Olya finally lost her patience with me after another four or five questions about khozyains and volshebniks and left, saying I was just as boring as a rice paddy.
By that time, Liza was being carried out the door between two of her friends.
Dasha, Sanya, and I all looked at each other and wordlessly got up to go to our room.
Inside, Dasha spun on me as soon as the door closed behind us. “What did you learn?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and sat down on the wide, scratchy mattress. “Not much. She just wanted to fuck me.”
“Blind, was she? Ugh.” She shook her head, frustrated at her inability to resist the joke. “Was that all you wasted your time on?”
“I thought you had it handled with that loud woman.”
“Yes, and she didn’t even want to fuck me, as you do so delicately put it.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t talk about fucking people, Dasha. We all know—”
“Stop distracting me. I’m trying to find out if you have anything to add to my report to Mam—to Knyaz Aksana.” She cut her eyes at Sanya where he stood to the side of the door, hands behind his back, like she had forgotten he was there. He made it easy to do (if you were anyone but me). “I guess the answer is no.”
“Report? What report?”
“What report?” She threw her hands up. “What the fuck report do you think I’m talking about? How drunk are you; I swear I’m cutting you off if you’re going to spend every night flirting and forgetting why we’re here.”
“What is there to report about? That was just drunken chatter.” I waved my hand.
“This is exactly the kind of thing we’re here to ferret out and you say it’s drunken chatter.”
“People need to vent their frustrations. They need someone to be mad at. They’ve never even seen a volshebnik before. They’re not hurting anyone.”
“How do you think it got started in Veliko?”
“I don’t know, and neither do you.”
“Well, it didn’t come from nothing, Iyu. It starts with talk.”
“Maybe, but talk doesn’t have to turn into anything else. People talk all the time; that girl said it was the same everywhere.”
“I thought you said she just wanted to fuck you.”
“She did. She called me boring every time I tried to steer the conversation away from sex. Dasha, what do you think Mamushka’s gonna do if you tell her—”
“Knyaz Aksana,” Dasha said.
“What do you think she’s gonna do if you tell her they’re fomenting rebellion here?”
“What your knyaz does is not your concern. Don’t forget your place, Iyu Aksanevich.”
“And if she decides to raze the entire village?”
“You know she won’t do that.”
“We did that in Veliko, didn’t we?”
“Should we not have?”
“We shouldn’t raze this one!” I said, standing up. “Not over some idle rambling. That woman in there isn’t raising an army; she could barely even stand up.”
She slapped me. “It’s not your decision to make. Get in line.” While I was still holding my face, she turned and marched out the door, off to send her report.
I went to follow her, but Sanya blocked the door. “Move,” I said, attempting to force him out of the doorway.
“Let her.” He didn’t budge.
“This isn’t Veliko!” I said, shoving him in the chest. His back hit the door. “They didn’t kill your sister.”
He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me back. “If you stop her now, she will tell Knyaz Aksana later, and tell her that you tried to stop her.”
“They don’t deserve to die because they’re mad that life isn’t fair. If you were them, you’d be mad, too.”
He stared at me, and when I tried to dodge around him, he grabbed me and threw me back on the bed with enough strength I knew it wasn’t natural. “Do you want what happened in Veliko to happen here?”
“That’s not what’s happening here.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s got to be another way to do this. Everyone hates their khozyains. Here and in Veliko. Why can’t we put in better ones?”
“They don’t hate their khozyains. They hate that anyone governs them.”
“You would hate it, too, if your town got destroyed by a tornado and the people who you pay rent and taxes to were nowhere to be found. If they just took what you made and gave you nothing.”
He frowned. An honest facial expression. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s the kind of thing I saw in Veliko. I’m sure you saw worse. The way I lived when I was a kid, I thought it was like that because my mother was crazy. But so many people live the same way or worse. If I weren’t a volshebnik, I’d be as mad as Liza is.”
Sanya took a step toward me, and I squared up, like he might want to fight me. I guess that seemed like a reasonable response. Instead, he crouched down in front of the bed and looked up into my eyes. “You can’t say that. Not in front of Darya Aksanevich. Not in front of me or anyone else.”
“Why not? Are you gonna have me killed for inciting a revolution, too?”
He looked down at his feet. Slow exhale through the nose. He seemed to steel himself, his shoulders tightening before he looked back up. “I have thought things were not right before, too.”
“Bit of an understatement for someone who threw his cousin out a window.”
“I have wanted to burn it all down before.”
“I don’t think they killed her, Sanya. I don’t know. But they didn’t kill me; they didn’t even hurt me. I think the Ozeros killed her; I—”
“Stop,” he said forcefully. “They killed her, Iyu. They put her in that situation. They still have time to kill you, too, if you don’t stop.” He turned his head when we heard footsteps in the hall. Then he looked back to me and grabbed my hand. “Tell me you’ll stop.”
I started at the feeling of his skin on mine. I looked down at him, and the white all around his irises, felt the tightness of his grip.
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door, and he moved back, face shifting back to neutral by the time Dasha stepped into the room.
***
She wasn’t done berating me. I asked if she ratted me out to Aksana, and she said not this time, but if I ever spoke like I had this evening—if she ever thought I was withholding anything from her, if I couldn’t remember what we were here to do and stay focused on our goal, she would tell Aksana everything, and I could suffer the consequences on my own.
When she was done, I asked her if she had a message back from Aksana.
Dasha said yes, she did. Aksana told her to keep going. Aksana would send another message when she had decided what to do.
I didn’t know if I believed that, but I didn’t have any way to know. I thought about trying to tell someone on our way out, but Dasha and Sanya both were sticking close to me, and who would believe me, anyway? Who here was going to uproot their lives because some ragged stranger told them their knyaz might come burn their town down?
So we left in the morning.
That night we landed between towns and set up camp on the flattest patch of ground we could find in this hilly country. We hadn’t gotten very far. We were all low on myortva and the road here was rough and winding, which made travel at speed more dangerous. The hills hid witnesses behind every curve.
We stopped early enough in the evening to hunt before dark. We couldn’t eat all we killed to fill up our wells, but the scavengers would thank us. When Sanya threw the deer off its feet and Dasha snapped its neck, I saw a different line of trees in front of me, golden grass waving before my eyes, Antosha rising to a crouch, his arrow sailing wide.
I couldn’t help myself. I waited until Sanya and Dasha fell asleep, and I ran, at speed, back.
From the hill above the village, a few lights twinkled. No shadows moved between the dark buildings. It was quiet. It was safe.
When I got back to our camp, Sanya was sitting outside his tent.
I was sticky with sweat, exhausted, drained. I didn’t want to fight.
I plopped myself down next to him, and he reached into his tunic and passed me a flask.
I don’t know if I’ve ever liked him as much as I did at that moment.
While I sucked down the yasno like it was water, he said, “You can’t go back there every day.”
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and handed the flask back to him. “I know.”
Around us, the crickets sang. “It’s admirable that you care,” he said, finally.
“I think there’s something wrong with me,” I said, laughing. “I know why things are the way they are. I wish… I wish we could just go back to before, in Gorakino. I liked ghost-hunting with you.” I nudged his knee with my own. “Things were simpler.”
“You did not make things simple when we were ghost-hunting.”
“All of that seems so small now,” I said wistfully, looking up at the sky.
“You can do impressive things, Iyu Aksanevich. But many things, still, are out of your control.”
“This isn’t out of my control. This is something I’m here—we’re here—doing.”
“You don’t know if what you hear is bluster or real. What if it were real, and it cost your family a life?”
“And if it’s not and we cost a whole town theirs?”
“In Veliko, you said you saw a town razed by a tornado. Knyaz Aksana never razed a town. When you found a pair of rebels in a village, she did not kill everyone in the village.”
“We killed so many people. I killed one of those rebels myself,” I said. “I’d never killed anyone before. I didn’t even mean to. But we, each of us, have the strength of ten men.” I laughed.
“I’d never killed anyone, either. I killed a lot of people in Veliko.”
“I bet it felt good to throw Vasilij Artyomovich out that window, though.”
He shook his head. “It shouldn’t feel good. Violence may be necessary sometimes, but it’s not to be enjoyed. Attacking Vasilij Artyomovich was not even necessary.”
“Sanya.” I sighed. “Can we, for one second, stop thinking about what we should and shouldn’t do and feel? Can we just, for a minute, enjoy something? Vasilij Artyomovich deserved to be thrown out of that window, and you enjoyed doing it! Good!”
He stared down at the ground, a hint of a smile on his face. “I enjoyed it.”
“And you’d do it again if you had the chance!”
“I’m only sorry I didn’t break his neck.”
“Yes, Sanya! Drink!” I put my fingers on the bottom of the flask and pushed it up towards his mouth.
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