Nadya rose high into the air in a great wheeling arc, dipping her wings, learning the feel of them. She saw the woods spread beneath her, the clearing, and Magda’s hut. She saw the Petrazoi in the distance and, gliding lower, she saw the gingergirl’s path through the woods. She swooped and darted between the trees, unafraid of the forest for the first time since she could remember.
She circled over Duva, saw the main street, the cemetery, two new altars laid out. Two more girls gone during the long winter while she grew fat at the witch’s table. They would be the last. She screeched and dove beside the gingergirl, driving her onward, her soldier, her champion.
Nadya watched from a clothesline as the gingergirl crossed the clearing to her father’s house. Inside, she could hear raised voices arguing. Did he know what Karina had done? Had he begun to suspect what she truly was?
The gingergirl knocked and the voices quieted. When the door swung open, her father squinted into the dusk. Nadya was shocked at the toll the winter had taken on him. His broad shoulders looked hunched and narrow, and, even from a distance, she could see the way the skin hung loose on his frame. She waited for him to cry out in horror at the monster that stood before him.
“Nadya?” Maxim gasped. “Nadya!” He pulled the gingergirl into his arms with a rough cry.
Karina appeared behind him in the door, face pale, eyes wide. Nadya felt a twinge of disappointment. Somehow she’d imagined that Karina would take one look at the gingergirl and crumble to dust, or that the sight of Nadya alive and well on her doorstep would force her to blurt out some ugly confession.
Maxim drew the gingergirl inside and Nadya fluttered down to the windowsill to peer through the glass.
The house looked more cramped and gray than ever after the warmth of Magda’s hut. She saw that the collection of wooden dolls on the mantel had grown.
Nadya’s father caressed the gingergirl’s burnished brown arm, peppering her with questions, but the gingergirl stayed silent, huddling by the fire. Nadya wasn't even sure that she could speak.
But Maxim did not seem to notice her silence. He babbled on, laughing, crying, shaking his head in wonder. Karina hovered behind him, watching as she always had. There was fear in her eyes, but something else, too, something troubling that looked almost like gratitude.
Then Karina stepped forward, touched the gingergirl’s soft cheek, her frosted hair. Nadya waited, sure Karina would be singed, that she would let out a shriek as the flesh of her hand peeled away like bark, revealing not bones but branches and the monstrous form of the khitka beneath her pretty skin.
Instead, Karina bowed her head and murmured what might have been a prayer. She took her coat from the hook.
“I am going to Baba Olya's.”
“Yes, yes,” Maxim said distractedly, unable to pull his gaze from his daughter.
She’s running away, Nadya realized in horror. And the gingergirl was making no move to stop her.
Karina wrapped her head in a scarf, pulled on her gloves, and slipped out the door, shutting it behind her without a backward glance.
Nadya hopped and squawked from the window ledge.
I will follow her, she thought. I will peck out her eyes.
Karina bent down, picked up a pebble from the path, and hurled it at Nadya.
Nadya released an indignant caw.
But when Karina spoke, her voice was gentle. “Fly away now, little bird,” she said. “Some things are better left unseen.” Then she disappeared into the dusk.
Nadya fluttered her wings, unsure of what to do. She peered back through the window.
Her father had pulled the gingergirl into his lap and was stroking her white hair.
“Nadya,” he said again and again. “Nadya.” He nuzzled the brown flesh of her shoulder, pressed his lips to her skin.
Outside, Nadya’s small heart beat against her hollow bones.
“Forgive me,” Maxim murmured, the tears on his cheeks dissolving the soft curve of icing at her neck.
Nadya shivered. Her wings stuttered a futile, desperate tattoo on the glass. But her father’s hand slipped beneath the hem of her skirts, and the gingergirl did not move.
It isn't me, Nadya told herself. Not really. It isn't me.
She thought of her father’s restlessness, of his lost horses, his treasured sledge. Before that…before that, girls had gone missing from other towns, one here, one there. Stories, rumors, faraway crimes. But then the famine had come, the long winter, and Maxim had been trapped.
“I've tried to stop,” he said as he pulled his daughter close. “Believe me,” he begged. “Say you believe me.”
The gingergirl stayed silent.
Maxim opened his wet mouth to kiss her again and the sound he made was something between a groan and a sigh as his teeth sank into the sweetness of her shoulder.
The sigh turned to a sob as he bit down.
Nadya watched her father consume the gingergirl, bite by bite, limb by limb. He wept as he ate, but he did not stop, and by the time he was finished, the fire was cold in the grate. When he was done, he lay stretched out on the floor, his belly distended, his fingers sticky, his beard crusted with crumbs. Only then did the crow turn away.