What I learned that first week we spent together was that Aleksandr Artyomovich was fearless. He charged ahead. He followed all the rules and protocols Yelena laid out for us, rules I was sure he drank in along with his mother’s milk, but his own personal safety seemed of little consequence to him. He got within a hair’s breadth of ghosts without flinching. He preferred to use his sword to kill them, undoubtedly because he used less myortva that way. I have no doubt that the way I fight, the way I use energy even now, was shaped indelibly by fighting alongside him. He knew how he wanted to fight; I learned how I could fight by slotting myself into the spaces he left open, compensating for his weaknesses. He went in; I held back, keeping our perimeters, picking off latecomers, avoiding the scrum until the last minute so I wouldn’t get in the way of his swinging blade.

The first time the tendrils hit him, I didn’t know it until we got back to camp. I, as usual, busied myself checking and replacing the warding talismans (I’d learned to hold the inkpot between my thumb and forefinger and slide the talismans between my fore and middle fingers to brush the strokes on), but Aleksandr Artyomovich simply collapsed in a heap by the fire pit and shed his coat.

“What are you doing?” I called around the brush tucked between my lips as I hung a fresh talisman in a bush. “Did you forget it’s colder than a corpse’s ballsack out here?” (I considered my frequent complaints about the weather and his frequent vague huffs in response an inside joke between us by now.)

I glanced back at him, hoping to catch one of his irritated but simultaneously expressionless faces. He wasn’t looking at me at all. He was stripping off his heavy sweater and rolling up his left sleeve.

I nearly dropped my ink pot when I saw the ugly black mark wrapping around his forearm. “Sashenka! What is that? What happened?” I hurried over to him.

“Go back to your work,” he said. “I will handle this.” But I could see how his teeth gritted when he touched the spot.

“My mother was a healer; I know what I’m doing.” I began searching in my bag for the medicine kit.

He pushed the kit away. Of course, I hadn’t been thinking, but of course he knew more about ghosts than I did. Of course you didn’t cure the rotten energy ghosts left behind with herbs and ointments. He put his opposite hand on his forearm and began massaging.

Up close, the mark was dead black in the center, purple and red on the edges, and the skin there was blistering already. The massaging could not have felt good, but as he worked, the blackness drew back until the spiraling mark where one of those tendrils seized him looked like nothing more than a mild and strangely patterned sunburn. When he had done all he could, he pulled his hand back and whipped it as though shaking water off. A black mass flung from his fingertips and curdled on the ground before evaporating entirely.

“How much myortva does that use?” I asked.

“Enough.”

“Do you have enough left?”

He nodded grimly (he did everything grimly).

“Okay. Can I help now?” He didn’t push me away, so I took that as assent and set to work cleaning and dressing the wound as I would a burn. “So they leave gnila behind, huh? What makes energy go rotten, anyway?” I didn’t expect a response, so I didn’t pause for one. “We’re so concerned about conserving energy, but if these ghosts are all made of gnila, there must be plenty of energy out there spoiling before we can get to it. Do you think the Sundered Lands are just full of gnila or is there good energy going bad out there all the time? Has anyone ever gone looking? Well, I don’t know how they could. If it’s all this foggy, how could you even see anything? Eugh.” I glanced at where the gnila he’d sucked out of his arm had landed. “Is it like eggs? Once it goes bad there’s no getting it back? What if we could purify it? Has anyone ever tried that?”

“It disappears.”

“Maybe there’s a way to make it not disappear.” I had really just been talking, but since he responded to that, I seized on it. “We can use myortva to speed ourselves up; we could probably use it to slow things down.”

He hmmed.

“Or, what if we could capture a ghost alive or… whatever they are?”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. They can probably get out of a net, huh?”

“Gnila cannot be purified.”

“How do you know?”

“If it could be done, someone smarter than you are would have done it already.” He took the end of the bandage I was winding around his arm out of my hand and tucked it in.

“How do you know there’s anyone smarter than me?” I grinned.

Well, we’d had a good run, but he was back to not responding, instead replacing his layers in silence.

“Do you think ghosts feel anything?” I asked. “I didn’t know they could scream like that.”

“They do it to call others. Or warn them,” he said, adjusting the fur across his shoulders.

“So they communicate with each other.”

He shrugged, but I didn’t know if it was at me or just to get comfortable in his clothes.

“Why do we go into the Sundered Lands hunting ghosts, anyway? We just waste myortva and don’t get anything from it. If we could harvest gnila, I’d understand. But if they stay in the Sundered Lands, why does it matter to us?”

“They stay in the Sundered Lands because we keep them in the Sundered Lands,” he said curtly. “You see how close they get to the border.”

“What if we could talk to them? Tell them, hey, just stay away from us, and we’ll stay away from you. If they can communicate.”

“The next time we fight some, you are welcome to try.”

I crowed with glee. “Thank you for the permission, Aleksandr Artyomovich, but you should be the one doing the talking, with that silver tongue of yours.”

***

By the next time we fought ghosts, neither of us was in the mood for talking. Over the border, we chased a group of shadows in the distance and got turned around, unsure in the end if we’d just been hunting a gap in the fog. Both of us were tired and unsure of our footing when we finally gave up the ghost (as it were) and decided to make our way back towards the border. At least we knew which way that was: uphill.

We hadn’t gotten very far when we heard shouting in the distance. We both paused, Aleksandr Artyomovich putting his arm out in front of me. A familiar gesture, by now.

“Is that a ghost?” I said, voice low.

“No.”

And no, it clearly wasn’t. We followed, and after a moment, we could pick out two distinct voices. One of them, I thought I knew.

I picked up my pace, and Aleksandr Artyomovich matched me. In another moment, we were running. Unwise in this terrain, and normally, he would have chastised me for it.

We nearly had to get close enough to trip on them before we could see them: Semchik and Ratty rolling on the misty ground. Momentarily, I was gratified to see Semchik on top of him, fist coming down, but before he could connect, Aleksandr Artyomovich hit him from behind. Semchik tumbled off of Ratty, and I, instinctively, threw myself at Aleksandr Artyomovich.

He had his arm across Semchik’s throat, and Semchik looked dazed, on his back on the ground. I grabbed Aleksandr Artyomovich under the arms and threw my weight back, but before I could pull him off, Ratty—I assumed—collided with my back and an elbow locked around my neck. I sputtered and gave another heave, and I’d have to thank Ratty later because his added effort helped me pull Aleksandr Artyomovich away from Semchik.

We all fell backward in a heap, the back of my skull knocking against (what I gathered from the teeth-snapping sound that accompanied it was) Ratty’s jaw. Aleksandr Artyomovich’s head hit my sternum, and I tightened my grip on his arms, pulling my own up so my elbows were in his armpits and my fingers locked behind his neck.

Semchik scrambled to his feet, eyes refocused but somewhat wild. “Stop!” he cried, and I was shocked to hear how deep his voice sounded.

Ratty, whose grip on my neck had loosened when my head hit his jaw, now tightened it again, and I gasped, involuntarily and ineffectively. This may have affected my hold on Aleksandr Artyomovich, because he broke my grip and hoisted himself to standing. Worried he would go after Semchik again, and with my arms newly free, I gave Ratty an elbow in the ribs and tried to maneuver my jaw down to bite his arm.

Before I could, Aleksandr Artyomovich seized me by the collar of my coat and hauled me to my feet, dragging Ratty with me.

“Stop,” he repeated and pushed me back.

I stumbled over Ratty, whose arm had gone slack around my neck at Aleksandr Artyomovich’s command, but kept myself upright on the power of sheer outrage alone. “Stop! How can you tell us to stop, when—”

“Your cousin was going to punch mine in the face.” I knew he was truly angry: interrupting and neglecting to call Semchik by his name and patronymic.

“I’m sure he had a good reason! It’s a miracle any time your cousin’s talking and someone isn’t punching him in the face!”

“You should talk!” Ratty said. “Or rather, not. That would be the real miracle.”

“Was that supposed to be an insult? I’m only shocked you managed to get through a whole sentence without calling me ‘bastard.’”

“Bastard.”

“There it is!” I didn’t even realize we were standing nose-to-nose until Semchik wedged himself between us.

“Stop it, Yusha,” he said, deep, commanding voice gone and, awfully, tears in his eyes. “Think about what they can do to you.”

“Oh, I won’t go to my father to have your hands chopped off; I’ll do it myself!” Ratty said, shaking off Aleksandr Artyomovich, who was trying to steer him away. “You don’t have a right to touch me, either!” Apparently, he was too carried away to stop himself. “I’m going to be knyaz here, not you!”

Aleksandr Artyomovich just hmmed.

I said, “You’re not going to be knyaz; Vasilij Artyomovich is. Unless you’re planning to have some of his body parts chopped off, too.”

“Iyu Aksanevich!” Semchik grabbed my arm. “Shut. Up.”

“You tell me to shut up when you were the one ready to bash his face in,” I said, aware enough to know my rage was becoming aimless now, thrashing like a snake with its head cut off, but unable or unwilling to still it. “You think they won’t cut your hands off just because you’re not a bastard?” If that was what he thought, he was correct, of course. They wouldn’t dare lay a finger on Semyon Aksanevich, the only son of the Knyaz of Khorizova. I’d like to see them try. If anyone so much as thought it, I was sure Aksana would know, would sense the ripples in the air, would crush a hundred birds in her fists to fly here her terrible self. She’d lay waste to Gorakino, raze it to the ground.

But since she wasn’t here, I’d have to do my best impression of her. My focus shifted to Ratty, and Semchik put his shoulder across my chest to keep me from stepping forward. “What did you do, anyway?”

“He—”

“No one will have his hands cut off,” Aleksandr Artyomovich said. “This is over.” He looked between me and Ratty.

Ratty began to argue. “Aleksandr Artyomovich, they—”

“You wouldn’t feel obligated to inform Yelena Artyomovich?” I said.

He regarded me silently for a moment. “This is a stressful environment. Will you continue to fight?” His eyes moved to Ratty and Semchik.

Semchik shook his head. Ratty sighed in an unearned, aggrieved way. “I didn’t start this fight in the first place.”

“Oh, please,” Semchik muttered under his breath.

“What was that?” Ratty craned his neck around Aleksandr Artyomovich.

“He just said it’s fucking bullshit you didn’t start the fight; what did you do to him, anyway?” I said, pressing against Semchik, head weaving, like a dog barking on the wrong side of a fence.

“It’s nothing!” Semchik said, the red in his face showing through the mist. “Leave it.”

“If you’re going to keep fighting when Aleksandr Artyomovich and I leave, then it is something. What if he throws you in front of a ghost?”

“More like he’d trip into a ghost and drag me with him,” Ratty called.

“Shut the fuck up, Ratty, I’m not talking to you.”

“What did you call me?” There was a threat in his voice now.

Aleksandr Artyomovich turned, slowly, and I took an involuntary step back from Semchik.

I laughed, blood rushing to my face. “Oops. That’s just my little pet name for you, you know, on account of the rat face.”

Aleksandr Artyomovich moved quicker than the rest of us could, catching Ratty with one arm and throwing the other out at us. Before we could do anything to block it, a burst of energy knocked us off our feet and carried us back five yards. I hit the ground with a crunch, inches from a jagged boulder, and Semchik landed on top of me. Between Semchik’s weight (I was still unable to accept that he’d grown bigger than I was) and the shock of Aleksandr Artyomovich wasting myortva, all the air was expelled from my lungs.

“Semyon Aksanevich, go back with your cousin. I’ll stay with Filipp Artyomovich.”

No one argued with him, face still river-rock smooth through his fury.