Cry of the Firebird (The Firebird Fairytales Book 1) Read online

  Cry of the Firebird

  by Amy Kuivalainen

  For Fox, who was there from the beginning.

  Prologue

  Look through the heavy pine forest and see a fire glowing. Beside it sits a bear of a man, knife in one hand, a clay bowl on the ground in front of him.

  It has been a long time since he last shed blood for his Gods. Tonight would satisfy them a little while longer. The screech of a doomed animal is cut short and the bowl fills with its steaming blood. He puts it on a flat stone by the fire. He cuts his scarred wrist to let his own blood drip into the warming mixture.

  For many days he has thrown his runes and has had no clear sight. He has marked each one with his blood and still they reveal nothing.

  A tune starts deep in his gut. It stretches and twists like an unborn child, travelling up like a snake through his chest, setting his bones to shake. He grinds his jaw shut to keep it from escaping as it creeps up his throat.

  His lips start to vibrate with the tune as it tries to push its way out. The man is well learned in the ways of the song and knows how to control it. The bowl is steaming heavily and he leans over it to breathe in the blood fumes that will give his visions. This man’s name is Vasilli and he is trying to find his brother.

  Chapter One - Death for Breakfast

  Anya sat cradling a hot cup of coffee outside her village’s small café. After making sure nobody was watching she took out a small silver flask, tipped some of the contents into her cup and hid it once more. She had been to the bottom of a bottle the previous night and crawling her way out seemed more effort than she was capable of. She remembered dreaming of blood and fire and woke sweating and afraid. Her long fair hair was unbrushed, her pale skin a little grey and her green eyes were bloodshot. Anya had stumbled into the village and everyone had politely looked in the other direction.

  The village itself was so small that it didn’t even have an official name, the villagers sometimes refering to it as “Wolf’s Run” after the largest farm. Built over the borders of Russia and Karelia it consisted of dark brown timber and brick houses, a convenience store that was the hardware, butcher and mechanic all in one, the café, the tavern and a tsasouna. Tourists as a rule were generally discouraged. In villages like this everyone had their secrets and Anya and her family had more than most.

  People remembered the forest rather than the village. A thick mass of twisted black alder, elms and taiga pines heavy with moss. The undergrowth was an unruly abundance of blackberry, juniper and ashberry bushes. On the stretch of road that passed through the forest Anya’s parents had crashed their car, killing them both and leaving her too frightened of the shapes in the gloom to climb out. They had been visiting her grandfather Eikki who refused to ever leave his farm and stay with them in Petrozavodsk.

  “You must not leave until the sun rises,” Eikki had argued angrily that night. “You know the forest at night is a part their world!” Her father had laughed the warning off. He had been joking and talking with Anya’s mother about putting Eikki in a home when something had leapt out from the fog, making the car swerve and collide with a pine on the side of the road. Anya still recalled the pat, pat sound the blood made as it dropped from her mother’s head onto the dashboard.

  When people had driven through early the following morning they found the wrecked car; Anya still with her seatbelt on, pale and trembling trapped with the two dead bodies. She simply watched the commotion with a blank and tearless expression as the village doctor had checked her all over and claimed her only injury was shock. They had taken her to her grandfather and there she had stayed and screamed from nightmares every night for the next year. Relatives on her mother’s side had tried claiming her but the visits from their St Petersburg lawyers had always ended with them leaving empty handed and defeated.

  Anya took a large mouthful of coffee and felt it go down to burn a hole in her empty stomach. She shook herself and wondered why after all this time she had thought about her parent’s deaths. Of course the villagers still talked about it because it was the only exciting thing that had happened in the last two decades.

  They also enjoyed repeating the scandal of Anya running off to Moscow with a man, only for her to come back broken hearted. In truth, she had run off by herself. Her grandfather had found her freezing in a park and had brought her back with him. The villagers added a lover to the gossip to make it juicier. Anya had never bothered to correct them. She rarely spoke to any of them unless she had no other choice. She had been running the farm by herself since Eikki had died five months ago. He used to deal with the pigheaded tradesmen in the village. They would barely acknowledge Anya.

  “Excuse me, is this seat taken?” a male voice asked in English, bringing Anya sharply out of her daydream. In this part of nowhere, English speakers were few and far between. He wore a sharp black suit, had neatly groomed black hair and black eyes.

  “I suppose,” Anya answered even though six other tables were free. The man smiled and placed a coffee so black and bitter on the table that her nose started to tingle as she breathed it in.

  “I’m Anya,” she said slowly as he sat down. “And you are?”

  “I have many names but you may call me Tuoni because that’s what your grandfather Eikki used to call me,” the man replied with a smile. The smile was genuine but it chilled Anya in her already queasy stomach. The knowledge of not only who Tuoni was but also what he was fell into her mind. Tuoni, in the Karelian tales, ruled the Underworld. The Russians called him Koschey. Everyone in the world knew him as Death. She wondered if she was still drunk and that had somehow caused the hallucination in front of her. It wouldn’t surprise her if when she sobered up she realised she had been talking to herself.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” she asked defensively. You’re going crazy; it’s not who you think. You’re drunk.

  “Perhaps you are drunk, but let me assure that you are not crazy and I am here,” Tuoni said and took a small sip of the coffee.

  Bloody mindreader, she thought and then stopped thinking very quickly.

  “You should not swear.”

  “You should stay out of my head,” she snapped. “My mind is my business.”

  “Your grandfather would not have liked to hear you swear. I knew him.”

  “You don’t know anything if you think Eikki never heard me swear,” Anya replied, a fresh wave of grief and anger beating at her. I know who and what you are so don’t think you can frighten me, she thought in the hope that he would hear.

  “How is it you know who I am?”

  “If you knew Eikki you would know the answer to that. He would have told you all about the granddaughter who saw things in the shadows and knew their secrets.”

  “Your parents used to call it an overactive imagination,” Tuoni interrupted bluntly. “Luckily your grandfather knew otherwise. If you had been given a normal Papa he may have locked you up.”

  “That was a long time ago. I don’t see things,” Anya said sharply. Except the wolves, the voice in her head betrayed her. “I’m sorry, what do you want? Unless you’ve come to collect my soul then I don’t know why you’re here.”

  “I told you, I knew your grandfather.”

  “You’re Death. Everyone knows you.”

  Liisi, the middle-aged café owner, bustled outside and placed Anya’s breakfast on the table. “Who is this man you’re talking to?” she asked suspiciously. Tuoni gave her a dashing smile.

  “I’m her grandfather’s lawyer from Petersburg,” he said. “Just in to clear up some business.”

  “I knew you were no farmer,”
Liisi said slowly in English. Anya was glad she spoke it better than that. Her parents, a lawyer and a school teacher, had made sure she was taught English in the hope that as she got older they would travel further abroad. Her grandfather had encouraged her lessons until she was fluent in English, Finnish and Russian.

  “You must be psychic,” Anya said to Liisi.

  Liisi clucked her tongue and shook her head, ignoring Anya’s comment.“A tragedy what happened to that old man,” she said sympathetically, switching to Russian, “Attacked by wolves in the middle of summer! It is unnatural.”

  Tuoni cut in, “Anya and I have a lot to discuss about his legacy.”

  “Oh, of course! Here I am blabbering when you have business to get on with. I certainly have lost my manners today.”

  And your mind, Anya thought as she smiled politely.

  “You let me know if you need anything,” Liisi said as she squeezed Tuoni’s arm.

  “Rest assured, you will be the first to know,” he said and after giving her another smile she giggled and wandered back inside.

  “A lawyer, huh?” Anya said as she began to eat. Her stomach had roiled when Liisi had offered her herrings so she had settled with eggs.

  “I have found that if people think you’re a lawyer they lose interest in you almost at once,” Tuoni said with a slight grimace. Anya laughed despite the macabre company.

  “It is nice to hear you laugh. Not many people laugh when they are with me.”

  “So laughing in the face of Death really is just a saying then.”

  “Indeed.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Eikki wasn’t who you thought he was.”

  “If you ask anyone around here they’ll tell you he was a crackpot.” She was still bitter about how the townspeople had treated him. They had gossiped and giggled about his strangeness but whenever something bad happened or someone was sick he was the first person they called on.

  “He wasn’t crazy. Shamans like him are only anxious when there is something to fear.”

  “A shaman like him.” Anya let out a dry laugh. “Very funny.”

  “I am not lying to you. There was much he kept hidden from you and everyone else.” Tuoni fixed her with an unnerving stare. “He wanted to protect you. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he did with your father.”

  Anya’s guts squirmed. “Don’t talk about my father.” She never got along with the religious bastard even when he was alive. When she tried telling him of the things she sometimes saw he hired a priest to exorcise her. It had resulted in her striking the priest when he poured oil over her and screaming that God was going to judge him harshly for hurting her and the other children. Her parents had been banished from their church because of her. Anya hadn’t stepped foot in a church or a tsasouna ever since. The priest still glared at her every time they made eye contact.

  “I do not obey gods, mortals or the likes of you,” Tuoni said viciously. “I do not have time to argue with you so you will shut up and listen to what I have crossed the borders of the worlds to tell you.”

  “You don’t frighten me,” Anya hissed. “I have been willing to face you for nearly a year now. I have spent nights begging to whatever God would listen to finish me. Then when you finally show up it’s to feed me stories.” She didn’t want to run the farm by herself anymore. She didn’t want to have nightmares about her grandfather’s death. She didn’t want to be afraid of the forest. She wanted peace.

  “It wasn’t your time to die. It still is not. This meeting occurs as a final request from Eikki, so let me tell you what I need to so I can get back to what I am actually meant to be doing.”

  “Get on with it then,” she said bluntly and began to shovel food into her mouth so she wouldn’t say anything more.

  “What I’m going to tell you, you probably won’t believe or understand. All you are required to do is listen,” Tuoni said as he calmly smoothed the front of his jacket. “Eikki was a Shaman. He has protected one of the gateways between this world and Skazki his entire life. There are only a few places in this world that touch the Otherworld and your farm borders one of them.”

  “The forest?”

  “Yes. Your family have been gatekeepers for generations. Your grandfather had many enemies. He had a lot of secrets and a lot of power that they wanted. The problem is, these enemies couldn’t really harm Eikki, but they could harm others. The night you and your parents drove home, he tried to warn them. It wasn’t an accident. Things in the dark lashed out at something he loved because they wanted to punish him. Not everything has the power to walk through the gates that join the worlds, so gatekeepers must be petitioned to help them. Most gatekeepers refuse to give them access to the real world.”

  Anya felt bread catch in her throat. All this time she thought the things she had seen that night had been because the crash had traumatised her. In a twisted way it made more sense that what she had seen was real and not the fantasy of a troubled child. Fantasies don’t haunt you like that.

  “Your parents didn’t see them because they didn’t believe when they should have,” Tuoni said slowly. “What they told you when you were a child about how the things you see aren’t always real so they can’t hurt you is a lie. Things you can’t see can hurt you, especially because you never see them coming.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “You need to start seeing them again. Eikki isn’t here to protect you anymore. When they find out he’s dead every one and every thing will try to break into the real world. You have a great power inside of you that needs to be utilised, or it will not only be a disaster for you but for your whole world.”

  “He never told me about any of this. How am I supposed to learn this without him? He couldn’t even stop them from…”

  “From what?”

  “Those wolves that killed him weren’t normal.” Anya felt the walls of her mind bend slightly. She had convinced herself they hadn’t been real. That she had been overtired and imagining things. Not real, not real, she had whispered over and over.

  “You saw them then,” Tuoni leant back in his chair. “They were not normal, you are right there. They were—”

  “Skin changers,” Anya said, trying to stop her hands from shaking. She had seen the stick men forms beneath their furs. She had thought no such creature could exist. By the time she reached where they were attacking him they had run further out of shooting range. Her grandfather’s stomach and chest had been ripped open and eaten. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the images of chewed intestines and gnawed-on spine. “If he had been protecting this gate, how did they get in to kill him?”

  “That is a very good question, one for which I don’t exactly have an answer. He had many enemies. He saw his death in a vision and knew it would be soon. He thought he would work a very powerful protection spell. It required death and he was already dying from the cancer eating him. His enemies sensed his weakening power and waited until they could destroy him. He is not here to renew the gates strength so they weaken and fray. You don’t have much time before the gates are completely ripped apart.”

  “Say I believe you, how much time do you think we have?”

  “Months at the most. Usually gatekeepers do protection spells twice a year to strengthen the gates. If the gate weakens too much anything will be able to walk through into the real world.”

  “Why are you telling me this? It seems unrealistic someone like you would be worried,” Anya said finally. God I need a drink.

  “If this world is flooded with things from stories, things that people used to believe in but don’t any more, like true monsters, it will be a bloody storm of apocalyptic proportions. It’s not even other monsters you need to be truly worried about. Its the ones with magic that will seek you out and kill you just for the chance to have their own way into Skazki.”

  “How am I supposed to learn all these things in a few months?” Anya asked as she scooped egg into her mouth. “It’s not as if Eikki shared
anything about it with me.”

  “Don’t be resentful. He did what he thought was right,” Tuoni said, “He wanted a different life for you; one where you would be safe. Now is not the time to indulge in self-pity or the mistakes of the past. Now is the time to step up. You have very big boots to fill.”

  A stray cloud drifted over the already weak sun and for a split second a completely different face appeared on the handsome man in front of her. She half vomited in her mouth and swallowed again, leaving her throat a burning trail of bile. Anxiety and panic were beginning to build in her chest.

  “I suggest you start by looking through some of your grandfather’s things. Most shamans don’t believe in writing things down but I know he occasionally did. You could learn something if you keep your mind open.” Tuoni gave her an oddly boyish grin. “Now I really must be off. Although I hope to see you again soon.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Try to stay alive and make it a challenge for me,” he said soberly. Anya gave him a ghost of a smile and tried desperately to hold his gaze. She couldn’t. He got to his feet, smoothing out his coat with a few swipes of his hand. He dipped his hand into his pocket. “Before I forget Eikki asked me to give you this before he died.” He took her hand gently and placed a smooth black rock in it.

  “What is it?” Anya said as she ran a finger over its polished surface. It was warm and the skin on her palm started to tingle.

  “All you need to know is it is very valuable, very precious and potentially very dangerous,” he said as he started to walk away. “And it has been in your family for generations.” He turned slightly on his heel and added, “Stay sober in the next few days. Things may start to get a little…strange. Hyvää päivää.” Anya casually tossed the stone in the air and caught it again.

  “Stranger than eating breakfast with the Lord of Tuonela?” she asked. But he was already gone.

  ***

  See the man in the forest. He is wearing a long black trench coat. Droplets of water cling to his curly hair. He doesn’t notice. He is watching the girl walk home from the little village, a shopping bag in the crook of her arm. Some days he curses the shaman and the promise he made to watch over his family but then he wonders to himself what it would be like to step into the light and let her see him. He is not there to talk, he reminds himself. Only to protect her.