Marisha is not a good fit for a koldunya’s assistant. A student of ‘reasonable philosophy,’ she doesn’t even believe the apparent magic of koldunry is real. But the sleeping plague that strikes Chernozemlya every ten years is only a few months away, and she’s almost as desperate for money as she is to escape the plague. So, she takes the only job available: assistant to the koldunya Baba Zima, travelling in her moving house.

The house, bigger on the inside (absurd), seems to ski through the snow on chicken feet (impossible). Baba Zima is alternately clever and cruel, and her acerbic apprentice Olena, the one Marisha was supposedly hired to help, doesn’t want anything to do with her. Yet Marisha is, despite herself, drawn in by koldunry – and especially by Olena’s research, looking for a cure to the sleeping plague that has swept the realm.

Both of Marisha’s parents are deep sleepers, sleeping not only through the plague year but for the rest of their lives thereafter. Marisha fears she is next. And as she learns more, accompanying Olena on an increasingly dangerous, seemingly impossible search for a cure, she finds hidden connections between the sleeping plague, her family’s history, and her bizarre, recurring dreams: dreams of a ball where the deep sleepers are trapped endlessly dancing — and the monstrous beaked man who seems to to be hunting her there…