The Fifth Doll(62)

She started shouting for Slava before she even reached the portico. “Slava!” she bellowed. “You have your wish! I’ll do whatever you want, just bring them back!” She ran up the steps to the door. Pushed it open. “Slava!”

The front room was empty, as was the kitchen, as was the doll room, where Pamyat greeted her with a hiss. Matrona’s worry quickly shifted into anger, which imbued her body with new strength.

“No more games!” she shouted, coming back up the hallway. “I’ll make your dolls! Keep your secrets! Wash your feet if I have to!”

She reached the entry hall and called up the stairs, loud enough to crack her voice. “Slava!”

No answer.

Had he left? All his talk about urgency, and he’d simply left everything behind?

Setting her jaw and lifting her skirt, Matrona climbed up the stairs. Only two rooms occupied the upper floor; the first was a large bedroom simply decorated, with a low, wide bed and taupe-colored curtains over a broad window. The other was a sitting room filled with remarkable wonders—shelves that held golden eggs and a bronze inkstand, plait ornaments, plates painted with unfamiliar heraldry, and the Japanese Fukuruma doll from Slava’s memories. The walls boasted embroidered plashchanitsas and paintings, as well as a small flag striped white, blue, and red. On any other day, at any other hour, the treasures would have incited awe. Now she saw only the empty spaces around them.

The tradesman was gone.





Chapter 18


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.