I spun, clapping the book shut and hiding it behind my back.

In the torchlight, his river-rock face was still smooth. “What are you doing?”

I grinned. “I knew you weren’t mute.”

“You shouldn’t be holding torches up to books.”

“Ohhh. I’m sorry.” I tapped the book against my back. “Silly me.”

“Put the book back.”

“Oh? This thing?” I produced it from behind me as though I were surprised to find it there.

He glanced down, and I tried to put it back before he got a look at the title.

“How did you get in here?”

“Me?” I put my hand on my chest. “The door was open.”

“It was not.”

“How do you know?”

He did not answer.

I should have just stopped there. “I opened it.”

“You stole the keys.”

“No. No,” I said, putting my hands out in front of me. “I did it with myortva.” I couldn’t help it; I was proud of that trick.

“You wasted myortva.”

“I didn’t waste it. I used it to get in here.” My smile had no effect on him, so I made it brighter.

His lips flattened and turned down at the ends. He looked me up and down, and I focused on looking as small and innocent as possible. We were the same height, but I slouched so he could look down on me. When he was done with his appraisal, he nodded and said, “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked as he turned to walk away. I didn’t follow.

“We’re going to speak to Yelena Artyomovich.”

At least it wasn’t the knyaz. “Wait a minute, Sasha! Let’s not be hasty. Are you going to wake her up to tell her you found me reading? Well good, she’ll see how studious I am.”

“I’m going to tell her you broke into our library, wasted myortva, and were out past curfew. And my name is Aleksandr Artyomovich.” He made a face, for the first time.

I tucked that soft spot away for future reference. “Wasted myortva! Aleksandr Artyomovich, no more than you would get from a weed!”

“All myortva is precious,” he said. “Something died for that, and it is disrespectful to use it for amusement and criminal activity.”

“Crimina—so, you’ve never used myortva on anything that wasn’t completely necessary.” I scoffed.

“No,” he said, without so much as a moment’s pause. “Come.” Still holding the torch in one hand, he grabbed my wrist with the other.

“You don’t have to manhandle me!” I said, but I let him drag me out of the library. What was I going to do, fight him? Use up even more myortva? The other Okhotnikovs would find out, anyway. “You’re hurting me. Ow! What are you doing out of bed? You should be asleep, too! Slow down, you’re going to break my wrist!”

“Be quiet,” he said once, and when I kept complaining, he stopped responding.

Yelena, when she was training, slept in a room attached to the barracks, and Aleksandr Artyomovich felt no compunction about banging on her door in the middle of the night.

“You’re going to wake everyone up and then everyone will be tired on their ghost hunt, and then they won’t be able to defend themselves, and they’ll die, and ghosts will invade Gorakino, and it will be your fault.”

“It will be your fault,” he said, and I laughed, because drawing him into indulging that fantasy felt like a victory.

Yelena was mussed and confused when she opened the door (I could not imagine Aleksandr Artyomovich bleary-eyed. He probably slept completely still, on his back, with his hands folded on his chest and his braids still in. His eyes probably popped open as soon as the sun’s rays lit the sky). It took her a moment to understand what he was doing as he listed my crimes.

When he got to the bit about me wasting energy, her eyebrows furrowed, and I felt I had to cut in.

“It was only a tiny bit. Only as much as you’d get from a weed,” I repeated, though it was really more like the energy you’d get from a handful of beetles or a baby mouse. You couldn’t get any myortva from a weed.

“He broke into the library with it.”

“He broke down the door?” Yelena’s eyes widened.

“No! I just opened the lock.”

Her horrified expression morphed into one of bemusement and then curiosity. “Really? That’s quite clever—”

“Yelena Artyomovich.” His voice was almost pouty.

“What, Sashenka? It is. It’s still wrong.” She looked at me, trying to put on an appropriately stern face. “Even if it is clever, I’ve made it perfectly clear that myortva is not to be wasted. You will need every bit of it on the border. There is less life there than you may be accustomed to in Khorizova, and hence, less death and less myortva. A small amount of energy could be the difference between life and death.”

“I apologize, Yelena Artyomovich,” I said, bowing.

“Moreover, if a door is locked, it is locked for a reason, Iyu Aksanevich.”

“Yes, Yelena Artyomovich.”

“What were you doing in there, anyway?”

“I couldn’t sleep, and I like libraries.”

“You have full access to the library during daytime hours.”

“I prefer libraries when they’re empty.”

“Now that sounds like you, Sashenka.”

His expressionless face grew vaguely dark, but I was too distracted by relief that Yelena did not appear to be taking this as seriously as he was to take too much notice. I should have known. Yelena corrected me frequently, but she seemed to like my spirit.

“What were you doing up and about that you caught him there, anyway? I’ve told you, you are not responsible for disciplining my hunters; you are one of my hunters, it seems I must remind you.”

“I saw a torch missing outside the library.”

“And why were you not in your bed?”

His jaw tightened, and he did not respond.

“Right. Well, Iyu Aksanevich, you knowingly broke the rules, and there are consequences for that. How can I trust you to follow the rules that keep you, your partner, and all of our lands safe if you cannot even follow the rules here under supervision?”

“I would never let anything happen to Semchi—Semyon Aksanevich,” I said hotly.

“Hm. I think to be safe, you shall have another partner. Aleksandr Artyomovich, this will be the perfect opportunity for you to make sure he follows the rules unerringly.”

***

I should make one thing clear. Though I did not understand this when I got to Gorakino, by the time I left, I knew that the oft-repeated claim that a bunch of teenage aristocratic ghost hunters were responsible for keeping the entire continent safe from the encroaching monsters of the Sundered Lands was a bunch of bullshit. Oh, the ghosts were real enough, and we fought plenty of them. But no one, especially not the Okhotnikovs, was trusting a bunch of spoiled children to maintain the border. No, the gentry class sent their sons and daughters here to toughen them up, to make them feel like the war heroes their ancestors had been, to give them an understanding of the threats we faced and the responsibility we had, without putting them in any real danger in the process.

But like I said, I didn’t understand that at the time. At the time, I was desperate that Semchik would be out there without me. Aksana would flay me alive if anything happened to him. What was I here for if not to protect Semchik?

But Yelena was firm in her decision, and no amount of begging from me or silent impassiveness from Aleksandr Artyomovich would sway her. When I told Semchik, he seemed mildly disappointed, but when I told him that assuredly meant that he would be stuck with Ratty, his face drained entirely.

When it came time for our first hunt, they took all of us trainees out of the fortress in carts and dropped us off at intervals between guard towers along the border, with promises they’d be back to collect us in a week’s time.

“If your cousin lays a finger on Semchik, I’ll kill both of you,” I said to Aleksandr Artyomovich as we shouldered our gear and set out toward the misty border.

He did not respond.

The borderlands were always cloudy and thick with fog that curled like snakes hanging off the trees and bushes. The further we walked, the thicker the fog got, until we couldn’t see our own feet under us, and it felt like wading through the sky.

“You’re from Gorakino; you’ve probably done this a million times already,” I said, not expecting anything but the half-grunt I got in reply. An eerie feeling was creeping up my back, and talking helped me tamp it down. “Why do you Artyomoviches live out here anyway if it’s all overrun with ghosts?”

He gave me a disdainful look without rearranging any of his facial features. “Someone has to.”

“I’m glad it’s not me. I don’t know how you can stand it. The cold, the ghosts. Khorizova never even gets cold enough for the grass to turn brown. Barely ever. It’s sunny every day. Until it rains. Have you ever been there?”

He shook his head, still staring forward.

“You probably wouldn’t like it. Couldn’t wear your furs there or anything. I would like to see a ghost, though. We don’t have any of those in Khorizova, either.”

I hoped that would draw him into some kind of lecture about the dangers of ghosts, but he just handed me a stack of talismans. I supposed he’d decided we’d gone far enough, or he’d gotten desperate enough to escape my chatter that he needed to create a distraction.

Back in the relative safety of land not thickly coated in fog, we’d set up talismans, much like the ones my mother used to protect our hovel, to establish a campsite. These were not like those. These would not repel ghosts but draw them in. Like bait. It was not particularly smart to swim in shark-infested waters with pockets full of raw meat, and neither was it smart to carry bait talismans before you were ready to fight ghosts. Before we could set them, we had to put the finishing touches on. It was an awkward process, handling the paper, bottle of ink, and brush in the middle of nowhere. I tried to crouch down and press the talismans on my thigh, balancing the pot of ink on my opposite knee, but the fog made it hard to see what I was doing. I looked up to complain to Aleksandr Artyomovich, but he was already slapping talismans on skinny, underdeveloped trees and the bald faces of the numerous boulders jutting up from the ground.

“Hey, Sashenka! How’d you do that?”

He ignored me and kept placing talismans.

“Can you help me out here?”

No response.

“Aleksandr Artyomovich!”

He turned and marched over to me. He snatched the stack of talismans off my leg and replaced it with the half-stack of his still remaining.

“Thank you, Aleksandr Artyomovich! But next time, you need to teach me how to do it so quickly.” By the time I finished placing the rest of my bait, he was done finishing my talismans and placing the second stack. “You know, I appreciate your help, but you wouldn’t be having to deal with me if you didn’t tattle in the first place. Why did you have to do that?”

“You shouldn’t waste myortva. You shouldn’t force your way into locked rooms.”

“Okay, but I didn’t do anything bad. You and your cousin just don’t like me because I’m a bastard. Were you following me because you don’t think I belong here?”

“I don’t care who your parents are,” he said. His voice was calm and demeanor unhurried.

“Your cousin sure does.”

No response.

“Did he tell you to follow me, then?”

“I don’t answer to Filipp Artyomovich.” Now his voice had an edge to it.

“Good, because he’s an asshole.”

“Nor will I suffer you to disparage my family.”

“Fine, but then why were you following me?”

It was a moment, as he aggressively slapped talismans against a rock, before he said, “I sensed wrongdoing.”

Maybe I should still have been mad, but I threw my head back and laughed. He sensed wrongdoing! I could believe it.

“Be quiet,” he said suddenly, snapping to attention somewhere off in the distance, his palm out to me.

“Ghosts?” I said out loud because there was sometimes no barrier between my brain and my tongue, and his hand curled into a fist.

I hurried out of the circle we’d created with the talismans and crouched down behind a bush. Aleksandr Artyomovich joined me, but he stayed standing, so I straightened up, too.

We didn’t have to wait long before the first ghost arrived. The first ghost I’d ever seen, darker than the ambient fog, long and thin and translucent, with what almost looked like a head at the top, tendrils floating out at its side, and a denser black core. It reminded me of the octopuses that swept across the sands of the shallows at home. My heart beat faster; I could feel the myortva in me perk up like it recognized something as the ghost groped out with ropy tendrils, caressed the talisman hanging in a low branch. When the tendril struck, the talisman curled in on itself, dried out and cracked, crumbled, and disappeared. The myortva in me positively crackled, but Aleksandr Artyomovich put his arm across my chest.

I didn’t even know I’d moved.

The ghost abandoned the crumbled talisman and moved on, seeking out the next. When I peeled my eyes away from it, three others, all slightly smaller than the first had joined it, and talismans were disintegrating all around the circle.

I was just about ready to jump out of my skin, but Aleksandr Artyomovich still held his arm up. The ghosts grouped together, and his arm shot forward.

Even before the energy left him, I’d darted to the side to get another angle on them.

I hadn’t been expecting the noise they made.

The first one Aleksandr Artyomovich’s myortva hit vanished into the fog without a trace, but the next one was only clipped, and it let out a warbling cry like a fox in heat. My own burst of myortva a moment later cut its cry short, and the two that were left surged toward us, tendrils cutting through the air like whips. Our next blasts collided, hitting and overkilling one of them, but the last ghost lashed out at Aleksandr Artyomovich, a blow he only barely managed to deflect with the sword in his off-hand.

His sword reeled back, and the flash of metal drew my eye behind him. I only half saw the shadow there, and as the myortva left my fingers, I had the absurd thought that he was going to chastise me for wasting it. But my myortva hit something, and the shadows behind him dissipated.

The ghost in front of him screamed as he skewered its dense core, and it crumbled apart. He looked at me and nodded.

That was the first time I had his back. It wouldn’t be the last.