I didn’t ask where he’d been. I wasn’t his nagging wife or his father or his knyaz. There weren’t any rules that said he had to tell me anything, so he didn’t.

We ate our now-cold dinner and he thanked me for making it, and then, he wordlessly but nevertheless firmly insisted on cleaning the dishes. I fiddled around fruitlessly with the returner for a while and then crawled into bed.

I couldn’t sleep. I had sworn off drinking for the evening to assure Sanya of my reliability, but I was suffering for it now. I had a hard time sleeping without a drink to quiet my mind. (I wonder if my mother was like that by the time she was eighteen. Or my father.)

In the low light from the stove, I saw Sanya curled up on his side, his back to the room and me.

I got up and took the jar of potato liquor from the shelf. I was just going to have a sip to help me sleep, but we were leaving tomorrow, so what would it hurt to finish it off?

I was at the table, comforted by the little fire in my stomach and the pleasant floating feeling in my head when Sanya rolled over. He just lay there for a moment, watching me. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and padded over to the table, taking the seat opposite me.

“I didn’t get the cups out,” I said, pushing the jar towards him.

He stared at it for a long moment before he picked it up.

“Are you all right?” I asked, braver now in the dark, with the fire burning in my belly. “I was worried about you earlier.”

He swallowed heavily. “I’m fine.” He kept his eyes on the jar as he pushed it back to me. “I just needed to be alone. My mother says I’m like a cat in a wolf pack.”

I laughed. “What?”

“She thinks I am too reticent when our world needs us to work together. She wants me to be less… ‘aloof,’ she says.”

“You’re probably a much better volshebnik for being able to sit down and shut the fuck up every once in a while. Your praying and all that.”

He shook his head. “It’s easier to be quiet outside than inside.”

“So in your head, you sound like I do all the time?”

“No.”

“Oh, you’re not going to elaborate?” I grinned.

He almost smiled back. “No.”

“Do you think if I prayed more I’d be a better volshebnik? Or if I just talked less?”

“You’re a good volshebnik, Iyu, but you should think more.”

“So I should pray.”

“That’s not thinking. That’s clearing your mind. You must do that in Khorizova.”

“Of course. But I can take myortva without doing that now, so I stopped bothering. It’s so boring.”

He nodded. He leaned forward for the jar I had neglected to push back to him, and the collar of his undershirt hung open, warm light from the stove bathing his chest.

“What should I think about, then?”

“Think about what you want. Think about why you want it. Think about what will happen if you get it.”

“I know what I want,” I said.

He cocked his head.

“I want that jar back.” I reached across the table and snatched it out of his hands. My fingers brushing his as I did so was the first time we’d touched in days.

“You should want something more than that.”

“Oh, I want plenty of things,” I said, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. Out from under the covers, it was cold in just my underclothes. The liquor helped. “I want food with some flavor in it. I want to see the sun again. I want to breathe air that doesn’t try to freeze me from the inside out.”

“You’re too weak for Gorakino.”

“Sanya! How dare you? You said I acquitted myself well here. Are you saying you lied to Knyaz Aksana?”

“I shall have to atone for my sins.”

“Drinking this potato liquor is punishment enough.”

He took the jar back. “I’ll relieve you of the burden, then.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, reaching for it.

He pulled it out of my reach. “Oh no, you’re not the one who deserves punishment,” he said, upending the jar over his mouth.

I was practically lying across the table reaching for it, and he put his hand on my forehead to keep me away. I grabbed his arm and bent his elbow, hauling myself closer, laughing. Now I was kneeling on the table, and Sanya stood up, still holding the jar up in one hand, smiling.

I pulled back on the arm still in my grip, reeling it into my chest and reaching out after the jar with the other. He twisted his arm out of my grasp, so I lunged forward and hooked my elbow around his neck, and the table tipped forward.

He saw it happening and abruptly shifted his weight back towards it. The table’s airborne legs hit the floor, my back hit the table, and Sanya hit my chest, my arm still wrapped around his neck.

He barely managed to keep our skulls from knocking together, and for a moment his face hovered over mine, mouth just open, eyes widened, breath warm and sharp with yasno.

He was so beautiful. He was always there to catch me. I raised my head, and our lips met.

I let my head fall back down, fear surging over my momentary bravery. I would laugh, I would play it off as a joke.

Before I could, he kissed me.

I heard the jar hit the floor and shatter and his hand landed on the side of my head. I tightened my arm around his neck and the other went to his waist.

His hand slid under my back and he sat me up on the edge of the table, and it was only then I noticed my knees were tight on his hips.

He pulled back.

My mouth hung open. No sound came out. We stared at each other, breathing heavily.

Sanya broke the silence. “It’s time to go to bed.” His voice was low; I could feel it rumble in my chest.

“I’m not sleepy,” I said. My grip on his neck had loosened; my hand rested on the base of his skull.

His eyes broke from mine. “You drank enough that you will be soon.” He turned around and retreated to his bed. “Good night, Iyu.”

***

I sat stunned for a moment before I could collect myself enough to slink back to bed. At least this time he, too, was pretending to be asleep, and I didn’t have to worry about him seeing the erection I had no hope of doing anything about due to the fact that he certainly was pretending to be asleep.

Fuck, Iyu, control yourself. This is no time for thinking about penises.

I joked about cocks when I was trying to irritate him. I had no qualms about bathing or pissing in front of him, but of course, Sanya was Sanya. He never undressed in front of me, which was an impressive feat given our close quarters. But it was one thing to joke about cocks; it was another to…

I rolled over to face the wall and tried to focus on my breathing.

It was a losing battle.

What was that about, anyway? That was not fair, what he’d done. He didn’t know how I felt about him, obviously. He probably thought I’d kissed him just to irritate him again. He was probably just trying to up the ante to shock me. To get me to shut up and leave him alone.

Well, it’d worked. I didn’t know how I was ever going to say a word to him again. He must have seen it in my face that I enjoyed that. Sanya had never had a sexual thought in his life, so of course, he thought I was an idiot. That there was something wrong with me. Something wronger than the things he already knew were wrong with me.

As a consequence of these thoughts, I didn’t speak much in the morning (or meet his eyes, or come anywhere close to him), and of course he didn’t, either, so we just silently got our things together and when the sleigh came, silently got on it and silently rode back to the palace.

***

Back at the palace, all the gossip was about what was going on in Veliko. It had been a year since we abandoned Veliko, and the place was eating itself alive. Insurgents popping up to burn down towns and herds of cattle and kill khozyains (so they said). The southern part of the country was as good as no man’s land, now. Knyaz Fadej didn’t have the resources to try and hold it. People were starting to throw around the term “death drought,” which was strange when there had been so much death there. What they meant was there wasn’t enough livestock to keep drawing myortva from. Fadej couldn’t keep his volshebniks volshebniks. So the southern khozyains were on their own. They were still better outfitted than the insurgents, but rumors were the insurgents were collecting new adherents every day, and the other oblasts were only strengthening their borders. Sending volshebniks there when miryanin troops loyal to local khozyains had done the job before.

But Knyaz Ivan was talking to Fadej about sending troops back into Veliko. Miryanins or volshebniks or both.

That was the move. That was how Ivan wrested control of southern Veliko—northern Tsura, soon.

I didn’t hear anything about Artyom joining him, though. That made me anxious. If it turned out Gorakino didn’t have anything to do with funding insurgents to facilitate a land grab in Veliko, then Sanya wasn’t going to go along with this.

If he were still going along at all, after he refused to help me get more gnila.

But he had to know more than the idle gossip I heard around the barracks. He lived in the palace. He was Artyom’s nephew. Not as though that status had much helped me understand what Aksana was thinking, but he was a legitimate nephew. The only surviving son of Artyom’s brother, who himself was still living. That had to make a difference.

If I asked if it was true that Gorakino was in on the deception, if I had anyone I even trusted enough to ask, I was sure they’d laugh at me. I was sure, if I dared ask, the cards would all come tumbling down.

If I am honest, I was scared it wasn’t true. I didn’t believe it was true. I was willing to believe, by this point, that any one of the knyazes was capable of innumerable villainies. But I didn’t believe that Artyom had sent his niece to die in a foreign land and his own brother either didn’t know (in which case, why hadn’t Sanya told him?) or had let it happen. Andrej Artyomovich had already lost a child before Yelena Artyomovich, what sane person would ever agree to lose another just to strengthen an already—as far as I knew—perfectly secure and wealthy oblast?

But Sanya believed it, and I was too scared to ask him why. He was either too blinded by grief to see the holes in it or he knew something I didn’t.

Or, he was lying to me. He wanted to make me think he was on my side, so… so he could collect enough evidence to get me executed? If that’s what he wanted, if Aksana or Artyom or both had put him up to it, he had plenty by now. All he had to do was show them the returner. He could have gotten it from me easily. He could tell them what I’d said, and they’d believe him over me easily. Everyone already thought there was something wrong with me after Veliko; everyone already knew about my dead rescuers. Maybe he wanted back in Artyom’s good graces after the incident with Vasilij Artyomovich and turning in a traitor was a good way to do that. Maybe he thought my sympathy for the insurgents was a betrayal of his sister, and he wanted me dead. Maybe he thought my intention to teach Tajna to miryanins was an act of heresy that he had a responsibility to investigate.

All of these seemed more reasonable, more believable than that he believed in what I did and wanted to help me. And if I had learned anything from our latest hunting trip, it was that I did not understand him as well as I thought I did, that he could still do things to shock and unmoor me. But if any of these motivations were true, why hadn’t he done it yet? Why was I walking around with my head still attached to my shoulders, collecting praise from Mariya Artyomovich?

When it came down to it, though it made more logical sense that he was helping me tie my own noose, the core part of me, the part of me invulnerable to logic and reason, didn’t believe he would do that to me. It believed him. I believed him. Or, I believed in him, even if I didn’t believe him.

Tajna expects us to accept mystery and contradiction. From death we make life; we dare not ask why. We dare not question Tajna’s design. If I had faith in Tajna, I would have to accept this mystery, too.