“In the next flock!”
Then the next flock came by.
“Geese, ye grey ones, where is the baby’s mother?”
Then the baby’s mother came to them, threw off her feathers, and gave her little child the breast, and began weeping: “For this one day I may come, but to-morrow I must fly away over the woods and over the hills.”
Then she asked: “What do I smell there?” and wanted to put on her feathers again, but could not find them anywhere.
Iván Tsarévich had burnt them. He seized hold of Márya Tsarévna, but she turned first into a frog, then into a lizard, and into all sorts of insects, and last of all into a spindle. Iván Tsarévich took the spindle and broke it in halves, threw the dull end behind him and the sharp one in front; and his beautiful young wife stood in front of him, and they went home.
Then the daughter of the witch cried out: “The destroyer and the wicked woman have come.”
But Iván Tsarévich assembled all the Princes and the boyárs, and he asked them: “With which wife shall I live?”
They said: “With the first.”
But he answered, “My lords, whichever wife leaps quickest to the door shall remain with me.”