Father, however, was convinced that it was not Mikola Mozhaiski who kept Baba Yaga in check, but rather his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as king by Father Lukas. "The same authority by which the Great Imperator sits upon the throne of Constantinople," he often told her. She never spoke disrespectfully to her father, and so her answer remained unspoken: If Christian ordination had the power to keep a throne attached to a man's buttocks, so many Great Imperators would not have been deposed or killed in years past.

The Holy Trinity created the heavens and the earth, she believed this absolutely; but she knew that it was Mikola Mozhaiski to whom the power had been given to protect sailors from the dangers of voyaging and kings from the dangers of politics. And unlike God, you couldn't pray to Mikola Mozhaiski, you couldn't curry favor with him, he asked of you neither baptism nor mass. You either kept to the rules or you didn't. If you did, even a witch like Baba Yaga had no power to destroy you, and if you didn't, he had no help for you.

So if it wasn't Baba Yaga's little trick, how did Katerina end up with this naked bumbler crashing barefoot through the woods behind her? He had already managed to lose the path several times even with her leading the way—he had no sense of the forest at all. How did he survive childhood without falling in a pit or getting bitten by a snake? Why didn't some merciful wolf run across him as a lost child—he must surely have spent half his childhood hopelessly lost—and send him on to heaven? Well, not heaven. He was a Jew.

How in the world did a man like this get past the bear?

She asked him.

"I jumped across," he said.

Jumped across. A chasm that wide and deep?

That gave her pause. A magical bear was sure to stop an ordinary knight. But a man so light that his body was like a boy's, and yet so strong that he could leap over the bear's head, fly across the chasm like a bird, like an angel...

Was his very boyishness the reason he was chosen? In that case, was it not a virtue to be admired, and not a failing to be despised?

She stopped and looked at him again. After a few moments of pushing branches away so they wouldn't scrape him as he passed, he finally looked ahead and noticed that she wasn't moving. That she was looking at him.

He became shy again at once, turning his body sideways, as if that would hide his genitals instead of displaying them in profile. A biting fly distracted him—he slapped himself. The movement was very quick. The man was agile. His body was so tightly muscled that no part of him, not even his buttocks, quivered after the sudden movement. This was the only sort of body that could have overleapt the bear and woken her with a kiss. And in the marriage bed, wouldn't he lie more lightly upon her than any of the hulking knights who had looked at her with covert desire?

"What? "he said.

"I was waiting for you to catch up," she said. "We're almost there."

The main village—Taina itself—was unchanged. It surprised her a little. No new lands had been cleared because the old soil was worn out. Even the houses were all in the same places, with only a few new ones for couples who had been married since she pricked her finger on the spindle and fell into the dream in which the bear chased and chased her until she could run no more and fell exhausted on the stone, to lie there watching as the earth all around her collapsed and the bear leapt into the chasm, and then to sleep. A dream in which she fell asleep. And yet it was no dream, was it? For there was the chasm when she woke again, and there the bear. And here was the kingdom of her father, the land that she lived to serve.

She stood at the edge of the wood, surveying the familiar scene, when her newly promised bridegroom finally came to stand beside her. His baby-tender skin was scratched and raw from pushing through bushes and brambles. He could have used the protection that a length of cloth might have given him. She felt a pang of guilt for having shamed him into casting away the hoose—though such feelings were irrational, she knew. Better to have a thousand scratches than to offend God.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"A thousand years have passed, you said," she said scornfully. "But it's been no more than a few months. The same fields are still being planted, no new ones have been cleared. And so few new houses—Dimitri, Pashka, Yarosz—they were all betrothed when the Widow's curse caught up with me. And none of the old ones abandoned or burned."

"Those are houses?" asked the oaf.

"What do you think they are, hayricks?" How stupid was he?

"I just mean they're—small."

"Not everybody is as tall as you," she said. "I don't imagine you could even lie down straight in a regular house. Not without sticking your head out the door and your ass in the fire."

"You have such a pretty way of talking," he said. "Like a princess."

"Of course I talk like a princess," she said, baffled that he would say such an obvious thing. "Since I am one, however I talk is the way a princess talks."

He raised his eyebrows in obvious mockery. What right did he have to be so hateful? She couldn't help thinking back over the conversation to see what he could possibly have thought was unprincesslike in her words. Was it because she had spoken of a man lying down? She hadn't said anything about lying down with somebody, had she? Wherever he came from, they must be such prudes, to be so fussy about a man's nakedness and take offense at mere words.

She felt the warmth of exertion radiating from his body. His bare skin was so close to her, and yet he hardly smelled at all. And he was taller than she had realized. She was uncommonly tall for a woman, and she didn't even come up to his shoulder. In fact, she was almost eye-to-eye with the nipples on his chest. Which, she noticed, were shriveled with the cold. The breeze was picking up, too, and his skin was mottled and seemed to have a bluish cast. Again she thought of the clothing she had denied him.

She reached down, took hold of his hand, and started leading him into the village.

At once he pulled back, fighting her like a donkey that didn't want to carry its burden.

"What?" she demanded.

"I'm naked!" he said.

"Yes, you stone-skulled ninny, that's why I'm taking you to my father's house, so you can get out of the wind!"

"Can't you go fetch clothes for me?"

"Am I your servant? You're my betrothed—would you leave me to enter the village alone, with you cowering in the woods, not even seriously injured?" She yanked his arm and began dragging him on. She glanced over her shoulder and saw, to her shame, that he was cupping his genitals with his other hand like a toddler who had just learned to play with himself. Was he really that determined to make himself utterly ridiculous?

"Stop that!" she hissed at him. "Stop handling yourself!"

He rolled his eyes in obvious exasperation, but he obeyed and uncupped himself. But he also pulled his hand away from hers, and walked beside her, refusing to follow her or to be dragged along. Good—he was asserting his right as her husband to walk beside her, without claiming to be her lord and walk ahead.

As soon as she was recognized, women began coming out of their houses and children began to gather in the lane, shouting and cheering and jumping up and down. Some of the more eager boys and girls ran on ahead to her father's house, so her father was waiting for her at the door when she arrived.

Tears streaming down his face, King Matfei embraced and kissed her. Only after many such hugs and kisses did he finally give any notice to the naked man beside her.

"King Matfei, my father, here is the man who crossed the chasm and blinded the bear and kissed me to waken me from the spell."