Part IV

I was fast asleep in the barracks when Sanya shook me awake, eyes shining in the dark. “They’ve pulled out of Veliko,” he said, voice low, barely audible above the snores around us.

I only pieced together what he’d said, what he meant, after a long while staring up at his wide eyes. Then it took me until after I’d already pushed myself up gasping to remember I already knew that.

“Come on,” he said, seizing me by the wrist and dragging me out of bed.

“Wait. I—”

“Shh.”

“No, it’s—” I shook him off. “It’s cold outside, hold on.” And I made him wait impatiently while I layered myself up—carefully, still babying my tender back—before I followed him outside where our breath collected like smoke from a bonfire.

As soon as we were clear of the barracks, he turned on me. “There’s more,” he said as though there’d been no break in our conversation. 

“What?” I said, hugging my arms. “What do you mean?”

He pursed his lips, frustrated I couldn’t intuit the full story. “Tsura was funding the insurgents.”

“What? Why? How do you know that?” (Sudden snip of Dasha’s voice saying, “They share a border with that grazing land.”)

“Knyaz Ivan wants Veliko. They raise more large livestock than anywhere else, and if Veliko becomes unstable and depletes its resources fighting insurgents, they’re vulnerable to a coup.”

“Or they’ll need to ask for so much help they’re owned by someone else entirely,” I said, beginning to piece it together. “But how do you know that?”

He looked at me, face hard. Then he grabbed me by the arm, harder than he usually did, harder than he needed to, dragged me around the shadowy side of the barracks, and pushed me up against the wall.

“Did you know?”

“What? Did I know what?” The question was so absurd I laughed.

He jammed his forearm into my windpipe.

“No, Sanya.” I gasped and drew on my strength to force his arm down. “No, I didn’t. Why would I know that?”

“You were with the insurgents for a month.” He let me push his arm back, but he didn’t drop it. “What happened there, Iyu? What really happened?”

I curled my fingers around his forearm, letting my strength subside. His arm moved closer to my throat but didn’t press up against it. “They never said anything about Tsura.”

“I asked you what happened.” I felt his muscles flexing under his sleeve.

I squirmed, looking for a way out that wasn’t there. The uneven barracks wall bit into my wounded back. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

I tried to push him down again, but he was using myortva now, too, and if I pushed any harder, this would end in bloodshed. I just shook my head.

“Did Aksana have the volshebniks who rescued you killed?”

I wet my lips, the cold threatening to ice them over. “If I say that she did, you’ll tell Knyaz Artyom, and Aksana will have me killed. If I say she didn’t, you won’t believe me. You probably won’t kill me, but the pain you inflict will be more immediate.”

He finally pulled his arm away and stepped back. “I won’t.”

“Won’t what? Hurt me or tell them?”

“They killed my sister. I don’t care about anything other than that.”

“Now I don’t know if I believe you.”

Sharp inhale. “I didn’t tell anyone we went back to see that woman hanged. I didn’t tell anyone we used zhiva. I didn’t tell anyone you suggested that the insurgents were good people suffering under corrupt rule.”

“This…”

“This is bigger than any of that?”

I looked over his shoulder, at the dark courtyard with its dancing shadows and saw another, faraway courtyard. Heard a dead boy’s laugh.

“I give you my word,” he said, drawing my attention back to him. “Whatever you say, if you tell me the truth, I won’t tell anyone, and I won’t hurt you.”

I knew, looking at his steady, river-rock expressionless face, that he was telling the truth. “Aksana had the volshebniks who rescued me killed, but it had nothing to do with Tsura. They worked for Tsura. She did it because they knew something. Or thought they knew something. They thought they saw a miryanin, one of the rebels, using myortva.”

His face stayed impassive. “Did they see it?”

I closed my eyes for a beat. I was tilting over the edge of something much higher than a third-story window. “Yes. I taught him.”

“Why?”

I hesitated. Not because I was reluctant to tell him—though I was—but because I didn’t know how to explain. I didn’t know. Not really. I couldn’t convey in words the feeling beyond mere magic of seeing Antosha’s face open, the world multiply in his eyes when he felt the myortva, the first strike of lightning through his fingertips. I couldn’t explain why I knew it was the right thing to do. “I didn’t think it could be done,” I said.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Do you really think we’re any better than the miryanins? Do you really think we deserve this and they don’t?”

“Was it just him?”

“I didn’t try with anyone else,” I said. “I’d only just taught him when the volshebniks came. He didn’t want to—the only time he used myortva for anything practical was when we went to a town—”

“Razed by a tornado,” he said.

“We went to help rebuild.”

“Do you think anyone could learn.”

“I don’t know. It’s possible that he was some descendant of a volshebnik bastard like me. It’s possible there are a lot of people like that out there. I don’t know how much volshebnik blood you need to have, or if it’s all luck of the draw. It’s possible everyone can do it, if they’re taught. I don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

“I think anyone can do it.”

He nodded. “Okay.” Then he turned and started to go.

“Where are you going?” My heart beat faster, fear creeping up over my shoulder.

“To bed,” he said.

“You’re not—”

“I gave you my word.”

“Okay, and I trust your word. I really do. But what are you going to do now?”

He turned back to me, shadows morphing on his face. “I need to think.”

“All right. And what are we going to do?”

“Tomorrow, we’re going to get up, and we’re going to train with the other ghost hunters. In a few days, we’ll go on a hunt.”

“And then—”

“And then, I don’t know. Good night, Iyu Aksanevich.”

“Wait. Do you believe me? I really didn’t know anything about Tsura. I still don’t.”

He walked away. I didn’t stop him this time.

***

Just as Sanya said, in the morning, we woke up and trained with the other ghost hunters. He was there early and was already waiting at attention, albeit with red-rimmed eyes, when I arrived on the training grounds.

Mariya Artyomovich was leading us now. Rumor had it that Sanya had been asked to succeed Yelena (perhaps in an attempt to give him purpose, to distract him) but had refused. As much as I respected Sanya, Mariya was clearly the better choice. Still, she kept him close. She had no official assistant, as she had been to Yelena, but Sanya seemed to be her acting assistant, helping—stiffly, uncomfortably—to demonstrate and teach. Sharp as Mariya was with everyone else, she was polite, almost gentle, with Sanya. At first, it hurt to look at them together, not because of any jealousy or because I had loved Yelena Artyomovich so well, but because looking at them reminded me of what Sanya knew, and trust his word though I did, I could not imagine he would forgive me for working with her killers (even if I didn’t know they would be her killers at the time).

But Sanya was no different. He moved with the same silent, efficient grace he always did. He rarely looked my way, but he didn’t avoid looking at me, either. His expression never changed.

It was no good. This wasn’t how I’d wanted to start this chapter, wriggling on someone’s hook. The threat was supposed to be far away; I was supposed to have some space to be invisible, some room to work.

Well, no use crying over spilled milk. I’d worked around Sanya before. He’d be watching me more closely this time, but he had to sleep (curled up on his side with his knees to his chest).

In a few days, we loaded up into the back of a wagon. It fit fewer of us with all our bulky winter gear, but there were fewer of us to fit, anyway. No knyazhiches or other near-knyazhiches now.

In the winter, even these Gorakino zealots recognized it was too cold for camping. Instead, we stayed in guard stations. In the warmer months, they spread us between them and let us concentrate on smaller areas per team. Now, we had a warm place to stay but more ground to cover. Longer days spent traveling.

By the time they dropped us off, I decided the only thing I could do was pretend nothing at all had changed.

“It’s picturesque,” I said, surveying the tiny log cabin laid out before us. It was smaller, even, than the shack I’d grown up in. Just a stove and two beds, and a rickety staircase that wound up past the drop ceiling into the darkness until it terminated in a crow’s nest watch tower. I couldn’t see that part. There was a trap door to keep the heat from escaping up into the tower.

Sanya didn’t say anything, but I hadn’t expected him to.

“It’s a little cramped, but better than the barracks. Good thing you don’t snore. Do I snore? You kind of grunt sometimes. Say, how come you never have to sleep in the barracks? That’s no way to build camaraderie, is it? You’d probably throw everyone out of windows if you had to be around that many people all the time.”

He sat down on a bed with his elbows on his knees. Hunched. Unlike himself.

“I’m not saying they wouldn’t deserve it. You can throw as many people out of windows as you want; if you did it I’d be sure you had a good reason for it. So we should get the stove going. You could probably sleep outside in your underclothes and not even shiver, but I’m cold. Was there firewood outside already? I don’t remember. If we have to chop our own wood, I will use myortva, and I will not apologize.”

I started for the door. He didn’t move.

I stopped, hand on the door. “I’m sorry I talked about your underclothes. That was very inappropriate of me.”

“I thought about it,” he said.

I let my hand fall away and put my back to the cold door.

“What do you want, Iyu Aksanevich?”

“Does your word still hold?”

“Yes.”

“I have to get stronger before I can do anything. That’s why I came back here. I need space, and I need to get stronger.”

“But what do you want to do?”

I squeezed my eyes shut, rubbed my brow, opened them again. “I want to know the truth. I want to know if it can be done—if anyone can use Tajna. Because if anyone can do it, things aren’t the way they are because they have to be; they’re this way because someone chose to make them this way. A long time ago, but they’re choosing it all the time. We’re choosing it.”

“You want to teach people.”

I shrugged.

“Speak with conviction.”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think will happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should think about it. Once it’s done, you won’t be able to control what happens.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it? That we shouldn’t be in control of everything.”

“The world needs order, Iyu. Tajna is about order. If we’re going to do this, we should have a purpose in mind.”

“We? Sanya, why would you say that?”

He sat up straight again, slid back on the bed until his back was pressed to the wall and his legs were folded like when he prayed. “Knyaz Ivan funded the insurgents, but Knyaz Artyom was involved. He sent Yelena Artyomovich there, knowing that something awful had to happen to give an excuse for the other oblasts to come in and make a mess of Veliko. They would split the land when it was done.” He said everything so simply, as though there weren’t thousands of words and years' worth of story in those few sentences. “If everyone can learn to wield myortva, if the people of Veliko can learn to defend themselves, then the knyazes can’t have what they want.”

I peered at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. I wanted to ask him how he knew all this. I had asked him outside the barracks, right before he slammed me against a wall, but he hadn’t answered. If he didn’t answer, he didn’t want to answer. If I asked him now, it might change something.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’ll take a long time. It took me weeks to teach Antosha the most basic piece of Tajna. By the time we teach enough people, it might be too late.”

“Antosha,” he said quietly. Then, after a moment of silence: “As long as there are still Ivanoviches and Artyomoviches, it won’t be too late.”

“Okay. But we have to be careful. We can’t just run off down the mountain and start telling miryanins we’re here to teach them death magic. That would get out. They’d find us. We’d lose our heads. Not to mention, no miryanin would listen to us.”

He closed his eyes. “It will take time.”

“I know where to start. There’s a man in Veliko. But I wasn’t joking; there’s more I need to know first. I want to find out how to make that emetic, and how to unmake it. I want to find out how to take gnila with us. If we can use zhiva but only here, it’s not very useful. I need to learn how to heal better.”

“You need to learn how to put someone to sleep with myortva and how to wake them up.”

“That’s right,” I said, smiling. “You said you’d teach me.”

“We have to hunt the ghosts.”

“Still?”

“Still. If the ghosts come down the mountain, they ravage towns full of innocent people. Nothing has changed about that.”

“Right.” I nodded. “Then I guess we have a lot of work to do.”

He stretched out his legs and pulled himself back to the edge of the bed next to me. “First, we should get the stove lit.”