Babayaga: A Novel by Toby Barlow Read Free Book Online Page A

said the man with a self-conscious grin. “It’s only a little rash.”
    She knew a simple myrrh cure for his ailment but she was not in a mood to be generous. “I need a room on the top floor if you can, one with a bath.”
    “No problem,” he said. “The top floor is mostly empty because the elevator is broken. I only have one room up there with its own bath, but it is our most expensive.”
    “ Quoi? The most expensive? With no elevator?”
    The man shrugged. “It’s a big room. Lots of sunlight.”
    “Fine, I’ll take it,” she said. “But I will need some assistance with my luggage when it arrives from the station. I hope that will not be a problem.”
    The clerk smiled. “Not a problem for me. I’m off in ten minutes. The next fellow can take it up.”
    She counted out franc notes to him as he explained that each room had a kitchenette with an electric coil, but that the only working phone in the building was behind the front desk. “We do not let guests use it unless it is an emergency. Otherwise, there is a phone booth down the hill on the corner. They sell the jetons for it down at the tabac.”
    When she reached her room she found it was quite spacious. She ran the faucet. The pipes rattled and banged but the water came out clean. She opened the windows and, reaching into her bag, took out a small stub of a red candle. After lighting it, she removed a few small striped feathers from her pocket and placed them on the outside of the window. She dripped the candle wax onto their thin quills to fasten them to the sill, pressing them into place with a centime. The birds would find her, maybe not tonight, but soon.
    From another pocket she took a piece of chalk and wrote a row of small words on the inside of the hotel room’s door. Then she filled the tub and took off her clothes.
    A hot bath almost always made her recall the fierce, frigid cold that had, through the years, so often clenched its teeth into her bones. She had to be careful with memories. When they flooded her unexpectedly, triggered perhaps by something as slight as the scent of blooming dianthus or the sharp taste of anise, they could overwhelm and debilitate her. But it felt safe to recall those deathly days of ice and cold when she was tucked in a warm bath. It was as if, enshrouded and cloaked in the thick cloud of rising steam, the ever-hunting frost could not find her.
    There had been five of them when they began their flight west from St. Petersburg. They had watched every train pull out of the Warsaw Station, the cars headed west toward the Balkans, packed full of deserting soldiers, all pale-faced and drunk with desperation, impure vodka, and the mighty relief of escape. The city’s spare horses were all gone—eaten or seized—and the handful of automobiles in the city had been taken too, commandeered by panicked priests and overflowing with the frightened remnants of their splintered congregations. Their faces stared out as they sped by, heading fast to the border in their stolen cars. Too tired to coax their passage, still exhausted from weeks of furiously wrought protective spells, the five women watched as all those in the city who could took flight, and then they followed, on foot, trailing the last vehicles’ sputtering black exhaust, steadfastly heading down the frozen roads toward nothing.
    The first lost had been Mazza, a day into the journey, shot dead as they stole a pair of mares from a barn. Zoya had looked back when she heard the gun’s report and saw Mazza’s eye explode out in wild, crimson red. They had not slowed their pace and the woman’s body was left behind, lying crooked, facedown, with the snow staining scarlet around her as they galloped their new horses away.
    Three days later, the hard-driven mares already dead, the women had been running across a frozen estuary when Lyda broke through, sinking with only half a gurgled shriek, the heavy hidden current hungrily gulping down her last gasp, her thick