I jumped back, letting out a strangled yelp. Belatedly, I remembered what Malko told me to say, on the off chance I found the people he sent me for: “Mikolka sent me for eggs!” I cried.
Nothing. I was worried I hadn’t said it loud enough. “Mikolk—”
“I heard you!” a woman’s voice said. “Put your hands on your head.”
Ah, so they knew how to handle volshebniks. “Okay,” I said. “I’m just gonna put my knife up first.”
“Drop it and put your hands on your head now!”
I did.
Then, nothing more but some rustling and a whisper. Then, “Just go, dammit!”
“Sorry?” I hazarded a glance over my shoulder, not that I could see anything.
“Not you!” she said, as though I’d made that mistake just to annoy her. “You just—take your pack off.”
“I have to take my hands off my head for that.”
“Obviously. Do it slow, and don’t get smart.”
“Wouldn’t know how even if I wanted to.”
“Don’t mumble!”
“Sorry.” I unhooked my arms from the pack’s straps and let it fall to the ground. “What now?”
“Stay where you are and don’t twitch.” Then in a lower voice, “Okay. Go now.”
More rustling and footsteps approaching me.
I fought every instinct in my body that said to turn and see who was there, to defend myself.
The footsteps paused right behind me, and I could hear someone breathing shakily. Someone very short, by the sound of it. The woman said, “You’re doing great.”
Hands wrapped around my arms and pulled them behind my back. Rope wound around my wrists, crisscrossing between them, and this should have scared me, but I knew I was in the right place, and if I needed to, rope wasn’t going to stop me this time. I had plenty of myortva stored up, and I wasn’t a frightened child anymore. So I let them bind my hands and gently reminded them about my pack when they started to turn me back to the forest.
“We’d better get it,” the woman said, stepping onto the path. “Otherwise it’ll draw attention.”
I couldn’t see much of her in the darkness, but she looked young. I hadn’t seen the kid—I wasn’t sure whether they were a boy or a girl—who bound me, but they must have been younger still, and I could tell they were skinny.
“You get it,” they said from behind me. A boy whose voice hadn’t changed yet, I decided. Embarrassing for me if I thought too hard about it. “I can’t keep hold of him and carry the pack.”
“I’ll keep hold of him,” she said, marching forward.
She took my arm and pulled me forward while the boy groaned as he picked up the pack. “It’ll be good for you. Get you stronger,” she said.
“Don’t forget the knife,” I said. “It’s the only one I have.”
Neither of them responded to that, but the woman led me into the darkness of the forest. How could they see? Where they were going? I balked again and again, because I couldn’t see a thing and kept getting snagged by the brambles and thorns, but she took me by the shoulders and guided me. (Some volshebniks used their myortva to improve their eyesight. I should have thought of learning that before I left. Now I would have to train myself on it. I was sure I could figure it out.)
“Mikolka sent you for eggs, huh?” she said after a while.
“Yes.” That’s what Malko said, wasn’t it? Yes, I was sure of it.
“Haven’t heard that one in a while.”
I sighed. “You’re not going to tie me to a tree and leave me there, are you?”
“No,” she said. “We’ll push you in a hole.”
But at least they didn’t ask me many questions about who I was and where I came from while they dragged me blind down a forest path.
I didn’t get a good look at either of them as we walked, but the few times they spoke, I started feeling like there was something familiar about them.
Eventually, after having been thoroughly shredded by the woods, I saw lights up ahead flickering between the branches.
***
The house reminded me, surrounded by those scraggly trees, of my mother’s. It was a little bigger, and there was an addition built onto the side, but it was the same plain wood box, gaps in the boards, no courtyard.
The girl passed me off to the boy before she went to the door. The boy had to reach up to hold onto my arm, and if you’d seen our silhouette, I was sure it would look like a little kid hanging off his big brother so he didn’t get lost in the market.
We stood a few yards back while the woman knocked.
The door opened only a crack, not enough for me to see anyone on the other side, and the girl pressed her face up against that crack and had a whispered conversation with the person on the other side, occasionally gesturing behind her in our general direction.
Then she turned around and beckoned us forward.
Stifling laughter, I let the boy (who could not have been more than ten) lead me up. He took his responsibility very seriously.
The door opened a little more, but the peson behind it stayed out of view.
The girl said, “Give me the bag,” and I stood there patiently while she helped the boy struggle out of the oversized pack.
She passed it through the door, and it opened wide enough for me to glimpse an eye and a lock of messy hair.
“You want my pouch, too,” I said, twisting my hands up to tug on my belt.
The girl looked back at me, and my heart dropped. In the light from the door, I finally saw it: that was Nadya. The girl who’d been with Antosha the first time I got myself captured by the rebels.
When she met my eyes, her brow furrowed, and I could see her putting it together. “Okay, give it over,” she said to the boy, not taking her eyes off me.
He began to fiddle with my belt. I didn’t recognize him as readily, but I felt sure the boy was Misha. He was taking so long to get the pouch off, I was tempted to snap the rope and do it myself, but eventually he got it and passed it to Nadya.
“The returner is in there,” I said as the pouch disappeared through the door after my pack. “The spirit water.”
There was no response from inside, and for those moments I sweated. The door could shut, and I could be left out here without a bargaining chip.
Well, I still had my myortva. It didn’t leave much room for negotiations.
The door opened. “Bring him in.”
***
The person behind the door was a tall, broad woman with thick, wild hair who said to call her Zhenya. She sat at a rickety table in the center of the room, and I sat across from her, hands still tied behind me. Not the best hospitality I had ever experienced, but not the worst.
Other than her, Nadya, and Misha, there were three other people in the house, two more women and a man, who was going through my things with a fine-tooth comb.
Zhenya had asked me my name, and, fearing that Ilya might remind Nadya (who was staring at me fixedly) who I was, I said Ivan Borisovich Reskov. Nadya had not been around once I’d started getting along with the rest of them, and I didn’t know if she knew about that. I wasn’t going to confess to being myself or to being a volshebnik until I saw Pavel Viktorovich. I tried to keep my face turned away from her.
Zhenya asked me more questions like where I came from and who sent me, and she seemed bored by my answers.
“All right, Vanya,” Zhenya said, leaning back in her chair, looking more tired than anything. I never said to call me Vanya, but it was the thing they all did, and I guess it was only fair I got a taste of my own medicine. “Why are you here?”
I should have had an answer for that. I opened my mouth, then shut it again. “I’m looking for Pavel Viktorovich.”
“You mentioned that, but why? It’s got to do with the returner, I reckon.”
“Yes,” I said. “I though you might find it useful.”
“You want to be useful?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“How do you know Pavel Viktorovich?”
“I met him a couple of years ago. I want to talk to him because he knows me is all. Because he wouldn’t have me hogtied.” I laughed, but it didn’t sound as friendly as I’d hoped.
“You’re not hogtied,” Zhenya said.
“I know, I was um… exaggerating for comedic effect.”
“Oh?” She sounded surprised.
Everyone in the room was staring at me. I squirmed. “Just uncomfortable,” I muttered.
“We have to be careful,” she said.
“If you bring me to Pavel Viktorovich, he’ll tell you I’m okay. I helped him before. I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t want to help.”
Over Zhenya’s shoulder, Nadya was grimacing at me, like I was a dog turd lying in the center of the room.
“We can think of some other reasons. We can’t get you to Pasha tonight, you know.”
“But you can get me to him?”
“Stop!” Nadya’s grimace morphed into open-mouthed shock. Her face drained of color. “I know him.”
*
I tried to look surprised, but the jig was always going to be up eventually. I knew that from the moment I recognized Nadya.
“He’s a volshebnik. He’s related to Aksana Moryakov. He’s… he’s her nephew or something. He was here with them, those couple of summers ago when all the volshebniks came and we—we caught him, and he’s the one Antosha…”
The air in the room went cold. The man going through my things froze with a hand on a pair of socks. The woman next to him stopped knitting, and the other woman pulled Misha behind her. Zhenya’s body went taut like a drawn bowstring.
“It’s true,” I said, hoping if I spoke first I could turn this around. “I got to know Antosha and his father—”
“You’re the one who got Antosha and Fedya killed,” Zhenya said, face more bewildered than angry, and I was so focused on her, her big, tense arms, that I almost missed the rustling from the side of the room until Nadya jumped.
I caught her out of the corner of my eye and just had time to snap the rope before she hit me, knife in hand, and I toppled from the chair.
We hit the ground, and I pushed out a wave of myortva that cleared the room, flinging Nadya, the chair, the table, and Zhenya against the wall. The whole house shuddered, dust falling from the rafters, and someone screamed.
“Stop!” I said, hands out in front of me. “I’m here because of him. I’m here because of Antosha. He wanted me to help.”
Nadya scraped herself off the man’s lap where she had landed in a tangle, my things now scattered across the floor, and limped towards her bow and quiver propped in the corner.
“Don’t,” Zhenya said, hand on her back as she struggled to prop herself up. She was talking to Nadya, but her eyes were still on me.
The woman held Misha in her arms, his face already red and blotchy.
Nadya pulled out an arrow and nocked it, aiming straight at my head. I was maybe twelve feet from her. She couldn’t miss.
“Nadya!” Zhenya said.
She loosed the arrow.
I slapped it out of the air with all the speed Tajna gave me.
“Nadya, stop it now!”
“He can’t keep doing that forever,” Nadya said. “He’ll run out of magic.”
“You’ll run out of arrows first,” I said.
She grabbed for another arrow, and Zhenya tried to lunge forward but couldn’t seem to get to her feet. “Katya, stop her! She’s going to get us all killed!”
Nadya shot, and I knocked the arrow away again.
“Stop her!”
The woman Zhenya called Katya reached hesitantly for Nadya’s arm, but Nadya shook her off and marched towards me.
“Nadya, I’m sorry. I didn’t want him dead any more than you did. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”
She nocked an arrow a foot from my face.
Before she could loose it, I flicked my finger and snapped the bowstring. She grabbed the arrow like it was a kitchen knife and stabbed at my chest. I caught her wrist and pushed her back. She tripped over the upturned chair and fell on her ass, snapping a leg off the chair in the process. Katya reached for her again, and again she shook her off, coming at me with her fists this time. I put up a wall of myortva.
Zhenya finally struggled to her feet, pain evident on her face, and lurched towards Nadya, who was beating on my shield with her bare hands. She wrapped her up in a big bear hug and hauled her back. Nadya’s face screwed up, and she let out a primal scream, loud enough to make me wince, pained enough I wished I hadn’t come.
I dropped the shield.
I didn’t know how she could tell, but she got an arm free enough to elbow Zhenya in the sternum. Zhenya’s grip slipped and Nadya broke free and rushed at me.
I let her hit me.
She punched me in the jaw, and I staggered back into the wall. She hit me again in the stomach, and I doubled over, and she seized my neck and pinned it to the wall (“Get the returner!” I heard the man shout, like he thought she really had the upper hand), winding up for a punch to the temple with her other hand.
“Stop, Nadezhda.” Another woman’s voice came from the other side of the room, from the doorway to the addition.
Nadya caught her own fist mid-swing and looked over her shoulder. “Irisha, it’s him!” she said, and suddenly she sounded like a child again.
“Irisha?” I said dumbly, voice thick with blood.
“Let him go.”
Nadya squeezed my throat harder before she dropped it and took a step back.
Nadya’s body blocked her from view, but I heard her footsteps, and then she took Nadya’s arm and moved her back, and there she was. Old, hunched, miraculously alive: Irisha.
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