I should write them all down, he thought as he lay awake that night. I should get some priest to teach me to write, and then I could record all my spells so I don't have to try to remember them. Commands to the waves and the wind, those I remember because I use them so often. The flow of the great sky river, that I could direct in my sleep. But the commands to each plant to wake up in the spring, I barely remember those, because they generally do it well enough without my help. And the spells to control insects in their flight, and the song to calm the birds—how did those go? He definitely should learn this new alphabet and all the words so he could write it all down and never have to worry about remembering.

But then he thought some more, and decided that it was a bad idea, for two reasons: What if he came to rely on the book, and then lost it? He'd be worse off than now. And—even more dire—what if someone stole the book and used the spells against him? Better to keep his memory sharp, so he would never need a book that might empower an enemy. That was when he began his long custom of rehearsing every spell he knew at least once a year.

He kept it up, too, for several centuries, until his people grew so rational that he had no more rivals, no enemies disrupting the right order with their local spells. Witchcraft and wizardry had so effectively been denied that his own powers began to weaken, for there were few who contributed to his strength by invoking his name. He could cast all the old spells, of course, but it cost him more, wore him out, and he stopped doing any spells but the essential ones, and began to look out for less and less of the old lands, until most of his effort was spent caring for this area that was sometimes Poland, sometimes Russia, sometimes Ukraine and Belarus, even bits of Slovakia. Names could change, armies could pass by, but they concerned him little. He steered them around his little godhold, or made sure they passed lightly over the land and interfered little with the people. Beyond that, he simply tended to the weather.

Until now. Until Baba Yaga brought her stink into the land. And now he had no book to remind him of the spells of combat, techniques he hadn't used since the early days, when his people first separated from the main tribe in the hills of Iran and woke a new god to be their protector. He still had vague memories of childhood, of an idyllic life playing on the slopes of a mountain, the animals all talking to him, the plants making a constant music to which he often sang along. And then they woke him, called him by a name that he knew at once was his own, though it had never been spoken before. It filled him with vigor and he leapt down from the mountain as eager as any adolescent boy, ready to take on all comers. Oh, he fought his battles then, putting others in their place—or getting put down himself, from time to time. Zeus especially loved to torment him, until Mikola finally learned all the weathers of the sky and matched him bolt for bolt.

The time of battles was over, though, long since. Even that arrogant sex fiend Zeus had retired from public life, though he still had a sort of fame that kept wakening him from his lazy philandering and henpecked domesticity—but to no purpose. It was just the sound of his name being murmured in a thousand classrooms; it had no strength in it. Mikola looked at Zeus these days and saw his own future, when his people had at last forgotten him. But until then, he was still guardian. And now a great danger had come into the land, and he could hardly remember how to aim lightning. If only, if only I had written it down.

So he struggled to remember as he trailed after Baba Yaga, following the odor of her passage through the land, cleaning up after her, casting little spells to make people forget her visit, removing the vile little curses she always left on any house that let her in or gave her anything to eat or a place to sleep. It took a great deal of ingenuity on his part, because she was so maliciously clever, laying traps for him, so that when he released one curse, a worse one would slip into place, unless he took precautions in advance.

Most important, he kept renewing the spell that kept Bear and Baba Yaga from finding each other. They both smelled each other, but whenever Baba Yaga thought of seeking him out, or Bear stirred in his somnolence, Mikola filled the air between them with so much of the forgetful haze of summer that they'd become distracted and think of something else, with only a feeling of fitfulness and ennui to remind them of their forgotten desire.

Mikola was no fool. He recognized that Baba Yaga was following the children's trail toward Kiev, even though she must have thought the twisting and turning of her path would deceive him. But he knew what she did not—that in Kiev, their trail took to the air and soared at thirty-five thousand feet across Europe and the Atlantic, heights and distances that would be utterly incomprehensible to a woman who, powerful as she might be, was still only a mortal who had never followed the flow of the great sky river around the world. She might make it to the airport and see the great planes lumber into the sky and figure out that Vanya and Katerina had flown off in one of them. But that wouldn't tell her where they went, and it wouldn't help her follow them. She would stand there, baffled, helpless, and gradually realize that they were out of her grasp.

Mikola imagined her going into one of her tantrums. The authorities wouldn't stand for it, of course. He could imagine the antiterrorist police surrounding her as she madly screamed and sprayed fiery spells through the airport, finally getting a good shot and taking her out just as in those American movies that had taught police all over the world how to walk with the swagger that made them ridiculous and frightening, both at once. Baba Yaga would see the silliness; not knowing the accuracy and range of rifles with scopes, she would not have sense enough to fear them, too. The bloom of a bullet in her head, spraying blood and brains in a fan-shaped pattern on the airport floor—the mere thought of it brought back feelings that Mikola had not let himself feel in years. He could smell battle. And even though he would not strike the blow himself, it made him feel no less triumphant to know that Baba Yaga would never survive in a world where he had managed to preserve a niche for himself and his beloved Sophia.

The whole drive to the airport had been awkward. Ruth just didn't have that much to say to Ivan's parents. During Ivan's long absence in Russia, Ruth had tried to keep in close contact with her future in-laws, and at first it seemed to work, but as the months went by, she got more and more of a sense that they entertained her only out of a sense of duty. In fact, Ivan's father was always distracted—nice, almost too nice, for a few minutes, then anxious to get back to his work. Back to his books. How terrible, for the husband to work at home. Much better the way her parents were—leave the job at the office, come home and really be home. Of course, Ivan would probably expect to live like his father, since they were both pursuing the same career. And that would be fine, Ruth would learn to live with it, that distraction, that there-but-not-there coolness. Besides, unlike Mrs. Smetski, Ruth would have a job. A career of her own.

Mrs. Smetski. She was the problem. Ruth suspected from the start that Mrs. Smetski thought that Ivan could have found a better girl to marry. She wasn't distracted like Professor Smetski. On the contrary, she focused completely, almost smotheringly, on Ruth. But there was this sense of amusement in everything she said. A sense of irony. I know something you don't know.

Ruth had tried to point it out to Ivan, but he never saw it. "That's just Mom," he'd say. "She's always having an out-of-body experience. Looking down on everything from the ceiling. Never part of it. It's nothing to do with you."