When does a woman become a witch?
It’s different for all of us. Some come to it naturally. Others struggle for a while.
For me, that contest of arms started in a few inches of water with my lover’s hands firmly pressed down on the back of my neck.
He won.
I don’t know how much time passed before I emerged, reborn as a rusalka bound to the river that swallowed my last breath. And I lingered there, until a girl came to me with a plea for help spelled on her bruised and battered lips.
Luckily for her, not all drowned girls stay dead.
The first thing I notice is her shining red hair. It streams past her shoulders like a banner. Following that flag is a soldier.
“Watermeid!” The fleeing girl summons me even though I am only the ghost of a rumor, a common condition for all women who’ve been beaten, broken, and left for dead.
She lunges into the river as the man closes the gap.
“Heks!” She cries out. Witch.
I slip out of the embrace of my favorite birch and into the water below. The girl’s feet crash through the river. Her bare toes cling to the smooth stones. The man’s shiny black boots slip on those same rocks, but he is determined in his pursuit.
He reaches out to catch her, but she stumbles forward, and he is left grasping at the white ribbons trailing from her long hair.
The soldier’s fingers close in a fist, and her flight comes to an abrupt halt. He lands a blow with his free hand. The girl crashes to her knees, waist-deep in the rushing river. She is fumbling for the trench knife tucked into her waistband when she finally spots me, drifting along the riverbed.
The soldier mutters something guttural as he draws a pistol from his belt. The girl’s lips curve in a blood-streaked smile, and she raises both hands in surrender.
I might not be a witch, but I am a watermeid. A drowned girl. A birch bride. And my arms are empty.
I tangle the soldier’s ankles, drag him to the deepest channel. And then I let go. He surfaces, arms pinwheeling as he gulps for air. When he sets out toward the nearest shore, I follow, hidden in the current. His strokes grow stronger, more purposeful the closer he is to safety. He grasps a handful of grass clinging to the shore before I pull him back into my domain. His eyes widen when he finally sees me, as the river wraps the length of black hair around his throat. His armband pulls free midstream. The cutwater snatches at the flash of red. It curls to reveal a white circle stamped with the harsh black lines of a crooked cross. I permit him to surface, make another attempt for freedom as I gather the sash as tribute. The iron cross pinned to his gray-green collar is the price for our third encounter. And so, bit by bit, his uniform is stripped of regalia until the soldier’s strong body finally fails. His lungs fill with water and weed, and I turn away.
The girl with the red hair waits for me near my favored haunt, the birch with roots sunk deep into the river. Cradled in the remains of an old channel, a pool reflects a spring sky as blue as a robin’s egg.
“I heard rumor of a watermeid near here. Lucky for me, it turned out to be true.” Her laugh is one of joyous discovery. “Thank you, comrade.”
Curious, I drift closer.
“A woman of action, not words, I see.” She uncrosses her legs, slides away from the safety of shore, and wades toward me with her hand outstretched. “I’m Tilde.”
I consider slipping away, but her bright-eyed stare dares me to stay. And so, I reach back, brush my fingers across hers, quick as a minnow darting with the current. Satisfied, she offers a mocking salute.
“Welcome to the Resistance.”
Tilde builds a hut on the riverbend near the silver-barked birch. The building is so close I can climb the slender branches and lean out to touch the roof. At night, Tilde scales the walls and settles herself in the rushes. We watch the stars together, learning to navigate the silence between us.
Early each morning, just as the sky begins to blush, the hut rustles like feathers fluffed by a roosting hen. Tilde rouses with it, brushes the thatch from her clothes, and blows me a kiss before heading back to town and the patriots plotting a revolution. I wish I could follow, but I am a birch bride, a rusalka fettered to the currents of death and despair. And so, I wait each day, swimming up and down the river, waiting for her to return.
Tilde brings me stories, opens them like presents. Her sister knits cables into code, garments woven with secrets for the forces fighting against men determined to destroy an entire race. And then, an ambitious aviatrix cousin jumps a train heading east. Now she is a Night Witch, dropping fire from the skies upon unwary armies.
“I don’t have the patience for knitting, and I’m afraid of heights,” Tilde adds with a shrug.
I find it impossible to believe fear is an emotion Tilde is acquainted with. She is much too fierce for that.
“I have other talents.” And she does. She might not be familiar with yarn and its endless variations of stitches and slipknots, but flirtation she’s mastered. And her beauty and charm are as fatal as bombs launched from a biplane under the cover of a new moon.
And so, Tilde lures the unwary to my shores. These hardened soldiers, with their shiny black boots and silver stars, are always so eager. Afterward, I strip their symbols, offer them to Tilde along with smooth pebbles and fish bones collected from the hollowed out human skulls paving my river’s deepest channels. She strings those red armbands, one after the other, on a piece of abandoned fishing twine from the roof. Unmoored, the sashes ripple in the breeze, and the crooked crosses dance like hanged men unwilling to surrender their last breath.
One day, Tilde steps into the water, naked and alone. I discover myself in her arms, and what was once shattered emerges sacred and complete. I remember love in its many forms. I am reborn, renewed.
We spend our days in the water, our nights tangled in the treetops. My birch stretches toward the rooftop; the hut moves closer to the river. But bound as I am to water, I shackle Tilde as well.
“Problems are meant to be solved,” Tilde says.
For seven days and seven nights, my beloved works to set river stones and beach glass into the loamy soil until the path stretches from the shore to her doorstep. But it still isn’t enough.
Tilde moves forward, always forward, and visits a baba yaga who lives in the forest. I correct her when I hear the name. There is only one Baba Yaga, and she walks with Death on the eastern steppes of Russia. Tilde laughs.
“Who would have thought a rusalka would be superstitious?”
“I have a name.” I slide deeper into the water.
“Yelena.” She leaves her work behind and comes to me. “There are many ways to be a witch in this world.”
Tilde demonstrates, and I begin to believe.
Under the baba’s guidance, Tilde adds another layer of spellcraft wrought in a border of foxglove, hemlock, and belladonna. She hauls bucket upon bucket of water to purify the walkway between worlds, yet still I cannot take more than three steps on dry land before terror and pain drive me back to the river that claims me as its own.
Searching for a solution to our dilemma, Tilde’s baba starts to work with the other forest mothers. Tilde is confident they will unravel the root of the curse, but still, she grows restless. They should trust her with more of their secrets. There’s other work to be done. More and more often, her gaze turns back toward town and the revolution that continues without her. I hold her close, hoping I can anchor her with my love, but one day I wake and my arms are empty.
“They killed a girl today.” Tilde’s bloodshot eyes stare into the distance.
Careful to keep my feet in the water, I stretch out on the riverbank to console her.
She pushes me away and rubs her cheeks.
“Pieter saved me.”
Pieter. The leader of Tilde’s resistance. A valiant man working to destroy the invading forces, one soldier at a time.
“They were looking for me,” she says, and I find myself caught between one breath and the next.
My lips wrap around questions—Who? How? Why?—but the words are like pebbles in my mouth, so I whisper her name instead.
Tilde ignores me. She unwraps brown paper to reveal a glass bottle filled with dark liquid.
“Her hair was red too. Lighter than mine, but close enough.” Tilde looks at me then. “Like you, she had a name, but we are now forbidden to say it.”
Men and murder. Will it ever end? I edge closer, wind myself around her. This time she allows it.
“Pieter told me run, hide. He doesn’t want to lose me too.”
Tilde talks about this revolutionary hero—often. She dismisses my jealousy. Pieter is nearly twice her age. When I question his motives, she corrects me. War is cruel, and those who are young and female are the most vulnerable of all.
This leads me to memories of rushing water and hands pressed against the back of my neck.
“Stay here.” Even out of the water, my voice rumbles and rolls over the syllables. “With me.”
She kisses my brow. “I cannot, my love.”
When she opens the bottle, I shrink away from the horrible smell and slip back to the safety of the river. Tilde ignores my reaction and applies the contents. A while later, she follows me into the water. And when she finally emerges, the contents of the bottle rinsed downstream, her hair is as blue-black as my own.
“I will find the men who killed her,” she says. “I will bring them here, and you will make them suffer.”
One day, when Tilde has been away for more than a fortnight, a man comes to the river alone. He strips the gray-green uniform, folds it neatly, and leaves it on the bank next to polished black boots. His cheeks are rough and red, his eyes water-logged.
“I know you’re here.” He opens his arms, palms raised to the sky. Even though the day is warm, he shivers.
I swim closer.
Peach fuzz follows the softness of his jaw. Not a man, but a boy still teetering on the edge of adulthood. Although I’ve drowned countless men—guilty and innocent alike—he is the first to offer himself willingly.
Unsettled, I splash in the water. He flinches, but otherwise doesn’t move.
“Go on,” he says. “I deserve it.”
“Explain.” The word rolls off my tongue.
“So many have died.” He pauses. “My fault.”
This boy is looking for absolution—something I cannot grant him. But death does not come easy at my hands. The bodies of these men are mine, but their souls belong to me as well. They flutter in the current, tethered to the riverbed paved with their bones. Tilde wouldn’t hesitate in the sentencing, but even I know a single soldier could not murder millions alone.
Every question I’d like to ask is as sharp as broken glass. If I utter the words, they will slice my tongue. Besides, I already know the answer. It is folded up in that neat and tidy package left on the riverbank—another red armband to string up, another crooked cross ready to dance in the breeze.
Tears course down those wind-chapped cheeks. He takes a deep breath. “They made me do it.”
Of course they did.
I should drag him under, rip the golden hair from his scalp, shear skin from muscle and bone. Tilde would have insisted. It’s a sacred duty to kill these invaders, every single one an evil to be routed from this earth. But I remember the true face of wickedness, and it is as familiar as my own. Strangers and soldiers aren’t the only murderers in the world. So I leave him there, still living, penance a possibility—at least for one of us.
Later, I wonder if I should have kept the boy. We could have traded stories—grief and guilt enough for sharing—a distraction from this unfamiliar loneliness left in Tilde’s place. But when I return, he is gone, tracks left in the mud on the opposite shore. The discarded uniform, weapons, and boots remain where he left them.
Tilde stays away. On the last full moon, the hut moved into the shallows. It balances on two sturdy chicken legs, revealing a hatch underneath that opens through the floor. Only a faint outline remains in the spot once occupied by the original door. Two windows have taken its place, as though the hut is watching for a flash of red hair in the distance.
Three full moons pass before Tilde returns. She climbs through the trap door. Her lips are stained red, her skin as white as the belly of a fish, and I am reminded of tales filled with teeth and blood and damnation.
“The deserter, where is he?”
I shrink away until my back is pressed against one of the straw-covered walls. The hut rustles reassuringly.
Tilde scans the room, eying the mobiles I’ve created from polished bones and river rocks. “You’ve been busy.”
I want to shout and scream. What have you done? Where have you been? Instead, I simply nod.
“Good.” Tilde closes the space between us and crouches next to me. “You’ve never told me who did this.” Cold fingers trail across my cheek.
“It was a long time ago.” My teeth chatter.
She curves her body into mine and pulls me close. “Tell me now.”
And I do.
I tell her of the unborn babe, the desperation, the inevitable.
“The curse can only be broken when your death is avenged,” she says.
“The babas told you that?”
“The babas are gone.” Her lips twist in a grimace.
“Gone? But where?”
“I didn’t need them anymore.” She flicks her fingers dismissively. “They refused to give me what I wanted, so I took it.” Tilde’s pupils are so large they eclipse all but a thin ring of blue at the edges. Belladonna. “Knowledge is power, and power only grows when it is used.”
“Tilde?” The rest remains unspoken.
The coldness of her skin against mine tells me what I need to know. The forest mothers are all dead, drained to feed the dark power of this creature I barely recognize.
She smothers my protests with kisses. I cannot leave, so I pretend I’m still with that fierce, red-headed girl, the woman who brought me back to this side of the living with the sheer force of her love. But I can’t bear to see her face, paler than even mine, or the way our hair tangles together, the color as dark as a bruise. Tilde demands that I see her for what she’s become, powerful and cunning, an enchantress feared by even Death itself.
“Yelena,” she says. “Look at me.”
The hut clucks and crows in protest.
My eyes stay shut.
It is a chilly day on the edge between the old year and the new when Tilde leads a man of a different caliber to my shores. The river roars as it nears the bend, but all the man’s attention is on the shallows. Each step he takes thuds heavier on the turf until, at last, he comes to a grinding halt.
The man frowns. “Why did you bring me here?”
“You asked a question. The river holds the answer.” Tilde picks up a flat stone that’s worked its way free from the abandoned path. She weighs it in her palm. “There is nothing to worry about, no chance of discovery. Those missing soldiers ended up far away from here.”
It isn’t true, but she doesn’t know that.
The man doesn’t seem to notice the trail that leads to an empty hollow, nor does he notice the hut huddling at the edge of the bank near the stately birch. Instead, he stares into the shallows as though his rippling reflection is a ghost.
“This is where you dump the bodies?” He clenches his teeth. A muscle twitches along his jaw like a fish rising to bait.
Despite my resolve to stay hidden, I glide closer to shore.
“Something like that.” Tilde grins and skips the stone across the water.
The years weigh heavy on the man’s broad shoulders. Yet beneath the stockier frame and the sorrow he wears like a shroud, I know this man. I know the freckles scattered across those gnarled knuckles, the press of those strong fingers around my throat. Yet, she called him a different name than the one I once knew. This Pieter is the leader of her resistance. Tilde’s hero, a champion of the people.
A murderer.
I reach through the water and grab the skipping stone midair. My toes dig deep into the silt, and I rise from the river like whitewater coursing around a boulder.
The man falls to his knees.
“It’s not what you think,” Tilde assures him. The sun catches the bold red emerging at the roots of her hair. “She is with me.” My beloved looks at me with eyes as dark as nightshade. “She’s with us.”
“No.” The word is a groan.
“Pieter?” Her gaze flits back and forth.
The river parts around me, and I walk across the slick surface of countless human skulls used to pave a path of my own making.
Tilde’s eyes widen at the sight of the army laid out beneath my pale feet. So many men, decades of death doled out in the wake of my own drowning. The soldiers Tilde brought me are only a fraction of those who’d paid for the crime of another, the monster who’d damned me to this twilight life. Wilhelm. Determined protector.
But he’d set that name adrift long ago; it is nothing more than a river-worn memory. Now, this man is a leader of a revolution. He carries a different name. Pieter. A pillar of strength.
“No.” Tilde’s eyes widen. She takes a step back. “It can’t be.”
I stop just inches from dry land. The cutwater churns and boils around my feet. The river lays claim to me just as this man once did, but neither the river nor the man can deny me now.
Tilde draws a gun from her waistband. No knife this time. The barrel is covered with neat tally marks. I am not the only one keeping score.
“Is it him?”
She already knows the answer.
“I don’t deserve your forgiveness.” Pieter bows his head, bares his neck. “But I am truly sorry.”
“Yelena, you must avenge yourself,” Tilde says, her voice as cold as a winter morning. “Freedom—” She bites down on the word. “Is yours for the taking.”
I hesitate. How many people has this one man saved over the years? According to Tilde, they number in the thousands. But a crime cannot be erased by a single act of vengeance. Besides, I am no longer a victim.
“No.” The skipping stone slips from my fingers. “Freedom cannot be taken. It must be earned.”
Tilde does not yield, and for a moment I see the girl I once loved. “The baba yagas said this day would come. Your death must be avenged.”
I tilt Wilhelm’s chin, so that he is looking up at me as I once did to him. “Leave this place.” Even I can see he is no longer the man I once knew. “Pieter.” The sound of his claimed name slides into place. “Go and never return.”
“Fine,” Tilde says, her voice as sharp as broken glass. “I’ll do it myself.”
The sharp retort of a bullet is followed swiftly by two more. Pieter is thrown forward. The whitewater frothing at my feet rises as the river greedily laps at what is left of his ruined face.
Tilde plants her feet on shore and reaches for me. “Come with me, Yelena.” Now that she’s seen the multitude, row upon row of bleached bone, she no longer trusts the water. “It’s time to leave this all behind.”
In that, she is right. I take her hand. Her nostrils flare when my grip tightens. Does she see Death coming for her? Or does she believe that her stolen power will save her from one such as I?
The moment between us stretches, a thin and tenuous thing, until I finally release her. A memory of minnows slips back into the stream of time.
I place one bare foot on Pieter’s head. My toes curl around the jagged crater that remains. My next step is onto the man’s broad back, a bridge between his world and my own. And then I am on solid ground, winter grass tickling at my ankles.
“Did it work?” Tilde drops her hands to her sides. Her eyes are blue once more, and this time they are filled with the memory of hope. “Is it over?”
I nod and trace the trail she once built leading from the river to the clearing nestled next to my favorite birch. Tilde abandoned that project as she’d done with me, but she follows, wary once more. Husks are all that remains of the poison garden, but I harvest the seeds as I go. By the time I reach the clearing, the hut has returned to the spot where it hatched. I think of the stories my Russian mother told me as a child, tales of a solitary woman who roams the wilds, seeding witchcraft into stones and sky.
For the first time since I drowned, my skin dries completely. Tilde paces, watching and waiting, but there is an urgency in her stalking. She sketches spells in the air, casts a net designed to capture her enemies. She is no longer simply a girl with a gun, no witch’s apprentice. Her power grows each day. I listen, make plans of my own. The sun sets, and the moon peeks over the horizon. I am reminded of those sweet summer nights when I rediscovered the power of love, but that rusalka and her beloved no longer exist. We have both changed, and so has the connection between us. I press my forehead against the familiar bark of the old birch tree and offer thanks for those long years of companionship, but this is no longer where I belong. It is time to go in a different direction.
“You’re free now.” Tilde interrupts my farewell. In the twilight, all hints of that red-haired girl are gone. She is Death incarnate. A creature that thrives on war, and her hunger is as bright as the full moon, as sharp as glass. Tilde faces south as though she can hear the sounds of gunfire and grenades in the distance. “Come with me. Together, we will make them pay.”
And I believe she will, but this is a path she must follow alone.
It is the north that calls to me, the birthplace of my mother’s mother—the roaming steppes beholden to Baba Yaga.
The hut rustles, rouses, and takes the first step toward our new life, far away from all this destruction. My homeland waits for me, just as it always has.
Not every woman becomes a witch. Some of us are born into it. Others struggle for a while.
A few of us—the drowned girls, the birch brides, the unquiet spirits—do both.
Originally published in Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga, edited by Lindy Ryan.
