Lyubov Maksimovna dipped her head and curtsied deeply, and when she rose, clasped her hands behind her back, suddenly the picture of primness and propriety.

I sat up straighter in bed.

“Thank you, Lyubov Maksimovna,” Vasilij Artyomovich said, “You may go.”

She curtsied again and left without a backward glance.

Vasilij stepped out of the way to let her pass and followed her with his eyes until she was halfway down the hallway.

His eyes, when they snapped to me, were unnervingly light. He closed the door behind him and crossed to the chair beside the bed. “Aleksandr Artyomovich already told me what happened. Do you have anything else you would like to add?” His voice was like Sanya’s, too, but quicker. Not quick, but quicker.

“I don’t know what he said, so I don’t know if I need to add anything.”

“He told me what happened.” Now, his voice was slower, but not any more like Sanya’s.

I nodded. “Sanya tells the truth. I’m sure I don’t have anything to add.”

“Sanya?”

I hadn’t even realized what I said. “I’m sorry. It slipped out. Your cousin and I spent a lot of time together is all, so I think of him as a friend.”

Vasilij did not respond immediately but kept his eyes fixed on me, gray like the sky outside and traveling all over my face in tiny, calculating flicks. “Aleksandr Artyomovich pulled zhiva from you,” he said finally.

“Yes, but it was an accident. He didn’t mean to—”

“You need only answer the questions I ask. I am not asking you to elaborate.”

“Okay, I just—”

He held up his hand to silence me and leaned back in his chair. “Why did you have gnila in your hand?”

I hesitated. “I got hit by a ghost,” I said. “I tried to pull it out, but I accidentally pulled it into my hand.”

“Was that the first time or the second?”

“Both.”

“So it happened once, and you tried it again.”

“Yes. I thought I could do it the second time.”

“The first time you failed to properly extract the gnila, Aleksandr Artyomovich removed it for you. Why didn’t you ask him to remove it the second time?”

“The last time he did it, he pulled zhiva out of me. I was scared that would happen again.”

“You were scared of it happening.”

“Yes.”

“And when you realized you’d pulled the gnila into your hand again, why didn’t you send up a signal?”

“We were already coming home in the morning, and after what happened on our last hunt, I didn’t want to cause any more trouble.”

“Aleksandr Artyomovich says he was able to use the zhiva he pulled from you.”

“Yes, but he didn’t want to. He tried not to use any energy at all because he—”

“How did you feel after he pulled the zhiva from you?”

“Fine. At first—I was fine.”

“That’s not when you started to get sick?”

“No. I only got sick after the second time, when I didn’t get the gnila out quick enough.”

“And when he used the zhiva, how did it work?”

“I don’t know; I didn’t really see it.” Sanya might have felt obligated to give Vasilij Artyomovich all the details, but I was not compelled by the same sense of duty to these people.

“Aleksandr Artyomovich told me it was powerful.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Very well, Iyu Aksanevich. Do you feel strong enough to return to the barracks?”

I should have known not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I had no control over my own mouth when it said, “What?” I shook myself out of it. “Sorry. Yes, I’m fine.”

“Good. You’ve missed enough training. Go see Mariya Artyomovich; you need to learn how to pull gnila out properly. That’s something you should be able to do easily by now.”

“Yes. I will. Thank you, Vasilij Artyomovich.”

“I’ve just realized I never introduced myself,” he said, something like a smile on his face, though his eyes were suddenly distant.

“That’s okay, I know who you are,” I said, starting to pull the sheets off my legs.

He put his hand up. “Wait until I’m gone.”

I didn’t know why he was acting like I was stark naked under the covers. These Okhotnikovs were terrible prudes.

When he was almost out the door he suddenly stopped and turned around. “Oh, and Iyu Aksanevich. Don’t mention any of this to the other hunters. I’ve told Aleksandr Artyomovich the same thing. There’s no need to scare anyone.”

***

I couldn’t believe my good luck. I was so excited to get out unscathed, I forgot not only about my own weakness but also that Lyubov was going to send Semchik up to me after Vasilij left. Consequently, I nearly ran into him, dizzily rounding a corner in the unfamiliar building.

“Semchik!” I croaked happily.

He gave me a look up and down and slid his arm under mine. “What are you doing running around like this? You look awful.”

“I feel great. Actually, I feel awful, but I feel great.”

“You need to lie down.”

“You sound like Lyubov Maksimovna. Isn’t she wonderful?”

“Sure. How do you feel great? Didn’t Vasilij Artyomovich come talk to you?”

“That’s all he did was talk to me. Come on, let’s go before he changes his mind.”

Semchik half-carried me back to the barracks where the other hunters were milling around between lessons, looking harried and tired. Sofya Ivanovich and Vladimir Lvovich asked me how I was, but otherwise, no one seemed too concerned. That was a relief, but, at the same time, it was something of a disappointment. I had been cooking up a good story I could tell that wouldn’t get Sanya or me in trouble.

“Where’s Aleksandr Artyomovich?” I asked Semchik as I sat down on his bunk. He had agreed to let me use his so I wouldn’t have to climb up to my top bunk.

“I don’t know.” Semchik shrugged, hands shoved in his pockets as he stood across from me. “I haven’t seen him. Are you going to be able to come to lessons later? You look pale.”

“I’ll be fine. Vasilij Artyomovich thinks I’m behind already.”

“You are, if you can’t even pull gnila out of a wound.”

“Of course I can,” I said testily. Then, before he could ask any more questions, “How was your week? You didn’t get into a fight again, right?”

“No.” He made a sour, offended face. “It went fine. Filipp Artyomovich is not so bad once you get to know him.”

“Oh. That’s good. Did you get hit by any ghosts?”

“Not as much as you did,” he said, then rolled up his sleeve to show me a red welt up his forearm like the ones on my neck and shoulder. “I even pulled out the gnila without poisoning myself.” He gave me a little grin. “I was really worried about you. Please pay better attention in lessons, okay?”

“Don’t worry about me, Semyon Aksanevich. This was just a stupid mistake. I really can take care of myself. I should be worried about taking care of you.” I touched his arm, but he drew back and rolled his sleeve back down.

He cocked his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “If you can pull the gnila out, why didn’t you?”

I shrugged, perhaps a little too dramatically to be believable. “I don’t know. I guess I was a little too keyed up. Pulled it all right into my hand.”

He kept looking at me. “I was really scared when I had to pull the energy out, too. I used too much myortva doing it. I don’t think I could’ve sucked the gnila back into me if I tried.”

I looked at him, at this hard stare I’d never seen directed at me before, at this boy who a year ago weighed as much as a wet cat and who now wouldn’t let me call him Semchik. I felt sad.

I cast around the room unsubtly, and when I saw no one was paying attention, I motioned for him to sit down beside me.

He sighed and did so.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I was really doing, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

He nodded.

“What happened was… Okay, so, have you ever wondered if ghosts have energy we could use?”

“It’s gnila. It’s energy that’s gone bad.”

“Sure, but the ghosts still use it. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I was trying to see if I could use gnila. So I pulled it back into my hand, but then I realized I couldn’t use it, or I didn’t know how to, so I tried to pull it out again, but when I did, some of my zhiva came with it.” Just because Sanya was a snitch didn’t mean I had to be. I’d keep his name out of it.

“What?” he said, and I shhed him. “Sorry. What do you mean zhiva? Like the stuff that keeps you alive? The stuff that’s supposed to stay inside your body?”

“Yeah, that stuff. But it was just a little bit, it didn’t even hurt, and I absorbed it like myortva. I could use it like myortva.”

“You’re not serious,” Semchik said, but I could tell by the rabbit-like quality of his eyes that he knew I was.

“Isn’t that amazing, Semchik? I felt fine, and if we can do that… If that’s something we can use, all of us… Think of what we could do.”

“If you felt fine, why did Aleksandr Artyomovich have to carry you back into the palace? Why were you in the infirmary for two days?”

“Oh, that wasn’t because of the zhiva. That’s because I tried to do it again, but I ran out of myortva before I could pull the gnila out.”

“Why didn’t you have Aleksandr Artyomovich pull it out?”

I sighed. “That was stupid of me. I just thought it would be okay until we got back to the palace. I didn’t know it would spread like it does when the ghosts put it in you.”

“Yushka, honestly. You’re not going to do that again, are you?”

“Well…”

He squared his shoulders to me. “Don’t. Do not do it. Don’t embarrass our family, don’t embarrass my mother and me. Please.”

“It shouldn’t be an embarrassment. It should—but fine. Yes. I won’t do it again.”

“I know you get restless, but please, just keep your head down. We have to be here for a long time. If you keep this up, you won’t make it to the end.”

***

Sanya was at training that afternoon, but I couldn’t get him to make eye contact with me. Vasilij Artyomovich wasn’t there, but Mariya Artyomovich called me over when she finished talking to the group of us. I had to explain to her that I was out of myortva, and she acted like this was a big imposition and done just to spite her. By the time we requisitioned an unfortunate goat for me to drain, the rest of the group was done and cleaning up for dinner, but Mariya insisted we stay out until she was satisfied I knew how to pull gnila from a wound. It was difficult to prove this with no actual rotten energy present.

So I didn’t get to talk to Sanya then, and when I finally got to dinner, he wasn’t there. This was not abnormal, and our interactions, or lack thereof, over the course of the day weren’t, either, but it still bothered me. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t know why. I was sure he was furious, but I’d been sure Vasilij would be furious, too.

The mood at dinner was strange. No one was terribly interested in me, and I not only found that strange because I was an incurable egoist but also because I knew most of them were incurable snoops and gossip-mongers. Either they’d already heard a story from Sanya or there was something even more interesting happening. I couldn’t imagine what the latter might be, but I found it more likely than the former.

Semchik was, unbelievably, sitting with Filipp Artyomovich and some minor Artyomovich cousins, and I thought about inserting myself into that group, but all that would come of that would be to make both Semchik and Sanya angrier with me, so I sat down by Chabas and her cousin Vladimir Lvovich and asked them what was going on.

They didn’t bother asking what I meant by that. Vladimir said that everyone had been on edge since Vasilij Artyomovich returned. He was here for a day, and then Yelena left. The kids from Veliko thought that it had something to do with an insurgent group that had been causing trouble along the border of Veliko and Tsura, but they hadn’t had any word from home. Chabas said she’d heard her grandfather saying something about that before they came to Gorakino, about how Knyaz Fadej of Veliko didn’t want to send his disciples to Gorakino while the rebels were still acting up. That’s why Maksim Fadeich and Yekaterina Fadeich weren’t here even though they were both due to start their service.

Okay, that was perhaps slightly more interesting than what happened to me and Sanya, if you were from Veliko (the Ozero twins didn’t seem concerned about the Tsura side of the equation, but they never seemed concerned about much) or if your sister had been dispatched to… to what? I asked Chabas and Vladimir what Yelena was going to do about it, but they didn’t know any more than I did on that account. Maybe she was going to infiltrate them, Vladimir suggested. More probably, she was going to talk to Knyaz Fadej about whether Gorakino could help, thought Chabas. But if that’s where Vasilij came from, why did Yelena need to go right after him?

They didn’t know, and the conversation moved on.