"He wasn't a knight," said Bear. "He was practically naked."

"Come here and let your Baba Yaga put something on that wound."

He shambled over and put his head in her lap. She began to clean around the wound and apply a salve to it.

"He carried no weapon. He didn't really fight. He just ran and ran."

"How did he get to the princess?" asked Yaga. She had to know, because there was always the fear that somehow Bear had got himself free of her bindings enough to throw the contest against her.

"Jumped the chasm," said Bear. "Which you said no man could ever do. You said any man who tried would end up in the pit where I could take his head off." He scooped up a pawful of brain and ate it sloppily while she worked on his eyesocket.

Bear winced at the salve, as well he should, since she had deliberately left the pain-deadening herbs out of the mix.

"I can't be right about everything, can I?" said Yaga. "After all, I'm not a deity."

"Yaga, Yaga, Yaga," he said, as if she had made a foolish joke.

How she hated that nickname! And yet the name had stuck, until now it was the name she used for herself.

Her late husband King Brat had given her the name when he brought her to Kiev as his twelve-year-old bride. That was the pet name he murmured to her tenderly as he raped her immature body, and again as she pretended to weep over the grave of the first baby he sired on her. His dear Yaga, his sweet pet Yaga, Yaga the loving mother who pressed the face of his greedy slurping spawn into her breast long after it stopped struggling for breath and then, wailing, laid his firstborn son in the very lap that had forced it on her. It was a message, though Brat never understood it, dense heavy-armed warrior that he was, a message that people understood now, with him deposed from his throne and then dead of a withering disease, and his widow married to a husband who at last looked like what every human husband secretly was, a hairy stinking drooling beast. A simple message: If you make Yaga do what she doesn't want to do, you won't like the result.

And maybe the message had changed over the years, and now it was more along the lines of: If you try to stop Yaga from doing what she wants to do, you and everyone you ever liked will be destroyed. But in spirit, in origin, it was really the same message. If she had to leave the gloriously beautiful coastland of her childhood and then the bustling traders' town of Kiev to live in this crude woodland, at least she would control all the kingdoms around her and run things her way.

The only drawback was that she always had to have some husband with the title of king, or no one would take her seriously. Well, she 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 him at all. Take his immortality, his godly powers, and then be rid of him the way she was rid of Brat. But if there were spells for emptying and discarding a god, she hadn't found them yet. Maybe the Christians should be encouraged. Maybe if everyone stopped believing in these forest totems, they'd lose their power.

In the meantime, Bear was hungry and needed feeding. Then he'd void himself wherever he felt like it, all over the house. It had taken her all these months to get the stink out of the house while he guarded the sleeping princess. Now the odor would be back in force. If only she could...

If only, if only. No matter how much power she had, there was always something else to wish for.