Vasilísa then thought of the three pairs of hands and said nothing.
“Why don’t you ask any further?” Bába Yagá asked.
“I know enough, for you say yourself ‘too knowing is too old.’”
“It is well you asked only about things you saw in the courtyard, and not about things without it, for I do not like people to tell tales out of school, and I eat up everybody who is too curious. But now I shall ask you, how did you manage to do all the work I gave you?”
“By my mother’s blessing!”
“Ah, then, get off with you as fast as you can, blessed daughter; no one blessed may stay with me!”
So she turned Vasilísa out of the room and kicked her to the door, took a skull with the burning eyes from the fence, put it on a staff, gave it her and said, “Now you have fire for your stepmother’s daughters, for that was why they sent you here.”
Then Vasilísa ran home as fast as she could by the light of the skull; and the flash in it went out with the dawn.
By the evening of the next day she reached the house, and was going to throw the skull away, when she heard a hollow voice coming out of the skull and saying: “Do not throw me away. Bring me up to your stepmother’s house.” And she looked at her stepmother’s house and saw that there was no light in any window, and decided to enter with the skull. She was friendlily received, and the sisters told her that ever since she had gone away they had had no fire; they were able to make none; and all they borrowed of their neighbours went out as soon as it came into the room.
“Possibly your fire may burn!” said the stepmother.