I didn’t follow Sanya. I almost did. I wanted to hear what he had to say in his message to home, and I had a half-baked idea about asking him to see if I could come with him, but I needed to think more first, and the bath really couldn’t wait any longer. I expected I would be summoned to an uncomfortable conversation with Aksana soon, and I wanted my appearance to be beyond reproach.

Alyoshka pretended to be happy to see me.

While I washed up, he made tea and listened to me talk. I appreciated that about him. He let me talk without telling me to shut the fuck up, and he (usually) laughed at the appropriate places. Sanya listened to me, but he almost never laughed at my jokes.

I ran a comb through my wet hair, stretching the ends out and letting them rest on top of the water, where they bobbed in the gentle waves my movements made before they sunk in the soapy, greasy water. It was a nasty color already. I was dirtier than I realized, even.

I was just thinking I should ask Alyoshka to bring some fresh water when he came and set a teapot and cup down on the table by the tub.

“Thanks,” I said.

He bowed, and as I watched him straighten, I had a strange thought. I looked him up and down. He was a boy a year or so older than I was. Short and compact, with a broad, open face and suspiciously blank eyes. He’d been with me since I was ten. I knew he had a mother who worked for Aksana, and his aunt used to work for Aksya (my oldest cousin of whom we never spoke, who was now a nun somewhere). But he didn’t talk much about them, or about anything to do with his life outside of me.

“Would my lord like any yasno?” he said as I examined him in what I was sure was an obvious way he was too well-trained to mention.

“Do you like it here?” I asked.

“My lord?” His eyebrows curved up slightly.

I draped myself over the side of the tub and looked up at him. “I mean, serving me. Is it all right? You don’t hate it, right?”

“No, my lord.”

“I know I talk a lot. If I get boring, you can just tell me to stop.”

“Of course not, my lord.” When I first got him—when he first started serving me, I tried to treat him like a friend. Not that I knew how to treat a friend, but I was starved for them. At first, I thought he was scared of me, like Semchik had been. All of the palace children and some of the palace adults had been wary of me when I first arrived. Here I was, this feral child of a common witch and the dead, terrible knyazhich. But Alyoshka wasn’t scared of me. He just wasn’t my friend. He was a consummate professional, even then. Now, he’d do almost anything I asked, even things he shouldn’t, but he still wasn’t my friend.

“You’re just saying that. You must get bored.”

He shifted. I was making him uncomfortable. “This servant has much to occupy his time.”

“I bet.” My hair hung over the side of the tub, nearly to the ground, dripping water onto the floorboards.

His eyes darted to the pool it was making, and I flipped the sheet of it back into the tub. “And when I do stupid things like that to make your life harder, you can just tell me to stop being a jackass.”

“My lord always makes a mess when he washes. It is to be expected.” He gave me a half-smile. 

“Am I really such a child?” I laughed. “Don’t answer that.”

His smile was practically beatific now.

“What would you do if you were a volshebnik?”

He’d been bending down solicitously to me as we spoke, but at that he straightened up. “This servant… has never thought about it, my lord.”

“What if you could be one? Would that make your life better?”

His mouth opened and closed, and his blank eyes squinted just a little, revealing the clockwork turning behind them. “Ought my lord be talking about this? After what happened this summer?”

It was my turn to snap up straight, sending water flying across the room as I did. “You knew why…”

He nodded.

I slumped back against the other side of the tub and slid down until the water was up to my chin and my hair swirled around me in ropes. “No one was supposed to know that.”

“My lord, it’s only servants’ chatter. It’s of no consequence. No one speaks of it anymore.” He looked like he was about to say more but instead turned, undoubtedly looking for a rag to clean up my mess.

“But,” I prompted before he could move.

“This servant would not dare give his lord advice, but perhaps, to give idle tongues no room to wag, my lord should keep his own counsel on this matter.”

“What do they say about me, Alyoshka? Idle tongues?”

He gave me his most disingenuous smile. “Everyone knows my lord is very spirited and generous.”

“They think I’m a spoiled idiot.” I sighed.

“They dare not, my lord. If there’s nothing else, may this servant clean now?”

“I can clean it up when I’m done.”

“This servant will not hear of it,” he said, already stepping away.

I sighed again, more dramatically. “Thank you, Alyoshka. Oh, and… yes.”

“My lord?”

“Earlier, you asked if I wanted yasno.”

***

I finished bathing and got dressed, and Alyoshka combed and dried and pinned my hair up into what I thought was a very neat and respectable style.

Aksana still had not summoned me, so I sat down to wait, an activity that was always difficult for me. I would have gone fishing first, if I’d known it was going to take her this long, but now here I was, all buffed and polished, with nothing to do but fidget.

Well, perhaps there was something I needed to do, and I could probably do it without ruining all of Alyoshka’s hard work.

Semchik’s personal servant, Oleg, answered his door, but he said Semchik wasn’t there.

“Where is he?” I asked, but Oleg was every bit as deft as Alyoshka and deflected me pleasantly, which was only strange because no one, not even Oleg, ever made it seem like there was anything private or secret about anything Semchik did. Semchik was boring; he’d never had a secret in his life. Not until recently. I told that to Oleg (omitting the last bit), and he just smiled benignly and asked if there was anything else he could do for me.

No, Oleg, I’ll just fuck off now.

And then I had another thought. Probably, I was being paranoid.

I went to seek out Dasha.

She wasn’t in her rooms, either.

So, I went to find Sanya, and at least he was where he was supposed to be.

He hadn’t brought any servants with him, so the only people who accompanied him on the training grounds were ours, and they didn’t see fit to stop me when I barged through.

“Sanya!”

He was practicing with a sword on a dummy, thumping it again and again, dinged blade sliding under its wooden arms, swiping across its wooden neck. He clearly hadn’t washed yet, but the braids were back in his hair, beads and clasps in place, which seemed like a waste since he’d have to wash it before dinner, anyway. (Did he do all the braids himself or had he taught our servant? Maybe all the servants had to know the ancestral hairstyles and grooming habits of every volshebnik family.)

He did not look surprised to see me stomping towards him. “Good,” he said. “None of them will spar with me.” I assumed he meant the weapon master’s servants watching stoically from the sidelines.

“I’m not going to spar with you, Sanya. Look at me.”

He blinked and gave a cursory glance at my embroidered robes with the impractically voluminous sleeves and freshly done hair. “You look well.”

“And you look like shit; Aksana’s gonna want to see us soon. You should clean up.”

His brow creased.

“Okay, I’m sorry. You look great as usual. That’s not the point.”

He turned and started walking towards the servants, and I hurried to follow, hoisting the hem of my robes up so they wouldn’t drag in the dust. “Where are you going? I need to talk to you.”

“I’m going to clean up. Thank you.” He handed the sword back to one of the servants and swept out of the training grounds.

I followed. “I can’t find Semchik or Dasha, but Aksana hasn’t called for me yet. She must be talking to them without me, so what is she talking about? Slow down; I can’t run in these stupid clothes.”

“I’m not running.”

“No, you’re just walking like you’re trying to escape a burning building. They’re talking about me, Sanya, I know it.”

“Perhaps Knyaz Aksana simply wants to see her children.”

And that stung, even though it shouldn’t have. “If she cared so much about seeing her children, she wouldn’t have destroyed all of Aksya’s things and banned her from the palace.”

“Iyu Aksanevich.”

“What, you can throw your relatives out windows, and I can’t say true things about mine?”

Slow exhale through the nose.

“I know Dasha must be telling her all kinds of untrue things about me right now. Saying all that nonsense about me and Semchik not having the stomach. Yeah, I don’t have the stomach to”—I dropped my voice low, despite the empty boardwalk around us—”murder innocent people for no reason.”

“There was a reason,” Sanya said. “You might not accept the reason, but it was not without reason.”

“Bullshit. You know that’s bullshit.”

We came to his door, and I followed him in. The personal servant we had given him for his stay started awake from a doze in the chair by the door.

“You can go,” I said, waving him away. “Aleksandr Artyomovich and I need to speak privately.”

“Stay,” Sanya said. “Excuse me, Iyu Aksanevich. I need to wash up. Vanka, will you please get the bath ready?”

Vanka bowed out to go get the water, so either way, he was gone.

When his footsteps faded, I turned back to Sanya. “She’s right about one thing, though.”

“Iyu—”

“I know, I know, you have to wash up. You can go change behind the privacy screen if you want, but I have to talk to you.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and did not move.

“All right, I’ll make it quick.”