The Fukuruma doll hit the floor.
More of the wonders spilled onto fine rugs as Matrona searched behind and under the treasures for Slava’s doll. She emptied bookshelves and turned over chairs both in the sitting room and in his bedroom, then went downstairs to do the same. She lifted rugs and pillaged cupboards, even received a sharp bite from Pamyat when she searched behind his perch. She physically touched each and every doll Slava owned, ensuring none of them wore his face.
None of them did. Matrona panted, weary. There was no doll.
She went through the room again, this time cleaning up the clutter, then crawled over the floors on hands and knees, searching for a small doll. A center doll without a seam. That eluded her as well. She searched the small stable behind the house, and the yard surrounding it. No sign of the tradesman.
But he’d left his horse, so he couldn’t have gone far. Where could he have hidden? The wood?
Matrona sighed and trudged back into the house. Slava wasn’t the sort of man to hide. He had merely . . . vanished.
Matrona collapsed on the stairs. “Slava, I need you,” she said, too tired to shout. “Roksana needs you. Please.”
No answer.
Matrona spat the few curse words she knew and pulled herself up, then dragged her body back to the Zotov house. She found Roksana in the kitchen, clutching the edge of the table, making a sound between a grunt and a scream as her fingernails dug into the wood. Matrona expected Roksana to resist when she put her arms around her, but the laboring woman leaned into her instead, sobbing, and allowed Matrona to lead her back to the bed.
Roksana climbed onto the mattress on her hands and knees, breathing too fast. She cried out.
“Slow breaths,” Matrona urged, hoping Roksana would understand. She pulled the tie off the end of her own braid and used it to pull back Roksana’s hair. “Try to take deep breaths, or you’ll faint. It won’t be forever.”
Getting Roksana as comfortable as possible, Matrona returned to the kitchen to boil water again—she’d left the stove too long, and the first pot of water had all gone to steam. Then she ate a piece of bread and returned to Roksana’s room, where she arranged towels for the delivery.
Roksana uttered the words of her sad lullaby in the short spaces between contractions.
Matrona sang them with her.
The babe’s cry startled Matrona awake. Her eyes hurt from being pressed into the mattress, her backside from sitting in the wooden chair too long. Folds from Roksana’s blanket had left creases in her forehead.
Roksana had labored all night, but delivered a baby boy in the hours of midmorning. All three of them were exhausted, but because Matrona feared Roksana would not nurse the baby on her own, she stayed alert and nearby.
Roksana stirred groggily as the infant wailed beside her. Matrona woke her friend with a few words and helped bring the babe to her breast. Fatigue, it seemed, helped keep the madness at bay.
That evening, while both mother and son rested, Matrona ventured back to Slava’s house, finding it just as empty as before. She took the path that surrounded the village and walked it, picking up a few more dolls, adding them to the collection she now kept in one of Roksana’s cloth satchels. She visited Olia, who pretended to knit while only tying knots in her yarn, then went to the butchery, where she found Oleg’s doll, and the Popov izba, where she collected Feodor and the rest of his family.
By nightfall, it became evident to Matrona that whatever spell Slava had cast over the village would not resolve itself, and that Slava would not save her from it. She also knew she could not break it alone.
She dumped the satchel’s contents onto the rag rug in the Zotovs’ front room. Familiar, painted faces rolled. She found Jaska’s doll, palmed it, and returned to the tradesman’s home.
Though it felt like weeks, only three days had passed since Matrona had bumped into Slava’s table and opened Jaska’s second doll. Now there was no one to interrupt her as she sought out his likeness on the table of dolls. Even Pamyat saved his hissing. The kite was looking sick, and likely hadn’t been fed since Slava’s abandonment. Did the bird hunt his meals? There was no meat to be had in the house. She’d need to do something—even a creature as grumpy as Pamyat shouldn’t be made to suffer.
Clasping Jaska’s fifth doll in her hands, she popped open his first doll, then his second, then his third. She held the fourth in her hands. The urge to pull it apart made her fingers twitch, but she set it back down. She couldn’t risk losing Jaska to the insanity of Slava’s spells.
She reassembled the doll and turned about slowly, studying the rest. Starting on the far edge of the room, near the kite, she opened the first doll of each one. Pavel, Alena, Luka, Feodor, Oleg, Galina, Afon, Viktor, Kostya, Georgy, Zhanna. Irena, Nastasya, Boris Ishutin. The Grankins, the Demidovs. Every last one until her hands threatened to blister.
Then she moved a dozen of the dolls to the floor, climbed atop the table, and pushed open the solitary window. Pamyat leapt from his perch and flapped wildly for his escape, the copper band about his leg glinting in the sunlight.
Chapter 19
The tip of the chisel stuck into the turning linden wood, leaving a crooked gash. Matrona pulled her foot off the lathe pedal and barely resisted throwing the chisel into the wall beside her. Tears burned her eyes. She hadn’t blinked as she worked.
Dropping the chisel, Matrona grabbed the ruined wood and threw it onto the floor with the rest before squatting down and throwing her arms over her head. She’d tried and tried and tried, but she couldn’t even get the shape of a doll correct, let alone carve out its hollows and bespell them. And how was she to paint the babe’s face? All of Slava’s dolls were adults. Somehow he knew what the young would look like once they aged, and he hadn’t told her how. She hadn’t let him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Two days since Roksana’s unnamed babe had been born. Slava had warned her about the third day, that without a doll, the infant would vanish just as Esfir had. Yet without the tradesman, Matrona had no way to stop it from happening. Slava had promised Roksana’s baby would pay the price for Matrona’s disobedience, a thought that pounded through her head again and again as she kept trying—and failing—to work the lathe. She had no way to create a functioning doll, and no way to free herself, let alone anyone else, from this bespelled prison.
She rubbed a knuckle into her eye and picked up the chisel. She was so tired. Exhausted from running about the village, from tending Roksana’s child, from trying to create this doll.
She knew she’d never learn the craft that quickly. But if she didn’t try, where did that leave her?
She didn’t even have the pleasure of the villagers’ secrets occupying her thoughts. Whatever spell had turned them into wooden miniatures had also voided the consequences of opening their dolls. Matrona would have loved to know her mother’s secrets, or Feodor’s. If Luka’s deepest thoughts had been spilled, perhaps she would discover just what he had intended to name his son.
Sighing, Matrona trudged out of the doll room and to the nearest closet, taking up another block of wood from Slava’s dwindling supply. She had to try again. And again, and again . . .
Matrona failed.
She hated leaving Roksana like this, weeping into her pillow, calling out Luka’s name in fleeting moments of lucidity. Roksana had barely seemed to realize her babe had been born, yet even with her mind gone, she felt the infant’s absence. Three days old and the boy had vanished, just as Matrona’s sister had.
Roksana wouldn’t eat anything, and Matrona couldn’t, for her belly twisted and ached with her failure. She carried the pain with her as she departed the Zotov house for Slava’s abode, Roksana’s wails catching the breeze that followed her.