“I guess you’d better come in,” she said, and walked back to the Airstream. Where the front door had disappeared. Again.
“Oh, cut that the hell out,” Barbara said, giving the blank silver wall a hard whack with her fist. “You’re supposed to hide the door from visitors, not from me, you temperamental tin can.”
Her guest gaped at the suddenly visible door, and then at her. “How, what?” Then added with alarm, looking over his shoulder, “You know, you probably shouldn’t do that. In all the stories, it says it’s not a good idea to anger the Baba Yaga.”
“You don’t say?” Chudo-Yudo muttered, although thankfully, he said it in Dog, not in English (or gods forbid, Dragon, which tended to involve a lot of flames).
Barbara rolled her eyes. “It’s my house; I can bang on it if I want to.”
Ivan stopped dead, one foot hovering over the second step. “Wait. Your house? You’re the Baba Yaga?” He gazed at her in disbelief. “But the Baba Yaga is an ugly old crone, and you’re, you’re . . . not!”
Chudo-Yudo was laughing so hard, Barbara had to push him out of the way to get inside; not an easy task with a two-hundred-pound dog. She muttered an obscenity in Russian and beckoned her unwelcome guest the rest of the way in.
“Thank you, I think,” she said. “And yes, I am the Baba Yaga. One of them, anyway. It’s more of a job title than a name, really. You can call me Barbara, if you’re more comfortable with that.”
Ivan stumbled his way to the couch, alternately staring at her and around the inside of the Airstream with wide eyes. Apparently its rich velvets and colorful tapestries hadn’t been what he’d been expecting. Nor was she, obviously.
Barbara made an effort to be nice. She wasn’t very good at social situations; being rescued from a desolate orphanage and raised in the forest by an ancient and antisocial witch would do that to a person. Still, it wasn’t as though she couldn’t manage to be polite—she just rarely bothered.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “It will probably smell like blue roses, but it’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
“Uh, okay,” Ivan said. “Um . . . I thought that Baba Yaga lived in a hut on chicken legs.”
“Sure,” Barbara said, tossing some tea into a pot and pouring hot water over it.
“But when my adoptive mother and I moved here from Russia she decided we needed to blend in with our new land better. Both the hut and the flying cauldron have gone through a couple of permutations since then, but I’m pretty happy with this one.” A flower from the rug started trying to grow up the leg of the galley table and she nudged it back in unobtrusively with one booted foot. “Generally.”
She sat down in the chair opposite Ivan and gave him his tea.
“Oh,” he said, clasping his mug with both hand as if it was the only solid thing in the universe. “So I guess the stories about the Baba Yaga that described her as an old crone were about the other Baba. That explains it.”
Barbara bit her lip, trying not to laugh. “Mostly it was just tradition. A Baba Yaga can look like anything she wants to, but usually the frightening old witch fits the role best.” She brushed away his next question with the wave of a hand. “Why don’t you tell me why you sought me out? Let me guess—you want me to give you some kind of treasure. People are always looking for magical treasure.” She sighed. It wasn’t that the Babas never granted jewels or riches to the people willing to jump through impossible hoops to get them; Barbara just couldn’t understand why on earth they’d go to all that trouble just for some shiny baubles.
Please don’t let it be treasure. Please don’t let it be treasure. She crossed her fingers under her teacup. She kind of liked the guy; she really didn’t want to have to send him into the mouth of a live volcano or down into a bottomless pit.
The lines around Ivan’s mouth grew deeper and his brown eyes saddened. “I already had the greatest treasure in the world, Baba Yaga, and someone stole it from me. I need your help to get it back.”
Barbara sighed and uncrossed her fingers. “What was it then? Diamonds? Gold? And who stole it from you?”
Ivan pulled a much-creased photo out of his wallet and handed it to her. It showed two young blond girls on a swing set, laughing as they soared through the sky. Their hair was lighter than his, but their eyes and cheekbones were pure Dmetriev.