"Oh, I know you!"
"Yes, Respected Grandmother, you do."
"So you were behind this, eh? You set these people on their path?"
"Yes."
She squints, giving the animals a knowing look. "Still at it, are you? Still trying to make your new world?"
"Yes."
She hmphs, and asks, rather crankily, "And I suppose you still want the same thing?"
The animals nod.
"Very well!"
Baba Yaga turns around and touches the wall of the hut, petting it gently, then slaps it; the hut shudders in response. "Alright, you old rattling pile of wood, hear me! These five, who have done me a service, are now to be allowed herein! You will answer them when they command you, and you will go where they say. Treat them as honored guests henceforth, and for all their lives and ages!"
She turns back to the five animals. "Now, I'll need some blood from each of you, to seal the deal."
The cat pads forward, sits back on its haunches, and holds out its paw.
Baba Yaga smirks. "Oh no, dearies. Not from these puppets. From you."
And saying this, she grabs at the cat with a gnarled hand, quick as a frog's tongue snapping up a fly. Fear and bewilderment is in the cat's eyes, and it tries to shrink back from the witch's grasp, but Baba Yaga is too fast. Before the cat can protest, the old woman thrusts her hand into its mouth, and reaches down its throat; and keeps reaching, farther and deeper than there is cat to reach into, until her arm is inside the thing, up to the shoulder. The other animals watch, frozen, transfixed. Baba Yaga feels around, a faraway look in her eyes; and she grasps something, and yanks, and gives a great heave; and she pulls, and she pulls, and she turns the cat inside out, and out of the cat, out of its skin and flesh, she pulls a man; and she lets the cat go, and there is no cat, only a man, kneeling on the floor with his head dropped to his chest, as if he has fallen to his knees after running a hundred miles. Baba Yaga looks up from him, and casts her sly gaze on the other four. She leaps toward them, and grabs each in turn, and does the same as she did to the cat, as they watch, immobile. From the fox she pulls a red-haired woman; from the raven, a girl with a round face and short, black hair; from the hare, a young man with golden hair, long and straight; from the pig, a slim youth — boy or girl, you cannot tell. Each of them, she leaves kneeling or lying on the floor, exhausted, weak. Baba Yaga steps back then, puts her hands on her hips, and looks at them, and cackles.
"Well now, what have you to say, my lovelies?"
The five have raised their heads, though they haven't stood; they look at the witch in awe. The black-haired girl speaks up. "There are no words in this language for how far you have just pulled us. One must study for years to understand such distances, such numbers. This is impossible."
Baba Yaga cackles again. "Hah! Thought you were safe, hmm, in your far places? That you might send only your eyes and your mouth, and come into Baba Yaga's house, and no magic would touch you? Think again! So many tricks do I know, that I might sleep for an age, until the stars have died, and new ones rise in the sky; and should you study all this time, still you will not know as many tricks as old Baba Yaga. Come, now; the bargain's struck, and do not shirk!"
The man who was a cat gets up, slowly, rising to his feet as if they might give out under him. With a solemn face, he bows low, and his companions follow. When they straighten up, they hold out their right hands, palms half upturned. Baba Yaga reaches into a pouch on her belt, and extracts a small thing: green and fleshy, thorns like teeth on the edges of its twin leaves; a flytrap. The old crone takes a knife from a rack, the sort with which to peel potatoes. She goes to the man who was a cat, and the woman who is no longer a fox, and the rest; she cuts a slash across the palm of each, and under the dripping blood she holds the flytrap, which drinks it greedily, snapping at the last drops. The blood soaks into the leaves, which grow before your eyes; by the time the blood of all the five is taken, the flytrap is melon-sized, and it opens and closes, slowly, contendedly. Baba Yaga caresses the leaves, like petting a cat; and then she plunges the knife into the plant, spearing it through both leaves at once. The flytrap jerks once, and is still.
She walks to the cauldron then, and in a language you have never heard she speaks some words. The five no-longer-animals shiver at the sound of it. Baba Yaga holds the dead flytrap over the cauldron, and squeezes; her iron grip crushes the plant into pulp, and its juices, pink with blood, drip into the cauldron. When the last of the juice is squeezed out of the leaves and the flytrap is a wrung-out chunk of pulp, the witch tosses it over her shoulder and turns to the five, and winks.
Then she turns to you.
"So, my great heroes. Tell me, now, what is it you'll have of me? You might ask for the same thing as they, if you are foolish as they are, or as arrogant. But I hear tell that you carry other wishes with you. Tell me, and you'll have them. What is it you want of this old grandmother?"
