Trapped inside this house.
Tucking the short, stray strands of black hair behind her ears, Matrona walked around the house, crisp grass crunching softly beneath her shoes. In the backyard, she examined the edge of the wood and the stable. She’d let the horse out to graze a while back, and it had wandered away. She came to the back door and the steps leading up to it.
None of the dolls’ spells had taken hold until she left Slava’s home. The villagers had turned into dolls the day she ran away from Slava. The moment she left his house . . . through this door. Every other time she’d visited, she’d come and left through the front door.
A numb heaviness settled on her chest, making it difficult to breathe. She studied the back door. Rubbed her hands together. Reached for the handle and pushed it open.
Slava Barinov greeted her.
Chapter 20
His eyes, dark and shadowed, met hers. A chair fell behind him, and Matrona started to see her father and mother stumbling toward the wall, Feodor standing on the table, and Galina sitting beside him. Matrona had left their dolls on the table. They’d been restored.
“What is this?” Feodor asked, his gaze flitting from Slava to Matrona. “Why are we—”
“Reverto!” Slava barked, and the four shrank before Matrona’s eyes, returning to small wooden dolls in a quarter of a breath’s time. Feodor and Galina fell to the table; her parents rolled across the floor.
“What have you done?!” Matrona shouted, taking a single step into Slava’s home before stopping. Though it would not be safe to draw too near to the tradesman, she also did not want to linger in the threshold of his house. If any doorway housed dark beings, surely it would be Slava’s.
Slava growled. “You will have to tell me exactly what you did in the Nazad if they are to be restored, foolish girl.”
“The what?” Gritting her teeth, she stepped back into the shelter of the doorway, more willing to risk superstition than Slava’s anger. “I know the truth.” She clutched the frame to keep her hands from trembling. “I know what you did.”
A frown deepened the wrinkles in Slava’s face and made his eyes droop.
“Your house is your doll. That’s how you separated yourself from us. You put us in our dolls, then put those dolls inside yours.” She glanced at the small dolls on the table, then at the open door before her, and she realized something else. “The spells don’t take hold until we leave the house. This place is neutral ground. It binds everything together, doesn’t it?”
“So you are not as simple as you appear.”
“Is that why your house is so elaborate? To be some sort of . . . ultimate doll?” She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. It wasn’t built of logs or panels, but was a solid sheet of wood. The pattern in its grain matched that of her fourth doll . . . and that of the sky.
Slava’s nostrils sucked in a long breath before he spoke. “The spells on this house are far more complex than anything you could hope to understand. These dolls are child’s play in comparison.” He stepped away from the fallen center dolls and closer to Matrona, then pressed a flat hand to one of the walls. “This is not simply a doll. It is a sanctuary. A vessel. A temple.”
“A temple to yourself.”
She expected Slava to glare, but he merely straightened and pulled his hand from the wall, strangely calm. “You are not incorrect.”
Matrona took half a step into the house—she dared not take more, and she watched Slava with the eyes of a kite. “What would you have them do, Slava? Do you plan to restore them to their mindless existence and, once death claims you, have them come here to worship your memory?”
A chill nipped at her bones. Was Matrona the first to discover these truths, or had someone else done so before her? Had Slava merely . . . reconditioned them all?
“Death will never truly claim me if the spells are right,” he said. “I will be here to watch over them always. Them, and you.”
Matrona scoffed. “You think yourself immortal? The tsar didn’t think so.”
Now Slava did glare. Several seconds passed before he spoke. “If the spells are right. This body will not last; that much is evident. But the mind is something else entirely.”
“So you intend to live on in this make-believe world in spirit, using our captivity to fuel your immortality?” Matrona asked, hardly believing the words passing between them. “You think yourself a savior, but how is that saving us?” She gestured to the dolls. “How is this a kindness?”
“I never should have dealt with you. Better to have left you curious than to have pulled you into my plans,” Slava said, more to himself than to her, for his eyes remained fixated on the wall. “You would not have spoken of it, mousy girl that you were. And if you had, who would have believed you?”
“Jaska.” Her grip on the door handle tightened. “He would have.”
Slava stood tall, his body like the shadow of a great beast. “Then perhaps he did not forget as easily as I had supposed.”
Her stomach dropped. Jaska? Like Matrona, had Jaska once discovered something he shouldn’t have, and had his memories replaced?
She took back her half step, framing herself in the doorway once more. Slava’s calm demeanor melted from him—his eyes widened, and his forehead grew tight.
“You know the truth, Matrona,” he growled, advancing toward her, his hand reaching forward. “You’ve seen the place we hail from. Surely you recall the harsh winters, the starvation, the war. Boys too young pulled from their homes to fight battle after battle, leaving their mothers and sisters with nothing. And if the hunger didn’t kill you, disease would, festering and—”
“You were never hungry,” Matrona snapped. “You lived in a palace.”
“I was not born into luxury!” he spat. He took another step forward. He was almost close enough to touch her. “Look beyond your own nose, you selfish girl! I can sense your thoughts, and they are foolhardy!”
Matrona swallowed, trying to moisten her tongue. She whispered, “Run back to Russia, Tradesman.”
Slava’s hand shot out. Matrona released the door handle and pushed herself backward, falling through the doorway. Her backside hit the ground hard, sending a sharp burst of pain up her tailbone. Her lungs sought air as if she had run one of the loops.
She looked up. The doorway stood empty, without the slightest trace of Slava Barinov.
Matrona’s blood thrummed beneath her skin. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears.
“The Nazad.” The backward. That was what Slava had called this place—this backward version of the village, where Matrona’s eyes saw the villagers as they really were: tiny dolls made for an old man’s play. But why did Slava vanish when she entered it?
The answer lay within herself, Olia, and Roksana. They had all opened their dolls. They had been exposed to the truths of this world. Jaska, too, came into his normal being once Matrona had opened all of his dolls. But Slava . . . Slava had never opened his own doll.
She stared up at the house, unsure if it held the same layers the other dolls did, but one thing was certain. Matrona had seen Slava’s secrets as soon as she had opened his back door. Perhaps that was his doll’s first layer. Yet Jaska hadn’t known the tradesman’s secrets. Had Jaska been unable to absorb the information in his small wooden form? Was that how Slava protected himself?
The tradesman ruled over their village, but he had never exposed himself to it. In that sense, this Nazad was his weakness—the one place Matrona could go where he could not follow . . . for now.
She had to act before the tradesman found an escape.
Picking herself up, ignoring the dirt on her dress and beneath her fingernails, Matrona ran down the narrow space between the stable and house. Jaska’s home was not too far; she had to tell him what she’d learned, then go back to the house for the—