Free Deathless by Catherynne Valente

oil and whipping her again. At first she shrank away, but by his last blow, Marya Morevna found herself arching her back to meet the branch, as though the forest itself were commanding her body to heal.
    Finally, hot and aching and wrung out, Marya let Koschei lead her to the wood stove, where he had made a bed for her, tucked up against the warm bricks. She slept, and dreamed of the London fashion magazine the Blodniek sisters had so cherished. The magazine had grown as huge as a museum hallway. She wandered through the pages, cowed and small next to the beautiful tall women with their crisp coats and feathered hats.
    One of them turned to her. She wore a bright blue turban and waved a golden fan.
    “All the girls are wearing their deaths this year,” the model said haughtily. “It’s just the thing for a plain country girl hoping to make her fortune.”
    The woman gestured at her turban. In the folds rested a hen’s egg, white and gleaming.
    *   *   *
     
    When Marya woke, the red car had gone, and in its place a sparkling white one rolled towards them, its fenders arcing with a swan’s grace. She felt much better, though she had a headache and her back still throbbed where the birch branches had struck her. Still, her skin hummed with heat, and she leaned gratefully against Koschei as the icy, mountain-hunched world slipped by, as though everything had been caked in salt to wait for spring.
    That night, the last night, the car ground through the rocky snow to another low little house, its eaves carved like icing, its door thick and red. Koschei lifted her up and carried her. Marya lifted her head sleepily to look over his shoulder and saw the white car roll up the path, only to bounce on a hard, icy lump of snow and spring up a great pale horse, his mane twisting in the wind. The horse whinnied happily and trotted off in search of supper. At least I caught the car changing, she thought dreamily. At least I can still see the naked world, even if it will only show me an ankle or a flash of wrist now. She had grown used to silence, and it had grown used to her. And because she had relaxed into muteness and ceased to think about it very much, because she was dizzy and warm and not at all vigilant, Marya Morevna slipped.
    “Marya, we are nearly there, nearly at the borders of my country. I will have you healed before all the hustle and busyness there.”
    “Really, I’m feeling much better,” she assured him before she knew she had spoken.
    Like lamps extinguished, Koschei’s eyes darkened. He put her down, less gently than usual.
    “I have asked you not to speak, Masha,” he said. His voice was as twisted as a rope. Marya fell silent, abashed.
    A simple supper steamed on the table: turnip greens, bread, mashed eggplant, and salted chicken jelly with bits of meat suspended in it. Soft, bland food for her wrung-out body. Marya still could not eat much.
    “This is our last night alone, Marya,” said Koschei. “Tomorrow you will be beset with my relations and my serfs and all manner of tasks at hand. I shall miss this, our selfish private hours, secreted away from the collective share. But so it always goes in marriage. Half of matrimony is given over to those with no stake in our bed. I suppose you wonder if your sisters fared so, with their handsome bird husbands; if they grew sick or thrived, if they traveled so far, so fast. All those lieutenants were my brothers, my comrades, and though they did not have so far to go so fast, nor did they travel so well, they too had their moments with borscht and vodka and birch branches. It is a mating dance all birds know. I wish you would have looked out the window, Masha! I was such a lovely owl for you. I fell so hard onto the streetside. So that you would be comforted; so that what you expected would happen just as you wished it to. That is how much I want to please you. But tscha ! You missed it! Perhaps if you had seen me that way everything would have happened