Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (9 page)

“What are you talking about, Papa?” Olena asked frantically. “She’s coming! Run!”

“I knew how this would end from the start, Petrushka,” he said, using Petro’s most intimate nickname. “You can’t let her take Olena.”

“Papa?” Olena said.

Petya crushed Vasyl to him, and Vasyl felt tears running down his face, and he didn’t know if they were his or Petya’s or both.

“How can I lose you now that I just found you?” Petya’s voice was thick and hoarse.

“You had me your whole life,” Vasyl replied, equally hoarse. “Now
run
!”

Olena’s protests about leaving Uncle Vaska behind faded as Petya fled with her deeper into the city. Vasyl swiped at his face with his sleeve and turned with Broom to face Baba Yaga. It wasn’t long before she stormed into view. Broom quivered and tried to hide behind Vasyl, but Vasyl grabbed the top of his staff and held him in place, though his own hands were shaking and black terror threatened to swallow him whole.

Baba Yaga loomed over him, clawed hands on hips. “So, it’s going to be you, my little mechanical. Very well. I’ll devour you raw and screaming in this place so the noise will remind all those people cowering behind their ordinary windows what it means to cross Baba Yaga.”

But Vasyl pressed the point of Broom’s staff against his heart. The life pulse throbbed beneath his ribs. “I offered you my soul, Grandmother, and you refused it.”

“You can’t bargain with something that doesn’t belong to you, boy.”

“But I can.” Breath coming in short puffs, Vasyl spread both arms wide, leaving Broom’s sharp spear at his heart. Broom remained motionless. “One word to Broom and I die.
You
won’t have taken my life, and our bargain will be nullified. Without the bargain, you can’t touch Petya, either, no matter what kind of future you saw.”

Baba Yaga’s eyes narrowed. “
He
doesn’t like suicides, you know. Would you choose an eternity of torment to ensure that your little Petya lives a few miserable years in freedom?”

“Yes. My soul, my bargain. My choice.”

“Liar.” Baba Yaga drew back her hand. Iron claws gleamed in silver moonlight.

“Broom!” Vasyl shouted. “Kill—”

“Wait!” Baba Yaga dropped her hand. Witch and man stared at each other for a long moment. The center of the universe shifted, and Vasyl felt empty and triumphant at the same time.

“Very good,” Baba Yaga chuckled at last. “I said I liked you, boy. You’ve earned your future. But think on this—a witch always fulfills her bargain.”

Still chuckling, she turned to stalk away, then paused and turned back. “By the way, boy, where did you find that delightful and delicious paraffin oil?”

“It’s my mother’s formula,” Vasyl said.

“Hm. If you ever want to share it with someone who can truly appreciate it, you know where to find me.” She vanished into the dark and stony streets.

Vasyl held himself upright for a moment, then grabbed Broom’s handle as his legs turned to bread dough. He stood there for some time, feeling his own heartbeat, tasting every breath.

Footsteps tapped toward him. He turned, expecting to see Petro. Instead, Broom’s little blue lights illuminated a young woman in a dark cloak.
She gasped when she caught sight of Vasyl and flung back her hood. Golden hair spilled over the cloak, and azure eyes blinked at him. It was Hanna Vyktorevna, the mayor’s daughter.

Vasyl’s mouth fell open. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t want to marry you,” she blurted. “I don’t want to marry
anybody.
”

“That’s still no reason to be out on the night of…oh. Oh!”

“If
she
can’t help me, no one can.”

“That way.” Vasyl pointed. “Better hurry, though. The tesseract closes in less than an hour.”

“Tesseract?”

“Just run.”

She gave a curt nod and started off. Vasyl called, “Hey, wait!” He dug through his pack and handed her a tattered, much-folded piece of yellow paper.

“What is it?”

“My mother’s formula for paraffin oil. It’ll give you a leg up when you bargain with her.”

Her eyes widened. “Thank you! You’re so kind, Master Tinker.” The new center of the universe kissed him on the cheek and dashed away.

Moments later, Vasyl let himself into Petya’s house. Before he could even shut the door, Olena flew into his arms and nearly knocked him over. Petya grabbed them both together and squeezed so tightly Vasyl thought he would never breathe again. He kissed Vasyl over Olena’s head, his strong fingers running through Vasyl’s sunset hair.

Vasyl set Olena down and kissed Petya back. The last of the fear and tension evaporated, and he gave himself up to the thrill and love that ran through him, the upswell of pure emotion he had been waiting for his entire life. He loved Petya and Petya loved him back and the rest of the world didn’t matter.

“I was right! I was right!” Olena squealed. Broom bobbed up and down.

They separated and Petya tugged one of her braids. “You were definitely right, my Olenka.”

“And now Uncle Vaska can move in with us and fix toys for children and be my uncle forever.”

Vasyl touched Petya’s cheek with the back of his hand. “Is she right? Am I moving in?”

“Of course she is. What better pairing could there be besides blacksmith and tinker? Everyone in the neighborhood is half expecting it anyway. No one will notice or care, as long we keep quiet.”

A terrible thought occurred to Vasyl. Petya read his expression and asked what was wrong.

“Baba Yaga said a witch always keeps her bargain,” he said. “Is she going to come back to finish the job?”

“Not to worry,” said Maroushka from the kitchen table.

Everyone jumped and spun. The cat was sitting calmly next to the lamp.

“How did…what are you…?” Vasyl stammered.

“What’s with the surprise? I can’t stay with Baba Yaga, duh,” Maroushka said. “And
you
make paraffin oil.”

“A talking kitty!”

“Hey! Hands off, kid.”

“All right,” Petya said slowly. “Why don’t we have to worry?”

“The bargain’s fulfilled. Baba Yaga’s future came true. Again, duh.”

“Because of you?” Vasyl asked. “If you live here, it’ll mean I came away from the cottage with a mechanical that can think for itself?”

She gave a paw a swipe with her tongue. “Hell with that.”

“Hey!” Petya snapped. “If you’re going to stay here, you have to watch your language.”

“Whatever. Why aren’t you going to marry the mayor’s daughter, kid?”

“Because I chose someone else.” He looked down at his own hands, and realization clicked. “Oh. Oh! Baba Yaga meant that I’m—?”

Petya took one of his hands. “We’ve known each other more than twenty years, Vaska, but you never reached for me.”

“Because everyone told me not to. I tried to marry because everyone expected it. I escaped my stepmother because my father told me to go. I even obeyed Baba Yaga’s rules without thinking.”

“The perfect little automaton,” Petya said. “Until she let me go to you and you chose to break her rules.”

Vasyl nodded. “I chose to think for myself. I chose you.”

Petya cleared his throat. “But there’s still the mayor. You can’t present yourself to him and claim—”

“Actually, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Vasyl interrupted. “Hanna went to bargain with Baba Yaga about the marriage, right? If Hanna wins, she gets what she wants, and she won’t have to marry me or anyone else.”

“And if she loses,” Maroushka put in, “there won’t be anyone for you to marry. End of bargain. Nice one, kid.”

“I think her chances are pretty good,” Vasyl said. “She’s pretty smart, and she has my mother’s formula.”

“So, are we a family now?” Olena asked.

“Yes, my Olenka.” Petya touched her head. “All three of us.”

“Four,” Maroushka corrected.

“Four,” Vasyl agreed with a laugh.

“Five,” said Broom.

H
e was still a young man, though his tall, slim body was much battered and his face no longer handsome beneath his luxuriant blond mustaches, but when the news came, his commanders were as glad to send him home: a patched and broken soldier, old at twenty-six, and no good to anyone at the front—not anymore. No good to anyone at home, either, for there was no one there, nor family remaining East, West, North, or in the war-torn South. How bitter the irony that while he stood in the hellfire of war and emerged changed but still living, his wife and child, safe at home, had died of fever and remained forever as they had been in his memory, but only there.

He had returned to bury them, and then found no reason to stay. Carrying nothing but what lay in his pockets, he returned to the station and boarded the first train heading away from all he knew—west past Kansas until the train could go no farther. He disembarked at the rural station in an unknown territory and begin walking. Just walking. Looking for…what? Something to set his heart by, perhaps. Some purpose. Or some reason to stop.

He came to a crossroads in the woodland through which he trod and paused beside the stout signpost there, the sunlight through the trees dappling his pale hair as he looked down. He checked his watch—like its owner, a battered thing but running still in spite of all it had passed through—then took a key from his pocket as if he meant to wind the mechanism up and stood staring at the key a moment. He had looked up at the fingerboards pointing from the post and down to the key again—as if the key would help him decide which road to follow—when he heard a sound all too familiar: an explosion like those made by the infernal torpedoes to which he had lost a good horse on the battlefield and taken no small injury himself.

The not-so-old soldier shoved the key back into his pocket as he ducked and scrambled under the nearest cover, expecting a hail of dirt and stones thrown up by the blast that had sounded so near at hand, but there was no such rain of debris. Instead he felt a rude and insistent shoving at his back, which he had pressed against a sheltering rock outcrop.

“Devil take it,” someone groused at his rear. “Give way!”

He jumped forward, whirling to see what and who prodded him in the backside so persistently and why they spoke in such impatient tones.

From the depths of the rock emerged a disordered man who shoved wide the camouflaged door that had been hidden in the deep shadow of the overhang. The soldier saw that the door was in fact wood, cleverly painted. The rock around it had been carved away in some fashion to create a niche just deep enough to ensure that the door would remain shaded all the year and preserve the illusion of stone, but not so deeply set in the rock that any animal would choose to make its den on the threshold.

The man, portly and balding, wearing a long leather apron covered in bulging pockets and sleeve gaiters over his clothes, closed the door in haste against a billow of smoke as acrid as that from any battlefield and stepped out into the sunshine near the signpost to stare at the soldier from behind the thick, round lenses
of a pair of goggles that gave his eyes a bizarre, insectile appearance.

“What, by Jupiter, are you doing here?” the man asked, pulling the goggles off his face as if they might be causing him to hallucinate. “No one walks through these woods nowadays.”

“If they are regularly troubled with explosions beneath their feet, that would hardly be a wonder. Shall I assume that was your work,” the soldier asked, pointing to a few wisps of sulfurous smoke, “since you came from a door in the rock that clearly leads to wherever that explosion originated?”

The disheveled man peered at him, his uncovered eyes sharp with speculation. “An observant man, I see. Do I take it rightly, by your dress, sir, that you are but late returned from the battlefields of the Southeast?”

“I am not returned at all, sir,” the soldier said, taken for a moment by a perverse humor. “But I am, indeed, late from the war.”

“I don’t recognize you,” the man said, “and I’ve lived in these parts nigh on five years.”

“I am not from these parts. I find myself at loose ends and thought I’d take a walk until I tied them back up again.”

“What, no family nor friends nearby?”

“None. Not nearby nor anywhere. All dead.”

“A tragic tale, friend, and perhaps too common in this time of conflict.” The man shook his head in sorrow and then offered his hand. “My name is Conscience Morton and you have my sympathies.”

The soldier took his hand and shook it stiffly, but offered nothing more, for there seemed no further reply to make.

Morton continued after a moment’s clumsy silence. “Well, friend, if you have no destination, perhaps I might persuade you to do me a small favor…? Though you are wan—perhaps still suffering from your wounds?—you seem a strong man and clever. Educated, I would guess. And what I would ask of you requires no great strength, but is quite out of the question for one…encumbered by such flesh as I am.”

The soldier nodded at him to go on, or in agreement that the gentleman before him was, inarguably, rotund and unused to physical labor.