I found them in the same place they were yesterday, but this time, they were picking flowers from the ground.

“I found another red one!” - the boy yelled and gave it to the blond girl.

“How do you always spot them? I can’t find any!” - she replied.

She was braiding the flowers together in a wreath, and while white and yellow ones were in great supply, the red ones she needed for the middle were impossible to find.

“I don’t think we’ll find anymore here. We must have picked all of them.” - the boy said.

“Yes…” - she said and looked at the wreath again - “I can take them out and use blue ones? There must be more of them.”

“But the red ones look so good… Maybe we can go to the other patch and see if there are any there?”

“But mother doesn’t let me go too far into the forest” - she said, biting her lip.

“She won’t know. We’ll just get some flowers and go back.”

“No, I can’t! She told me that Baba Yaga lives there.”

“She’s gone now, the damned witch. Shame she managed to run off and we didn’t burn her alive. How many people died because of her?”

“Don’t talk like this. She might hear you!”

“I hope she does and comes back so I could drive a pitchfork in her gut myself! She’s gone to spread her suffering somewhere else. My dad says those priests in black robes will get her one day.”

“They scare me even more than she does. Baba Yaga’s somewhere deep in the forest, but the priests pass through the village once a moon now, they’re everywhere.”

“Cleaning up witches and demons as is right.”

I woke up, the name echoing in my mind like a scream in a cave. Yaga. My grandmother’s name. Whenever I wasn’t drowning in my own spit, I was thinking about that. The seeds were supposed to help me make peace, but I had no idea what the dreams meant.