Babayaga

question. “In the river swamp. He buried them down in the reeds of the swamp.”
    She nodded and said no more. Then she waited, almost three moons, simmering and stirring her plans in her boiling and turbulent mind. She would wander the muddy wetland trails in the dawn’s bleak mist, amid the shrill, disturbed cries of waking starlings, searching, wild-eyed, for a sign of where her daughters might be buried. She would at times collapse and kneel on the ground, blinded with anger, a grief hot inside her that felt like molten metal. At dusk, after feigning her way through the day, she would return again to the swamp, clawing at the earth for graves she could not find. Night would come and the screaming wind would blow as the tall reeds swayed thick, looming above her like hissing serpents. During these trying days, she kept her face serene at home, and when she went on trips into the village, she was chatty and friendly. The horse trader found her full of idle questions about the roads and trails that ran out of town. When she asked for ways to kill off the squirrels nesting in her lofts that were eating at her grain, a bullman’s wife gave her a recipe for poison.
    Finally, the spring moon turned and Oman rode off, his mare topped with goatskins for the new season’s trade. Only hours after he was gone, she went round and invited his brothers to her house for dinner. “I have a seasoned boar that needs roasting.” She put out bulgur stew, sausages, radish, and blackberry wine. As she was setting out the meal, Elga told them that she had woken that morning from a nightmare in which her husband faced terrible trials on his journey. She raised a glass: “We must frighten this bad dream away with a toast to his safe return. All of us. Even my boys must drink this toast for their father’s safe return,” she insisted.
    “You’re going to make the little ones drunkards,” teased Elon.
    “Ha ha, no, I have mixed some water with the wine, so indulge a superstitious woman; let us drink and shout the devils away.”
    They all drank the wine and soon the men were unconscious, their heads heavy on the table. She pulled each one down from his chair and lined them up next to one another on the floor.
    She killed her sons first, hammering a long fence nail through each of their hearts. Then, taking an ax, she methodically beheaded each one of her brothers-in-law. Going out to the pens, she drove the livestock into the barn, bolting it shut, and while the goat kids and spring lambs panicked and brayed, she put all the buildings to flame. When she took Elon’s strongest horse and rode off, the mad screaming of the dying livestock burned in her ears.
    She was sure Oman would try to track her, but she never saw him again. She felt no sense of guilt, no sorrow. Her husband had brought that pain to the world, she had merely set the scales to balance. Still, she was wise enough to keep running, blazing over the mountain passes and across the high plateaus. She wrapped herself in shawls to cover her eyes from strangers’ questions and risked the bandits at night to cover as much ground as possible. On some loose and rocky flats she lost her horse to a sprain and then continued on foot, lying down on her belly to sip from the streams she passed, rarely pausing for long.
    As the eighth sun rose, now starving, thirsty, and dizzy, she found herself following a strengthening scent of woodsmoke down a broken ridge of alder and pine that led her into a bustling encampment. A group of women were busy caring for a field full of injured soldiers. The women paid her no mind until the leader of the group whistled loudly and signaled for her to approach. Without introduction, and in a blunt tone, the woman told how the forces had already advanced over the next rise, harrying a retreating army. Supply horses were supposed to bring up the rear, the woman said, but for now they were alone there and overworked, with three of their own ill from fever. They needed help. “What about you?” the woman asked. “Did the soldiers attack you?”
    The woman pointed at the blood that was still splattered on Elga’s dress. “Oh,” said Elga, looking at the stains. “No, I was only slaughtering animals.” Already a good liar, Elga knew to wrap her deceptions in vestiges of the truth. The woman nodded, and Elga felt as if a conditional trust had been achieved.
    The woman pointed her to the campfire and she began helping, washing rags and filling