Pavel Viktorovich’s aged face broke into a smile.
I didn’t realize until then how much I needed it. My whole body relaxed when he hugged me.
“He’s not an Aksanevich anymore,” Irisha said from the doorway. “Call him Yusha.”
“Yusha,” he said, laughter tickling the top of my head. “I knew you’d come back.”
“Inside,” Irisha repeated. “We need to get the lights out.”
Pavel Viktorovich ushered me through the door, hand between my shoulder blades.
They’d brought five more people with them, and everyone inside was up and trying to make room for the crowd. They’d brought things with them, too—a trunk and more bags than people; Tajna willing, there was some yasno in there—and the single room was packed, the air humid with our breath.
“Who’ve you taught?” Pavel Viktorovich asked, ignoring the bustle inside.
“Misha,” I said, pointing out the sleepy boy yawning in the corner. “And Nadya, but I didn’t know it at first.”
“You got Nadya to learn from you? Next, you’ll be telling me Irisha’s gonna learn Tajna, too.”
“Yeah, Nadya hates me; I guess she blames me for…” I bit my tongue and wished I’d thought to do so a second earlier.
Pavel Viktorovich patted me on the back. “You must know I don’t blame you, and I’ve told her she shouldn’t, either. Antosha brought you there, and I kept you there. I brought you outside. It’s my fault.”
I mumbled something about it not being anyone’s fault, but I couldn’t really disagree.
“We don’t need to talk about that anymore. How much do they know?”
“Nadya doesn’t like to show me what she’s doing, but Misha can send myortva out to force things back, maybe kill some small things. He’s a little wobbly focusing the energy, so he doesn’t get as much force out of it as he could, but we’re working on it. And we started uh… strength and speed and a little healing. But we can’t do much speed in the woods.”
“Amazing. That’s amazing. How is he with handling dead animals? He’s always been a little sensitive.”
“He was a little squeamish at first. Not like Antosha constantly hunting for mice.” (He chuckled.) “But he’s getting used to it.”
“Do you think Nadya knows the same things he does?”
“She’s a lot better at focusing myortva, but I only know that because she killed a bird with it to threaten me.”
He laughed again. “Of course she did.”
“Okay, but what have you been doing? I thought I would—I’m happy to see you. What have you been doing? How has it been going? How can I help? If there are ghosts somewhere—well, I need to teach more people Tajna first; I could teach you—”
“Whoa, slow down.” He was laughing an awful lot for someone with a dead son. Thankfully, I prevented myself from saying that thought out loud.
“We do have a lot to talk about.” His hand rested on my shoulder in this reassuring way, and he looked older, he had a gray lock in his hair. It was all pulled back at the nape of his neck, not like Antosha had worn his, but it was burnished at the ends like Antosha’s, he was tall like Antosha, his mouth curved like Antosha’s, his eyes were sharp and penetrating like Antosha’s. He was what Antosha would have looked like if Antosha had been allowed to grow up.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He tilted his head quizzically, mouth open. Oh, he’d been in the middle of saying something.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I just got…”
“You’re tired. Why don’t you go to sleep? We can talk tomorrow.” He squeezed my shoulder.
“No, no,” I said, trying to shake myself out of whatever trance I’d just gone into. “I’ll stay up. I want to know what’s going on.”
“Not much is going to get done tonight,” he said, gesturing at the room. There was a lot of hugging and splintered conversations like ours going on, and Zhenya was pouring from the jug of yasno. Nadya kept looking over at us, glowering. “You should go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t even asleep before you got here,” I said. “I couldn’t sleep, so I don’t know why I should be able to sleep now.” But even as I said it, I felt tired.
“You’re not sleeping well?”
“No, just sometimes. Nothing a little yasno can’t fix.” I laughed but hoped that would coax him into revealing whether they’d brought any.
“You’re a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t be using yasno to get to sleep.”
“I’m not a child. I’m almost twenty, and I’ve been drinking yasno since I was Misha’s age. Everyone does. My mother didn’t drink yasno, but I used to drink her blackberry wine, too. Or I did, once, but I thought it was disgusting. I shouldn’t bring up my mother, though, you’ll just want to talk about her.”
I liked that he laughed at my jokes. Unlike Alyoshka, I thought he actually meant it, too. “That was a bit heavy-handed, wasn’t it? I wasn’t exactly experienced at converting young volshebniks to the cause.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “You converted me in the end, didn’t you?” I thought about telling him about my ill-conceived visit to my mother’s.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was all Antosha.”
“Yeah.” I looked down at my feet.
“Thank you for coming back, Yusha. He’d be happy you did.”
“If he were still here, I never would have left.”
Pavel Viktorovich sighed heavily. “All right. If you’re not tired, let’s talk.”
So we talked, or he talked at me. He confirmed that Fadej had moved forces out of the southern part of Veliko to keep the capital in the north fortified, but it wouldn’t last long. He was trying to negotiate with Knyaz Lev in Akassiya to bring in more livestock to fuel his volshebniks. The most direct and by far the easiest route to drive livestock to the capital would be through southern Veliko, but it was suspected that they would try to avoid that, for obvious reasons, and bring them through Gorakino or Khorizova, but both had significant natural impediments, so we were on the lookout everywhere, though we couldn’t get close to the border without drawing attacks.
Most of Pavel Viktorovich’s energy was spent trying to help communities regain some sense of normalcy, which was not an easy task, and many people hated anyone who had anything to do with the rebellion. People didn’t understand that sometimes things had to get worse before they could get better, and why would they?
He struggled, sometimes, with that. If this was about giving people more agency over their own lives, how could it be done against their own will? We had to make things better, and quickly, or this would never work because…
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said, rubbing his brow.
“No, I need to hear everything. I can’t get cold feet now, anyway. Even if I could cross the border, my family knows I left, and it won’t take long for them to figure out why.”
“I don’t want you here as a captive. I don’t want you to be here because you, like those people we’re ostensibly helping, didn’t have a choice.”
“Well if I’m in a cage, it’s one I locked myself in this time. That’s agency. Can I ask you something that’s probably very rude?”
“Do you dare?” He raised his eyebrows.
“You still think this is worth it? If you could go back and stay out of it, and just live quietly somewhere with Antosha, would you?”
“This would have happened with or without me, Iyu. I didn’t conjure it from thin air. I’m not a magician like you are.” He elbowed me in the ribs. “I couldn’t help picking a side.”
“That’s it? You’re only here because you had to be, too?”
He laughed. “No, Yusha. I made a choice. Perhaps the first real one I ever made in my life. I chose to do something rather than have things done to me, and I made that choice for my son, so that one day he might live in a world where he could direct his own destiny.” He’d started this speech strong, but by the end he sounded drained and his eyes were vacant, staring out into the room. “As much as I tell myself otherwise, he didn’t choose to die the way he did. I’m scared to ask, but you were there; did he…”
“He didn’t suffer,” I said, quickly. “I was in front of him, and it… It happened really fast.” Throat exposed, face out of view. Later, blood chipping off my fingers, stains on my sleeve.
He sighed a shuddering sigh that he arrested before it became a sob. “I couldn’t give him a better life.”
“You did! I think. Maybe not a long one, but he really believed in what you were doing. He didn’t want to be anywhere else.” I nodded like my insistence would make it so. “He was happy. I think maybe the last time I ever saw anyone truly joyous was when he felt myortva for the first time.”
He smiled. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. He was so happy. I think that—it’s stupid, maybe, but I think that’s what made me believe. Seeing how happy it made him. He really believed, really.”
“And if he didn’t, he might still be alive.”
“But it was his choice. He wanted to do it, and if you told him he couldn’t, you’d just be doing to him the same thing they—we do to all of you.”
“It’s not just about choice,” he said, folding his arms on his chest and squinting at the room. “If it were, we’d have our answer. Not everyone is choosing this. It’s impossible to make everyone choose one way to run a village; how can everyone agree on one way to run an entire oblast?” He scoffed. “When you say, ‘I want to change the way things are done,’ there’s going to be some paternalism in that, because you’re saying to some of the people you want to help, ‘I know better than you.’ Even people who agree things are bad, things are unjust, they don’t trust that we can do any better, and they’re not willing to go to lengths to change the way things are. It’s hard enough just staying alive. But it’s not just about their choice, it’s about their material conditions. It’s about getting rid of the structures that allowed greedy, venal men to bleed this country dry for their personal gain, a system that determines the quality of your life based on the amount of gold you’re willing to squeeze from your neighbor, and the only way your gold means anything is if your neighbor doesn’t have any. If he wants your gold because he doesn’t have any, then it’s worth something, but if he’s happy with what he has, then what you have means nothing.” He was heated now, speaking rapidly at the empty air between the room’s crowded bodies. “Have you ever wanted for anything, Iyu Aksanevich? No, of course you haven’t. Because your family has all the gold the rest of us don’t.”
“My aunt doesn’t want her people to suffer,” I said, a knee-jerk reaction I wasn’t quick enough to catch.
“She doesn’t know her people well enough to care,” he snapped. “They’re not her people. They’re their own people.” He put his thumb to his mouth and ripped off a hangnail. Blood began to fill the crevices around his finger.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, I just—”
“Oh, don’t be sorry.” He tossed his head as though trying to shake something out of it and clapped me on the shoulder again. “That was your family. I’m sure she wasn’t cruel, personally.”
“No, she can be. She can be, but she’s had to be hard. You must know she’s the first female knyaz in over a hundred years. Not just in Khorizova but in any oblast. She can’t be weak. The standards are different for her, and if she makes one wrong move, there are cousins everywhere looking for it, who think it ought to be them or their sons on the throne instead. It’s why she’s so protective of Semchik—my cousin Semyon. Sometimes I think she’ll only be happy when she’s dead and he’s on the throne. People still say that after my father died, she killed her uncle so he couldn’t try to seize the throne.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I half-think if she did she would’ve hoisted his head on high and paraded it through the palace.”
“She sounds like quite a woman.”
“She is,” I said. “She’s… something. You know my cousin Dasha said of all of us—Semchik, Dasha, and me—that she loved me the most. She killed the volshebniks who killed Antosha and Fedya because they knew Antosha used myortva. She did it to protect me. She kept trying to protect me. Always.”
“You miss your family.”
“No, I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t any good to them, anyway, and it’s better for them if I’m gone. That’s another reason I don’t believe Aksana killed her uncle. If she did that, she would’ve killed me, too. You said back when I first got to the farmhouse that everyone was surprised she didn’t kill me when I was a kid. There were always gonna be cousins who thought they could use me, like I wouldn’t be loyal to her. So it’s better for everyone.”
“It may be better, but you still lost your family. It’s okay to miss them.”
“Antosha would be alive if it weren’t for them.”
“We could go in circles like this all night, Yusha. Now it really is time to go to sleep.”
“We haven’t even talked about what we’re going to do.”
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk tomorrow, and if I don’t go say something to Nadya, she might kill us both in our sleep.”
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