showed all those suitors who pursued her after Brat died. They thought they could get her and her late husband's kingdom, too. But she wouldn't settle for any of these petty princes. Her consort would be a god.
So Brat's precious "Yaga" was Bear's wife now, and no one even remembered that she had once been Olga, a hopeful young princess in a lovely kingdom on the south shore of the Baltic Sea. And now that she happened to be getting on in years, they were starting to call her Baba Yaga - grandmother, of all things! Of course it was ironic. A term of endearment, used for someone they hated and feared so much? The accusation that she ate babies was so widespread that she was tempted to cook one up and taste it someday, just to see what all the fuss was about. Grandmother, indeed.
She got up from her place beside Bear and carried the dead eye to her dressing table, where she could see herself in the mirror. Of course she had marked the mirror with several wards, so no passing spirit could leap out of the mirror and harm her. There was so much envy of her power and beauty.
"I don't look like a grandmother," she said.
"Yes you do," said Bear. "You know those spells don't work on me."
"I don't care what you see," she said.
"I've never seen the point of using magic to fool yourself."
"I have to live surrounded by beauty," she said. "Even in the mirrors."
"So you're going to make me seem to have both eyes?" he murmured.
Yaga ignored his self-pity. "About the princess Katerina."
"You know the story. He kissed her, she woke up, and they walked over the bridge."
"Which bridge?"
"Her bridge. I thought you were so sensitive you'd feel it when she came back into the world."
"I did feel it," said Yaga. "I thought it was gas." Had she felt it? No. What went on at that place was undetectable to her. But as soon as Katerina left the place and returned to Taina, then Yaga would know her every movement.
"Well, now you've got Katerina awake and headed for Taina with a husband who runs very, very fast and hurls a mean stone."
"He's not a husband yet," said Yaga.
"You mean to cast a spell to make a eunuch of him? He fell in love like any dog when he saw her, lying there giving off her love smell like a bitch in permanent heat."
"Sometimes I regret having given you the power of speech."
"So take it away again," he said. "I'd never miss it. Not like an eye."
"I don't need a spell to make a man into a eunuch," said Yaga.
Bear murmured something.
"I heard that."
"No you didn't," he said.
"Well, I know what you meant to say, anyway, and it wasn't funny."
"We'll see what the servants say when I repeat it to them."
"Go ahead," she said. "I'll just have to kill every one of them you tell."
"You should only kill what you intend to eat," he said. "It catches up to you, in the end, all this murdering."
"It's not murdering, it's my life's work," she said. "Besides, you killed this fellow."
"Yaga, Yaga, Yaga," he said.
"Shut up," she murmured sweetly, and sat on his lap. "I'm glad to have you back, darling."
"Are you?" he said. "It occurred to me, as I was running around and around in the moat, trying to stay between the peasant and the princess, it occurred to me that your plan could only be for no one to ever kiss the girl, in which case your loving husband would be trapped in the chasm forever."
"Don't be silly. As soon as her father died I would have brought you home."
His huge claws caught at the cloth of her dress and delicately shredded it right off her body without so much as scratching her skin. Then his paws rested firmly, tightly, crushingly against her belly and chest, pulling her so closely against him that she could hardly breathe.
"I don't think you should send your loving husband on any more permanent errands," he whispered in her ear.
"Well, why would I, anyway?" she wheezed, struggling for breath. "Do remember how much you love me, my pet."
His arms relaxed. She sucked great gouts of air into her lungs.
"Not killing you," he said, "is just an old bear's way of saying I love you."
"I love you, too," she said.
If only she knew some way to break down the last barrier and take his magic whole, so she didn't need