"Go outside and play; General Winter will be here soon and I don't want you outside while he's here."
Yekaterina and Ivan were kicked out of the house without much ceremony. He wandered over to the woodpile to try and find lizards or worms, while she pulled her doll out of her apron pocket. Sitting down, she drew the outline of a house in the dirt and walked her doll up the pathway, trying to think of how to include Ivan so she wasn't playing alone. He solved her problems by stepping on her drawing.
"Hey!" She pushed his bare foot off and redrew the house.
"Kasha, come play with me," he whined.
"I'm playing right now. Go run down to the tree and back and I'll tell you how long you took."
"Nooooo." He sat next to her. "Fine, I'll play with your stupid doll."
He picked up her doll and twisted the arm between his fingers, trying to think of something they both could do. Yekaterina laid out wood chips and stalks of grass to indicate a forest and a field.
"Look, Ivan. We could play 'The Firebird'."
He looked at her doll in its dress. "But we don't have a boy doll."
"We can pretend it's a boy. And this piece of wood is the wolf."
"But your doll is a girl! Prince Ivan is not a girl!"
She smacked the doll out of his hands.
"Don't be stupid," she told him.
She would have elaborated for the sake of his less-than-Yekaterina intelligence, but the neighing of a horse caught her attention. A lone horseman was riding up the path to their house. He wore heavy armor and carried a long spear with a shield hanging from the saddle, covering his left leg. Mama came out of the house, balancing Natalia on her hip. The little girl blinked sleepily in the light and turned her head into her mother's neck.
Ivan rushed over to Mama and clutched at her skirt. Afraid he would get her in trouble, Yekaterina followed him. Mama frowned at the rider and handed Natalia to Yekaterina, running her hand over Ivan's hair as she stepped forward.
Natalia pulled painfully on Yekaterina's hair and she looked away from Mama to untangle Natalia's pudgy fingers from the pale strands.
Beside her, Ivan screamed and Yekaterina jerked her head up just in time to be blindsided by a jolt of horror and shock as she saw the rider swing the butt of his spear towards her face.
She woke up in a haze, hearing Natalia hiccupping. The side of her head hurt and felt stiff. Sitting up, she found Natalia had fallen asleep with her head resting on Yekaterina's stomach. Natalia rolled off and onto Yekaterina's thigh when the older girl sat all the way up. Yekaterina held her breath and gently stroked her sister's hair as the little girl scrunched up her face, curled her hands into fists a few times, then relaxed back into sleep.
Ivan was missing and the sun was gone.
Had Mama left the two of them outside? Yekaterina carefully pushed Natalia off her leg and stood up shakily. Her head throbbed painfully and made her dizzy. She stood still until the dizziness passed before walking over to the rain bucket. Picking a small leaf out of the ladle, she drank deeply, feeling the stiffness on her face again as her cheeks filled with water. She touched it gently. Whatever it was, it was cool and smooth, with rough patches. Some water from her fingers soaked into the mess and it turned sticky the more she felt it. She pulled her fingers away and looked at them. In the waning moonlight, her fingers seemed black. Yekaterina poured another dipper of water on her face, leaning awkwardly to the side so her clothes would not get wet.
Natalia started crying.
Where was Mama? She wouldn't have let Yekaterina out of the house with a dirty face and she certainly would not have left her daughters to sleep outside in the dirt. What were they doing outside, anyway? Yekaterina touched the side of her head where it hurt. She remembered playing dolls with Ivan, arguing with him, then the horseman. He was gone too.
Yekaterina picked up Natalia and tried to hold her on her small hip, like Mama did. Rocking back and forth, she sang softly to calm the toddler as they entered the house. Mama's cloth basket was knocked over and the chest where they kept their spare clothes was opened and rifled through. Yekaterina looked inside, but only Ivan's clothes were missing. Did Mama take Ivan with her? Did she leave with the horseman?
"Mama?" Yekaterina could hardly hear herself.
"Mama!" She overcompensated for her earlier call and screamed, startling Natalia.
"Mama! Mama!" She could not stop calling for her mother and tears started rolling down her cheeks while sobs choked her throat and cracked her words oddly. Natalia started crying for Mama too.
Yekaterina sat down on the floor and clutched her sister to her chest, crying so hard she could not call out anymore.
Something welled up inside her chest, right under her heart and swelled to fill her body.
Mama was gone. Ivan was gone. Natalia was small and Yekaterina could not wield Mama's long sword. How were they to protect themselves from Rome and other greedy people?
Natalia eventually cried herself to sleep, so Yekaterina put her in Mama's bed and built up the fire. The house felt enormous to her, intimidating. She hurriedly threw more wood in the grate then sprinted to the bed where Natalia was.
Curling herself around her sister, Yekaterina tried to make herself get up and go outside to look for Ivan. What if he was still out there? She was responsible for both her siblings if Mama wasn't home. But if he was with Mama, then he was safe, she argued with herself. The wind rattled down the chimney and at the door, as if someone was trying to get in. Yekaterina knew Mama locked the door, especially in winter, to keep people like Rome and General Winter outside. Yekaterina couldn't reach the bolt though and she couldn't drag anything across the floor to stand on so she could reach it.
She didn't sleep that night, and when the first light of dawn poured into the small house, Yekaterina slowly opened the door, half-expecting to see Roman legions, General Winter and scores of wolves right outside. There was nothing but a thin layer of frost on the ground, not even enough to freeze the water bucket she had drunk from the night before. In the dawn light, Yekaterina's breath spiraled away from her and she breathed out to make more clouds come from her mouth.
"Mama? Ivan?" The words spun away in the still early winter air as puffs of white clouds.
No one answered.
She gently closed the door behind her and looked around for Ivan. He wasn't hiding in the tree, behind the woodpile or anywhere else he normally hid.
Giving up on him for the minute, Yekaterina made her way over to the fence where she last saw Mama. A pile of cloth lay in a crumpled heap near a knocked-down post.
She picked up the cloth, holding it up above her head. It was a kosovorotka with stripes running around the wrists and a brown stain trailing down the front from the neck to the waist. As she analyzed it, she suddenly remembered why it seemed so familiar. It was her mother's, her apron and skirt lying close by with the boots peeking out from the horizontally striped skirt. Yekaterina couldn't understand why Mama would have left her clothes behind while she wandered around outside in the cold.
Ivan was still missing too. Yekaterina bent over to pick up her mother's clothes and go back inside. The brown stain streaked down the front of the skirt too, smelling of Mama's sword and the time Yekaterina had sliced her hand open on a sickle blade.
She dropped the clothes and backed away, everything suddenly making horrible sense. Mama had not explained everything to her, but she had explained what had happened when a country died. Their bodies dissolved back into the ground they had come from, as if they had never existed. Mama had killed a few countries and seen other countries like China and Scandia and Rome kill other nations.
Mama was dead. Ivan was probably dead too. She and Natalia were the only ones left.
Yekaterina tried to control her breathing, but she could feel herself starting to panic.
She left the clothes lying in the dirt and ran back to the house, slamming the door shut behind her.