Season of the Witch part 15

Using the well that was in the nearby woods, a few heat spells, and lots of soap, Calla was able to take a nice warm bath, as well as wash her filthy clothes.  Then, with her hair still wet and unbrushed, she hurried to make dinner, as it was almost the hour when Baba Yaga would announce that she was hungry.  Calla had not yet done anything to make the witch cross, and she was afraid of what would happen.
Luckily, there was no complaint from Baba Yaga, who (as usual) devoured the roast chicken and potatoes and rolls, eating whatever Calla did not get hold of first.  Mentally the girl was resigning herself to another quiet night, perhaps with a phone call to someone back home, when Baba Yaga suddenly said, “You did not kill the vodyanoy.”


Calla jumped, and after composing herself, admitted, “I did not.”
“Why not?  He could have drowned you.”
“I’m not a killer,” she said quietly.  “Once was enough; I don’t need more blood on my conscience.”
Even without looking up from her plate, she could feel those red eyes staring at her.  She just scooped up a piece of chicken with her fork, and bit into it hungrily.  It really was good chicken; soft and chewy, without that horrid dryness that white meat tends to get.  Calla would not dare to call herself the best cook in the world, but she at least knew how to handle meat.


After another silence, the witch asked, “You enjoy talking with him?”
“Well enough.  He doesn’t know about much besides the pond, but he’s a good enough soul.  Just very lonely.”
Baba Yaga made a bit of a sniff, and continued masticating her own enormous piece of chicken.  Then she swallowed, and spoke again.
“How about that young man whom you talk to sometimes when I’m asleep?  You enjoy talking with him?”
Calla felt her cheeks grow warm.
Of course she knows about him.
“Y-yes.”
The witch smiled widely.
“He’s a very precious young man, then.  Even if you haven’t told him about the blood bond.”
Calla’s shoulders and neck felt warm this time.
“How do you know that?”
Baba Yaga shrugged, and stabbed her fork into a potato.  “I can see into people’s hearts, myshka.  It’s something you will learn too, if Chernobyl does not get the sword and you’re around long enough.”


The heat burned more fiercely; she’d thought she was growing numb to the idea, but hearing it spoken aloud in the witch’s pronounced Russian voice somehow brought all the pain back with a vengeance.  Calla tried to hold it in, but she had to squeeze her eyes shut and take a gulp of water so that she would try not to cry in front of this woman.
Baba Yaga continued, relentless.  “Even if he does win, if you go home and are no longer in my service, what are you planning to do about your young man?  Will you want to bond him with a vurdalak as well?  Or another of the Folk?  Because otherwise, he is going to grow old and die long before you even start to taste old age.”
Calla stared at the old woman’s plate, unable to look at her face.  “I haven’t really found a solution-”
“That is because you’re young and inexperienced!” she snapped.  Then she used a bony finger to reach over and raise the girl’s chin, forcing her to look at her face.  Though not at her eyes; Calla resisted that urge.


Baba Yaga smiled at her, teeth glinting in the light.  “I might be able to help you.”
Internal alarms went off in Calla’s mind.  But she forced her face to go blank, and asked softly, “How?”
Baba Yaga nodded over to the black sunflower.  “Do you know why I keep this?”
Calla said, “I know it possesses some sort of powerful magic.”
She nodded eagerly.  “Yes, yes!  The sort that kings have quested for, and alchemists wasted their lives trying to find!  Each of those seeds grants the one who eats it one hundred more years to live!”
So, sort of a plant version of the Holy Grail.
Calla managed to keep a straight face and not giggle at her internal commentary.
The witch went on, “If your young man were to eat these, there would be no fuss over age difference.  You could be happy with him.”
“What would your price be?” Calla countered.
The reply was succinct: “Become my apprentice.”


While Calla was still trying to digest that, she said, “You would not have to live here.  You could go back to your home in America, and solve your little problems with Chernobyl, assuming he gets back.  But you would come here every so often, and I would teach you what I know.  And every month, if you had learned well and been a good pupil, I would give you one of these seeds to give to your love.”
Slowly the mage sat back in her chair, blinking and searching for the words she wanted.  Finally she settled on, “Why?”
Baba Yaga said, “Be specific.”
“Why do you want an apprentice all of a sudden?  And why me, of all the people in the world?”
The witch shrugged.  “Call it a whim.”  Then she stood up, cramming the last of the chicken into her mouth and gnashing it to shreds with her iron teeth.  “At least consider it, myshka.”


Morgan, if Baba Yaga wanted to make you her apprentice in exchange for a way to make Nathan live longer, what would you say?
Calla tapped out the text message after cleaning up the remains of dinner, and sent it before thinking, Wait.  That might have been a very stupid idea.  I think she is going to freak.
She was right. Morgan’s first text was a question mark, followed by one comprised only of exclamation points. 
What are you doing with Baba Yaga? was the third.
...It’s for a case, Calla replied.
You and Tristan get the strangest cases.
I know.
Let me think about it a minute.


Calla waited anxiously, curled up by the fire, which she had built up a little bit.  It wasn’t necessarily that cold, but it made her feel a bit more secure.
Finally the response came. I don't know that I would now, but that's because of the blood bond. If you had asked a year ago, the answer would have been yes.
Even if it meant he’d have to watch his parents grow old and die while he stayed young for longer than he was supposed to?
That would be his decision to make, not mine.
She nodded slowly, even knowing that her friend couldn’t see her.  Then she leaned her chin in her hand, staring at the fire.
Her phone vibrated.
Are you okay?
Calla typed back, It’s kind of a long story.
I'm listening.
This is a text message.
You know what I mean…
After a hesitant second, she texted back, Tristan has to steal a sword from Koschei the Deathless or I’m going to be Baba Yaga’s prisoner.
Wow.
Yeah.
Any way I can help?
I doubt it.  But thanks anyway.


Had she been more secure regarding her emotions, Calla might have jumped to Baba Yaga’s offer with a lot less hesitation.  But she wasn’t.
To the best of her understanding, she loved Lars.  But was it enough to make her want to make him immortal?  After all, they were still in the process of getting to know each other.  And frankly, sometimes she was afraid that he felt more passionately for her than she did for him.  Or, to put it a bit more positively, he depended on her more than she did him.  Probably because she was one of the first people he’d cared about outside his group of homeless children.
Is that really a healthy relationship, then?  Maybe we’ve jumped into this whole thing too quickly...so is it really worth preserving his life for longer, especially because it wouldn’t be fair to Rosie?
Relationships are hard.
I wish Tristan was here, so I could talk to him about this.  He’d know what to do.

Season of the Witch part 13

Even though she was afraid, and remembering that even though she could swim a little, she was not very adept at it yet, Calla was not willing to give up that easily.  Before the creature could go very far from the surface, she kicked out; even though the water forced her to move more slowly, she felt her shoe connect hard with something.  There was a bellow of pain in her ear, and one of the hands started to release her.  She took advantage of it, and wiggled her left arm free of the lasso, sending a concentrated blast of power over her shoulder at whatever had ahold of her.  Much to her relief, despite it not being a lethal or even hurtful blast, it enabled her to break free, clawing her way to the surface.


She barely took a moment to gratefully breathe before grabbing the plants on the shore, and starting to pull herself up.  However, she had not gotten far before she was being seized again.  Frantically, Calla kicked out, writhing and wrapping some roots around her hands in an attempt to anchor herself in place.  In desperation, and almost instinctively, she raised her head and called out for help-in Ghoulish.*


Calla didn’t even know if there were any Ghuls in the immediate vicinity-it just came out, probably an instinctive result of her connection to Sharky.  And it seemed to startle her captor; the grip faltered enough for her to scramble all the way out of the water, turn around, and come face to face with whatever it was.  Which, if you hadn’t guessed already, is what she did.


It looked, more than anything, like a giant frog masquerading as a man.  He had a wide, sagging mouth, bulbous, fiery gold-green eyes, a large flat nose that sunk into his face, slimy green and brown skin, and long, webbed hands.  Long, green, weedy stuff drooped from his chin and the top of his head; it took Calla a second to realize that it was actually hair, albeit very lank and greasy hair.  And she could see that he was dripping with algae all over.


After her brief examination, Calla, hating to do it but thinking it was the fastest way of communicating with the creature if he didn’t speak English, stared into his eyes.  And was promptly overwhelmed by a flood of strange thoughts and emotions.  They mostly seemed to consist of shock at the moment-shock that she spoke the tongue of the vurdalaki, and shock at how efficiently she had gotten out of his grasp, and shock at what was happening now.  And with a quick scan of his thoughts, Calla learned that the creature was known as a vodyanoy.  It was a Russian water spirit, like the nymphs back home, except this one seemed far more aggressive.  When she probed around to figure out why he had tried to drown her, his thoughts became somewhat indignant.


Drown her!  He had no such intention!  The truth was, he was lonely and seeking companionship.  He had been here for hundreds of years, and the only other sentient creatures in this lake were some silly rusalki** who called him fat and giggled at him behind their webs when they thought he wasn’t looking.
That doesn’t give you the right to just kidnap me! Calla retorted.
However, as she looked at his thoughts, she felt a pang of sympathy for the vodyanoy.  She knew how it felt to be lonely.
Could you try going to another lake?
He twisted around in the water a bit, until he was able to hold up a fat tail.  Calla began to see the problem, since this lake was completely land-locked.  He was stuck here, with nowhere else to go, and despite the other creatures there, he was completely alone.
But there are other ways besides kidnapping…


She spent maybe an hour sitting by the side of the lake, talking mentally to the vodyanoy, whose name she learned was Pavel.  He was overjoyed at finally being able to talk to someone, and determined to make the most of it.  And the mental connection was beneficial for Calla, too; not only was she helping someone and being distracted from her worry about what was happening to Tristan, but it enabled her, after a time, to start figuring out the basics of the Russian language; in a way, killing multiple birds with one stone.


Finally, though, she had to say, I need to go back now.  Baba Yaga needs me to bring these plants to her.
She couldn’t help questioning the veracity of that statement a little bit; both that the witch actually needed the plants, and that she needed Calla to be the one to go and get them.  But Pavel understood; nobody around here ever wanted to cross Baba Yaga.
She would come back, wouldn't she?
...I’ll try.
Calla looked away, rubbing her throbbing temples, and cut some fresh plants to add to the bag, before going back to where she had left the mortar.


Baba Yaga barely bit back a cackle when Calla stepped into the cottage: damp, muddy, a little bloody around the hands, and windblown.
“Have a good time?” she asked innocently.

*Ghoulish had become her word for the Ghul language, if you could call it that, which her blood bond with a Ghul had kind of helped her to understand better.  It’s based on a series of screeches, growls, snarls, and inflections based on current emotions.  A call for help is a sort of long, high banshee-like wail, that if done right, can reach an octave usually saved for dog whistles.
**Russian water nymphs.  Often purported to be the spirits of women who drowned themselves, and well-known for luring young men to their deaths by drowning or something.  A lot like mermaids and other types of woman monsters in mythology, really.