Babayaga

“This? It’s not my car,” she said. “I found the key on the street.”
    The policeman nodded. “You will please come with me, madame. We can ask our questions at the station.”
    In her dazed exhaustion, forgetting for the moment the girl she had left sleeping on the hotel stoop, Elga limped off with the policemen to their waiting car.
    A few hours later, after she had told the same lies repeatedly to a parade of different officers, she sat waiting in the dimly lit corner of the station’s jail cell. There were three other women in the cell with her, all prostitutes. Elga shivered in the cold. She had never been arrested before, though she and Zoya had occasionally been detained and questioned. Usually it didn’t take much to be released; Zoya could always distract them with a flash of leg while Elga hissed out the appropriate spell.
    This time was different. This time she was tired, alone and vulnerable. She hugged her knees and thought about Noelle, whom she now regretted abandoning back at the hotel. How would she find her? Elga had never worried about Zoya in all their years together, that one had a fierceness in her that could be frightening. But little Noelle was unproven. She had allowed Zoya to get the upper hand in their battle, and she would need to be taught many more things or she certainly wouldn’t make it. But was she smart? Did she have the right blood in her? Perhaps it was not worth the time, perhaps she should be cut loose or put down? Elga wondered what the right move was. Yes, it’s simple, Elga said to herself, if she finds her way back to the suite, then she lives. If not, forget her.
    Elga shook her head with dismay at how protective she was letting herself feel toward Noelle. She knew soft feelings were weakness, and that girl made her feel soft. Zoya had already been a woman when they met, fully formed, already betrayed and abused. But Noelle was still in possession of an innocence that, like green shoots in spring, stood out against the bleak, starved landscape. Elga thought for a moment of her own daughters, the three of them, but then stopped as she caught one of her cell mates preparing to squat.
    “Piss in the pot, not on the floor,” Elga hissed.
    “Shut up, old woman,” slurred her mascara-streaked cell mate, unsteady on her feet, either drunk or drugged.
    “Piss in the pot, not on the floor,” Elga repeated, staring at the woman. Her cell mate looked away and then stumbled over to the chamber pot in the corner. Elga slipped back to the past.
    So many memories had flowed by, she was amazed at how much was dim now and what stayed sharp. The only child of older parents, she had grown up close to a loud sea. She remembered playing on the red sand shore and the roar of the waves when the winter storms came. Her father ran an inn of sorts, more like a barracks for traders who stopped to barter at their little crossroads. Her earliest memories were of late-night lanterned meetings where travelers with sly, wary eyes toyed with colored stones and sniffed pungent samples as they sat drinking and spinning tales around the rough wooden table. Her father weighed and measured while her quiet mother refilled the visitors’ cups with wine and put out dishes of dates and lamb.
    Elga helped with the chores, but where her parents were reserved, taciturn, and careful, she was boisterous and loud. She enjoyed staying up through the night, teasing the traders and taunting them with barnyard jokes until even her father broke into laughter.
    The years were not counted, so she did not know how old she was when her father sold her. All she knew, looking back, was that it was in a thin season when desperation hung heavy, like spiderwebs off the broad-beamed rafters. One windy night some traders came through and as she watched the haggled exchanges, she failed to note one shallow-cheeked trader who had set his eyes on her.
    The next morning, climbing out of her sleep, she heard her mother’s voice barking her name. She blinked awake only to find the man standing with her mother beside her cot. Without warning, he plucked her up and carried her through the house and out to the horses. His stallion was laden heavy with saddlebags and the mare had a small pack her mother had stuffed with a handful of her possessions. She tried to recall now what would have been in that bag. Some rags of clothes? Perhaps some toy? No. She dimly recalled a small carving of a bird. Was it there? She was