I came to a village on a dried-up creek bed as it got dark out. The streets were empty. The inn was boarded up; there was a note left on the door, but half of it had been torn off, and all that was left was: “Gone for… Capita… Ninth.” I didn’t think it would be prudent to go around knocking on people’s doors in the night, so I broke through a boarded-up window on the one side not facing any other structures. It didn’t look like I was the first person to have done so.

The owners had covered the furniture and locked up what they could, but the interior doors were kicked open, their locks broken, nothing at all left in the kitchen except some shattered pottery and a sliver of a china plate nice enough I was surprised to find even its remnants here.

I went instinctively to the second floor to sleep, even though I knew the mattresses would be gone. I bedded down on the floor. I was tired enough that I fell asleep quickly, despite the stifling heat trapped inside by the boarded-up windows.

I woke up in the middle of the night to footsteps in the hallway. It was a good thing the empty place echoed so loudly. If there’d been more fabric to absorb the sounds, well, I was not a particularly light sleeper.

There were more than two sets of footsteps, but not more than four, I didn’t think.

I’d set myself up by a window, more for the illusion of air circulation and escape than for the reality of either. The footsteps were close enough now that if I were going to get out, I’d have to use myortva. There wasn’t anywhere in the barren room to hide.

Instead, I sat right where I was, and when a man appeared in the empty doorframe, I put up my hands.

***

“I just needed a safe place to sleep,” I said before he could say anything.

He was holding a torch in one hand and a hatchet in the other. He was middle-aged or maybe younger, the torch deepened the wrinkles on his face and made his beard wilder. He looked at me, then pinched the hatchet in his elbow, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled.

The other footsteps roaming around the inn stopped and began to converge on the upstairs hallway.

“Why are you here? We don’t have anything to steal, and we’re not involved in any bad business.”

“I told you, I just needed somewhere to sleep. I’m only passing through. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

Bodies gathered behind him, but I couldn’t make out faces beyond the glow of the torchlight.

“Passing through.” One of those bodies snorted.

The man in front ignored him. “Where are you coming from and going to?”

“Uh, I’m coming from Khorizova. I have family in…” Damn, what was the name of that town? “Kineshma.”

“Why the fuck’d you leave Khorizova?” One of the bodies laughed, but still, the man in front ignored it.

“You got anyone else with you?”

“No, sir.”

He leaned back and whispered something to one of the bodies, which turned and retreated back down the hall.

“What’s your name?”

“Ilya.”

“What’s your full name?”

“Ilya Reskov.”

“No patronymic?”

“Ilyich.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“I said, Khorizova.”

“And you’re going to where?”

“Kineshma.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Excuse me?” I said, laughing despite myself.

“Kineshma’s gone.”

I let my nonthreatening smile drop entirely. “What?”

“You said you got family there. They didn’t tell you?”

“That’s why I was coming. We hadn’t heard from them, so I…”

The man finally stepped into the room, looking sympathetic. “You’re not gonna find your family in Kineshma, son. Please keep your hands up.” He didn’t suspect me of being a volshebnik, or he would’ve had me put my hands on my head, so if I used death magic it’d only be against my own skull. “I guess they told you at the border you’re not getting back through.”

“Yes, sir.” My accent was unconvincing, but they knew I was from Khorizova. Maybe they didn’t know what people sounded like there.

“So. Where you headed now?”

“Um…”

“You’re headed nowhere, and that’s a problem for us.” His boots beat a slow, deliberate tempo on the aching floorboards, but he wasn’t walking straight at me, wasn’t raising his hatchet.

“I’ll just go. Maybe they’re there. I still have to check.”

Before he could respond, a voice called from the hall, “No one here, boss.”

“You check everywhere?” The man turned his head towards the door, and as soon as he did, I moved my leg to cover the pouch with the returner and my money in it.

One of the bodies saw me moving. “Malko!”

The boss whipped around, raising his hatchet.

I raised my hands up higher. “Sorry! Sorry, I had a cramp.”

He sighed, letting the hatchet fall. In the patchy torchlight, I could see the swell of his throat moving jerkily. His nerves calmed mine. “You really came all this way by yourself?”

“I didn’t say I was smart.”

“No, you’re sure not that. Look, kid. You probably got a mama who’s worried about you. You shouldn’t go to Kineshma. You shouldn’t go any further. You shouldn’t’ve come here at all, but you can’t go back now.”

“So what do I do?”

“That’s the rub. We don’t have anything for you here.”

I hesitated. I’d just told him I was on my way to Kineshma. I couldn’t very well just say that didn’t matter because I had other places to be. I settled on a lie that I hoped would last me until I left in the morning. “I can work.”

No such luck. “Not enough work for the hands we already have. You’d just be another mouth to feed. Can’t have you hanging around, either, cause when you run out of the food your mama packed you, you’ll come sniffing around for ours. Nothing against you, son. Anyone who gets hungry enough’ll do the same thing, but we can’t have it.”

“Then I’ll just go.”

“Where you gonna go?”

“I’ll go… I’ll just go find another town.”

“Any town you find’s gonna be the same as this one. Or you run into bandits. Or people like you that wandered out here, and now they’re hungry…” He shrugged.

“People must come through here a lot, then.”

“Not so much anymore. I’m gonna have to look through your things.”

“Why?”

“Won’t know until I see if you have it,” he said. “You can get up.”

So I did, warily. If I were about to be robbed, this could get unpleasant.

When I got to my feet, the boss stepped up. He hung his hatchet off a loop on his belt and said, “I don’t like this any more than you do, but it won’t take but a minute. Keep your hands up, please.”

Before I’d decided whether it was time to release the myortva crackling in my core, Malko began patting me down. “You don’t got a weapon on you?”

“Not on me, sir.”

“You should.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can drop the ‘sirs,’ all right? Go on, stand over there. I’m almost done.” I watched nervously as he went straight for the pouch, but he only looked briefly at the bottles of returner before dropping them back in, and he didn’t touch the coins.

The bodies—two other men and a woman, as it turned out—had filtered into the room but still hung back. They all held torches, too, but two of them had been put out. They stood in a tight group and didn’t seem to want to come any closer to me in the corner Malko had pointed me to.

It galled less to be treated like a common criminal when I saw how scared they were of me.

“What are you going to do with me?” I directed my question to Malko.

“What are all these?” he asked, holding up the bundles of lobelia and mariweed.

“For if I eat something bad, to make me throw up. Lobelia and—”

“That’s all right, I believe you,” he said and rose to his feet, groaning as his knees cracked. “Here.”

Something flew at me, and I reached out just in time to catch my knife in its sheath.

“Keep that on you, will you? Even when you sleep.” He turned to the others. “Relax, nothing to be scared of. He’s just a dumb kid.”

“What if he’s got magic?” one of them said quietly, his eyes shifting between me and Malko.

“Not much of a witch if he couldn’t even stop us creeping up on him,” Malko said.

“I’ll go tonight. You won’t see me again.”

“I know we won’t if you go out alone in the dark.” Then, to the others, he said, “I’ll stay with him tonight. Go back home and let everyone know we’re all right. In the morning, we can fix up that busted window, and I’ll make sure he gets his back to town.”

“What d’you want us to tell Yanna?” the woman asked.

“Tell her what I just told you. He’s just a kid. He’ll be gone in the morning.”

They left without further discussion, and once the sound of their footsteps disappeared, Malko stopped squinting out the cracks in the boarded-up window and turned to me. “All right, son. Where’d you get the spirit water? Who’re you bringing it to?”

“I’m…” …disappointed in myself for not having better lies ready.

“I told you, it’s all right. If I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve told them who you were with.” When I still didn’t say anything, he took the hatchet out of his belt and tossed it across the room. It landed with a thud heavy enough I was worried it would bring the others back. He showed me his empty palms. “Look, now you’re armed, and I’m not. Tell me where you’re really trying to get to, and maybe I can help you.”

I could handle him if I had to, armed or not. “I’m looking for a man named Pavel Viktorovich Polunin. Pasha.”

He nodded. “You got any other names?”

My heart sank. I thought if he knew anyone, it’d be Pavel Viktorovich. “Grisha? I don’t have full names for anyone else.”

“I don’t know them,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the empty bedframe.

“Oh.”

“That’s all right, though. I bet I know some people who do. I know where you can go, and I’ll tell you what to do. Listen carefully, cause you’re gonna wanna do it just like I tell you. These folks aren’t so meek and mild as us around here.”

*

Malko said where I was going didn’t have a name, but it should take me about two days to get there if I followed his directions right. If I got turned around, if I saw anyone friendly, I should ask them to point me to Sinij Falls, but I shouldn’t get turned around, because I probably wouldn’t see anyone friendly. I should avoid people if at all possible. Stretch that food I brought. I could hunt, couldn’t I?

He looked relieved when I told him I could, but I didn’t think he saw much of a chance of me reaching this place.

After the falls, I was to cross the river and enter the woods (I’d never seen anything even approaching woods in Veliko, so either I would spot this right away or I’d walk right past the two or three trees he considered woods). I should find a path there, marked by a branch nailed to a tree.

I didn’t want to spend any two days walking to this place, but Veliko was such a wide, open country that a single person speeding down the road could be seen from a long way off.

I found the falls about an hour before sundown on the first day. At least, I thought they were the falls. They were really just a shallow series of steps down in a creek about ten feet wide. I crossed there and started up the shallow hill, looking for woods.

The woods were not a lie. I saw them once I crested the hill.

The trees were scraggly, their upreaching branches largely devoid of leaves, but the brush on the ground was thick and peppered with long, claw-like thorns. I didn’t see anything that looked like a path, never mind a branch nailed to a tree. Perhaps these tenacious brambles had grown over it. Maybe the rebels had moved on or been flushed out. Maybe I’d walk into these woods and never come out.

Just as it was getting dark and I was ready to give up, I saw it in the grass before that dense brush started: bare patches, flattened grass worn down by foot traffic. But there wasn’t a path beyond it, just more brush.

I took hold of a branch, pinching it between my fingers to avoid the thorns, and pulled.

It didn’t dislodge at first. It took some work, but with a light application of myortva, a big hunk of bramble tore free, and under it, a section of a path.

I wished I had a sword. Really, I wished I had a machete, but what I had was a knife, and it made slow work of the brush covering the path. Slow enough that it was almost full dark, and I still wasn’t through it. I was not yet foolhardy enough to go traipsing through unknown woods full of anti-volshebnik rebels in total darkness.

I’d have to go find somewhere to make a camp.

I was just turning away when I heard a rustle in the brush where the trees got thicker. I froze, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up with the sudden feeling of being watched. Perhaps I’d been too focused on my work to notice it before; there was no telling how long they—animal or human—had been there.

I didn’t move or speak, worried any motion would invite an arrow through my back.

The silence elongated, enough that I began to relax. I had just made to turn back to the woods when an arrow whizzed by my face.