Bear snarled at her and went to sleep again. Or seemed to.
Living with a god is not what it's cracked up to be, thought Yaga. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around.
She looked into her mirror again, but this time she shook into her palm a bit of dust out of a bag made from a ram's scrotum. Then she blew across her hand. The dust flew toward the mirror, then clung to it as if it had been glued there.
"Bring me the sleeping warrior," she whispered to the mirror, careful not to blow any dust from the mirror's surface.
The face of King Matfei appeared in the mirror, shimmering.
"Not the king, the warrior. The mighty Dimitri."
Nothing happened; the mirror went blank.
He must not be asleep, the fool.
Quickly she pulled a small wooden carving of a man's head from a box near her dressing table. She anointed it with a dab of bearfat - a supply she replenished from time to time without particularly mentioning what it was to her husband - and then whispered the name of Dimitri over it, naming it so that whatever she did to it would be done to Dimitri. Then, laying it on the table, she poured out a thin trickle of sleeping sand onto the head.
Within only a few minutes - but it felt like tedious eternities - the mirror shimmered again, no longer empty. There lay Dimitri asleep. At this time of night he should have been asleep long ago. But perhaps he had lain awake with worry about the kingdom he served. Well he might.
Yaga reached out, her fingers extended toward the mirror. Then she plunged her hand into the glass. It hurt; it always hurt to have part of her body in one place, and part in another. But one had to endure many hard things in order to achieve great ends. With her hand she toyed with a lock of Dimitri's shaggy hair, then caressed his hairy cheek.
"Do not wake, O great one. Do not wake, O king who is yet to be. The interloper will marry thy bride, to fulfill the terms of the curse, but in the moment of the marriage, he is the heir. Therefore all is fulfilled. Wait thou not for the conception of a child, for such a child would be as weak as the father. Once wedded and bedded, Katerina will hold the kingdom by widow-right, as Baba Yaga did, and her new husband shall be king beside her, and the sons he makes in her body shall inherit after them. Be thou that man, O great one. Thy bright herald tells thee what the Winter God most surely desires of thee."
Then, grimacing, she rose from her stool and plunged her head through the glass. It felt to her as if she had been beheaded, or at least as she imagined such a thing might feel; but even so she managed to put a loving smile on her face and kiss the cheek of the sleeping man. Then, wincing from the pain, she pulled herself back through the mirror, first her head and then her hand.
Slumping down into her stool, she rested a moment, panting. Then she carefully wiped the precious powder from the mirror with a dry cloth. There was no retrieving the powder to use it again on glass, but the cloth was charged with it now, and thus had within it the power to carry any item, like a box and all its contents, across an infinite distance. Baba Yaga was very economical with her spells. Anything that could be reused in any way, she kept. It made for a cluttered house, but it was worth it.
She scooped the sleeping sand from the table and restored it to the little box in which she kept it. Then she took the wooden head, used a bit more of the bearfat, and named it as No Man, so it would be ready for the next use.
In the morning, Dimitri would wake up with a clear memory of a bright and terrible dream. A divine herald came to me, that's what he would whisper to himself. A bright messenger, so beautiful of face. The smell of the Winter Bear on her. And she kissed me.
Don't laugh at what my mirror shows, Bear, until you understand just how and when I do the showing.
Chapter 8
Wedding
Dimitri awoke trembling from his dream. He felt as