The closet was just wide enough to fit Matrona’s shoulders, and just short enough to force Jaska to bend his head down ever so slightly. He pressed his face to the doors, peering through the crack between them. The faintest sigh passed from his lips. Matrona held her breath, trying not to think of his arm pressing against her arm or his feet spaced between hers. Only a few more inches and they’d be body to body.
Chiding herself without words, she listened. The steps coming down the stairs were not heavy enough to be Slava’s. A few jars shuffled on a set of shelves, and then the feet returned up the stairs. The light between the closet doors vanished as the cellar was shut once more.
“My father,” Jaska whispered, and Matrona relaxed into the corners of the closet. A dim slice of light illuminated his grim expression, and she wondered if Afon had just retrieved a bottle of kvass. Matrona knew little of the relationship between Jaska and his father, but the man had never been around on the occasions she’d watched the younger Maysaks.
Still, Jaska didn’t open the closet doors. His eyes lingered at the crack. “I’m sure Slava saw us,” he continued. “What does he want with you?”
Matrona pinched her lips together, too many words boiling in her throat.
“Matrona,” he whispered. “What happened that day, at his house?”
“Dolls,” she croaked.
He pulled back, smacking the back of his head on the closet ceiling. “What?”
“Dolls,” she repeated. “The tradesman’s house is full of dolls.” She knew she sounded mad, but if anyone could tolerate madness in the village, it was a man who had been raised alongside it. “He has a room full of them. Wooden dolls, only with smaller dolls nesting inside them. They’re painted to look like us—the villagers. I have one, you have one, my father has one. So many dolls. All of us are in there.”
He shifted in the darkness, and she wished he would stoop enough for the sliver of light to reveal his reaction.
She swallowed and steadied herself. “I returned a paintbrush. I saw them, all of them. Tried to open my father’s and left. He acted so strangely after that. And I went back. I went back to his house”—she was breathless—“and he told me I had to replace him. Slava. That I had to take care of his dolls because I had seen them. Because he was old. They’re connected to us, Jaska.”
The way she issued his name made it sound like a desperate cry. Jaska held very still, listening. Matrona straightened as best she could.
He tried to lift an arm, but there wasn’t space, so he dropped it. “I don’t understand.”
“They’re connected to us, somehow,” she whispered, suddenly aware of the silence settling in the cellar. “Witchcraft . . . I don’t understand it. But he made me open my doll. After I removed the first layer, everyone knew my . . . secrets.”
Her face burned, and she thanked the darkness, though the close walls made the air sweltering. Steeling herself, she asked, “How did you know, Jaska? Who told you those parts of my . . . thoughts?”
He went so still, he could have been a carving. Even his breaths barely registered to Matrona’s ears. “I . . .” He paused. “I’m not sure.”
“Everyone knew instantly.” Words flowed from her like water. “And three days later, I opened the second doll, and it brought up such darkness inside of me. Torture rolling around my head, torture I put there from the time I learned to think.” She couldn’t explain it any other way. “It hit me right before you found me. And it’s been three days. He told me I had to come back after three days, but I don’t want to go back.”
She leaned against the closet’s back wall, ignoring the splinters poking through her dress. “It sounds mad,” she whispered, “but it’s true. It’s all true.”
The quiet between them grew stale.
Matrona pushed against the closet door until it opened. She couldn’t do this without seeing his face. Without knowing if he thought her mad. The cellar air felt cool when she stepped out. She eyed the cellar doors, listening.
Jaska stepped out as well and closed the closet doors. “I’ve heard worse.” A weak smile touched his lips. “And no one else believes you?”
“I’ve told no one else. He forbade it.”
Jaska drew a long breath through his nose and released slowly through his mouth. “I don’t know Slava well.” It seemed as if he wanted to say more, but any further words died in a low sound in his throat. “These . . . dolls,” he spoke carefully, “they’re why he wants you?”
She nodded.
“As what? An apprentice? To take over this sorcery?”
The word sorcery prickled the back of Matrona’s neck and sent a new burst of energy through her weary limbs. She tried to study the shadows of the young man’s face. “You believe me?”
“I don’t have a reason not to.”
For a moment, Matrona tried to imagine those words on the lips of her mother, or Feodor. It was impossible to envision it. “But it’s so far-fetched.”
“Not if you pay attention.”
“What do you mean?”
Jaska shrugged, hesitated. “Have you ever noticed . . . how content everyone is?”
Matrona’s lips parted slightly. She thought of her mother, her father . . . Feodor pacing in her front room, lecturing her for the suffering to which Slava had subjected her. “I can’t say I have.”
“They are.” He rubbed the back of his head with a hand. Noticing the glove over his fingers, he pulled it off, then did the same with its match. “So . . . complacent. Or how everyone is born here, and everyone stays. There’s no . . . mingling with other towns, save for the goods Slava brings from them.” He, too, eyed the cellar doors. “Aside from your sister’s disappearance . . . nothing bad ever happens.”
“What do you mean?” Matrona wrung her fingers. “What sort of ‘bad’ things would happen, Jaska?”
The potter pulled away from the closet, shaking his head. “I don’t know.” He paused. “Things my mother says.”
Matrona frowned. Mad Olia had a lot to say, and most of it was nonsensical, if it could be understood at all. Like bad poetry spoken underwater. But, Matrona conceded, were she my mother, I would try to make sense of it.
The cellar doors creaked again, and Matrona’s hands tightened into fists as she waited for the doors to open. They didn’t. A trick of the wind, perhaps.
“I don’t trust him,” Jaska murmured after a long moment.
“Slava?”
“Mm.”
“Why? Because of what I said?”
He shook his head again, watching the cracks between the cellar doors. “Because he’s . . . different.”
“Different how?”
“Look at him, Matrona. Listen to how he talks. He’s different.”
“I hadn’t spoken to him much before . . . this,” she confessed. “But yes, he is. Dragon house and all.”
He turned from the crack. “Dragon house?”
Matrona flushed. “It looks like . . . Never mind. He’s a sorcerer, he has to be. If only you could see the dolls—”
“I’m not surprised. Makes me wonder about the others.”
Her spine stiffened. “Others?”
Jaska didn’t answer.
“Who else do you not trust?” Who else should I not trust?
He shrugged and leaned onto one leg, tilting his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Jaska—”
“Pavel.” The name struck her chest like a hammer. But there was nothing off about Pavel. Matrona knew him well. “Ole—” he continued, but the name cut clean between his teeth. Still, Matrona had heard enough of it.
“Oleg?” she repeated, skin heating. “Oleg Popov?”
Jaska ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “I didn’t mean to say it.”
“What is there not to trust about Oleg?” Her betrothed’s father? Her heart raced.
“I don’t know. Intuition. I have no good reason to suspect him of anything, Matrona.”
“But then why—”
“The horses, I guess.”
She paused, stared at him. “Horses?”
“He and Pavel have both asked me to paint white horses on their pottery. Both have white horses in their homes. Dozens of them. I’ve asked why, and neither will answer beyond admitting to a fondness for them. I don’t know. I thought it was strange.”
“That two men happen to like horses?”
“White horses, specifically? I’ve never even seen a white horse.”
She licked her lips, listening to the cellar doors in the silence that fell between them.
Jaska shook his head. “Like I said, I have no reason.”
Matrona pursed her lips.
After a long moment, a soft chuckle sounded in the potter’s throat.