house and train my mind here, during meals and before bedtime, so I can spend all the daylight hours training my body to be a soldier."
"I'll think about it," said King Matfei.
The next day, Sergei showed up soon after dawn with a dozen parchments and the book of the Gospels in a basket. "Father Lukas is furious," said Sergei. "But your baptism will be day after tomorrow. And here I am, living in the king's house!"
Within moments, Ivan had shown him all the blank spaces on the parchments.
"Write on these? The very parchments written by the hand of Kirill?"
"And then we'll seal them all up and hide them to be found in a thousand years," said Ivan.
"You're serious about this," said Sergei.
"It's the second most important thing I'll ever do here in Taina."
"And what's the most important?"
"I have to learn to be a knight, so I can be a king, so I can be a husband." He did not add aloud the most important point: So I can go back home.
Baba Yaga
Yaga found her husband tearing at a human thigh. It was disgusting, the way he let blood drool onto his fur, making a mess of everything. On the other hand, the ligaments and tendons and veins stretched and popped in interesting ways. It made Yaga wish that Bear hadn't disassembled the body. She liked to see how everything connected with everything else. And Bear absolutely refused to eat humans while they were still alive, with the feeble excuse that when they weren't dead they made too much noise and moved around too much. To Yaga, that was just another proof of Bear's laziness. Godhood was assigned to the most unworthy people.
Still, he was pleasant company, much of the time, and he was more or less permanent - he was the only male she'd ever slept with that she couldn't kill no matter how much she sometimes wanted to. As a result, he stayed around long enough for them to develop something akin to friendship.
"How are you with the broadsword?" Yaga asked her husband. "Or has losing an eye made it impossible for you?"
"Having no thumb makes it impossible for me." He talked with his mouth full, of course. "I've never needed a sword. I knock swords out of men's hands. I bite off the ends of their spears. I roar at them and they shit themselves and run stinking into the woods."
"This bridegroom of Katerina's - you know, the fellow who put your eye out - he didn't shit himself, did he?"
Bear cocked his head to remember. "He ran."
"But not away. I distinctly recall that he ran around and around until he made you stupid. Oh, wait - you started that way."
"We're not in a good mood today, are we, my love?" said Bear.
"He's practicing with the sword. Doing exercises. Hours a day, till he staggers back to Matfei's squalid little hut of a palace and falls asleep. Lifting bags of stones on a yoke to make his thighs and back stronger, directing the fletchers to make light javelins with hard metal points and teaching the boys to throw them. He might make something like a king out of himself after all. He's becoming a nuisance."
"Poor Baba Yaga." Bear let the bone drop on the floor. Later, one of the servants would pick it up and give it to the cook to add to the stew for the prisoners and slaves. Still, it annoyed Yaga that he was so untidy. And sarcastic, too, as he added a little jab. "I thought you said that telling the people he wore a dress would undo him."
"It will," said Yaga, feeling surly but knowing that the dress thing hadn't worked out quite as she hoped. "It still might. But they seem to have let the rumor wash over them. Maybe they're waiting for him to make some stupid mistake, and then they'll say, We knew it all along, after all, he wore a dress."
"Is Queen Yaga learning a bit about human nature?"
"Bestial nature. They scarcely deserve the name of human."
"I'm sure they feel the same about you."
"Nobody thinks of you as human."
"To my enormous relief."
"If this unmanly foreigner becomes a real king, then he's lost his usefulness to me."
Bear finally got it through his head what she was asking. "If you think I'm going to go roaring into Taina and bite his head off, think again. I heard what you said about javelins. This fellow aims projectile weapons far too well."