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.”