Spells of Blood and Kin Read Online Free PDF

backward into the scatter of broken safety glass.
    She hit the wall hard with one shoulder and bit off a curse word.
    â€œI take no pleasure in damaging you,” Maksim said.
    â€œLiar,” Augusta said, without heat, twisting to tug down her torn shirt collar and inspect her shoulder.
    Maksim picked up the rum bottle and held it up to the wash of light from the window—a finger left, at most.
    â€œGive me that,” said Augusta, stumbling over to drop to the sofa. “It wasn’t my best fight. I’ll do better tomorrow.”
    â€œThat is what we all say,” Maksim said, gulping the rum and tossing the empty bottle in the direction of the kitchenette.
    Augusta cursed him, so he turned his back on her before he succumbed to the want in his fists again. He left her dim, stuffy room, jogged down the iron stairs, and vaulted over the last half story.
    Then he went to see the witch.
    APRIL 28
    Â Â  WANING GIBBOUS
    Lissa closed her bedroom door. The air hung still and stuffy. She’d told Stella she wanted a nap. She sat on her bed, back against the headboard, and opened the lockbox.
    The doll, unclothed muslin body scalloped with faint brown stains, had eyes that opened and closed. Its porcelain head was capped with carefully sewn curls of auburn hair. Human hair. Baba’s hair, it would be, cut when she was young enough that it held no gray. Lissa thought Baba must have made the doll originally for her daughter, Lissa’s mother. Lissa tilted it back and forth, watching the clear, glassy gaze, and laid it on her lap.
    The letter was on lined paper torn from a Mead notebook and folded small. Baba had written it in pencil, dark, spiky, and sprawling.
    The letter reminded her again of the old story for which Lissa had been named: Vasilissa the Beautiful, or Vasilissa the Wise, depending on the version.
    Vasilissa, like so many girls in old stories, grew up with a stepmother who hated her. The stepmother sent Vasilissa into the forest one night to ask the witch Baba Yaga for a light. Baba Yaga lived in a house that strutted about on hen’s legs, and she rode through the sky in a mortar. Her house stood in a yard ringed with a fence of skulls mounted on spears, and the skulls’ eyes burned with fire.
    When Vasilissa explained her predicament, Baba Yaga said she might stay and work, and then she assigned her three tasks: cooking enough dinner for ten people, sorting and grinding a sack of millet, and squeezing all the oil from a sack of poppy seeds.
    Vasilissa’s sole memento of her departed mother was a doll, which she brought with her everywhere, even into the forest to visit the witch. At the full moon, Vasilissa could ask this doll three questions, because as usual in stories, everything came in threes. Vasilissa asked the doll to help her through the three tests Baba Yaga set for her, and the doll gave her such good advice that Vasilissa was able to do everything the witch had asked. Baba Yaga was so impressed that she agreed to give Vasilissa a light to take back to her stepmother: not just any light, but one of the fiery-eyed skulls.
    When Vasilissa returned from the forest, bearing the skull aloft on its spear, her stepmother was at first grateful, for there had been no light in the home since Vasilissa left. But the skull’s flaming eyes began to scorch the stepmother, and when she tried to hide, the skull followed her and burned her to a cinder.
    Vasilissa then took up the skull again, went back into the forest, and asked Baba Yaga to teach her all her magic. With the help of her doll, Vasilissa was able to perform all the tasks Baba Yaga demanded in exchange. Eventually, Vasilissa became a powerful witch in her own right, so powerful that she drew the attention of the czar, who made her his wife; and the story said she carried her mother’s doll in her pocket for all her days.
    There were other stories about Vasilissa, or maybe there was more than one Vasilissa,