Misha was not the same sort of student Antosha had been. He didn’t have the same desperation. His mind was not on fire all the time; he was not suffering with the weight of feeling. At least not as far as I knew. As far as I knew, he was a kid who seemed happy living here in the woods with his odd little family. I was sure he had hidden depths I didn’t know about; who didn’t? But mostly he kept drifting off while I was talking, eyes wandering and fingers shredding leaves.

He needed me to keep him focused, and to do that, I had to stay focused. I was not a particularly patient teacher. I hadn’t needed to be with Antosha. Antosha was the one who kept me on task. He’d wanted it so badly, so I knew he deserved it.

“Hey, c’mon.” I snapped my fingers in front of Misha’s face for maybe the tenth time. “You’ve got to concentrate. Once you get it, it’ll be a lot easier, but you’ll never get it if you don’t concentrate now.”

“I have been,” he whined. “It’s not working.”

If I ever saw Nikita Aksanevich again, I was going to bow down and kiss his feet. How did he do this with kids? So many ungrateful volshebnik children.

“It takes time, and you need to actually concentrate. I know you’re not concentrating because you keep snapping those twigs.”

He snapped another as if to punctuate my sentence.

“Give me that.” I snatched the pieces of the twig out of his hands.

“I did it, though. I feel all my body. Especially the sticks poking me in the butt.” He shifted, brushing debris out from under him.

He had a point. It wasn’t easy out here, where you might be sinking into your body and suddenly feel some bug crawling up the back of your neck. Back at Whitecap, we had big, quiet, blank rooms given over entirely to teaching children Tajna. There were soft cushions and Nikita Aksanevich tapping out a hypnotic rhythm on that big drum of his. Even with Antosha, we had my quiet room with the whitewashed walls.

They burned the place down, I was told. I’m sure they took the animals and drained them. What did they do with Fedya and Antosha? Their bodies probably burned, too. Their bones probably blackened with the beams of the house. His long throat, the last image I had of him, would have split and cooked like meat roasting over a campfire. His skull was there somewhere, empty eye sockets staring at nothing. Bottom jaw disconnected. You’d never be able to tell, looking at it, that he never stopped smirking. Some lone traveler, stumbling over the ruins, would never see the parentheses around his smile, never look at those still eye sockets and see his quick, fox’s glance.

Where was it? How far away?

“Yusha, are you paying attention? I asked if I had to feel my hair, cause I don’t think I can feel my hair.”

I snapped back to the forest. “What? Oh. Now do you see how it feels when someone doesn’t listen to you?”

“And the hair?”

I laughed. “No, Misha, you don’t have to feel your hair. I’d be impressed if you could, though. Why don’t you try to feel your scalp? See if you can feel how your hair feels on it. No, not with your hands.”

***

Misha might not have been the most internally motivated student, but there were ways to get him interested, I found. Things like making him wonder whether he could feel his hair. If he asked questions like that, that was a way in, and when I could feel his interest flagging between lessons, I found creative ways to use myortva to amuse him. I found a way to push one wave of energy against another and set them spinning, creating little dust devils swirling with leaves. When I sent sparks into it, and the leaves caught, it looked truly spectacular.

And it was truly dangerous, of course. I only did that once, and luckily the water barrels were nearby, but it definitely caught Misha’s interest. Not any more than when I used myortva to push Seryozha’s chair back when he was about to sit down, though. That was the Dasha special, and it had Misha on the floor in tears. (Seryozha, thankfully, was a good sport about it.)

I even got Zhenya and Seryozha (both considerably bulkier than I was) to agree to an arm wrestling competition. Misha did love that one, throwing himself on top of their hands, trying to push mine down.

None of this impressed Nadya. I saw her watching, but she never commented and only looked disapproving when Misha showed enthusiasm. I wasn’t going to convince her to come around. She’d have to do it on her own.

***

When I wasn’t teaching Misha or forcing my way into helping out with the daily chores and tasks, I practiced for myself. I sat out late at night, trying to force my eyes to see in the dark. I sat in the forest with my eyes closed and strained to hear every sound around me, to single out and identify them, to search for ones I did not yet hear.

I was using a lot of myortva, and the traps could barely keep up. If more of us here learned Tajna, as was the goal, they wouldn’t keep up at all. I kept looking at those bottles of returner.

*

It had been over a month—longer than I’d had with Antosha—and still I had seen neither hide nor hair of Pavel Viktorovich.

I was still sleeping in that room with Irisha, so I had plenty of opportunities to quiz her on his absence, much to her chagrin.

I’d asked nightly for the first couple of weeks, then, sensing both the futility and her increasing irritation, I scaled back my inquiries to every other day, then maybe twice a week.

The adults—Zhenya, Kseniya, Katya, and Seryozha—left sometimes and might be gone for a day or two. Three at the most. Irisha left more rarely and was never gone for longer than one night. I never knew where they were going. No one did, Irisha said, except for the ones who had to. It was safer for the rest of us that way, Irisha said. Every time, I hoped that they were going to meet Pavel Viktorovich, but I couldn’t imagine that they had. If Pavel Viktorovich knew I was here, he would have come immediately. I was sure of it. He’d want to see me one way or the other. He had to. He wouldn’t just leave me here doing nothing. He’d want to use me, or he’d want to kill me for getting his son killed.

I hadn’t thought about the second option before Nadya made it explicit that I got Antosha killed. Of course I did. But so did Pavel Viktorovich, and so did Antosha, really. I never would have ended up there without Antosha. Antosha wouldn’t like anyone else claiming responsibility for something he did himself. But grief wasn’t rational. Mine wasn’t. Mine had brought me all the way back here.

“Misha got it today,” I told Irisha as we got ready for bed. “Will you tell Pavel Viktorovich that?”

“He got what?”

“What do you mean ‘he got what’? He got myortva, the death magic. He pulled a little bit in today, but then he got so excited his concentration broke and he couldn’t find it again. But he can do it. So tell Pavel Viktorovich that, in case he thinks Antosha was a fluke or maybe that… I don’t know, Antosha was some volshebnik’s bastard. He wasn’t.”

She climbed into bed, her sparse hair wrapped in a scarf like it always was when she slept. “What do you think is going to happen when Pasha sees you?”

My brow furrowed. “What do you mean? I mean, he’ll… That’s why I came, to help, so he could tell me how I can help.”

“I told you how you can help.”

“What?”

“Pasha isn’t a knyaz, Yusha. He doesn’t have any more power than any one of us. Me telling you what we need is just as good as him telling you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard it before. We don’t have a leader.”

“Okay, but I just thought… I just wanted to talk to him, because…”

“Because you want absolution for what happened to Antosha, and you think his father is the one who can give it to you. You think if you let yourself be his father’s tool then you can compensate for his death.”

“No. I don’t want to be anyone’s tool.”

“All you’ve ever been is someone’s tool. You don’t know another way to be.”

“I came here because I didn’t want to be anyone’s tool anymore.”

“I thought you came here to help.”

“I did!”

“Then help. Keep teaching Misha. You’re doing a good job.”

“Misha is a kid. Misha can’t go fight all these volshebniks off or kill khozyains.”

“Is that all it’s for? Killing?”

“Isn’t that what’s important now?” I snapped.

“When the fighting is over, we still have to live here. We need to make a world that’s livable. That’s the world for the young. That will be Misha’s world. Your world, too, if you stay here. They need to know how to grow things, build things. Not just tear them down.”

“But we have to tear it down first. I can tear it down quicker than any of you. Most of the volshebniks are gone now; it’s only the Fadeiches. I could find any khozyain; I could kill them easily, but I’m just sitting here in the middle of nowhere, and the only one who wants my help at all is a ten-year-old boy I have to keep entertained with fart jokes!”

“If you want to go kill khozyains, you’re welcome to. No one is keeping you here.”

“That’s not the—was Knyaz Ivan giving you money? Was Knyaz Artyom?”

That got her to open her eyes and look at me. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Tsura giving you supplies to destabilize Veliko so they could take all the good grazing land once Knyaz Fadej couldn’t hold onto it anymore.”

“Oh.” She closed her eyes and put her back to me. “That makes sense.”

“That makes sense! What does that mean!”

“You think a knyaz would come down here and tell us they were going to arm us to overthrow their neighbor? You think that we’d say, ‘Sure, you can have our land after we give our lives for it’? No. But we’ve had some khozyains help us. Never did believe it was out of the goodness of their hearts. Guess they decided to bet on Knyaz Ivan.”

“Oh. Doesn’t that…” I ran my fingers through my hair, scraping my scalp with my fingernails. “Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Yes. It does worry me. But if they are going to fight us for control of this land, too, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We’ll just have to be ready for it.” She rolled halfway over. “You were waiting to ask Pasha that.”

“Yes. Do you think he knows?”

“No more than I do.”

“Unless they paid him to start this, or promised him something in return.”

She snorted. “You really do think too highly of him. He’s just one man. He didn’t start this on his own. You don’t really think that either, because I’m sure you didn’t come here to serve Knyaz Ivan.”

I sat down against the wall.

“You’re looking for everything to be a lie,” she said. “It’s not the way you expected it to be here, so you must’ve gotten fooled again. But no one here is lying to you. The truth is just messy, and no one knows all of it. Not me, not Pasha, not your aunt or Knyaz Ivan. And you never will, either. At least we miryanins know that we are not omniscient, which is more than I can say for you volshebniks.”

“The returner. Where did it come from?”

“A physician gave it to us.”

“Who? A miryanin?”

“Yes, a ‘miryanin.’”

“But who? Where are they?”

“He’s dead.”

“But how did he know what it was? If he’s a miryanin? Cause it comes from ghosts and—”

“You don’t think we’ve had plenty of occasion to see ghosts in Veliko?”

“Yeah but you need to use myortva and zhiva to get it, so I know a volshebnik had to be involved, and—”

“If you’re looking for the root of the conspiracy, you won’t find it here. We don’t have the luxury to question the provenance of the tools at our disposal. We’re trying to survive. We’re trying to create a world where we can do more than just survive. Until then, we take what we can get.”

I squeezed my eyes shut so hard I saw sparks. “What does it look like? The world you want instead?”

“It’s still messy, Yusha. You can’t get around the mess. But it will be better.”

“It’ll be good when everyone knows Tajna, right?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “But it will probably be better than what we have now. It can’t be worse.”

“So when are you going to learn?”

“I don’t think I ever will. My heart’s too hardened to it.”

“What about Nadya? Is her heart too hard?”

“Nadya is sixteen. How could her heart be too hard?”