The Fifth Doll(75)

Feodor frowned. “Look around you, Matrona. How the people shiver. At the hard ground, and these . . . things.” He gestured to a squat izba, not nearly as fine as the homes Slava had crafted for them. “Why would you do this? Bring us here?”

Matrona licked her lips, but it only made them colder. “It was all or none.”

“And you chose for us.”

The declaration stabbed knife sharp. Her own words to Slava echoed in her ears: “Why . . . if this life is so much better . . . did you not give us the choice?”

But she wasn’t like him. She hadn’t done wrong, merely undone wrong. This was the real world; the other world, the one he had created, was no more than a mirage.

“You were incapacitated.” Hardness leaked into Matrona’s voice, and she drew away from him. “Or did you not also hear about the dolls? You were a doll, Feodor. Wooden and painted and lifeless.”

“We had a pleasant life,” he continued, as though her words had dropped before reaching him. “Easy crops, perpetual summer.” Looking down into her eyes, he sighed. “I don’t know how we’re going to mend this.”

Matrona shook her head. “There’s nothing to mend. Not between us.”

Feodor looked at her, expressionless save for the slight downturn of his lips.

“We have a village to assemble,” she continued. “Fires to build, homes to repair. Memories to settle. There will be no wedding, Feodor.”

He merely nodded. Relief flowed from her core, and yet sorrow tinged it, for Matrona knew Feodor had never truly cared for her, even by the smallest measure. How easily she could have assigned her life to him. The prospect left her colder than the ice lining the road.

Feodor turned up the way, for his family, and she was glad to see the back of him.

Matrona let out a long breath and cut through the yard of another building—house or shop, she couldn’t quite tell. A vine of sorts, brown and dead from the winter, climbed up two sides of it. She touched it, and an old, stale leaf crumbled beneath her fingers.

She walked, wondering at Feodor’s words. How many more would share his sentiment? Not Pavel, not Oleg. Not Jaska or her parents. Hopefully most of the older men and women would remember their homes and recognize they’d been freed from captivity. There was no returning now.

Slava Barinov’s voice chuckled in her imagination. She dug her nails into her palms and hushed it.

Her toe kicked something in the road, and she paused. Its smoothness and colors contrasted against the heap of ash nesting it. Painted eyes looked up at her, squinting and smiling.

Crouching, Matrona picked up the Japanese Fukuruma doll and turned it in her hands. Nothing else had survived from the doll world, so why had this?

She ran her hands over the doll, which was a little larger than the ones Slava had crafted. Even if Matrona had not seen his memories of Russia, she would have known this figure had another creator. The hand was not Slava’s—it was simple, with fine, black strokes. The large face sat low on the body. It had large eyebrows and a rounded nose.

This was the doll that had started it all, whispering of magic and possibilities to the tsar’s mysticist.

Something shifted within its body.

Pressing her thumbs to the seam, Matrona split open the halves. But instead of a smaller version of the Fukuruma doll, she found two other dolls. Fourth dolls, judging by the size. One bore the face of a kite; the other of an old man. She recognized the second as Slava, if the years had been harder on him.

Her breath tickled her lips. Cradling the Fukuruma doll against her elbow, Matrona took the brown doll and ran her fingers over the detail in its feathers. The wood squeaked when she opened it. Emptiness greeted her.

A cry pierced the air and startled her, nearly causing her to drop the dolls. Looking up, Matrona saw a kite soar above the village. Sun glinted off a copper band around its leg as it flew toward the wood.

“Pamyat?” she whispered, and looked down at the doll in her hands. He had been of this world, and preserved? Then . . .

She placed Pamyat’s doll halves back into the Fukuruma and pulled out the doll painted to look like Slava. She didn’t understand. Slava’s doll had been his house. So why did a vessel with his likeness exist here?

The words of Pavel rang ever true in her memory. “Do you really think that whoreson would build himself a prison without a way out?”

Her eyes met the blue painted ones of Slava. The irises weren’t as neat as the other dolls’. The clothing was oversimple, as though the painting had been done in haste. A new construct? Had Slava created this while Matrona and the others hid in the Nazad?

She eyed the seam splitting the stomach of the doll.

“Matrona.”

She turned to see Jaska walking toward her, a borrowed hat pressed over his hair. She searched his face for traces of regret, but his eyes were warm, and that singular dimple curved into his cheek ever so slightly.

His gaze fell onto the dolls, and his brow furrowed. “What is that?”

Matrona set the tradesman’s doll back into its Fukuruma hiding place. She thought of Feodor. “It is a decision that isn’t mine to make.”

She had already mimicked her mentor and changed the fate of her comrades. The village would choose what to do with Slava’s last attempt at immortality. She pressed the Fukuruma halves back together.

Jaska’s eyes refocused on her, framed with lines of confusion.