Night Witch

Chapter 16

Karina could feel Nyx's eyes burn holes into her back as she joined her mother and her younger self. It was hard to attempt forgetting the person that had brought her to this fantasy, the one that could take it away from her at any second.

Person? Karina clenched her fists. Anyone who could transform into five different people and change their form from human to bird wasn't a person. They were a thing. An it. Something unnatural, uncommon--

Just like me. 

Karina swallowed hard. She was a yaga. Someone who could control...well...something. She was someone who Moracia considered unnatural.

And who was to say that they weren't right?

She shook her head stiffly, focusing on matching her footsteps to her mother's and listening to little Karina and Vasilisa converse. "Karina darling, do you want to go to Hans's house or watch me do my job?"

"Hmm..." The five year old tilted her head to the left. Do I do that? Karina wondered, watching the little girl's eyebrows furrow together as she pondered the situation. Were there some gestures that she was unaware of? Did she slump her shoulders when she thought like this little memory of her did?

"I think I'd like to watch you do your job, Mama," Karina said quietly, folding her hands in front of her solemnly. "Hans can wait."

Vasilisa gave a large smile that looked a bit like one of Hans's smirks. "Alright. We're going to Olga's house. You know who Miz Olga is, right?"

A pompous creep. A perfectionist fool. A heartless, soulless woman who cares about nothing more than herself. A--

"The Oracle, of course. Our spiritual leader." Karina grew more animated as she talked, her eyes lighting up like miniature suns at daybreak. "She summons spirits and communicates with the holy Ancestors."

Karina watched disgustedly at the way her younger self seemed to idolize the very woman that would become her torturer for eight years. How could she have? Why hadn't she been smarter?

"...and she wears a soft wool shawl that's made every year from the youngest sheep to symbolize the cycle of life and how innocence never dies. Right?"

"Right you are." They turned a corner. Karina recognized the route as the way to Olga's. Vasilisa continued: "She's delivering a child and it's supposed to be a tricky birth. We're going to help her."

"How does it work?" the child asked. "Will she be alright?"

"Who knows," Vasilisa muttered quietly before pasting a smile on her features. "I mean, I certainly hope so."

"She's the Oracle," the younger said, frowning slightly. "She can't die."

Oh, would that she had!

"No one is invulnerable, darling," Vasilisa said curtly. "Now, do you know what to do when helping mama work?"

"Stay out of the way, always listen and do what you say, don't say anything, and leave the room whenever you tell me."

"Yes." Vasilisa stared ahead in a resolved manner, her mouth pressed in a thin line. Wisps of red hair flew out from her kerchief but she made no move to brush them aside. She looks like she did the day she...

Died.

Karina's hands trembled like dead autumn leaves, and all of a sudden she couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Because this was the way her mother had looked when flames had charred her mother's freckled skin and pressed against her sides, when smoke had smothered Vasilisa's face until she couldn't breathe.