I woke up early, planning to hunt and make us something nice for breakfast (a shameless attempt to persuade him), but Sanya was already up. He couldn’t have gotten much sleep.

“Good morning, Sanya. Do you want to practice?” I tried to straighten myself up and sound studious and hard-working.

He shook his head. He was sitting by the embers of our fire, staring at them intently.

“Okay.” I stood there awkwardly for a moment, trying to think what I could do to put him in a better mood, but then he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s practice.”

***

We practiced, and he was as fierce and focused as ever. If anything, more so. There were times something flashed in his eyes, and I thought he wasn’t going to stop. I thought he might run me through.

But he didn’t, and after we practiced and ate, we set out to the borders as though nothing had happened.

He didn’t use energy of any kind, and my heart rate didn’t return to normal the entire day. It made me work harder. I didn’t dare stray far from his side, which meant we were working in closer quarters than normal, and which seemed to irritate him endlessly, though he didn’t say so. The whole day, in fact, he was more silent than ever. I, too, tried to keep a handle on my mouth, cognizant that any wrong word might talk him out of the reprieve he had granted me. Us. It was a reprieve for us, to be clear, but he was always ready to put himself on the chopping block.

That day and the next went fine. I felt fine, but I used more myortva than usual, making up for the energy Sanya wasn’t using. If he noticed (and I thought he noticed everything), he didn’t say anything about that, either.

Thus, we made it to the last day of our hunt. I was tired and anxious that no matter what happened, Sanya was going to spill his guts to his sister as soon as we got back to the palace, but I was also relieved that it would be over soon.

What happened next was a lesson for me in not counting my chickens before they hatch.

The day started normally enough. We went down to a section of the borderlands we hadn’t cleared yet and saw nothing unusual on the way there. We trooped in, set up the bait talismans, and waited. At first, I thought maybe none would come. Sanya and I sat back-to-back on a boulder outside of the circle, and I drummed on my knee to keep myself awake. I’d tried whistling, but Sanya did not appreciate the distraction. I wanted to argue with him but thought better of it. I needed to be on my best behavior in case that made any difference in his decision to rat us out to Yelena.

He nudged me in the ribs, and I turned and followed his pointing finger to a swirling black smudge approaching from the distance. I got up and rubbed my hands together, warming them up. But then the smudge widened, a black fog unfurling above the gray, covering the horizon from north to south, a long smear of ink drawn across the page. The back of my neck prickled. They were a mass, moving as one, a landslide rolling uphill. They were still so far away, but I could already smell the rotten egg.

I glanced at Sanya. He was perched on the edge of the boulder, still and taut as a tiger ready to spring, with as much focused intensity in his eyes.

“We should go,” I said, voice low. “There’s too many of them. We can’t, not if you won’t channel Tajna.”

The muscle in his jaw worked. Then he shook his head.

“Sanya, do you want to die?”

“They’re coming for the border,” he said as though that settled anything. But I knew what he meant: that many ghosts moving together, this close to the border. There was no way he’d let them cross over and terrorize the towns down-mountain Gorakino was responsible for protecting.

“Send up the signal, then,” I said as the ghosts moved close enough I started being able to pick out individual forms in the rolling mass. “We’re going to need help.”

“They won’t get here in time,” he said.

“Then we’re going to need someone to come pick up our bodies.”

“Don’t be dramatic.” 

“Stay close to me,” I said, drawing my sword.

He snorted and drew his.

Then the ghosts were there, and I didn’t have any more time for observations.

Before this, the most ghosts we’d fought at a time were five or six. Yelena told us to expect groups of up to ten, but that ghosts were not habitually social creatures. They were mildly drawn to living beings and strongly to dead ones but did not seem to be to each other. They didn’t work together as far as we could tell, despite what Sanya said about their ability to communicate. I couldn’t easily count the number before us now, but they were certainly more than ten.

I pushed out as wide a blast of myortva as I could, which knocked the first five back, but the energy was spread too thin to dissipate any but the one in the middle that was hit most directly. Sanya carved through the others in the front as fast as he could, but without myortva, it wasn’t fast enough.

I scrambled up on the boulder and hoped he would do the same, but he didn’t. He just kept slashing at them, and I knew once they surrounded us, there was no way he’d be able to slash fast enough. Damn him, didn’t he have any sense of self-preservation? I sent out concentrated bursts in quick succession, focusing on the ones closing in on him from the sides and the ones a row back from those he was currently stabbing. Some were crowding the boulder now, and he’d come off the boulder far enough that the ghosts could get between the rock and him.

“Get on the boulder!” I shouted or thought I shouted. I was starting to panic, knowing that the pool of myortva in my chest was going shallow, sloshing around inside me with every burst I sent. I killed a ghost slipping between him and the rock, but others were moving to take its place, and if he moved too far away, I couldn’t protect him from all directions. The ghosts were reaching up, too, and they were tall enough to grab my ankles without needing to climb. I wanted to put up a shield, but with the little myortva I had left, it would only last long enough to give us a second to breathe.

Sanya missed a slash, and a ghost tendril whipped past his defenses and slapped down his chest. I pushed the last of my energy out. The ghost hadn’t fully dissipated when a wave like a typhoon hit me out of nowhere and shook me off my feet. My back hit the rock, and I scrabbled blindly to find a hold, but a tendril wrapped around my ankle and yanked.