The water in the crater is up to my chest.
It's brown and cold, and it tastes of iron and earth. The walls are mud. Over the lip, the sky is low and grey, and something is hanging in it. A little black cross, with a propeller at each corner. Buzzing. Patient. Looking down at me.
I know what it is. I know what it's carrying.
I try to climb out. My legs won't push. My arms fold under me like wet paper, and I slide back down into the water. Saint Nicholas is in my hand, in his tape, with blood on him. I hold him up, as if he could stop it.
I don't want to die.
I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
The little cross tips forward.
There's no sound.
Then the pain comes.
It doesn't come into me. It comes out of me, from everywhere at once, as if every part of my body has caught fire at the same moment and is screaming in its own voice. My legs. My arms. My face. There's no room left in me for anything else. No thought. No prayer. Not even my own name. I'm not a man with pain in him. I'm only the pain. It goes on and on, and it doesn't care that I'm begging.
Then things start to go.
My ears first. A high, thin ringing, and then not even that. Then my eyes. Everything goes grey. The dark comes in from both sides, slowly, until there's only a thin line of grey left in the middle. Then that goes too. Then the smell of the mud. Then the cold of the water.
Last of all, the pain.
It doesn't stop. It goes away. Further and further, like a train you hear going off across a marsh at night. Smaller and smaller, until you can't tell any more if you're still hearing it or only remembering it.
And then there's only the dark.
It's soft.
That's what surprises me. I always thought death would be cold, or loud, or full of fire. It isn't. It's soft and dark, like sinking into deep warm water with your eyes shut. Nothing hurts. Nothing wants anything from me. No drone. No orders. No mud.
Oh, I think. So this is it.
It's all right. It's really all right. I let go of everything at once, and I let myself sink.
I sink for a long time.
Then I notice that I'm still here.
The dark hasn't ended. It isn't going to end.
Somewhere, a long way off, there's a body. Mine. I can feel it the way you feel an arm you've slept on. Heavy. Numb. Not answering. I try to move my fingers. Then I remember there aren't any. I can't see. I can't hear. I can't even tell if I'm lying down.
That was already too much to bear.
But then something happens inside me that's worse.
Something opens in my chest.
Not pain. Pain was something. This is a hole. An empty room with the door left open and the wind going through it.
My grandmother isn't here. Lyokha isn't here, talking and talking. Timur isn't here, with his flat voice and his steady hands. Saint Nicholas isn't here. God isn't here. Nobody is coming down into this dark to find me, because there's nowhere in it to come down to.
There's only me. A small point of somebody, awake, in the middle of nothing.
I call them anyway. All of them, one after the other. My mouth won't move, so I call them from the inside.
Nothing answers. Not even an echo.
I don't know how long it goes on. There's no sun here to cross my chest in the morning and my throat at noon. There's no clock. It could be a day. It could be a hundred years. It could be the first minute of for ever.
That's when I start to want it.
Not to be saved. Not to wake up. I want to die. Properly, this time. All the way. I want this last small, stubborn point of me to go out, and stop, and never be anything again.
I'd give anything for it.
But there's nothing to die with. I have no hands. There's no grenade. Nobody's fingers on my throat. I'm at the bottom of everything, and there's no further down to go.
So I stay. Alone. Awake. In the nothing.
I want to scream. Nothing comes out.
I wake up with my mouth wide open and no sound coming out of it.
It's dark. For one long moment, it's the same dark. I'm sure of it. I never left. I never will.
Then I see a light.
It's very small. Down at the front of the stove, in the ash where the last coals are kept for the morning, one of them is still glowing. One small red point in all that black.
There are no coals in the nothing.
Then something heavy moves on my chest.
An arm. Fedya's arm, thrown across me in his sleep, the way it is every night. It's warm. It smells of smoke and boy. It's the heaviest, best thing I've ever felt.
On my other side, Masha is breathing. Slow, through her nose, with a tiny whistle at the end of every breath that she'd never admit to.
Below us, on the bench, my father. Short breaths, careful ones. In, and stop, and out. That's how you breathe with cracked ribs.
Grandma is snoring in her corner. My mother sighs in her sleep.
The stove. Warm brick under my back. Sheepskin on top.
I lift my hands in the dark, where I can't see them, and count my fingers. One to five. One to five.
Ten.
I count them again, because I can.
It was a dream.
I tell myself that a few times. My heart takes a long while to believe me.
Four years in this world, and I've never once dreamed about the crater. Not the hole, not the bed, not the dark. I'd started to think that part of me had stayed behind with the old body, like a coat left on a hook when you move house.
It hadn't. It was waiting.
And it isn't hard to see why it came tonight. A month ago, I sat on the bellows and watched two men break my father's ribs. Then I ran across a meadow with soldiers behind me. Then Father Ivan read out a paper in church that said two more years, and then forty-nine. A small body can only carry so much in one month. After that, it starts putting some of it down at night.
But the dream wasn't about the forge, or the meadow. It was about the dark.
At the very end of my old life, somebody heard me. I don't know who. A voice came, and a light, and I got out.
In the dream, nobody came.
I lie there with Fedya's arm across me and think about that for a long time.
In the dream, at the bottom of the dark, I wanted to die. I wanted it more than I've ever wanted anything.
Now, awake, I want the other thing. Just as much.
I want to live.
It surprises me, how much. Since the forge, I've been getting through the days the way you walk through deep snow. Head down. One step, then the next. I'd forgotten I wanted anything at all.
But I do. I want Grandma's porridge in the morning, too hot, so I burn my tongue on it. I want to hear Masha whistle through her nose. I want to see Fedya grow a beard, a bad one, so I can laugh at it. I want to see what's past the river. I want summer.
I want all of it. Every day of it. Even the bad ones.
Then, because my head never lets me keep anything nice for long, I think of the meadow. The boy in the slush, with his voice cracking. How easy it would have been. How calm I was.
Was that me?
I've asked it every night for a month. The question doesn't get any smaller.
Fedya says something into the sheepskin, and his arm gets heavier. I let it. Under the sheepskin I count my fingers one more time, and fall asleep somewhere around ten.
Easter comes, and it's quiet.
There are red eggs, the way there always are. Grandma boils them with onion skins until they come out the colour of old brick, and on Easter morning the whole street knocks them together, end to end, to see whose cracks first. Fedya beats every boy on our side of the church with one egg, which he says is lucky. Masha says it's a duck's.
At midnight the church was full, and the candles went round outside in the dark, and Father Ivan said the words, and everybody kissed everybody three times. The bells sounded the same as last year. The people didn't. Last year, the whole village sang on the way home. This year, they walked.
At the crossroads by the traktir, a carter from down the river is standing on his cart with a little crowd round him. He says the paper Father Ivan read isn't the real one. The real one is golden, with the Tsar's own seal on it, and it gives the people all the land for nothing, and the masters have hidden it.
Grandma stops to listen. She listens with her whole face. So do the people round the cart. Somebody says, "I knew it. The Tsar would never."
My father stops too. Only for a moment. He looks at the carter, and at the people nodding, and then at Grandma. It's a hard look, with his jaw tight. I've never seen him look at her like that.
Then he walks on, with my hand in his, and doesn't look back.
That's all it is. One carter, one morning. But I know where that story goes.
It's my mother who says it, a week after Easter, at supper.
We're round the table, with the bowl in the middle and everybody's spoon going in turn, oldest first. It's mostly bread and cabbage again, because Easter doesn't last, but there's an egg each, and the end of the Easter cheese.
"Father Ivan read me the paper again," my mother says. "The part after."
Every spoon stops.
"Two years the old way. Days for the master, the same as now. Then the papers come. Who has which land, and what it costs." She puts her spoon down. "After that, he doesn't want our days any more. He wants money. A first share to him, all at once. Then the rest goes to the Tsar's treasury, a bit every year."
"How much?" says Grandma.
"Father Ivan doesn't know. Nobody knows till the papers come. A lot."
"How many years?"
My mother looks at the bowl. "Many."
Forty-nine. I don't say it.
Nobody says anything for a while. Then my father gets up.
He goes to the corner by the stove and kneels down, slowly, because of the ribs, and gets the point of his knife under the edge of a floorboard. It comes up with a creak. He puts his arm into the dark underneath, and brings out a pot.
It's a small clay pot, the kind Grandma keeps salt in, with a piece of old leather tied over the top. He puts it on the table, takes the leather off, and tips it out.
Copper. A little heap of it, brown and green. Two silver coins, small ones. That's all.
Four years I've lived in this house. I've lain on that stove and listened to every word anybody's said in it. And I never knew there was a pot under the floor.
Every time the steward comes, this house goes to war to hide what little it has. I knew that. I didn't know it ever won.
"For the cow," says Grandma, "when she dies. And for my funeral."
"Your funeral can wait," says my father.
"That's what I keep telling God."
My father moves the coins about with one finger.
"Gavrila's got work," he says. "Small things. Arrowheads. Trap springs. A bite mark on them, for the hunters. Things the steward doesn't count."
My mother's face doesn't change. "And if he counts them?"
"Then he counts them."
"Stepan. It's his forge. His coal."
"Gavrila brings his own coal." My father doesn't look up. "And they're my hands."
He said that to the clerk too, at the anvil, with the rouble in front of him. Nobody at the table says so.
"I can take more calls," my mother says, after a while. "Further. The villages down the river road. They pay in eggs and flour, and sometimes butter. But that's bread we don't buy."
"I'll do the dogs for Gavrila," says Fedya at once. "Feed them. Clean the hides. Petka used to, and Petka's gone to the iron road. Gavrila said he needs somebody."
"Gavrila said that to you?"
"He said it near me."
"I'll pick herbs," says Masha. "The guild buys them dry, for the hunters' packs. Mama knows which ones."
"Yarn," says Grandma. "And the hens. If the steward doesn't count them first."
Everybody looks at the pot.
"Me too," I say.
They laugh. Grandma, Masha, Fedya, even my mother. Not unkindly. The way you laugh when a small boy says he'll carry the cow. My father doesn't.
"And what will you do, little stove?" says Grandma. "Warm the coins?"
"Work."
My father puts his hand on my head, the whole of it, like a hat. He tries to smile at me. It takes him a long time, and it doesn't get very far.
I'm not joking.
He puts the coins back in the pot one at a time and ties the leather on. The board goes back down. He presses it with his boot until it sits flat, and then it's only floor again.
Third board from the stove. The one with the knot in it like a shut eye.
I'm four. Nobody in this world is going to give me a kopeck for anything.
Yet.
In May, the bird cherry comes out along the stream, white as washing on a line, and like every year it brings the cold with it. Grandma says it always does. The bird-cherry cold. Three mornings of frost after a week of sun, so the white flowers have ice on them and the hens won't come out.
I run anyway.
I've changed my route. Since the thaw, I don't turn round at the church. I go past it, round the back, along the graveyard fence, and home along the stream. It's longer. My legs are nearly four and a half now, and they want longer.
Behind the church, between the graveyard and the stream, there's a little house I've never looked at. It's lower than ours, and darker, and it has no chimney. The smoke comes out of a hole in the roof and over the top of the door, and the logs round the door are black with it. A black house. In my old life, I only ever saw one in a museum, with a rope across the door.
There's a boy sitting by the fence.
He's on the ground with a wooden tub in front of him and his hands in the water up to the wrists. Long pale strips lie across his knees. As I come past, he lifts his head.
"You're the one who runs," he says. "Pat-pat-pat. Every morning."
I stop.
He's about my size. Fair hair, cut short and a bit crooked. A shirt much too big for him, tied round the middle with string. His eyes are open and grey, and they're looking at my knees.
Not at my face. At my knees. Then at nothing, a little to the left of me.
"How do you know?" I say.
"Your feet. Everybody's are different." He takes a strip out of the water and runs it through his fingers. "Old Kuzmin goes clump, drag, clump. Father Ivan goes like a hen. Something under the mill sings at night, in summer, but it hasn't got any feet. You go pat-pat-pat, very fast, and then you breathe like a dog at the end." He sniffs. "And you've got iron on you. And the forge."
I look down at myself. A shirt. Trousers. Bast shoes. No iron. Then I remember the nail in my pocket that I picked up by the forge door yesterday, for no reason. And my hair. My hair always smells of the forge. Everybody's does, in our house.
"You're the smith's," he says. "Kolya. Your sister shouts it."
That's true. She does.
"I'm Rodya."
A four-year-old would ask him if he can't see. I don't.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. Then he says it himself, the way you'd say your hair is fair.
"Mama says God forgot to light my eyes."
In my old life, a doctor would have shone a little lamp into them, and written something long in Latin. Here, God forgot. That's the whole of it.
"What are you doing?"
"The strips." He holds one up. It's the inside of a bark, the soft part under the rough brown, pale and wet and as long as my arm. "Lime bark. Papa peels it off the young trees in the spring, and I put it in the water so it goes soft. Then I split it. Then I make it flat." He shows me. His fingers find the edge of the strip without looking, and pull it in two, straight down the middle, as neat as a knife. "Then Papa makes the shoes."
Lapti, the bast shoes everybody in the village wears, woven like little baskets. They're on my feet now. I've never once thought about where they come from. You don't, when you're four. They wear out, and Grandma gives you new ones.
"Papa makes them all day," says Rodya. "And at night. In summer a pair lasts a few days, if you're working. In winter it's longer. Ten days, maybe. So everybody needs new ones all the time. So Papa never stops." He pulls another strip in two. "On Sundays and feast days, I sit by the church door, and people put things in my cap. An egg. A crust. Sometimes a kopeck. Mama says it's good for their souls, giving to a blind boy." He thinks about it. "Papa says it's not enough. He says it to Mama when he thinks I'm asleep."
Everybody in this village thinks small children are asleep.
I squat down by the tub. The water is so cold there's a thin skin of ice round the edge. His hands are red to the wrist.
"Doesn't it hurt?"
"Yes." He goes on splitting.
I help. I'm not much use. My strips go in two crooked, and one of them breaks, and he hears it break and says "Oh," in the voice of a man whose horse has just put its foot in a hole. I get a little better. Not much. By the time the church bell goes for the early service, there's a small pile of flat strips on the grass by my knee, and my hands are as red as his.
My fingers have gone stiff with the cold. They won't bend properly.
So I do what I always do. I don't even think about it. Under the frost, a hand deep, the ground is still warm from the week of sun. I take a little of that warmth, up through my feet, and put it into my fingers. The ground has always been the easiest place for me to take from. Not much. The smallest thing I know. My fingers come loose again.
Rodya lifts his head.
"What did you just do?"
My heart does something complicated.
"Nothing."
"You did." He's turned his face towards me. Not his eyes. His whole face, the way a dog turns its ears. "Something leaned. Like a door."
I don't say anything at all.
"You know," he says. "When somebody opens a door in the other room. And the air goes that way, just a bit." He frowns. "Like that. Only not air."
Those are my words.
Not Gavrila's. Gavrila said a mouse in a mill. The door was mine. I thought of it in the loft of the guild hall, flat on the pelts, holding my breath till my chest hurt. I put it on my shelf, and I've never said it out loud to anyone.
And this boy just said it, with his hands in a tub of cold water. Without holding his breath at all.
"Does it happen a lot?" I say, carefully.
"Sometimes. In church, when they do the oil." He shrugs. "And when your mama came, when my sister had the cough. Lots then. Like lots of doors." He turns his face back down to the strips. "Doesn't it happen to you?"
"Sometimes," I say.
He thinks everybody feels it.
Gavrila sat in the dark for weeks, with his eyes shut like a fool, before he felt anything at all. Rodya has been sitting in the dark his whole life.
For two years, I've been careful about eyes. The steward's eyes. The neighbours'. I never once thought about a boy who doesn't use his.
I should be frightened. A bit, I am. Somebody in this village can feel me, and he doesn't even know it's strange.
But mostly I'm thinking that he split that strip straight down the middle without looking, and mine broke.
The bell goes again. I get up.
"Tomorrow," Rodya says to my knees. It isn't a question.
The next morning, I come round the back of the church at the same time.
He's already at the fence, with the tub, and his face turned to the road.
"Pat-pat-pat," he says. "You're late."
At the end of May, two knocks come on the same night.
The first one is Matryona the midwife's grandson, barefoot and out of breath. The miller's wife has started, and the baby's coming the wrong way round, and Matryona says come now.
The second comes while my mother is still tying her shawl. It's the ferryman's boy. His father was splitting wood by the lamp, and the axe went into his leg instead.
My mother stands in the doorway between the two of them.
I can see her doing the sum. A baby the wrong way round, and a mother who could die of it. A man with an axe cut, who could bleed. One healer.
"Masha," she says. "Get your shawl. And the small bag."
Masha already has the shawl on. The small bag hangs by the door, where it always hangs. Clean rags, boiled and dried. A roll of linen for binding. A twist of dried yarrow. A needle and thread in a bit of leather. My mother packs it again every time she comes home, before she even takes her boots off.
"You go to the ferryman." My mother talks fast, and doesn't stop for breath. "Wash it with boiled water. Use the clean rags from the bag. Press above it, hard, where I showed you, till it stops. If the bone's broken, don't touch it. Bind it straight and send for me. And don't let them put anything on it. No cobweb. No dung. Nothing." She's already going. "Fedya, carry the water for her. Kolya, back to sleep."
On the bench, my father starts to get up. My mother puts her hand flat on his chest, over the ribs, and he lies back down.
Then she's gone into the dark after the midwife's grandson.
Grandma is snoring again before the door shuts. I lie on the stove and listen to Masha and Fedya go off down the street, fast, until I can't hear them any more.
I don't follow them. It's the middle of the night, and I'm four, and nobody at an axe cut needs a four-year-old under their feet. So I lie in the dark with Grandma snoring, and wait.
The ferryman's house was at the bottom of the village, by the river. When Masha came in, there was a lamp, and a lot of shouting, and the smell of blood. The ferryman was on the floor by the woodpile with his leg out in front of him. His wife was kneeling on the other side of it with a handful of something grey.
"Cobweb," she said. "From the barn. It stops the blood."
"No," said Masha.
She was thirteen. The ferryman's wife was forty, and twice her size. Masha took the cobweb out of her hand and put it in the stove, and nobody stopped her.
Then she knelt down and looked at the leg.
It was a long cut down the front of the shin, deep enough to show white at the bottom. The blood came out of it in a slow, dark pour. Not in jumps.
Dark and slow is a vein, Masha told herself. Jumps is the other kind. Her mother had taught her that in the evenings, with a piece of red thread tied round her own arm.
"Boil the water," she said to Fedya.
She pressed above the cut with both thumbs, with all her weight, and held it. The ferryman shut his eyes and held on to the woodpile with both hands. When the water had boiled, she washed the cut out, every bit of bark and dirt. Then she pressed again. Then she bound it with the clean rags and the linen, tight, from the ankle up, the way you'd wrap a horse's leg.
The bleeding stopped.
Only then did Masha let her breath out. It felt like the first time since the door.
They come home in the grey before dawn. Fedya is asleep the moment he's on the stove. Masha lies down next to me with her shawl still on and her eyes open, and doesn't say anything at all.
My mother comes back at sunrise. The miller's baby turned in the end, and came out the right way round, and the mother lived, and so did the baby. My mother doesn't sit down. She goes straight to the ferryman's.
When she comes home again, she sits on the bench and looks at Masha.
"I unwrapped it," she says. "I looked. I wrapped it again."
Masha waits.
"I wouldn't have done it any differently." My mother takes off her shawl. "Not one thing."
Masha goes red, the way she does, right up to the hair.
"From tomorrow," says my mother, "you come with me. Not to watch. To work."
Masha's head comes up.
"The guild—"
"Not the guild." My mother says it quietly, and it's still a wall. "Here. This village. I can't be in two houses at once. I found that out last night."
So now Masha goes with her, and I stay at home with Grandma and the hens.
But Masha tells us everything. Every night, on the stove, in a whisper, so Grandma won't hear. She's always loved a story. Now she's in them.
A little girl down by the mill had a fever, red and hot and crying for her mother. My mother put her hand on the child's neck, under the jaw, and behind the ears. Then she sent Masha out to the stream for willow bark, and boiled it, and made the child drink it. It was so bitter the child spat half of it down Masha's apron. Masha shows us where.
Willow bark. Salicin. Where I come from, it came in little white tablets. Here, my mother sends a girl to the stream.
A woman by the church cut her hand open on a sickle. My mother had the rags boiling before she even looked at it. She washed her own hands, and made Masha wash hers, and the woman's husband laughed at them both.
"'It's a cut, not a christening,'" says Masha, in a big man's voice. "And Mama didn't even look up. She said, 'Rot gets in from dirt. Boiling kills it. Wash your hands, or go outside.'"
"Did he?" says Fedya.
"He went outside."
In my world, it took doctors a very long time, and a lot of dead mothers, to learn that. My mother learned it somewhere before I was born. She's never heard the word germ. She doesn't need it.
Early in June, there was a birth, with Matryona the midwife. Masha didn't go in for that one. She stood at the door with the lamp and passed in hot water and rags when Matryona shouted for them. Matryona talked the whole time, Masha says. To the mother, and to the baby, and to the saints, and to my mother, and when there was nobody left, to the lamp. Towards morning, a baby started to cry, thin and furious. Matryona was still talking.
Masha does Matryona's voice too. Fedya laughs into the sheepskin until Grandma tells us all to be quiet or she'll come up there.
Nobody pays in money. Nobody has any. They pay in eggs. A lump of butter wrapped in a cabbage leaf. Half a sack of flour, for a birth. A week later, the woman with the cut hand comes to our door with six eggs in her apron for my mother. Then she takes two more out of her pocket and puts them into Masha's hands instead.
"For the girl," she says. "She's got lighter hands than you, Dasha."
My mother laughs. I haven't heard her laugh like that since before the train.
Masha holds the two eggs in both hands, like baby birds. She doesn't eat them. She gives them to Grandma, who takes the eggs down to the traktir on Saturdays and sells them to Shmelev. The coppers go under the floor.
Masha doesn't say anything about it. She doesn't have to. She walks taller for days.
In the evenings, my mother teaches her.
Not what to do. How it works.
"When you cut yourself," my mother says, "what does the blood do?"
"It stops," says Masha.
"Why?"
Masha thinks. "It goes thick."
"And then?"
"A scab."
"And under the scab?"
Masha doesn't know.
"The edges reach for each other," says my mother. She holds up her two hands, a little apart, fingers spread. "From the sides, and from the bottom. New skin, a bit at a time, from the edges in. Like mending a hole in a sock. The body does it by itself. It wants to. All it needs is time, and to be kept clean." She lets her hands come together, slowly, until the fingers meet. "You don't close a wound, Masha. The body closes it. You only help it do what it already wants. Know what it wants. Then give it that. Nothing else."
I sit by the stove and don't move.
My father says the same thing about iron. You promise it what it needs. You have to know what it wants, and why.
The two of them have never once talked about this. Not that I've heard.
Two weeks later, I cut my knee.
It's my own fault. I'm running back from Rodya's too fast, along the stream, and my foot goes into a hole, and I go down on a flat stone with a sharp edge. When I get up, there's a cut across my knee as long as my finger, and the blood is running down my shin into my shoe.
It hurts. I'm four. I let myself cry a bit, because it would look strange if I didn't, and because it hurts.
My mother is at the table with Masha, sorting dried leaves. She looks at the knee. Then she looks at Masha.
"You," she says.
Masha's eyes go wide. Then she kneels down in front of me.
She washes it first, with boiled water from the pot on the stove. It stings. Then she puts her two hands round my knee, not touching the cut, and looks at it the way she looked at the ferryman's leg. Her lips move. I think she's telling herself. The edges reach for each other.
I feel it go in.
It's thin. Much thinner than my mother's. One thread, fine as a hair, cold for a moment and then warm. It goes in under the skin at one end of the cut, like a root feeling its way through soft earth, and creeps along the cut, slowly, to the other end. It doesn't hurt. It itches. Deep down, where you can't scratch.
Then it's gone.
The cut is still there. But it's shut. A pink line across my knee, like a scratch from last week. The blood on my shin is the only proof it was ever open.
Masha sits back on the floor. Suddenly, as if somebody pushed her.
"Oh," she says.
She blows out a long breath, the way I do at the end of my morning run, and her arms drop into her lap. Then she makes two fists, squeezes them hard, and lets them go.
"Cold?" says my mother.
"A bit. And..." Masha frowns. "Heavy. Like I've carried water."
One thread, and a short one. My mother does that without even sitting down. But she's had years to understand it. Masha has had two weeks.
My mother is quiet for a moment.
She looks at Masha's hands. Not at my knee. At Masha's hands, open in her lap, for a long time, with a look on her face I've never seen on her before. Proud. And something else, under the proud. Something that looks as if it has been waiting for this for years, and hoped it would never come.
Then she gets up, takes her own shawl off the peg, and puts it round Masha's shoulders. She goes to the stove and stands there with her back to us.
"Sugar," she says, to the stove. "When the cold's inside. Sugar first."
Masha laughs. It comes out a bit wet.
The honey pot is empty, so she gets a crust with salt on it instead. She eats it on the floor next to me, wrapped in my mother's shawl, looking at my knee as if it's the best thing she's ever seen.
In June, Gavrila takes Fedya on.
He does it at our table, the way he does everything, with his mouth full.
"I need a boy for the dogs," he says. "Feed them, clean the yard, scrape the hides. Petka's gone off to the iron road to get rich, the fool, and the dogs miss him more than I do." He points his spoon at Fedya. "Three kopecks a week. Dinner when there's dinner. If your father lets you."
Fedya looks at my father as if his life hangs on it.
My father nods. Once.
Fedya's face could light the stove.
The next morning, when he goes, I go too. Nobody asks me to. Masha's out with my mother, and Grandma's with the hens, and the forge doesn't need the bellows till noon. Gavrila sees me come through the guild yard gate behind Fedya, and looks at me for a long moment.
"And the rat from the loft," he says.
That's all. He goes back to his pipe.
Fedya's job is worse than he thought it would be. He doesn't say so. The hides come in from the hunters stiff and stinking. They go up on wooden frames in the yard, and somebody has to scrape the fat off them with a blunt knife, every scrap of it, or they rot. The first day, Fedya is sick behind the woodpile twice. The second day, once. By the end of the week, he's scraping and whistling at the same time.
The dogs love him. They loved Petka, and now there's no Petka, so they love whoever brings the bucket. Buran, the big grey one, lies in the sun by the frames and watches Fedya work, and thumps his tail on the ground whenever Fedya says his name.
I sit on the woodpile and watch everything.
At the end of the second week, Gavrila takes Fedya to the forest.
"Not hunting," he says. "Looking. A hunter who can't read the ground is just a man with a spear, waiting to be eaten." He looks at me. "You too. Stay where I can see you, and don't touch anything with teeth."
We go out past the fields to where the forest starts, with the dogs running ahead. It's a different forest from the winter one. On our side of the river the ground is sand, and the forest is mostly pine. Tall, straight trunks, bare for a long way up, and red-brown at the top where the sun gets them. It's hot in there, and it smells of resin.
The ground is soft with old needles and moss, and covered in low blueberry bushes, the berries still small and green. Where the ground dips and goes wet, the pines stop, and there are birch trees and dark spruce, and ferns up to my chest. By the path there's a heap of pine needles as tall as I am, and the whole heap is moving. Ants. A cuckoo calls somewhere and won't stop. The mosquitoes find us in the first minute, and stay with us all day.
Gavrila walks through it without a sound, which I wouldn't have believed of him. At our table, he's the loudest man in the village. Out here, he moves like a cat along a fence.
He stops by a big pine and points at the trunk.
About as high as my father's belt, the bark has been rubbed off. Rubbed down to the wood in a wide band, as if something has leaned on it and gone up and down a thousand times. The bare part is sticky with resin. And caught in the resin, there are hairs.
Rust-coloured hairs. Thick ones, as long as my hand.
"What's that?" says Gavrila.
"A pig," says Fedya.
"What sort of pig?"
Fedya looks at the hairs. "A big one."
"A big one." Gavrila sounds like a man who has heard this answer before. "Kolya. What colour is it?"
I'm surprised he asks me. "Red."
"Red. Fedya, when did you ever see a red pig?"
Fedya opens his mouth, and shuts it again.
I reach up and pull one of the hairs out of the resin. It's stiff, like a bit of wire. It bends, and springs back. When I rub it between my fingers, it leaves an orange smear on the skin.
Hair doesn't rust. This hair has.
"Iron-mane," says Gavrila. "A boar. An old one, by how high he's rubbing. His bristles are like that all down his back, so thick an axe bounces off. You don't hit him there. You don't hit him at all, if you've got any sense. You climb." He takes the hair from my fingers and looks at it. "What does he eat?"
"Roots," says Fedya. "Mushrooms."
"Good. Where does he sleep?"
Fedya looks round. Gavrila waits.
So we look. A little further on, the ground has been dug up, all of it, as if a gang of drunk men has been at it with spades. Roots and stones turned over. Past that, in a wet hollow under some bushes, there are three deep holes in the mud, each as long as a man, with smooth sides.
"He lies in those," says Gavrila. "In the heat. Rolls about, keeps the flies off. Gets mud in his bristles, and the mud dries hard, and then you've got a pig in armour." He gets down by one of the holes and puts his hand flat in it. "Fresh. Two days. Maybe one."
Fedya looks round at the trees very fast.
"He won't come at us. Not in the day, not with the dogs." Gavrila stands up. "But listen. He shouldn't be here. Not this close. This is two miles nearer the fields than he ever used to come."
"Why?" says Fedya.
Gavrila points through the trees to the south, where the light is brighter.
"The iron road," he says. "They've cut the big wood along it, a mile wide, all the way to the marsh. That's where he lived. His kind have been in there since before your grandmother was a girl." He wipes his hand on his trousers. "Now he's got the iron road on one side and our oats on the other. Which would you choose?"
Nobody says anything.
On the way back, he shows us one more thing. Under the roots of a big fallen pine, there's a hole in the ground, wide and dark, with the earth round it worn smooth. The dust at the mouth of it is grey. Not earth grey. Ash grey. It's been dry for weeks, and there's a wind, and the dust doesn't blow away.
It smells, very faintly, of a cold fire.
"Ash wolves," says Fedya, in a whisper.
"Empty now," says Gavrila. "They go north for the summer. But they come back to the old places when the snow comes. They always do." He looks at the hole for a while. "What does it eat, Fedya?"
"Sheep."
"Sheep. And dogs. And small boys who don't come home before dark." He looks at me when he says the last part.
He doesn't need to. I heard them once, from a sleigh, the day I was baptised. I didn't see them. But I smelled them, on the wind out of the forest. It was this smell. It's one of the few things from that first winter that hasn't gone thin.
That evening, Gavrila comes to the forge after dark, with a sack.
My father shuts the door behind him, which he never does in summer. He doesn't light the lamp. The fire is low and red, and gives just enough light to work by.
In the sack, there are arrowheads. A dozen of them, plain and grey, from somebody else's forge. Gavrila tips them out on the anvil and says nothing, and my father says nothing, and Gavrila sits down on the coal bin with his cold pipe.
My father picks up the first one, and the little chisel.
Tap. Wait. Tap.
The bite mark is small. Three cuts, no longer than a grain of barley, at the base of the point. The iron goes dark. Then bright. Then it's only an arrowhead again, and he puts it down and picks up the next one.
I'm on the bellows, because I'm always on the bellows. Fedya is by the door, watching the lane in case anybody comes. That's his job tonight. He takes it very seriously.
My father does three.
Then he puts the chisel down.
"Enough for tonight," he says.
Gavrila nods, as if he expected it. He puts the three arrowheads in his pocket and the rest back in the sack.
Since the plates, my father stops at three. Every time. I've watched him. He doesn't call it a line. I don't think he'd know what I meant if I asked. But it's a line.
Fedya comes away from the door.
"Papa. Let me do one."
"No."
"Just a little one. On a nail. Nobody would know."
"No."
"Why? I've watched you a hundred times. I know where the cuts go. I could—"
"I said no!"
It comes out loud. Much too loud for a forge with the door shut. Gavrila takes the pipe out of his mouth. Fedya goes very still.
I've seen my father angry before. The quiet kind. I've never heard him shout at one of us.
For a moment his eyebrows stay pulled down hard. Then he looks away, at the fire.
"Before you promise the iron anything," he says, quieter, "know what you'll pay."
Fedya stands there a moment longer. Then he goes back to the door, and doesn't say another word all night.
When Gavrila goes, he puts a coin on the anvil. A silver one. My father looks at it, the way he looked at the clerk's rouble. Then he picks it up, and that night it goes under the floor.
That Saturday, Fedya's first wages go in after it. Six kopecks, for two weeks. He puts them in himself, one at a time, very slowly, so everybody can see.
I wait for an evening when the fire is dying and my father is sitting on the stool with his hands hanging between his knees. He's always quiet. At the end of the day, he's quieter than the anvil.
"Papa."
He looks at me.
"Can you make a kochedyk?"
A kochedyk is the little tool for weaving bast shoes. A flat spike, a bit bent at the end. You push it in under the woven strips to lift them, and feed the next strip through. Old men make them out of bone, or a bit of hard wood. Rodya's father has one, an old bone one, worn yellow. It's too big for Rodya's hand. I've watched him try.
"What for?" says my father.
"For my friend."
"What friend?"
"Rodya. Behind the church." I think about how to say it. "He can't see. He does the strips with his fingers. His papa's kochedyk is too big. He drops it. Then he has to look for it." I stop. "With his hands. In the grass."
My father doesn't say anything.
He gets up. He takes a scrap of iron off the heap by the door, a piece of an old hinge, and puts it in the fire. I pump the bellows without being asked. When it's the colour of a cherry, he takes it out and draws it long and thin on the anvil, tap, tap, tap, turning it, and bends the end a little. He rounds the other end into a ring, so it won't slip out of a small hand. When it's cool, he files it. For a long time. Until there's no edge on it anywhere that could catch a finger.
He gives it to me. Then he goes in to supper.
I stay by the dying fire with the kochedyk in my hand.
He didn't ask what Osip would give for it. He didn't ask anything at all. It's been a bad spring for him. Two men broke his ribs at this anvil. Every coin in this house goes under the floor. He stops at three now, and the other night he shouted at Fedya, and some evenings he sits on that stool so quietly you'd think he'd gone somewhere else.
And he still filed it until it couldn't hurt a finger. For a blind boy behind the church he's never even met.
I take it to Rodya the next morning.
Not to the fence. To the house. His mother sees me at the gate with something in my hand and calls me in before I can decide, the way you'd call in a cat.
Inside, it's dark. My eyes take a while. There's no chimney, so the smoke from the stove goes up to the roof and out through the hole, and everything above the height of a man is black. The walls, the beams, the ceiling, black and shiny like a beetle's back. Below that line, it's a house. A table, a bench, a loom in the corner, a cradle on a pole. Children. I count six before I give up. One of them is the sister who had the cough. She's fine now. She's sitting on the stove with two smaller ones, staring at me.
It's crowded, and it's poor, and it smells of smoke and lime bark and milk. And it's warm. Not only from the stove.
"The smith's boy," says Rodya's mother. She's a big woman with a baby on her hip and flour on her face, and a laugh that fills the whole black room. "I'm Ulyana. Sit. Sit! Rodya, it's your runner."
Rodya's father is on the bench by the door, where the light comes in, with a wooden foot on his knee and a half-made shoe on the foot. He's a thin man with bits of bark caught in his beard. He looks at me, and nods, and goes back to work. He says less than my father. I didn't know that was possible.
"Osip," says Ulyana, for him. "He says hello."
Rodya is on the floor by his father's feet, with the strips.
I put the kochedyk in his hand.
He goes very still.
Then his fingers start. They go over it the way they go over the strips, but slower, much slower. The ring. The smooth shaft. The little bend. The point, where my father filed for so long. He turns it over and does it all again from the other side. His lips move. I think he's learning it, the way I'd learn a page.
"It's iron," he says.
"Papa made it. For you."
"For me." He holds it against his chest. "Not for Papa?"
"It's too small for your papa."
Osip has stopped working. He holds out his hand. Rodya gives him the kochedyk, slowly, as if he might not get it back. Osip turns it over in the light from the door. He tries the point with his thumb. He looks at the ring, and doesn't say anything.
"That's good work," he says. It's the first thing he's said. His voice is soft and a bit rough, as if he doesn't use it much. "That's too good." He looks at me. "What does your father want for it?"
"Nothing. It's a present."
"We don't take presents." He says it gently, but he means it. "My boy sits at the church door with his cap out. That's enough taking for one house."
Ulyana opens her mouth, and shuts it again.
I look at Osip. A house full of children, black walls, and bark in his beard.
"Then I'll help with the strips," I say. "Every morning. And you pay me."
Osip looks at me for a long moment. Then something happens in his beard that might be a smile.
"A kopeck," he says. "For a week of strips. If they're straight."
"They will be."
They won't, not for a while. But he gives Rodya back the kochedyk, and Rodya puts it inside his shirt. Later that morning, sitting by his father's knee, he weaves his first bit of a shoe with it. Only the toe. Only a few rows, crooked, with his tongue between his teeth. Osip pulls half of it out and shows him again. But the kochedyk goes in and out, and doesn't fall in the grass.
My own strips are another matter. By hand, they still go crooked.
So I cheat, a little. When a split starts to run off to one side, I feel ahead of my thumbs into the wet bark, along the fibres, and give them the smallest push to part in a straight line. When a strip starts to crack where it shouldn't, I hold the two sides together for a breath and let it settle. It's tiny. Smaller than warming my fingers. It doesn't tire me at all.
And it's practice. Lots of little pushes every morning, each one a bit neater than the last.
There's something else, too. Since the meadow, every time I reach for the hum, I stop and check myself first. Here, I don't need to. There's no anger in me, and no wish to hurt anybody. It's only strips, getting straighter.
"You're leaning again," Rodya says, the first morning.
"It makes the strips straight."
He thinks about that. "Can you teach me?"
"Can't hurt to try."
So we try. I put my hands over his, on the next strip, and tell him the only way I know. Feel where the threads in the bark run. Then ask them, very gently, to come apart along that line.
Rodya frowns at the strip. He tries not to pull, only to ask. It splits crooked.
"Nothing," he says.
"Again."
Crooked again. But on the next one, I give it my little push, with his hands still under mine, and his head comes up.
"There," he says. "Inside it. Like a door, only small."
That's the first morning.
On the second, he feels it every time I push. On the third, he stops pulling with his fingers and listens to the strip first, the way he listens to feet on the road. On the fourth, one of his strips comes out nearly straight, and he can't tell if it was him or me. It was him.
By the end of the week, he doesn't need my hands at all. He runs his thumb down a strip, finds the line, and it parts straight along it, every time. As straight as mine.
"Easy," he says.
At the end of the week, Osip puts a kopeck in my hand. A real one, brown, worn smooth.
It goes under the floor. Third board from the stove. My father watches me put it in. He doesn't say anything, and he doesn't laugh.
After that, the fence is ours.
In the mornings, by the tub, while our hands go red, we play a game. It's Rodya's idea. To him, it's a game.
"Do it," he says.
So I do something. A drop of water on a dock leaf, frozen into a bead. A bit of warmth into my fingers. The water round Rodya's hands, a little warmer.
"Now," says Rodya.
Every time. Almost. Once in a while I do it so small that even I can hardly feel it, and he frowns and says nothing. But nine times in ten, he lifts his head the moment it happens and says "now", like a man hearing a coin drop.
Then he goes round to the other side of the fence and sits in the grass a few steps away, and we try again.
It's harder for him there. A lot harder. He gets one in two. Then one in three. Further than that, by the graveyard gate, he gets nothing at all.
So it isn't a guess. He really feels it, like the heat from a stove. Close, it's strong. A few steps, it's weaker. Across the yard, there's nothing.
"Nobody knows," I told him, the first morning with the strips. "Not about this. Not anybody."
"Who would I tell?" He says it without any sadness at all. "Nobody talks to me."
"People talk to you."
"They talk about me. 'Mind the blind boy.' 'Poor little thing.' They put eggs in my cap." He splits a strip. "That's not talking."
I don't have anything to say to that. I split a strip too. It goes crooked. It always does, when I don't use the hum.
He wipes his hands on his shirt.
"Can I look at you?"
I don't understand. Then I do. He means with his hands.
"All right."
His fingers are cold from the tub, and they smell of lime bark. They go over my face very lightly, the way they went over the kochedyk. My forehead. My eyebrows. Down my nose. Round my mouth. My chin. My ears, which tickles. Then back up to my forehead, where they stop, and he frowns.
"You're little," he says.
"I'm four. Like you."
"You don't talk four." He takes his hands away. "Not when you tell me about the strips. Then you talk like Uncle Kirill."
Uncle Kirill is the village elder. He's about seventy. He talks to the floor.
Ulyana is at the gate with the baby, and she laughs her big laugh.
"He's a pretty one, the smith's boy," she says. "Eyelashes like a girl's." And at once she spits over her left shoulder, three times, quickly, so the evil eye won't hear her and come to look.
Rodya puts his fingers back on my eyelashes, very gently, to check.
A few mornings later, he stops in the middle of the game and turns his face towards me.
"Why do you hold your breath?"
"So I can hear."
"It makes you loud." He sounds puzzled. "When you hold it, your heart goes bang-bang-bang. I can hear it from here. And you go all tight. Like a dog when there's a cat."
"Gavrila says you have to shut everything else out."
"Who's Gavrila?"
"The big man. With the dogs."
"Oh. Him." Rodya thinks about it. "He's loud too."
He puts his hands back in the tub.
"You don't shut it out," he says. "You let it in. All of it. The stream, and the hens, and Mama, and the bell. You listen to all of it till you know it. Then when something's new, it sticks out. Like a stone in your shoe."
Gavrila said a mouse in a mill. Rodya says: learn the mill.
I try it that night.
Not on the stove. At the table, after supper, with everybody there. Grandma spins in the evenings now, for the pot, and when her knuckles swell up she can't hold the spindle. So my mother does what she does most evenings. She takes Grandma's hands in her lap, and gives each one a thread or two. Very small.
I don't hold my breath.
I let the room in. All of it. The fire ticking in the stove. Fedya scraping the bowl with his spoon. My father's breathing, a bit less careful now. A cricket somewhere under the floor, near the pot. Masha humming without knowing she's doing it. The house at night. I've been hearing it for four years. I know it the way I know my own hands.
And there, in the middle of it, something new. A lean.
Small. So small. Like the draught from a door that's only open a crack, towards my mother's hands. Then it stops, and Grandma bends her fingers and says "Ah," and picks up the spindle.
I let my breath out. Only I hadn't been holding it at all.
It's only a shade better than the loft. But it's a shade.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, under the line from the loft, I put another one. Other people's magic: learn the mill.
Under that, very small: from Rodya.
Trinity comes fifty days after Easter, and every house in the village fills up with birch. Branches over the doors. Branches tied to the gate posts. Fresh grass on the floors, so the whole house smells like a meadow. Even the church has birch in it, standing in buckets in the corners.
On Trinity afternoon, the girls go down to the river with wreaths.
They weave them out of birch twigs and flowers, and they put them on the water and watch. If your wreath floats away nicely, you'll marry soon. If it sinks, you won't, or worse. If it goes round and round in the same place, everybody laughs at you. And wherever it goes, that's where your husband will come from.
Masha says it's all nonsense. Masha spends an hour on her wreath.
Fedya and I watch from the bank, with half the boys in the village, who all say they've only come to laugh.
Masha puts hers on the water. It floats. It turns once, slowly, and then the current takes it, and it goes off downstream, fast and straight, past all the others, out into the middle of the river. Towards the city.
"Far," says one of the girls. "Masha's going far."
"A clerk," says Fedya. "In the city. With ink on his fingers."
Masha throws a wet birch leaf at him. Her face is the colour of an Easter egg. She watches the wreath, though, until it's gone round the bend.
The week after Trinity is the rusalka week.
Nobody swims. Nobody washes clothes in the river. And everybody carries wormwood. A bunch tucked into a belt. A bit behind the ear. A twist of it in an apron pocket. The whole village smells bitter.
Grandma tells us the rule at supper, as if we didn't know it.
"If you meet one, she'll ask you what's in your hand. You say wormwood. Then she has to let you go." She points her spoon at Fedya. "You say anything else, and she'll tickle you till you die."
"What if I say parsley?" says Fedya.
"Then she says, 'You're mine, darling,' and tickles you till you die."
This year, the village has more to say about the rusalki than usual.
Everybody knows they came early. They came to the marsh in the thaw, and made the soldiers scream, and covered the gentlemen's carriage in mud, and sank half the soldiers in the meadow up to the neck. The old women tell it at the well with their hands over their mouths. Every time they tell it, the soldiers get bigger and the mud gets deeper. They say the rusalki are angry this year. They say they're hungry.
Fedya listens to all of it with a face like an angel's. At night, on the stove, he's furious.
"They stole it," he whispers. "Our night."
"Nobody stole anything," Masha whispers back. "Go to sleep."
"Everybody says it was them. It was us." He turns over. "I want to see them."
"There's nothing to see."
"Then it won't hurt to look."
I'm on Masha's side, for once. I've made my peace with a lot of things in this world. Runes. Crystals. A catfish the size of a boat. Dwarves, more or less. But drowned girls who come up out of the river to ask about your herbs? That isn't magic. That's what grandmothers say so that children won't go in the water and drown. My own grandmother told me the same story, in Nizhny, about the Volga.
The next morning, I tell Rodya, because I tell Rodya most things now. Not everything. Most things.
He stops splitting.
"I hear them," he says.
"Hear who?"
"Them. Every summer. Down below the mill, where the willows are. At night, when it's quiet, they sing." He says it very simply. He says everything like that. "Under the water. I told Mama. She said it's the frogs." He frowns. "It's not the frogs. I know frogs."
Then I remember. The first morning at the fence. Old Kuzmin, Father Ivan, and something under the mill that hasn't got any feet. I thought he was making it up.
So Fedya gets his way. He nearly always does.
We go on the Thursday, when the moon is nearly full.
Fedya and me. Masha, because she says if we're going to get drowned by dead girls, she's going to be there to say she told us so. And Rodya, because he's the one who knows where.
Masha won't let anybody go without wormwood. She has a big bundle of it from behind the bathhouse. Before we leave, she ties a bunch to every belt, knots it twice, and checks it. Then she checks it again.
We go the long way, behind the gardens, so the dogs won't hear. Over the Kuzmins' fence. Round the back of the church, to the black house.
In summer, Rodya sleeps in the passage by the door, on a pile of old sacks, because the house is too full and too hot. When I scratch on the door, he's already up. Masha ties a bunch on him too. He puts it up to his nose and sneezes.
Then through the wet grass to the stream, and along it to the mill.
The mill is quiet at night. Below the wheel, the river spreads out into a wide, still pool, with willows hanging over it so low that the ends of their branches trail in the water. The moon is on the pool. On top of the water there's a mist, knee-high and white.
We sit in the willow roots on the bank and wait.
Frogs. Mosquitoes. Fedya slapping at them. Water going over the weir. For a long time, that's all.
"There," says Rodya.
Nobody else hears anything. Fedya opens his mouth, and Masha puts her hand over it.
Then I hear it too. Very faint. A voice, singing, a long way off, as if somebody is singing in the next house with the windows shut. A girl's voice. No words that I can catch. It goes up and down, slow and sweet, and it's coming from under the water.
I let the night in, the way Rodya taught me. The frogs. The weir. Fedya breathing through his nose under Masha's hand. My own heart, going much too fast.
And there's something new.
It isn't a lean. Nobody is doing anything. It isn't like the train, either, the deep, cold well of the crystal. It's something I've never felt before.
A shape.
Thin. Old. It makes me think of the dip in the church step, the one everybody's feet go into on the way in. I don't know why. That's just what it feels like.
And there isn't much of it. It's faint, and thin at the edges.
The mist moves.
Out in the middle of the pool, where the moon is, the water bulges. I've seen water do that once before, the spring the river ice went, when Grandfather the catfish came up. Only this time it isn't a black back that comes up. It's a head.
A girl's head. Then her shoulders. Then another, a little way off. And another.
Three of them. They come up slowly out of the black water, until they're standing in it to the waist. Girls not much older than Masha, in long white shirts, wet through. Their hair is loose, long and dark and dripping, all the way down into the water. They're pale. Pale like something that has never once seen the sun.
They're beautiful. That's the worst part. They're very beautiful. Almost as beautiful as my mother and Masha, and I've never seen anybody else come close to those two.
Everybody says it about my mother. The women in the villages down the river road say it when she comes to them. The steward's eyes say it, which is worse. Masha has the same face coming.
But my mother's face moves. It's tired, and it laughs, and it worries about us. Masha goes red up to her hair at nothing at all.
The rusalki's faces don't move. They're smooth and still, like the faces on the icons, if the icons were wet and smiling. And every hair on my body is standing up.
They stop singing.
They come towards us across the pool, slowly, waist-deep. The water parts round them in long, dark ripples, and the mist curls away.
The one in front stops by the bank, where the willow roots go into the water, an arm's length from Fedya's feet.
"What's in your hand?" she says.
Her voice is soft, and very kind, and it goes through me like cold water.
Fedya doesn't answer.
Fedya, who wanted this more than anybody, who has been planning it for a week, who says he'll kill every ash wolf in the forest when he's fourteen, has gone as still as a fence post. His mouth is open. Nothing comes out of it.
"Wormwood!" says Masha. Loud and sharp, the way she said "No" to the ferryman's wife. She holds the bunch up in front of her face. "Wormwood!"
The rusalka draws back.
All three of them do. Not far. A step. They look at the bitter grey bunch in Masha's hand the way a cat looks at water.
Then the second one looks at me.
She comes along the bank, slowly, in the water, towards the place where I'm sitting in the roots. Close. Closer. I can smell her now. Cold river, and something sweet underneath, like flowers left too long in a jar.
"And you, little one?" she says. "What's in your hand?"
I reach for my belt.
There's nothing there.
Somewhere between our gate and here, Masha's double knot has come undone.
The rusalka smiles. She has small, even teeth. She puts out her hand towards me, out of the water, very slowly, as if I'm a bird she doesn't want to frighten. Her fingers are long and thin, and water drips from them back into the pool.
I reach for the hum.
It's there. It's always there. It comes up ready, just like on the meadow. And then it stops, because I don't know what to do with it.
What would I do? Heat the water round her? Freeze it? I don't know what she is. I don't know what hurts her, or if anything does. Every trick I have works because I know what a thing is made of, and what it will do. I don't know what she's made of. I don't know what she'll do.
For the first time in this life, the hum has nothing to say.
Her fingers are a hand's width from my face. I can feel the cold coming off them.
Then something presses into my palm.
Rodya.
He's next to me in the roots. I didn't hear him move. He couldn't see her coming. He felt it, he tells me later. Not the way he feels me when I lean. Something colder, all round her, pulling towards me. Wanting something. He has broken his own bunch of wormwood in two, and he's pushing half of it into my hand and closing my fingers round it with his.
"Say it," he whispers.
"Wormwood," I say.
It comes out small. A four-year-old's voice. It's enough.
The rusalka stops.
She looks at the bitter twigs in my fist for a long moment. Then she looks at me, right into my face. Her eyes are the colour of the river at night, with no bottom to them. She tilts her head, the way Rodya does, as if she's listening for something.
Then she sinks.
Not quickly. She goes down into the water as slowly as she came up, until there's only her hair spread out on the surface like weed, and then not even that. The other two go after her. The mist closes over the place.
A little later, far out under the willows on the other side, the singing starts again.
We don't run. Masha won't let us. We walk back along the stream very fast, in a line, holding hands, with Rodya between Masha and me. Nobody says anything until the mill is out of sight.
Masha is shaking. I'm shaking. Fedya hasn't said a word since the pool.
Halfway along the stream, in the wet grass, Fedya starts to laugh.
Not loud. He can't, here. He does it with his hand over his mouth, bent over. Just like in the bathhouse.
"Little one," he gasps. "She called him little one."
Then Masha's laughing too, and so am I, and so is Rodya. We stand in the grass in the moonlight, wet and shivering and laughing, the four of us, until Masha says "Shh!" and we go on.
At the passage door behind the church, Fedya leans in close to Masha and me.
"We're the real thing now," he whispers. "They're the fakes."
Masha elbows him.
Rodya's face turns towards us. He heard. Of course he heard. He can hear Father Ivan's hen-walk from across the graveyard.
"What real thing?" he says.
"Nothing," says Masha. "Fedya's being Fedya."
Rodya doesn't ask again. He never asks again about anything I don't tell him. I like that about him.
Masha kneels down in front of him in the wet grass and takes both his hands.
"Thank you, Rodya," she says.
"What for?"
"For Kolya."
Rodya thinks about it.
"He's my friend," he says.
He goes in through the passage door to his sacks, holding his half of the wormwood. I watch until the door shuts.
The night witches are three. That's a promise, made in a bathhouse, with our little fingers. Rodya isn't in it. He doesn't know it exists.
But tonight he broke his wormwood in two and gave me half, without being asked.
On the Kuzmins' fence, on the way home, I find my bunch of wormwood. It's hanging from a nail by its string, exactly where it caught.
On the stove, I hold the wormwood up in front of my face, in the dark.
Wormwood. Bitter, because of something called absinthin. Dangerous, because of something called thujone. It was in the lab manual in my first year, on the page about things you don't drink. It keeps moths out of a clothes chest. That's all it should be able to stop.
And it stopped her.
I lie there in the dark and can't stop asking.
What were they? Girls, once? Something that only looks like girls? Were they real at all, or did four children frighten themselves silly in the mist? Rodya felt her. I felt the shape.
Then why did she stop? Was it the plant? The word? Or was it all the grandmothers in all the villages, telling the same story for so long?
I don't know. I don't even know how to start finding out.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, I don't put a line this time. I put two questions. What are they? And why did the wormwood work?
It's the first thing on that shelf I have no idea how to test.