We have no choice but to marry. Forget this other woman. Take her as a concubine after we are wed."
"But it's been a thousand years," he said. "More than a thousand years that you've been lying here."
She looked at him as if he were crazy. "No thousand years," she said. "It is today. This morning is today."
She pulled at his hand, drew him onto the bridge, and led him to the other side.
Piotr and Esther lay in bed at the end of the day, watching Johnny Carson because Piotr enjoyed the program; Esther barely understood it. Even when she caught the meaning of the English, she rarely knew why everyone was laughing. But she watched because Piotr wanted to watch. Carson was wearing a turban and holding envelopes to his head, then saying things that made people whoop and laugh.
Piotr also laughed. She could feel the bed shaking.
Then, suddenly, it was as if she were falling; her stomach lurched within her. No, it was as if a baby kicked in her womb. No, no, it was as if her baby did not kick. It was as if she were carrying a baby and suddenly knew that it was dead and would never kick again.
"He's gone," she whispered.
"What?" asked Piotr.
Esther began to cry.
Piotr turned off the television, concerned. "What is it, my love? Are you sick? What's wrong?"
"He's gone," she said. "My little boy. He's gone. He's left this world."
Piotr put his arms around her. "Hush, hush, my love, that can't be so, that can't be true. How would you know it, anyway, so far from him? You're just afraid for him, a mother's worry, but don't be afraid, he's with Cousin Marek, he's safe, he's safe."
His words, his tone, they were meant to be comforting, but she took no comfort from them, only from the arms he wrapped around her, only from the warmth of his body next to hers. We made only one baby out of our love, Piotr, only one baby, one little boy, and he is gone.
Baba Yaga
Yaga was busy when Bear came back. She was in the midst of a tricky extraction of the living eyes of a merchant who had failed to bring anything interesting to sell, but who had the most fascinating silver-tinted irises that might have some unpredictable effects in spells of vision and illusion. The fellow was trying to persuade her, in his halting foreign speech, that perhaps she could make do with only one of his eyes, while she concentrated on popping out the left eye without bursting it, when Bear gave a great roar just outside the room.
The merchant jumped in surprise, which of course caused him even more pain than he was already in, as the cords that bound him cut more deeply into his throat. Choking, he managed to croak out, "What was that?"
"My husband," sighed Yaga. She was grimly determined not to show how bitterly his return disappointed her. Not that she had really expected to keep him tied up guarding the princess forever - for one thing, there were some very useful spells that she could only cast when he was close at hand. Still, she had thought that by putting both Bear and the princess in a place cut loose from time she would gain more than the few months that had passed for her during the princess's enchantment.
The real disappointment, however, was the knowledge that the princess had somehow managed not only to wake up but also to get the person who woke her to propose marriage to her. The whole point of putting her there had been to make sure that whoever kissed her would be some stranger from another time and place who wouldn't speak a word that she could understand, so that Bear would have plenty of time to eat him from the head down before there was any betrothal possible. And here was Bear, showing that her plan hadn't been foolproof after all.