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ocean wide enough to place between them.
After a space of time longer than it takes the stars to draw breath together, the Tsar of Death was so well loved by his court of souls that he became puffed up and proud. He bedecked himself in onyx, agate, and hematite, and gave bayonets of ice, and cannons of bone, and horses of drifting ash with eyes and nostrils of red sparks to each of the souls that had perished in the long, tawdry history of the world. Together this great army, with shrouds flying like banners and trumpets of twelve swords lashed together marched out across the deep snow and into the lonely kingdom of the Tsar of Life.
    Marya swallowed. She felt as though she could not breathe.
    “Comrade Likho, the Great War began because Archduke Ferdinand was shot, and the West would have crushed a noble Slavic people to dust underfoot if we had not intervened.”
    Likho chewed her cheek. “You are a very clever child,” she said.
    “Not really, everyone knows that.”
    “If you are so clever that you know everything, why did you call me?”
    Marya sat back in her chair. The black book slid perilously forward on her lap, but she did not reach out to catch it.
    “Me? I didn’t call you! You’re a widow! You were allocated housing!”
    “Your hair is so long and tidy,” sighed Widow Likho, as if Marya had not even spoken. Her breath rattled like bones in a cup. “However did you get it to behave?”
    “I … I have a silver brush. It belonged to a ballerina before me.…”
    “Yeeeeessss,” the crone said, drawing the word out longer and longer, until its end flapped like a broken rope. “Svetlana Tikhonovna. I remember her. She was so beautiful, you cannot imagine. Her hair was the color of water in winter, and her bones were so delicate! She hardly had any breasts at all. When she danced, men killed themselves, knowing they would never again see such beauty. She had four lovers in Kiev, each richer than the other, but her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt. We could all have taken lessons from her. And then, one New Year, her second lover, who owned a cosmetics company and a fleet of whaling ships that harvested ambergris for perfumes and lipsticks so red they would leave spots in your vision, made her a present of a silver brush with boar bristles. Who knows where he found it? A peddler woman, maybe, hunched and thin, in a black dress, hauling her cart along a larch-lined road. Svetlana loved the brush; oh, how she loved it! The longer she spent brushing her hair, the more terrible and beautiful she grew. So she let her lover comb her pale hair over and over, and I heard the sound of strand against strand on the other side of the snow. I came to her immediately; I wasted no time for one such as her. And when she performed for the Tsar’s daughters, the ribbons of her shoes were just a little loose—such an infinitely small difference—but she fell, and shattered her heel. Her four lovers left her, since she could no longer dance so that they wished to die. But, ah, bad luck! She was pregnant, and though ice would not melt in her mouth, she hurried to marry the first bricklayer who didn’t care about dancing, and had four children who ruined her beauty. Then her house burned during the purges. Terrible to happen to such a sublime creature, but tscha! Life is like that, isn’t it?”
    Marya wanted to run out of the house, but she could not move. Her throat dried up. “Who are you?” she whispered.
    “Say my name, daughter. You know who I am.”
    “Widow Likho.”
    “ What is my name, Marya Morevna? ” the crone roared, her black voice bending the windows and rattling the books on the shelf.
    Marya quailed, shrinking away into the upholstery. “Widow Likho! Comrade Likho! Comrade … oh … oh. Likho . Bad luck.”
    The old woman leaned forward. “Yeeeeessss,” she said again, stretching her voice like dark glue. “And you have my brush. You called me