The Fifth Doll(68)

“That could be why we saw the snow,” Jaska concluded.

She nodded. “Perhaps the spell is weakening.”

Jaska knit his fingers through his hair and tugged on the locks. “So what do we do now? Wait for it to snap?”

“I don’t know how the magic works. He never told me.”

Matrona’s vision flashed again, the sky turning gray and solid, snow spinning through the air. The wood flickered away, but Slava’s bright house stood untouched. A chilled gust engulfed her, shaking her down to her bones. The change lasted half a heartbeat before the sun snuffed out the icy weather.

Matrona’s pulse sped in her chest. She glanced back to Jaska, who stood wide-eyed as a dormouse. “Slava cares for himself above anyone else. His house may be the safest place for us right now, so long as we keep the dolls outside of it, where he can’t influence them.”

When Jaska didn’t respond, she stepped up to him and put a palm on either of his cheeks, urging him to look at her.

“We’ll solve this. What we can do is open the others’ dolls to restore them like I restored you. They’ll remember more than I do; they might have ideas that can help us. I already opened all the first layers.”

“Three days for each layer, Matrona,” Jaska murmured. “Will Slava find a way to strike back before we’re done?”

She dropped her hands and chewed on her bottom lip. “Opening the back door was the same as opening Slava’s first doll. I’m not sure how to open the others. But I believe that if Slava opens all of his dolls, the Nazad will cease to exist. Perhaps the village itself will unravel. I don’t believe he can find us without ruining everything he’s created, and he will not risk that.”

“Why does the Nazad exist?”

Matrona shook her head. “I’m not sure.” She pondered the question, trying to piece together the ill-fitting puzzle Slava had created. “Perhaps this is where reality and sorcery collide. A space between spells.”

“And if he opened his dolls to come here, there would be nowhere left to come,” Jaska said methodically, thinking. “He’d be freeing us, possibly undoing these . . . spells that he believes will prolong his life.”

That gave Matrona a spark of hope. “Then we’re safe.” For now, but she didn’t want to voice her doubts. “We have to stay here, in the Nazad, where he can’t reach us. Not yet. We have to open the dolls, or the village won’t remember. Three days . . . Slava set that time limit for safety, but we might be able to open them faster than that.”

Jaska looked toward his mother, who appeared to be trying very hard to stomp out a bug in the grass.

“And have a town full of madmen,” he said.

Though the ground beneath Matrona’s feet didn’t shake, she heard the rumble of the earth’s movement from the south of the village. A flock of starlings flew up into the sky, and the trees bowed under a heavy gust of wind.

“Madmen, or a village in pieces,” she whispered. “But we have to try. Just with one. If we lose him, we’ll still have the other, and we’ll know to be more careful with the rest.”

“Him? You know who to open?”

She nodded. “The man most likely to understand both worlds: Pavel Zotov.”



Matrona ran back to the Zotov household, seeing the world flash before her one more time—the blink of gray swallowed up the izbas and replaced them with sparse wood, where the trees stood tall and close and naked. The heavy snow had lightened to a few flakes, carried on a breeze that rose bumps across her skin.

Matrona collected the rest of the fifth dolls in a bag and packed everything Roksana would need for the move—a change of clothes, the midwife’s tonics, rags for her bleeding. Then Matrona guided her quiet, barely lucid friend back across the village to the tradesman’s house. She settled Roksana down on the bed upstairs. Roksana didn’t seem to recognize she had moved. Olia would stay in the front room with either Jaska or Matrona, and whoever wasn’t with the two women would be just beyond the portico, guarding the dolls.

The ground shivered around the house as Jaska and Matrona opened the second dolls of every person in the village.



After the first night in Slava’s home, Jaska spent most of his time in the wood, searching for a door or a break in the loop. He found nothing of use, save for the doll of a hunter, caught in a bed of clover. Matrona itched to open Pavel’s doll, but managed to wait two days before unscrewing doll number three—the one that would return his memories to him, were he whole.

She hadn’t shared her thoughts with Jaska, but if three days was the true minimum for opening the dolls, Oleg could take Pavel’s place. Perhaps it was cruel to take such a risk with a man’s life, but they needed to make haste.

It seemed like a decision Slava would make, and that made her stomach turn.

“I can only hope he can receive his memories in the state he’s in.” There was no way of knowing, since Jaska, whom she’d also awakened in the Nazad, had memories of only the village. She reassembled the revolutionary’s doll outside the steps by Slava’s front door. “If he doesn’t remember, we’ll be lost.”

“We’ll open the others tomorrow,” Jaska said. The rest of the villagers would be given the benefit of Slava’s three-day rule.