I traced the route drawn on the thick paper—over the blue Atlantic, to the land marked Alba, England, Cymru. The word Sidhe rounded the southeastern edge of the deep green island. I wondered what the name meant as my fingers wandered on to Norge’s capital of Asgard, and then on to . . .

My hands shook as I skimmed the borders of the gray mass labeled Imperiya Yotne.

England had been the last empire to fall in Europe. But it was not the last to rise.

Some time after England’s struggle in the south for Bharat’s ports and people had ended, war broke out on another front in the north.

As trade ground to a halt and economies collapsed and countries retreated within themselves and stomachs went empty, a headwoman in the little country of Yotunkheym grew hungry.

She made herself tsarytsya, and when she found her own larder empty, she made Europe her table. The tsarytsya—the young headwoman who became the ravenous old crone they called Baba Yaga—devoured her neighbors to the north and the south and the east and the west, hungry as a Wolf.

Or so went the story. I’d found the book—a newer one—in the Roots, at the Council table. Momma had taken it away from me, but not before I’d read the tale whose memory still left me cold.

A boy and a girl once upon a time wandered into the woods. Brother and sister they were, hungry and orphaned and defenseless. They hoped to find roots or birds’ eggs or berries to eat. But though they wandered for days and days, they found nothing.

The house, you see, found them.

The house was in the woods, waiting, when they were hungriest and thirstiest, tiredest and saddest.

The little boy frowned at the house, tall and spindly as if it stood on bird’s legs, its face away from them, toward the forest.

“Yzbushka!” he called. “Little house! Turn away from the woods and look upon us.”

“And be kind,” said his little sister. She was a tiny thing, bones straining against her cheeks, her face dirty. “Please, please be kind, for all that our village has lost.”

All their villages, and all others. All the children in all the towns around them had been disappearing, and they knew not where. Perhaps they were somewhere better. Perhaps they were somewhere safer. Perhaps they had plenty of food to eat.

Perhaps not.

The spindle-legged house stalked over to them, shrieking and groaning on rusty old joints, then dropped as if to its knees to let them inside. An old woman welcomed them from its threshold.

“Hello, Grandmother,” said the little girl.

(She was not their grandmother; they called her so out of respect.)

“Hello, Grandmother,” said the little boy.

(Her name was Baba Yaga.)

“Come you here of your own accord, or are you compelled?” asked Baba Yaga.