The fingers were tight and gelid around Starling’s neck, squeezing the air, the life. Pain blossomed in red, red roses opening to the forbidden sun behind her eyes, a harmful brilliance of light and color. All the hues of long-forgotten Day and extinct Summer.
Baba Yaga lifted her easily and flung her to the side. Starling hit the mantle over the hearth and dropped at the foot of the flames, coughing blood and panic. The heat was frightening this close. She tried to roll away, but found she was held with one extended arm, while the other reached overhead and tipped the brimming cauldron towards her.
Blood draped her in scarlet sheets, boiling and corrosive. Agony of dying, agony of living. She stood, a glistening red doll dripping garments to the wood, and bit her lip so as not to scream.
A lesson, came Baba Yaga’s voice in her mind. I will teach you how to be me when I am gone.
Thank you, Mother Baba, she answered back in thought, not trusting her mouth to unclamp. You are kind.
Through the mist of torture, Starling understood that she had been released. She saw, through a red veneer, the old woman stooped over her, her puckered face bending like a vulture’s down to carrion. Her lips like thin, wriggling tapeworms pursed closed about her rotting teeth, covering the dank chasm of her mouth that folk rumored stretched from earth to hell and slavered to eat everything in between. Into a doting moue they pursed and pecked Starling once on the brow. She blinked and felt boiling blood slide into the cracks around her eyes. A kiss? She wept blood tears.
There was red limned around those ancient lips, now, as they peeled back to speak. “That is for wisdom, kitling. As Baba Yaga, you must be wise.”
You are wise, Mother Baba, she thought with difficulty, beginning to shiver all over under the acid that ate her skin. What do I know of the wisdom of ages? What do I know of the Dark Forest when it wasn’t dark? I am only seven, Mother. Only seven.
“That is a powerful age, little one. I was only seven when my Mother Baba gave me her… self.” Baba Yaga made an upwards, wavering bow of her bloodstained lips — a smile. Blood was seeping in slow trickles down the channels of her shrunken chin, beading the white hairs. “When she christened me. I still remember how it hurt, so many millennia ago. Does it hurt, little one?”
Starling felt her lips fly open at last; her teeth had worked a hole into the skin and it had shredded upwards, giving nothing for purchase. She half cried, half laughed — a mangled sound from her mangled mouth. And nodded, because it did. The blood still bubbled on her flesh and made wax out of the skin, pale and quick and sloughing.
Baba Yaga nodded too, one ear cocked to old memories, the other cocked to now. “Yes, that was the way of it, christened in pain. Then she told me it was my mother’s blood she had used to baptize me, my birth-mother. It hurt more then,” she added with a softer whisper. “Does it hurt more now?”
Of a sudden Starling was aware of the taste of the stuff crawling into the edges of her mouth, coursing through the tear in her lip. Like copper and salt, and now like mother. This is my mother’s blood?
“And your brother’s, unborn in her womb. Be cleansed with your kin, Starling. Be cleansed of your kin.”
This is my mother’s blood.
“And your brother’s blood.”
My brother’s blood.
Somehow the words steadied Starling, and she stopped writhing on the floor beneath the hearth. She stopped trembling. She sat up, quite still, a red figurine carved of wax, melting before the flames. Nothing hurt anymore. Nothing really felt at all anymore. The excreting, yellowed eyes of Baba Yaga watched her behind cataracts and opaque lenses, the film of age, tremendous age. She was dying.
Starling bowed to the demon hag, until her brow came to rest on one three-toed foot, pressing the white lip-shaped mark of her red-wet brow where Baba Yaga had kissed her, against the scabbed skin. She thought in that moment about a woman she had never seen. A woman who had left her beside the porch on a cold autumn night, and walked back inside to hide from evil.
You are my mother, Mother Baba. I have no other. I have no brother.
Again Baba Yaga grinned and showed her cosmic mouth. “Good, girl, you are cleansed. Now eat me.”
She felt something after all. Surprise. Not quite shock, but near to it. She raised her head, felt wet hair swing ponderously around her head, black turned red turned blackish again as the blood dried, caked, congealed. Eat you?
Baba Yaga walked to the table, picked up the bowl of flesh, tossed it past Starling into the fire. Hiss, crackle — she heard her mother’s meat depart to ashes, to smoke. Not her mother, she reminded herself firmly — this was her mother, this old, crumpled hag before her, so many sevens of years to her one, too many to count. Too many to understand.
