My mother still listens to me breathe.
Not every night any more. Once a week, maybe. Always late, always when she thinks the whole house is asleep. The bench creaks. Bare feet cross the boards. Then she's standing over the top of the stove, where I sleep now, between the wall and Fedya's elbows.
She puts her hand on my chest.
I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow. I've had a lot of practice at this. I'm good at it.
The hand goes warm. Then something comes out of it.
Not her hand. Something from her hand, thin as root hairs. It goes in under my ribs and spreads, branching, feeling its way, the way roots find their way through wet earth. One thread goes to my lungs. One goes to my heart. It stays there, very still, listening. Then it gives a little, warm and slow, like a spoonful of broth pushed into a sick child's mouth.
And under it, the hum gets louder.
It always does.
Sitrep, then, since it's been a while.
Date: early March, snow still on the roofs. Age: two and a bit. This will be my third spring. Mobility: excellent. I can run, climb onto the bench by myself, and reach the honey pot faster than Grandma can say my name. Speech: fluent, give or take one letter. Height: up to Grandma's elbow, when she stands still, which is never. Personnel: unchanged. Two parents, one grandmother, one sister, one brother, one spider on the ceiling who is either very old or the son of the first one.
The letter is R.
In my old life, I could roll an R like a tank engine. In this one, my tongue hasn't grown into it yet. Ryba, fish, comes out lyba. Fedya thinks this is the funniest thing in the world. Every day he makes me say it, and every day I try, and every day the fish is a lyba.
Everything else works. The words came when my mouth was ready for them, about when they come for everybody. My first one was "Mama". Fedya, who had spent the whole winter teaching me to say "Fedya", didn't speak to me for two days.
The hard part isn't the mouth. It's what comes out of it. Before every sentence, I have to ask myself: would a child my size know this? Most of the time, I ask questions instead. Children ask questions all day long, and nobody ever finds it strange. It's the best cover I've got.
The real work is the hum.
I made myself a promise, a long time ago. No more giving it orders. Watch it. Listen. Write it down. I've kept the promise. I don't have a notebook, but I don't need one. It all goes on the shelf marked MAGIC, and nothing on my shelves ever gets lost.
Here's what's on it so far.
One. When my mother's hand goes warm on my chest, the hum gets louder. Every time. Forty-one times out of forty-one. I counted.
Two. Last spring, in Lent, the seven weeks before Easter when nobody eats meat, milk or eggs, the house ate bread and cabbage and not much of either. Week by week, the hum went a little thinner. After Easter, after weeks of eggs and milk and long, lazy sleep, it slowly came back.
Three. Hard thinking and hard feeling leave a mark on it. Not much, and not all at once. The week Masha taught me every herb hanging from the rafters, and what each one is for, it was a shade deeper by the end. The day Fedya went through the ice on the pond and Papa pulled him out by the hair, the same. Only a shade. You'd miss it if you weren't counting. But it didn't go away again.
Three observations. That's not a theory. It's a list. But every theory starts as a list.
So, a working hypothesis. The hum is mine, the way my heartbeat is mine. It has something to do with the body, how it's fed and how it sleeps, and something to do with what goes on in my head. And it reacts to other people's magic, the way iron filings react when you bring a magnet near the paper.
That leaves the question I still can't answer. Can I move it myself?
Not with orders. I tried that when I was a baby, and got changed for my trouble. I've tried other ways since. Every one has ended the same: nothing, and a headache.
So this spring, I'm going to find out how other people do it.
Dasha kept her hand there longer than she needed to.
She had done this with all five of her children: let the thin roots of her magic down into a small chest, to the lungs and the heart, and listened, and given what she could spare. She knew what a small heart felt like, and small lungs, and the little heat that came the night before a cough. What she felt under her palm now was none of those things. It had been there since his first winter. It was bigger than it had been at Christmas.
She did not know what it was. Once, she had known people she could have asked. Most of them were dead.
She took her hand away, and said nothing to anyone.
The bench creaks again. I wait until her breathing goes long and slow. Then I open my eyes and look at the dark, and think.
The next afternoon, Auntie Kuzmina from next door comes over the fence with her youngest under one arm. Her face is white. The youngest is screaming. That's Vaska, who is four, and who has just grabbed the handle of a pot that was sitting too close to the fire.
"Dasha—"
"Put him on the bench. Mama, water. The cold, from the step. Masha, my bag."
My mother doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't need to. Everybody is already moving.
I'm on the floor by the stove with a wooden horse Papa made me, which I've been pretending to play with for an hour. Nobody looks at me. That's the nice thing about being small. You can sit in the front row of anything.
The last time I saw her do this, I was too small to see much more than her elbow. Now I'm two steps away, at floor level, with a perfect view. So I watch everything.
First, the water. She holds Vaska's hand in the bucket and counts under her breath, and doesn't let go when he kicks. Then the bag: the green one, the one nobody else is allowed to touch. She takes out a little clay pot. It smells of goose fat and something green and sharp. Masha holds Vaska's other arm without being asked.
Then my mother takes Vaska's hand between both of hers, and closes her eyes.
Her lips move.
I thought she'd be praying. I can just hear it, under Vaska's howling.
"Skin. And under the skin. And the little vessels. Slowly. Skin. And under—"
She isn't praying. She's listing.
Then something comes out of her fingers.
It isn't light. It isn't anything I have a word for. Thin, clear threads, like the white roots of an onion left too long in a cup of water. So that's what goes into my chest at night. I've felt it forty-one times. I've never seen it. They creep out of her fingertips and into the burn, and they don't stop at the skin. I can see them go under it. They branch, and branch again, into every corner of the blister, and the skin over them moves, very slightly, the way the ground moves over a mole.
In my old life, I saw a lot of things go into people. Shrapnel. Needles. The tube from a drip, taped down over a vein. None of them moved like this, by itself, looking for the way. I can't look away.
Nobody else looks surprised. Masha watches it the way you'd watch somebody thread a needle. Vaska stops screaming in the middle of a breath and just looks at his hand, amazed, with his mouth open.
The threads pull back into her fingers, and they're gone.
My mother lets go.
The burn is still there. It's still red, and it's still a burn. But the big white blister that was coming up across his palm has gone down to a thin, wrinkled skin, like the top of boiled milk.
"It'll peel," my mother says. Her voice sounds tired. "Keep it greased. Masha will come round tonight and do it again."
"God keep you, Dasha," says Auntie Kuzmina. "God keep you." Then, at the door, very carefully: "And Yegor's back, when you have a minute. He can't bend since the ploughing."
"Not now, Marfa." My mother is sitting down now, and she's gone the colour of the wall. "I've done my share for this month."
Auntie Kuzmina nods at once, as if that's an answer she's heard before.
Grandma pulls the bench a little closer to the stove without a word. My mother leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes, without a word, too.
I put it on the shelf.
The list she says under her breath: skin, and under the skin, and the little vessels. The cost: white face, shaking hands, eyes closed against the wall. And a word, "share". A share of what? It sounds like a ration, like bread in a hungry winter. Every month, so much and no more. And if there's a ration, somebody is handing it out. Somebody's counting.
That evening, we eat out of the one bowl, as always.
Lent food. Bread, cabbage, a radish, a little kvass. Very early in this life, I reached a verdict on this table: no protein in this house. I've had plenty of time to check. The verdict stands.
"Fedya," says my mother. "What did you do today?"
"Geese," says Fedya darkly.
"And?"
"The big one bit me. On purpose. She waited till I turned my back."
"She knows you," says Grandma.
"Masha?"
"I sorted the nettles from the dead-nettles," says Masha, "and I carried water, and I greased Vaska's hand again before supper, and Grandma says I used too much."
"She did," says Grandma. "That was a week of fat."
"You have to use enough, or it doesn't work," Masha says.
"You have to use enough so it works," says Grandma. "Not enough so the Kuzmins can fry an onion on him."
Masha is eleven now. She talks to everyone like a doctor on her rounds, and the worst of it is she's usually right.
Then Grandma puts down her spoon. She's been bursting with something all day. I could tell from the way she kneaded the bread.
"I saw the pedlar woman at the market," she says. "The one from across the river. She's just come back from the city."
"Here we go," says my father.
"She says the Tsar has called all the landlords of the province to the governor's house. Every one of them. Our master too." She lowers her voice. "To talk about the volya."
Volya. Freedom.
"Freedom for who?" says Fedya.
"For us, you goose. No more belonging to the master. No more working his fields three days a week. The steward can keep his book."
It isn't the freedom from my history textbook, with a capital letter and a flag. When Grandma says it, it's a smaller word, and heavier. It means: your days are your days. Your children are your children.
"She says a lot of things, that pedlar," says my father.
"She says we'll get land, too. Our own land."
For a moment, nobody eats. Even Fedya.
My mother is looking at the window. Not out of it; it's dark out there. At it. I've seen her do that before, when the master's sleigh went by with its silver bells.
Then Fedya remembers he has news too.
"And there's going to be an iron road," he announces.
"A what?"
"Petka says. A road made of iron, all the way from the city to the capital. So the Tsar's horses don't get stuck in the mud."
"It's not for horses," says Masha. "Petka said it's for a machine. It eats fire and runs along two iron lines, and it doesn't need horses at all."
"Then what pulls it?"
"Nothing pulls it. It pulls itself."
Fedya turns to me, the only person at the table he can still win an argument with.
"She's making it up, Kolya. Things can't pull themselves."
I know exactly what pulls itself along two iron lines. I've sat in one. The seven-fifteen from Moscow, four hours, seat 14B, next to a man who ate sunflower seeds the whole way and spat the shells into his hand.
I can't say any of that.
"Like a stove that walks?" I say.
Everybody looks at me.
"Yes!" says Masha. "That's what Petka said. It's got a fire in its belly, like a stove."
"Stoves can't walk," says Fedya.
"This one can," I say.
"Kolya doesn't know anything," says Fedya. "Kolya's two."
"And a bit," says my mother.
Grandma isn't listening. Her mind is still on the volya. Her eyes have gone bright.
"When it comes," she says, "I'm going to walk into the master's house by the front door. And sit down. Without being asked."
"And then?" says my mother.
Grandma thinks about it.
"Then I'll get up again," she says. "My knees."
My father laughs into his kvass, which splashes, which makes Fedya laugh, which makes everybody laugh. Even my mother. Even, a little, me.
And still, under the laughing, the word stays in the room. Volya. Nobody says it again that night. Nobody has to.
A week later the Lapin boy comes to the forge.
He isn't a boy any more. He's seventeen, and he has to duck under the forge door, and there's a white scar across the back of one hand, from the ash wolves. The guild badge on his coat has gone dull from being touched. He isn't a child playing at hunters now. He's the real thing, and he's a regular.
I'm on the flour sacks by the wall. That's my place in the forge: on the sacks, and not one step off them, or Papa says he'll sit on me. Masha is sweeping. Fedya is out with the geese, losing.
"Those bite heads," the Lapin boy says, "the ones you did me for the wolves. They went through the ash wolves like bread. Old Grom said he'd never seen better work this side of the river."
"Grom says that about everybody's work," says my father. "Except mine."
"He said it about yours. I was there."
My father doesn't smile. But he goes a bit slower, putting his tongs down, which is how he smiles.
What the Lapin boy wants this time is a sword. He's brought one: long, plain, bought in the city, and he wants it to stop rusting, because he's going down the river to the marsh with a party, and the marsh eats iron.
"Like that one," he says, and points at the old axe head on the wall. The grey one with the neat rows of marks, that the frost never touches. "A rust rune."
"Not on the edge," says my father.
"Why not?"
"Because you'll sharpen the edge. Every time you sharpen it, you cut the rune away. Then you've paid me for nothing." My father turns the blade over in his black hands. "Bite on the edge. Rust on the spine. That way the spine looks after the edge."
The Lapin boy thinks about it, and nods. He doesn't argue. Nobody argues with my father about iron.
He does the work at night, after the ordinary work is done.
Masha is allowed to stay up and hold the lamp. I'm allowed to stay up because nobody remembers to send me to bed, and I've learned that if I lie very still on the sacks with my eyes half closed, nobody ever does.
So I watch.
It isn't what I expected. I expected hammering, or fire, or some kind of glowing. It's quieter than that. My father sits with the blade across his knees, and he has a tiny chisel, no bigger than a nail, and a small hammer. He puts the chisel to the steel. He looks at it for a long time. Then he taps, once. Then he waits.
He looks at the steel the way the old priest looks at the book: not at the letters, at what they say.
Then another tap. Another wait.
Each cut is a hair deep. In my old life, a cut like that would do one thing. It would collect dirt. Here, after every cut, the steel goes dark along the line for a moment, as if it's wet, and then bright again, as if it's dried in the sun.
And my father goes grey.
Not all at once. A little with every cut. By the time he has done one rune on the spine, his face has gone the colour of old snow, and his hands, which can hold a horseshoe still in the fire, are shaking.
He puts the blade down and sits there for a long time, very still, staring at the wall, like a man at the end of a whole day in the hayfield.
I put all of it on the shelf. The way he looks at the steel. The waiting. The grey. The stillness after.
"Papa," I say. "Why does it go dark? The line. And then bright again?"
My father looks at me. Then at the blade. He thinks about it, which is one of the things I like about him. Most grown-ups just say "because".
"Because it's taking it," he says.
"Taking what?"
"What I give it." He rubs his eyes with the back of his wrist. "Go to sleep, Kolya."
"You have to understand the iron first," says Masha, from behind the lamp, in her doctor's voice. "That's what Mama says. You can't make a thing do something if you don't know what it is."
Masha says things like that all the time. I've always filed them under "things children say".
I take it out of that drawer and put it somewhere else.
The next day, I try it myself.
It's easy to get a piece of iron in a blacksmith's house. There are bits of it everywhere: nails, old hinges, a broken link of chain under the bench. I take a rusty nail from the pile by the forge door and a second nail to scratch with, and I go round behind the woodpile where nobody comes.
I have a perfect memory. That's not a boast; it's the one thing I've got that nobody else in this village has. I saw every stroke my father made. The angle of the chisel, the order of the cuts, the little hook at the end of the third one. I could draw that rune in my sleep.
So I draw it on the rusty nail. Or I try to. My memory is perfect. My hand is two years old. The lines come out wobbly, the little hook on the third one looks like a worm, and I have to go over it twice. In the end it's close. Closer than anybody my size has any right to.
Then I hold the nail in both hands, and I wait, the way he waited. I look at it the way he looked at it.
And then I do it the only way I know. In my old life, I never met a wizard. But I read the books and played the games, like every boy in my class, and in all of them magic was simple. You had a blue bar called mana. You spent it, and fire came out of your hands, or light, or a wall of stone out of nowhere. Mana in, energy out. No questions asked.
So I take hold of the hum and try to turn it into something. Heat. Light. Anything at all. And I try to pour it into the nail, the way you'd steer water down a ditch.
Nothing.
I try again. Slower this time. I wait longer between the strokes. I even try to go grey, which I don't think you can do on purpose.
Nothing. The rust is still rust. The nail is still a nail. The only thing I've made is a headache.
"What are you doing?"
Fedya. Of course. Fedya has a nose for anything interesting the way the geese have a nose for his ankles.
"Playing," I say.
He crouches down next to me and looks at the nail with the scratches on it.
"Are you playing forge? You're doing it wrong." He takes the nail off me. "You have to growl. Papa growls. Like this." He scratches at the nail and growls, deep in his chest, like a small bear with a cold. "Grrrrr. See? Now it's a rune."
Papa has never growled at anything in his life.
"Grrr," I say, to be polite.
"Better," says Fedya, and gives me the nail back, and goes off to tell Masha that he's teaching me to be a blacksmith.
I sit behind the woodpile with my nearly perfect, perfectly useless rune.
Maybe my lines are too wobbly. But I don't think that's it. My father's very first cut, before the rune had any shape at all, already went dark. Mine never does. Not once, not even for a moment.
A copy of the shape, it turns out, is just a shape.
My father knows something about that steel that isn't in the scratches. My mother knows something about skin that isn't in the words she says under her breath.
It isn't that I don't know about steel, or skin. I could tell them both a thing or two. What rust is, and why it eats iron and leaves gold alone. What carbon does inside steel. How many layers skin has, and what a blister really is. It's all there, on the shelves from my old life, every lecture and every page.
But those are the chemistry shelves. This is magic. I keep them in different rooms.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, under Mechanism unknown, I add a line.
Not the shape. Something else.
The steward comes at the end of March. He isn't due till the summer.
Every time he comes, the house goes to war to hide what little it has. This time, there's nothing to hide. It's Lent. The honey is long gone, and the goose is safe until Easter.
"Let him look," says Grandma. "Even the mice are fasting."
He's the same man, in the same coat of smooth town cloth, with the same book under his arm. Uncle Kirill the elder comes in behind him and finds his usual spot on the floor to look at. The ink isn't frozen this time. It's only sulky. The steward breathes on it twice and gets started.
The quit-rent. The poll tax. The dues on the forge. He reads them out in the same voice as before, like a priest reading the names of the dead, and my father puts the coins on the table one by one.
The steward holds his little brass box over each coin. Click. Click. Click.
When I was a baby, I could only hear the clicks. Now I can see the box. The stone set in its lid is the size of a pea, grey and cloudy, like a pearl that went wrong. Every time it passes over a good coin, something in the cloud of it turns over, very slowly, like smoke in a jar.
Click. Good coin. That's what it does. It isn't how it does it.
In my first week at university, our general chemistry professor, Lev Arkadyevich, played a trick on the whole lecture hall. "Hands up," he said, "who knows how a zip works?" Every hand in the hall went up. "Good. Come down here and explain it to me. The teeth, the slider. Why it holds, and why it opens." Every hand went down again. "That," he said, "is the difference between seeing a thing and understanding it. Write it on the inside of your skulls."
I wrote it there. I just haven't been reading it.
The box isn't the mechanism. The stone isn't the mechanism. Behind the woodpile, I learned that the shape of a thing is only its outside. So what's inside this one? What in that grey cloud can tell a good coin from a clipped one, or a false one? The weight? Something in the metal itself? Or something in the man who holds the box?
I don't know. But now I know what the question is.
The Kuzmins have a little stone too. It lives inside their Christmas star, and they take it out once a year. I'd bet my Easter egg it's the same kind. The steward carries his in a brass box. The Kuzmins keep theirs for best. We have none.
Then the steward stops reading.
He turns the page. He looks at the next one for a while, as if he doesn't like it, and when he speaks again his voice is different. Stiffer. The voice of a man reading something somebody else wrote.
"By the gracious manifesto of His Imperial Majesty, given at his crowning," he reads, "arrears owed by the peasant estate are forgiven. And the master, in his kindness, has chosen to follow His Majesty's example." He clears his throat. "Your arrears to the estate, Stepan, are struck out. All of them. From the year of the bad harvest on."
He takes his pen and draws a line through something in the book. One line. It makes a small scratching sound.
Nobody says anything.
"Read that again," says Grandma.
The steward looks at her. "I thought you were deaf, Grandmother."
"Only to bad news."
He reads it again.
My father looks at the line through his name for a long time. Then he puts both hands flat on the table, slowly, as if he's checking that the table is still there.
"God keep His Majesty," he says. That's all.
Grandma gets up. She goes to the red corner, to the smoky print of the Tsar between the saints, and she bows to it. Low, the way she bows to the icons. When she straightens up, her eyes are wet, and she doesn't wipe them.
Everybody in the house is happy.
I'm happy too. That's what bothers me.
Because I know this feeling. I know it exactly. The thirty-first of December, my grandmother's flat, the television turned up loud for the President's New Year speech. My grandmother wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron at the end, every single year. And me, at twelve, wiping mine, and hoping nobody saw. Somebody up there remembered us.
It's the best feeling a state can give you. It costs the state one line of ink.
My mother hasn't moved. She's watching the steward's pen, the way she always does.
"And the master's days?" she says. "For the spring?"
The master's days are the days we work his land instead of our own. Ploughing his fields, cutting his hay, digging his ditches. Nobody pays us for them. That's what being his means.
The steward closes the book.
"From St George's day, four a week," he says. "Every working hand in the house."
"It was three."
"It's four this year. The master wants the lower meadow cleared. Stumps out, stones out, a ditch along the road."
"The lower meadow?" My mother frowns. "Nobody's touched that meadow in twenty years. Why now?"
The steward looks at her a moment too long. "That's the master's business." He stands up, and puts his ink in his pocket. "God keep you."
Four days on the master's land. Two left for our own. In spring, when everything has to go into the ground at once.
Uncle Kirill follows him out. At the door he looks back at my father, and opens his mouth, and shuts it again, and goes.
In the red corner, under the smoke, the Tsar's crown catches a little light from the window. Grandma is still standing in front of it with her hands folded.
My father hasn't moved either. His hands are still flat on the table, as if he's afraid that if he lifts them, the line in the book will rub out.
The river goes at the beginning of April, at night.
I'm asleep on the stove. Then I'm not asleep, and I'm not on the stove. I'm under the bench, flat on my face on the floor, with my hands over my head, and I don't remember getting there.
Because I know that sound. A deep crack, so big you feel it in your teeth. Then another. Then a long grinding roar, like something enormous being dragged across the world.
One-five-two, says my body. Incoming. Get down. Stay down.
My head knows better. My body doesn't care what my head knows.
Then hands. My mother's. She pulls me out from under the bench and holds me against her, and I can feel how hard I'm shaking, all of me, like a wet dog.
"Shh. Shh. It's only the ice," she says into my hair. "It's only the river waking up."
The river. Not a gun. The ice on the river, breaking.
I know that. I knew it before she said it.
I keep shaking anyway, for a long time. To her, I'm just a small boy frightened by a big noise in the night. She walks me up and down in the dark until it stops.
In the morning, the whole village goes down to the bank to watch.
It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in this life.
The river, which all winter was a flat white road, is moving. All of it. Great plates of ice as big as houses, grey and white and dirty-yellow, are sliding past, grinding into each other, climbing on top of each other, standing up on their edges and falling over with a crash that you feel in your feet. Between them the water is black and fast. Bits of the winter go by on the ice: a sledge somebody left out, a broken fence, a frozen haystack, and, sitting very upright on one floe, a dog, looking deeply offended.
On the far side, the hill with the city on it stands over all of this as if none of it is any of its business.
"Grandfather's coming up," says somebody.
The fishermen are standing apart from everybody else, at the edge of the bank. There are four of them, and they've all taken their caps off.
At first I don't see anything. Just ice and water. Then, in a gap between two floes, the black water bulges.
A back comes up. Black and smooth and wide, as wide as a fishing boat turned upside down. Then a head, flat as a shovel, with a mouth that could take Fedya in one go, and two whiskers trailing from it as long and thick as mooring ropes. The whiskers move on the surface by themselves, feeling about, like the fingers of a blind man.
A dead sheep is floating in the gap. Somebody's sheep, drowned under the ice in some winter flood. The mouth opens, and the sheep is gone.
Then the back sinks, and the ice closes over the place, and the river goes on as if it had never happened.
The fishermen put their caps back on.
Under the ice, the catfish went back down into the dark, where the river was deepest and slowest. It had been down there since the autumn, not moving, while the cold sat on top of it. It was older than the church. It was older, probably, than the village. Every spring, when the ice broke, it came up to eat what the winter had drowned, and the fishermen took their caps off for it, and did not say its name on the water. They called it Grandfather. Nobody alive remembered why.
"Did you see?" Fedya is pulling at my arm so hard he nearly pulls it off. "Did you see? Kolya, did you see?"
"I saw," I say. "Fedya, how old is he? What does he eat in winter? Why didn't the ice squash him?"
Fedya has no idea. Nobody on the bank has any idea. I'm trying to work out how much a thing that size has to eat, and where it gets it, and why the ice didn't kill it. There are no answers on any of my shelves. A catfish like that is a fairy tale. But my mother is holding my hand, and the fishermen took their caps off, and the sheep is definitely gone.
Further along the bank, the young men are standing together, the way young men stand together in every village in every century: hands in pockets, kicking at things.
Petka from next door is with them. Petka is eighteen now, with a beard he's very proud of and nobody else is.
"My uncle came home last week," one of them is saying. "From the military settlement. Nine years he was there, drilling with a rake in one hand and a musket in the other. They've closed them down. All of them. They've sent everybody home."
"The Tsar's mercy," says another.
"And no levy for three years. No recruits taken. My mother lit a candle for it."
"Three years," says somebody else. "Then it comes back. Twenty-five years in the army, Petka. Then you come home with no teeth, and your wife's married the miller."
"I haven't got a wife."
"That's what I'm saying. Lucky."
"I'm not waiting for the levy anyway," says Petka. "Gavrila says another year, and I can go out with a real party. Or I'll go and build the iron road. They say the Department pays in silver."
The others laugh at him. But they're all of them listening.
I watch them from the height of their belts.
Boys who are glad, deep in their bellies, not to be soldiers. Lighting candles for it. In my old life, I'd have laughed at boys like these. I signed my contract myself. Nobody came for me with a book. I went and found the book and signed it.
The ice goes grinding past. On the other side, the city on its hill doesn't look at any of us.
When the ice is gone, the mud comes.
There's a word for it, rasputitsa, the season without roads. My grandmother taught it to me in my old life. The last time I thought of it, I was in a field in another country, pulling my leg out of a hole that wanted to keep it.
That was a different mud. That mud had an appetite.
This mud only has bad manners. It takes your boot, and then, if you pull hard and say a prayer, it gives it back.
On dry ground I can run anywhere. In this, I sink to the knee and leave my boots behind. So Masha carries me on her back, tied on with her shawl, the way she used to carry me to the forge. I'm much heavier than I was. She tells me so every fifty steps.
"You're like a sack of turnips."
"I'm not a turnip."
"You're a turnip with opinions."
Fedya walks ahead of us, testing the mud with a stick and then going in anyway. Ten days after the river goes, Grandma sends us to the crossroads for honey. We go the long way round, which Masha says is because the short way is too muddy, and which is really because the long way goes past the guild hall.
This is the first time I've seen the whole village properly.
It is bigger than I thought. One long street running along the high bank, with the church at one end on its little hill and the mill at the other, by the stream. The houses stand gable-end to the street, grey log walls and carved window frames, each with its yard and its fence and its dog. Between the houses, gardens, all black mud and old cabbage stalks. Smoke from every roof. Behind the church, on the higher ground across the stream, there's the master's house, which is the only house in the village that's painted, and the only one with glass in every window.
People are working. A man on his porch is carving spoons, a heap of white shavings round his feet. Two women at the well. An old man mending a net across his knees. A girl about Masha's age with a baby on her hip and another one holding her skirt. Nobody is doing nothing. Even the old men sitting on the bench outside the church are plaiting bark for shoes while they argue.
Everybody's clothes are the same grey and brown, the same homespun, and all of it has been mended so often that it's more mend than shirt. In my old life, somebody would call it a look. Here it's called April.
At the crossroads, where the road to the ferry meets the street, there are two buildings facing each other. One of them is the traktir, the tea house. The other is the kabak, the tavern. Masha takes us to the first one. Nobody takes children to the second.
The traktir has a carved sign with a bee on it, and a bench outside, and beehives behind it in a row, wrapped in straw for the winter. Inside, it's warm and steamy and smells of honey and wet sheepskin. There's a big brass samovar on the counter, the first one I've seen in this life, and a man behind it.
The man behind it is about as tall as Fedya.
He has a grey beard cut square at the bottom, and round cheeks, and a waistcoat with four brass buttons on it, the only buttons in the whole village that aren't made of wood. He's standing on a box to reach the samovar tap.
"Masha!" he says. "And the brother. And the other brother, the little one, the one who stares."
"Good day, Uncle Shmelev."
Shmelev the halfling keeps the tea house. He kept it before my mother was born, Masha says, and his father kept it before him. He fills Grandma's jar with honey from a barrel, and he weighs it very exactly on a little brass scale, and then, when he's finished weighing it, he puts in another spoonful.
"For the stare," he says, and winks at me.
On the way out, Masha bends her head to whisper.
"The Shmelevs don't belong to anybody," she says. "Halflings can't. There's a law. It's older than the Tsar's grandfather."
"Why?"
"Because there was a war," says Fedya, who knows everything. "And the halflings won."
"There wasn't a war. There was an agreement."
"An agreement is a war that's too lazy to fight."
I look back through the steamy window at Shmelev on his box, laughing at something a customer said.
He pays rent for his roof to the master, Masha says, the way you'd rent a room in a town. When the steward comes to the crossroads, Shmelev gives him tea. Then he charges him for it.
Somebody in this village isn't in the master's book.
I didn't know anybody was allowed.
At the back of the traktir, round a long table, a group of men are listening to the deacon from the church read aloud from a newspaper. The deacon is a young man with a thin beard who yawns at everything: christenings, funerals, the news. He's yawning now, between paragraphs.
"...the noble committee of the province," he reads, "has completed its first session on the question of improving the way of life of the landlords' peasants—"
"Improving," says one of the men. "That means land."
"It means they'll improve us right off our fields," says another.
"It means," says the deacon, "that they had a meeting." He yawns again. "Do you want the next bit or not?"
They want the next bit.
Across the road, outside the kabak, three men are standing in front of a board nailed up by the door. Somebody has painted new prices on it.
"Forty kopecks a measure," says one. "Last spring it was twenty."
"New man bought the vodka rights off the city. He's the master's cousin, they say."
"For forty, I'd sooner drink the river."
Masha pulls me away before I can hear any more.
The guild hall is the last building before the river road. It's long and low and very old, with a roof of grey shingles, and two of Gavrila's dogs asleep in the mud outside it like a pair of fallen haystacks. One of them opens an eye at Fedya and shuts it again.
Inside, it's dark and warm and loud. It smells of leather and smoke and dog and that other thing, the sharp clean smell like the air after a thunderstorm, the smell that always hangs about Gavrila's coat. Here the whole building smells of it.
There's a rug on the floor by the stove, made from a grey pelt. The pelt is the colour of a dead fire. And the floorboards under the edge of it have gone grey too, a little, as if ash has been sifting out of the fur for years and hasn't finished.
"The first one the Lapin boy brought in," says Masha, very quietly.
Then a voice like a barrel falling down the stairs:
"MASHA! FEDYA! AND MY GODSON!"
Uncle Gavrila, my godfather, gets a little greyer every year and never one bit quieter. He picks me up off Masha's back, shawl and all, and holds me up in the air in front of his face.
"Look at him. Look at those eyes. He's going to be trouble."
"He's already trouble," says Masha.
"Good. The good ones are."
He puts me on a bench by the wall, next to a crate. And that's when I see Grom.
He's sitting on the end of the same bench, mending a pack strap with an awl. I know at once it's him, though nobody's said his name. He looks up, and gives me a nod, as if I'm somebody he'd nod to.
He's short. Shorter than Masha. That's not what stops me.
I've seen short men. There was a boy at my school, Seryozha Ignatov in class 5B, who was born with short bones: his arms and legs never grew to match the rest of him, and he had a big head and short, strong fingers, and he was the best chess player in the school. I sat next to him for two years. I know that shape.
Grom isn't that shape.
Everything about him is in proportion. His arms are the right length for his body. His hands are the right size for his arms. His head is the right size for his shoulders. Only everything is shorter and wider and thicker, as if he was built to a different plan from the start. He isn't a short man. He's a different shape of man, the way a badger isn't a short dog.
His beard is white and thick, plaited in two, with a little iron ring at the end of each plait. His face has the deep lines of a very old man. But the skin between the lines is smooth and brown, like a young man's who works outdoors, and his eyes, under his white brows, are as quick and bright as Fedya's.
When he finishes the strap, he stands up and picks up the crate next to me. It's a crate of iron spikes. I saw two of the Lapin boy's friends carry it in between them, grunting. Grom picks it up by himself, tucks it under one arm like a loaf of bread, and walks off with it to the back of the hall.
A hundred and ninety years old, my father once said at supper. That's young, for a dwarf.
Not a nickname. Not a short old liar. A dwarf. A whole other people, with their own plan.
I put it on the shelf. This time, I don't put a question mark next to it.
When Grom comes back, he stops in front of my bench and looks at me. He looks for quite a long time. Long enough that I remember I'm supposed to be a child, and pick my nose.
"This one," he says to Masha, "looks at things the way a jeweller looks at stones."
"He's just nosy," says Masha.
"Nosy is how it starts," says Grom, and goes back to his straps.
Across the hall, Petka is sweating.
He's sitting at a table with a splinter of wood in front of him, a plain pine splinter of the kind Fedya lights the house with at night, and he's staring at it so hard his eyes are watering. Gavrila is standing behind him with his arms folded.
"Nothing's happening," says Petka.
"Because you're thinking about fire," says Gavrila.
"I'm supposed to be making fire."
"Fire is the end of the story, boy. You can't start a story at the end. Stop thinking about fire. Think about what's burning."
"Wood."
"And what does the wood do, when it burns?"
Petka thinks about it. "It gets hot?"
Gavrila looks up at the ceiling, like a man asking God for patience and not expecting to get any. Then he takes the splinter out of Petka's hand.
He doesn't wave his hands. He doesn't say a word. He just looks at the end of the splinter, the way my father looked at the steel, the way my mother looked at Vaska's hand. The end of the splinter goes brown. Then black. Then a thread of smoke comes off it, and then, quietly, a little yellow flame.
Gavrila lights his pipe with it, and gives the splinter back.
"Again," he says.
I sit very still on my bench.
Think about what's burning.
Wood is cellulose. Long chains of sugar, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, all locked together. Fire is those chains coming apart and meeting the oxygen in the air, too fast, and letting go of the energy that was holding them together. I could write the equation on the wall of this guild hall. I could balance it with my eyes shut.
Gavrila doesn't know the equation. I'd bet my life he's never heard of cellulose.
But he knows it's a story. He knows it has a beginning, and you have to start there.
My father, waiting between each cut, looking at the steel. My mother, under her breath: skin, and under the skin, and the little vessels. And Gavrila: think about what's burning.
None of them is looking at the hum. That's what I've been doing wrong. Behind the woodpile, I copied the shape, and then I tried to be a wizard from a game: grab the hum and turn it straight into heat, or light, or anything. Maybe somebody can do that. Somebody big, with a hum like a river. Not a boy with a hum like a thread. And none of them even tries. They're all thinking about the thing itself. The steel. The skin. The wood. What it is. How it works. What's inside it.
The hum is only the fuel. The real work is somewhere else, and it's much bigger than I thought. You don't just need to know where the energy goes. You need to know everything it's going into.
They're all understanding something.
The chemistry shelves and the magic shelf were never in different rooms. I put them there myself.
And understanding things is the only thing I've ever been good at.
My heart is going very fast. Under it, the hum stirs a little, like a dog that has heard its name.
The door bangs. The Lapin boy comes in, with mud to the knee, and two other hunters behind him.
"Gavrila. Saw something on the high road beyond the ferry."
"Wolves?"
"Department men. From the city. Green coats, the lot of them." He takes off his hat and beats the mud off it on his leg. "They've got a little brass thing on three legs, with a stone in it that shines in broad daylight. One of them looks through it. Another walks off across the field with a striped pole. Then they write in a book."
"Measuring," says Grom, from the back.
"For the iron road, they're saying."
"Through the marsh?" Gavrila snorts. "The marsh will eat their iron and ask for more."
"They didn't look worried."
"Men from the city never look worried," says Gavrila. "That's how you know they're from the city."
Masha takes me home on her back, through the bad-mannered mud. She complains every fifty steps about the turnips.
I don't hear a word of it. I'm thinking about what's burning.
I wait for the right morning.
It comes four days later: a clear, cold dawn after a clear night, the kind that leaves a last frost on everything. Masha is at the well. Fedya is out with the geese. Grandma is inside with the bread, and my mother and father have gone to the field. For once, nobody is watching me.
I go out into the garden behind the house, in my shirt and my too-big felt boots, and squat down by the cabbage bed.
There's frost on the old cabbage stalks. Each one has a thin white fur of it, little needles of ice standing up off the leaves, glittering. I choose one leaf. I put my finger very close to the frost on it, close enough to touch, and don't touch.
I don't look at the hum this time.
Think about what's burning.
Except nothing here is burning. So: think about what's cold.
Frost is water. Water molecules, millions upon millions of them, each one a fat oxygen atom with two small hydrogen atoms hanging off it, like a head with two ears. When they're warm, they tumble about and slide past each other. When they're cold enough, they stop tumbling and lock together, hand in hand, into a pattern. Six-sided, like a honeycomb. That pattern is ice. That's why every snowflake has six points.
And heat isn't a substance. It isn't something you pour in. Heat is movement. It's those molecules shaking. Make them shake hard enough, and they let go of each other's hands, and the honeycomb falls apart, and the ice is water again.
I know the number, too. Page 61 of my first-year physical chemistry book, the table in the middle of the page. To melt one gram of ice, you need three hundred and thirty-four joules. And a little fur of frost on one cabbage leaf weighs, what? A milligram? Less?
A third of a joule. Less than the spark from a cheap lighter.
That's all I need. Not fire. Not a miracle. Just to make a few million very small things shake a little harder.
I don't push. I don't squeeze. I hold the picture in my head, as clearly as I can. The honeycomb. The shaking. The hands letting go. I hold it the way my father held the chisel on the steel and waited.
And under my ribs, the hum changes.
It doesn't get louder. It gets thinner. Just a little, like one cup dipped out of a full bucket. And the cup is somewhere in my hand.
My fingertip goes warm.
Under it, the white fur on the cabbage leaf goes grey. Then clear. Then it's gone, and there's a drop of water sitting on the leaf, round and shining, with the sky in it.
One drop.
I stare at it. It sits there. It doesn't care that it's the most important drop of water in the world.
I did that.
And it cost almost nothing.
I check, the way you check your pockets after a crowd. The hum under my ribs is a little thinner, the way the house is a little cooler after somebody opens the door. That's all. No dizziness. No grey face. My father went the colour of old snow over one rune. I've just done magic, and I feel like a boy who has squatted in a cabbage bed for too long.
Why so cheap? Because a drop is small? Or because I knew exactly what I was asking for, down to the number? I don't know yet. One drop isn't an answer. It's a question.
So I do another leaf.
It goes quicker. The picture comes faster this time, as if it remembers the way. The frost goes grey, then clear, and there's a second drop next to the first.
Then a third leaf. Then the whole cabbage stalk, top to bottom. Then the next cabbage, and the one after that. I'm laughing under my breath. I can't help it. Twenty-three years in one life and two in this one, and here I am, squatting in the mud with my tongue between my teeth, melting cabbages one by one like a child popping soap bubbles. Which, to be fair, is what I am.
Each one is cheap. That's the trap. Each one is a coin out of a full purse, and you don't hear the purse getting lighter.
By the end of the row, I notice I've been yawning. My arms feel like wet rope. The cold has got into my felt boots, and I don't remember when. I try to stand up, and my legs think about it and decide not to.
So I sit down in the mud between the cabbages. Just for a moment. The sun is on my face, and the hum is a thin, quiet thread, the thinnest it's been since Lent began, and my eyes are closing all by themselves.
Then I feel eyes on me.
The goose is standing at the gap in the fence.
She's the big one, the one who bites Fedya. She's looking at me with one eye. Then she turns her head and looks at me with the other one, the way geese do when they want to be sure.
She saw. I'm almost certain she saw.
She opens her beak and honks once. Short. Like an accusation.
"Kolya!" Grandma, from the door. "What are you doing in the mud?"
"Looking at the frost," I say.
"Look at it from the house, like a Christian." She comes and picks me up under one arm, mud and all. "Look at you. You're white as a sheet. Are you sick?"
"I'm tired, Grandma."
"Tired? You've been up an hour. What have you done to be tired?" She puts her palm on my forehead, then on my cheek. "No fever." She gives me a long look. "You look like your father after a rune."
I keep my mouth shut. If I open it, something true might fall out.
She puts me up on the stove, and I sleep until dinner like a stone.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, the line that said Not the shape now has a second line under it.
Understanding. Heat is motion. One drop. Then a whole row.
Next to it, a smaller label that I've had to make myself, because nobody in this house has ever needed it. Cost: small, for one drop. But small costs add up, and the body only tells you afterwards.
But it worked.
Two days later, Fedya takes me with him to the geese. The geese go down to the lower meadow, the master's meadow, by the road, where the grass is coming up green through last year's dead brown. Fedya says I'm there to help. What I'm there to do is sit on a stump while he runs after them, swearing in words that would get him a spoon across the knuckles if Grandma heard.
There are people in the meadow.
Not our people. Strangers. Four men in long green coats with brass buttons, and a cart at the edge of the road with a horse dozing between the shafts.
One of the men is standing behind a thing on three tall wooden legs. On top of the legs there's a brass box, polished bright, with a short tube sticking out of the front of it. And set into the top of the box there's a stone.
It's shining.
Not reflecting. Shining. It's broad daylight, and the sun is out, and that stone is giving off its own light, small and steady and white, almost blue. Like the Kuzmins' Christmas star. Like the lights on the top of the hill across the river, the ones I saw through the hole in the frost. It doesn't flicker. Not once.
Far away across the meadow, a second man is holding up a long pole painted in red and white stripes. The man at the box bends and looks through the tube at the pole. He says a number. A third man, sitting on the tail of the cart, writes it down in a book.
Another book.
Then they pick up the three-legged thing and move it fifty steps along, and set it up, and do it again.
"They're measuring," says Fedya, who has come back without any geese. He says it like an expert. "For the iron road. Petka says."
"Will it come here?" I ask. "Right here?"
"It's going to go right through here. Right through the master's meadow. Petka says the master's going to get paid a pile of silver for it, as tall as a horse."
The lower meadow. The one we're going to spend four days a week clearing, from St George's on. Why now? my mother asked, and the steward wouldn't say.
Now I know.
The man at the brass box straightens up and stretches. He takes off his cap and scratches his head. Then he yawns, wide, like the deacon at the traktir.
He isn't concentrating. He isn't waiting between strokes, or listing anything under his breath. He isn't going grey. He's bored. He's a clerk, standing in a field, wishing it was dinner time. And the stone in his box shines and shines, all by itself, and does whatever it does, and he doesn't have to understand one thing about it.
Two days ago, one row of frosty cabbages put me to sleep in the mud. And I know exactly what heat is. I could write it on the wall.
Over there, a man who's yawning is measuring the whole world with a stone.
The geese come back on their own, in a long grey line, honking. Fedya swears at them and goes to count them. The man at the box puts his cap back on. The pole goes on along the meadow, and the book fills up with numbers.
And the little white light on the three-legged thing goes on shining across the master's meadow, all afternoon, without once flickering.
That Sunday is Palm Sunday. Here they call it Willow Sunday, because there are no palms within a thousand miles and the willow is the first thing to bloom. Father Ivan blesses everybody's willow branches, and everybody takes them home and puts them up over the door.
On the way home, Grandma whips us with hers, for health. "It's not me hitting, it's the willow hitting!" Fedya runs. Masha catches him by the collar and holds him still, very calmly, so Grandma can get him properly, and Fedya howls as if he's being murdered. I get three soft taps on the backside and a lot of catkin fluff in my hair.
The next morning, there's frost on everything in the yard. Everything except the willow over our door. Its catkins are soft and grey and dry, as if it's a spring morning somewhere warmer.
Gavrila's dogs, who don't breathe smoke in the cold. The old axe head in the forge. And now the willow, with Father Ivan's blessing on it.
Same rule. Whatever it is.
A week later, it's Easter.
The whole village walks to the church in the dark, before midnight, every family together, carrying candles. The street is a long, slow river of little flames. My father carries me, because I'm too small to keep up and too awake to leave behind. I wouldn't have stayed behind for anything.
In my old life, I did this every year. The cathedral in my city, the crowd spilling out into the frost, the bells. My grandmother's hand in mine.
Inside, the church is packed so tight you can't lift your arm. It's dark except for the candles, hundreds of them, and the air is thick with wax and incense and sheepskin. At midnight, Father Ivan comes out through the doors behind the altar. The whole church follows him outside, singing, and goes round the building in the dark with the candles.
Fedya's candle blows out at the first corner. He looks as if the world has ended. Masha tips her candle to his without a word, and his flame comes back, and he carries it the rest of the way in both hands, like an egg.
Then we're all back at the closed doors.
And Father Ivan, in his thin old voice, says the words.
"Christ is risen!"
And the whole village shouts back, as loud as it can:
"Truly, He is risen!"
The same words. The same answer. Exactly as I said them every year in my old life, with my grandmother beside me. Exactly. The words haven't moved a letter.
I shout them too, the way they sound in this church: Voistinu voskrese. Except my tongue still can't manage the R, so what comes out is voskLese. Nobody notices. Everybody is shouting.
Then the bells go, and everybody kisses everybody three times, even people who don't like each other, even the miller and the man whose fence the miller moved. Uncle Kirill kisses my father. Shmelev the halfling, who has come up from the crossroads in his best waistcoat, stands on a bench to kiss Gavrila. Gavrila kisses everybody, including, I think, a horse.
It's the warmest I've been since I was born.
At home, there's food. Real food.
There are eggs, dyed brown-red in onion skins, a whole bowl of them. There's a kulich, the tall Easter bread, which Grandma and my mother have been guarding for two days like soldiers guarding a bridge. There's a little white curd cheese, sweet, pressed into a pyramid. There's a piece of salt pork, sliced thin as paper, so that it'll go round.
My mother peels an egg and puts half of it in my hand.
I look at it for a long time.
Egg white. Albumin. Ovalbumin, mostly, plus a dozen others. The yolk: fat, and more protein, and iron.
There is protein in this house. It's been hiding since Lent began, and it's red on the outside.
I eat it very slowly.
The next morning, the hum is a little stronger.
Only a little. A bit deeper under my ribs than yesterday, that's all. Last year, it took weeks after Easter to come back strong: weeks of eggs and milk and long nights, and no more fasting. One feast and one night's sleep won't undo seven weeks of Lent. Observation two says so. Good things only count when they keep coming.
I know all that. And then I make a mistake anyway.
Because I'm full of Easter, and full of the bells, and full of pride about my row of cabbages. And somewhere at the back of my head, a little white light is still shining over the master's meadow, held up by a man who yawns. I think: a whole row of frost only put me to sleep. Nothing bad happened. Today I can do something a little bigger.
There's ice on the water trough in the yard. Not frost. A real skin of ice, thin as glass, all across the top, from the last cold night.
It's more than frost. But I don't want the whole trough. Just one corner, a hand's width. Just to see.
I go out while everybody is still asleep after the feast. I put my hand flat on the ice, in the corner.
Honeycomb. Shaking. Hands letting go.
It goes faster this time. A ring of clear water opens under my palm, small and round, and the ice around it goes grey and soft. The hum drains out through my hand in a thin, steady trickle. Not much. Less than the cabbages, even. It knows the way now.
The corner melts. Cold, clear water laps at my fingers.
That's my corner. That's enough.
And something in me says no.
It isn't a voice. It's more like a hand on the back of my neck, pushing. Keep going. The whole trough. You can. Don't stop now. Don't give in. Never give in.
It feels like me. It feels exactly like me: the stubborn part, the part that kept me walking at the front when other men sat down in the mud and didn't get up. Only bigger than it's ever been. Hungrier.
I know that feeling. I don't know it like this.
I take my hand off the ice.
It's harder than it should be. My hand doesn't want to come. For a moment, I have to pull it away, the way you pull a boot out of the mud. Then it's free, and I'm sitting back on my heels by the trough, breathing hard, with my wet hand held against my chest.
The feeling doesn't go at once. It sulks for a while, like Fedya when he loses. Then it's gone, and I'm just a small boy in a cold yard, with one melted corner of a water trough in front of him.
I'm tired, but only the ordinary kind, like after a long walk. That isn't the part that frightens me.
That afternoon, I fall asleep on the stove before anybody else has finished eating. Before I drift off, I lie on the warm bricks and think about the trough.
About the part of me that didn't want to stop.
I've always been stubborn. My grandmother in my old life said I came out of my mother arguing. It's mine. I know it. I've had it all my life.
But by the trough, it was bigger than me. Just for a moment, it was pushing, and I had to push back.
And I hadn't even spent much. The row of cabbages cost me more, and nothing pushed me then. So why now? Because the hum is still low after Lent? Because I was too excited to keep my head? I don't know. I don't like not knowing.
Matryona the midwife talks all the time, Masha said once. She always talked a lot. Now she can't stop.
It makes you funny, Masha said, if you do too much.
I lie very still on the warm bricks, and for the first time since the hospital, I'm frightened of what's inside my own head.
On the shelf, next to the label that says Cost, I add a line. Small, but in capitals.
NOT ONLY TIREDNESS.
And under it, smaller still: Next time, slowly. Watch yourself, not only the ice.
When I wake up, it's evening, and Fedya is climbing up on the stove with his hands behind his back.
"I saved you something," he says.
He brings it out. Half a red egg, cracked all over and slightly squashed on one side. He's been carrying it around in his shirt all afternoon.
"You were asleep when Grandma gave out the second eggs," he says. "So I saved you mine. I was going to save you all of it. But it's been a long afternoon."
"Thank you, Fedya," I say. Then, because that isn't enough: "Next Easter, I'll save you half of mine."
"Next Easter? That's a whole year!"
"I'll remember."
"You won't," says Fedya. "You're two. You don't remember anything." But he's grinning, as wide as his face.
I put it on the shelf. Next Easter. Half an egg. Fedya.
He's wrong, of course. I've never forgotten anything in my life.
I lie on the stove and eat Fedya's squashed half, very slowly, and it's the best egg anybody ever had.