"It will," said Yaga, feeling surly but knowing that the dress thing hadn't worked out quite as she hoped. "It still might. But they seem to have let the rumor wash over them. Maybe they're waiting for him to make some stupid mistake, and then they'll say, We knew it all along, after all, he wore a dress."

"Is Queen Yaga learning a bit about human nature?"

"Bestial nature. They scarcely deserve the name of human."

"I'm sure they feel the same about you."

"Nobody thinks of you as human."

"To my enormous relief."

"If this unmanly foreigner becomes a real king, then he's lost his usefulness to me."

Bear finally got it through his head what she was asking. "If you think I'm going to go roaring into Taina and bite his head off, think again. I heard what you said about javelins. This fellow aims projectile weapons far too well."

"Are you a coward?"

"I lost an eye for you already. Must I die for you?"

"You can't die, you fool. You're immortal."

"Yes, well, I thought my eye would grow back, too, but it hasn't."

"You've lost faith in yourself! Isn't that rich? A god who has become a self-atheist!"

"You don't even know what it means to be a god. The burden of it."

"You should have remained a weather god like your father. Taking on a totem only subjected you to the pains of mortality. Without even the release of death."

"The whole father-son thing doesn't have the same meaning in my family," said Bear. "We don't breed true. Weather god was never my option. This people didn't need a sky god. They needed a god to keep winter under control. Like any good king, we respond to the needs of the people. We become what they need us to be."

She understood the thinly veiled criticism of her own kingship. "Did they need you to be a one-eyed cowardly old fart?" She poured him a dish of mead. "To help settle your meal."

He looked at the dish but didn't lap at it immediately. "I should never have let you seduce me," he said.

"I didn't seduce you, I enchanted you. There's a world of difference."

"Bears have no business marrying women. We're unfaithful by nature."

"But you kept your word, you sweet hunk of bear, you."

"Hera let Zeus dally."

"Hera was weak," said Yaga. "She deserved what she got. And in case you're thinking of going about betraying me with other women, I've put a charm on you. Try it and your balls fall off."

"If Hera couldn't do that to Zeus, I doubt you can do it to me. You're not even a goddess."

"Try it and see."

"Don't worry. I'm done with human women."

"Good. Stick to swans and heifers or whatever it was that Zeus had a taste for. Or she-bears. But as far as humans go, you're mine."

"Why this charade of marriage? You only want my power. You don't even think about me except when I come into your room."

"I think about you all the time, my love," she said, pretending to feel hurt.

"I'm not going to go kill that boy, not in the middle of Taina, surrounded by soldiers. He and I will have an accounting about this empty eyesocket of mine, but not now. Certainly not at your behest, my love, since you're the one who sent me into that pit to fight with him."

Yaga silently went back to combing her hair. They both knew, of course, that he would do whatever she told him to do, and if he tried to resist, she could make things very uncomfortable for him. A binding is a binding, and the one who is bound is bound. Anything else was just talk. When the time came, when she really meant it, Bear would kill whomever she wanted dead.

Apparently mistaking her silence for patience, Bear went on. "Do you have any idea how sad it is, to see you comb those few scraggly grey hairs of yours as if they were long luscious tresses? I can see your sallow scalp right through it, the hair's so thin. I've seen bald men with more hair."

She sighed. "I'm combing thick reddish hair tonight. Sorry if you don't love me enough to see that."

"And your dugs hang down to your knees."

"Only when I'm sitting and leaning forward to see into my mirror."

"I don't have eyes enough to waste them looking at lies."

"Since the truth can never be known," said Yaga, "a wise woman learns to become a connoisseur of lies, choosing only the best and most satisfying to surround herself with. I sink into my lies like featherbeds, and they keep me safe and warm." She got up and danced a little through the room.

"So you plan to kill the boy yourself?" asked Bear. "Won't that cost you any chance for the throne?"

She shrugged and kept on dancing. "I'll find other hands to do it for me. I always do."

She began to sing a melody. The rhythm of it had nothing to do with her twirling steps. Bear lost interest. He lay down on the floor and fell asleep.

"I've got to find a faster-acting spell," Yaga murmured. "It took you forever to fall asleep."

Bear opened his one eye. "I didn't take your damn potion," he growled. "The stuff stank so bad I could hardly tell that it was supposed to be mead in the dish. You can't poison a bear, you silly bitch."

"I'll try it again sometime when you have a cold!"

Bear snarled at her and went to sleep again. Or seemed to.

Living with a god is not what it's cracked up to be, thought Yaga. They think their women should be grateful just to have them around.

She looked into her mirror again, but this time she shook into her palm a bit of dust out of a bag made from a ram's scrotum. Then she blew across her hand. The dust flew toward the mirror, then clung to it as if it had been glued there.

"Bring me the sleeping warrior," she whispered to the mirror, careful not to blow any dust from the mirror's surface.

The face of King Matfei appeared in the mirror, shimmering.

"Not the king, the warrior. The mighty Dimitri."

Nothing happened; the mirror went blank.

He must not be asleep, the fool.

Quickly she pulled a small wooden carving of a man's head from a box near her dressing table. She anointed it with a dab of bearfat—a supply she replenished from time to time without particularly mentioning what it was to her husband—and then whispered the name of Dimitri over it, naming it so that whatever she did to it would be done to Dimitri. Then, laying it on the table, she poured out a thin trickle of sleeping sand onto the head.

Within only a few minutes—but it felt like tedious eternities—the mirror shimmered again, no longer empty. There lay Dimitri asleep. At this time of night he should have been asleep long ago. But perhaps he had lain awake with worry about the kingdom he served. Well he might.

Yaga reached out, her fingers extended toward the mirror. Then she plunged her hand into the glass. It hurt; it always hurt to have part of her body in one place, and part in another. But one had to endure many hard things in order to achieve great ends. With her hand she toyed with a lock of Dimitri's shaggy hair, then caressed his hairy cheek.

"Do not wake, O great one. Do not wake, O king who is yet to be. The interloper will marry thy bride, to fulfill the terms of the curse, but in the moment of the marriage, he is the heir. Therefore all is fulfilled. Wait thou not for the conception of a child, for such a child would be as weak as the father. Once wedded and bedded, Katerina will hold the kingdom by widow-right, as Baba Yaga did, and her new husband shall be king beside her, and the sons he makes in her body shall inherit after them. Be thou that man, O great one. Thy bright herald tells thee what the Winter God most surely desires of thee."

Then, grimacing, she rose from her stool and plunged her head through the glass. It felt to her as if she had been beheaded, or at least as she imagined such a thing might feel; but even so she managed to put a loving smile on her face and kiss the cheek of the sleeping man. Then, wincing from the pain, she pulled herself back through the mirror, first her head and then her hand.