Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The buckles of the suitcase snap open with a well-oiled click. Rhoden rummages through his scarce earthly possessions. Socks. Underwear. Cutthroat razors, two. A brown brick of tar soap with “Urals Factory no. 35” stamped on it in green. Half a box of genuine Indian tea, the one he and Steinberg shared back in Kronstadt.

Ah. There.

“I have something for you,” he says to the back of Esther’s head. She’s pressed her nose against the thick glass of the compartment window, fascinated by the landscapes floating past.

She doesn’t turn around, but her left hand gropes the cot covers as if to say, well, give it to me, then. Alexander looks at her and then at Rhoden, rolling his eyes with an apologetic smile. Rhoden doesn't mind, though. He's not in it for the empty pleasantries.

He slides it over. She accepts it, spends a few moments feeling it with her fingers, and then does turn around to look. There’s bemusement in her expression.

***

Yulia gave it to him on their last evening in Reval.

“I bumped into someone just outside that place you used to play in,” she said. “I wanted to give you something before you leave, and, well, I asked for her advice. So it’s kind of from both of us.”

It was a miniature decorative tile made out of brass and wood. Against a background of smooth blue enamel, Rhoden could just make out a row of painted aspen trees fluttering in the wind and a tall grey figure of a man standing among them. A thin metal rod extended a few inches past the edge of the tile and tapered to a point, evidently designed to be affixed to a wall or to the arch of a gate.

He studied it with a faint smile. It was a protective talisman – a symbol of Metsik, “the grey man”, the deity of local forests.

Someone was no doubt Salme Rüütli.

"She said you'd need his favour if you're returning to the dig." Yulia hesitated a little, clearly wary of unwittingly offending him. "I'm not sure if she was in earnest."

"Probably not," Rhoden shrugged. "I never knew Rüütli to be religious. She must've meant it as a quip."

But a warm-hearted one. A grain of truth in every joke.

He turned the tile over, absently tracing a pattern on the polished wood. "How did she seem?"

What he meant and couldn't quite ask was did she seem sober.

"Well enough," Yulia said, giving him a tired smile and thrusting her hands deeper into the pockets of her blue linen dungarees. "Unhappy, though. I think she was hoping you'd stay longer."

Yulia had always appeared timeless to him - ever the life of any party, fiercely protective, warm-hearted, girlishly mischievous at sixty just as she was at forty. Even the sparkle of silver in her thick glossy hair had seemed more of an adornment than a sign of old age.

Now, this energetic, all-cheerful spirit seemed distant - as if some secret clockwork within her had at long last whirred to a stop.

"This isn't how I wanted to leave things, either," she said. "Come back safe and whole, malai. I'd hate it if we parted like this and something happened to you-" 

Before she could finish, he put the talisman away and carefully gathered her in his arms.

"It's not your fault, Yulechka," he muttered against the crown of her head. "I blame you for nothing. And don't worry about me. Leon has already told me in no uncertain terms that I am to exercise caution."

If you let yourself come to harm, Rubinstein had said, I will dance the khosidl on your remains. Then I will mail the fragments to my most incompetent student and ask him to glue them back together with a bit of potato kleister.

She ran one hand down his spine, from the seventh vertebra to the space beneath the shoulder-blades. "Told you to go fuck yourself, didn't he?"

"More or less."

***

"We had to leave before you could recover the swallow's bones," Rhoden explains, "and I thought this might make an acceptable substitute."

Esther looks at him and then back at the tile. She squints curiously at the lanky grey silhouette standing among the aspens.

"It's an Estlish deity. Metsik - 'that of the forest'. He can command wild animals to do his bidding, and he's supposed to be the patron god of grain and cattle, too.

"Pretty typical of Yoldia, really." Rhoden's mouth curls up at the corners. "We don't do fierce warrior spirits or what have you. It's a nation of pagan farmers."

Esther leans her elbow against the metal rim of the table and raises the tile up. Spots of pale butter-yellow sunlight glide over it, interspersed with the shadows of trees as the train passes by groves and fruit orchards.

"I don't know," she says, "I think commanding wolves and bears is pretty fierce. I want a pet wolf, myself."

Alexander snorts at this, giving her a fond look. Rhoden watches her hands as she fastens the tile to the breast pocket of her chequered black and white woollen jacket, fashioning it into a pin. The fingers of her left hand seem a little clumsy in comparison to the right one, slipping off the enamelled surface a couple of times before she finally manages to pierce the fabric at the right angle.

He frowns to himself. Perhaps there has been nerve damage after all. That's something they'll have to keep an eye on.

"Thank you, Arno," she says.

Smiling isn't really in Esther's vocabulary. He has come to suspect it's not so much because she's unhappy as because she hasn't quite got the hang of showing emotion through facial expressions. It doesn't seem to come naturally to her. But now her mouth tenses and her cheeks dimple a little - which is as close to smiling as he has ever seen her be.

Alexander, too, looks at him with gratitude. It hasn't escaped Rhoden's notice that his relationship with Esther holds some special hidden significance to her brother - that his eyes grow wistful and his features soften when he sees Rhoden interact with her.

We've come to expect no commitment from others. There's a flash of something raw and tender in Alexander's expression before he turns away from them and looks out of the window.

"I've something for you, too," Rhoden tells him. "I can hear the conductor passing through, though. Better to leave it until later."

There's a knock on the door. He puts his hand into his coat pocket and carefully slips a fresh five-rouble note between their tickets.

After the conductor passes - matter-of-factly accepting both the tickets and the money - Esther settles down to sleep. She covers herself with her jacket, stretches on the cot next to Rhoden, and rests her head against his leg the way she might prop it up on a pillow. Rhoden is both deeply touched by the sight and worried she might get a crick in her neck. His body is not exactly made to be comfortably rested on.

He and Steinberg sit in silence for a while. Outside, the colour of the light gets warmer and then colder again, shifting from peach-orange to cranberry-red and finally deepening almost into purple.

Rhoden eats a condensed milk biscuit, leaning carefully to the side so that the crumbs wouldn't fall on Esther.

"You've let him off too easy," Steinberg whispers, glumly.

Rhoden raises an eyebrow. "What, the conductor? I thought it was quite reasonable of him to accept the five roubles. He could've had more if he'd haggled with me a little."

Steinberg inclines his head, his features sharp in the gathering gloom. "Iakov."

"Ah." They pass a small whistle stop, and Rhoden draws one half of the heavy green canvas curtains, shielding Esther from the cold light of the lamps that floods the compartment.

"He deserves more of a punishment than a rap on the knuckles from his father."

Rhoden shakes his head. "I don't think so."

Steinberg's ginger brows draw together, a wrathful crease above the bridge of his nose. "What his actions cost you can never be repaid. You're forgiving - perhaps too forgiving -"

"His actions cost me nothing," Rhoden interrupts quietly, raising a palm. “You could certainly be angry for Leon's sake, but I - I would've published the report, whether the Third Section knew about it or not.

"You have more cause to blame me for your present predicament than to blame Iakov for mine. Trust me - he isn't worth your anger."

Steinberg frowns at him a few moments longer; then his features relax and he draws a tired hand across his face.

"You're right," he murmurs. "You're right, of course. I apologise.

"It's just that I'm- that you- It's difficult to think about it objectively, that's all."

He doesn't make himself incredibly clear. But then, to be fair, neither does Rhoden. He gave Steinberg a very abridged version of his conversation with Rubinstein; Leon wanted to protect his family was how he explained Rubinstein's reluctance to release their findings.

Mainly, he didn't want to worry the kid. The idea that Rubinstein had suspected Rhoden of having self-destructive motives so strongly that he hadn't trusted him to put his name under the Parlevo report would have certainly done nothing to reassure Steinberg regarding Rhoden's state of mind. It was bad enough that the kid knew how he’d come by his prosthetic hand.

Another - related - consideration had to do with that winter evening when Rhoden asked him to stay for a game of shatranj. With his reasons for helping Steinberg.

But this is a subject he prefers not to linger on. Rhoden shakes his head and resolves to think of it no more.

"I appreciate the sentiment, Sasha," he says gently. "It is kind of you to be upset on my behalf. But everyone gets what they deserve, in the end. It won't be easy on Iakov, remembering what he did. That is punishment enough."

Steinberg nods.

Some more time passes in silence. It is now fully dark outside; Esther still sleeps, her limbs splayed awkwardly on the covers. Finally, Rhoden carefully moves her head and lowers it onto the coarse woollen blanket. The only reaction he gets is a small sigh and a twitch of her eyelids. She's too unconscious to care.

"I'll go for a smoke," he whispers to Steinberg. Then he gets up from the cot, exits the compartment, and follows the narrow shaking hallway to the vestibule of the carriage.

The vestibule smells like iron and soot. The only light comes from the stars shimmering in the small glass square of the door pane.

But he doesn't need sight for what he's about to do.

He extracts a small bundle of fabric from the inner pocket of his coat. It's tied with a bit of string, and undoing the knots takes him a few moments. Then he carefully unwraps it, layer after layer of crisp linen.

In his hand lies a human collarbone, S-shaped and porcelain-white. Its midshaft is damaged, and familiar colours swirl slowly within the eroded edges of the defect. It's a part of the Sawirk cholera remains - back in Kronstadt, he showed this clavicle to Steinberg when telling him about the phenomenon of osteological memory.

Rhoden pulls the glove off his artificial hand. Then he takes a deep breath and carefully presses his metal fingers, glinting dully under the starlight, into the spongy insides of the bone.

The familiar austere landscape of a Sawirk cedar forest expands around him like an explosion. He- she? The memory Rhoden finds himself submerged in resists masculine terms. It's a curious feeling - a sensation of a mind divided. He naturally thinks of himself as a man; but now this thought causes discomfort, mild and yet unrelenting.

She turns. Cedar trees tower over her, reaching into the grey sky, proud like ship masts. Her feet sink into the soft damp moss. The air smells of decaying plant matter and ripening bog-berries; a red squirrel darts past her and disappears in the tree foliage.

He looks down at his hands. At her hands. It is odd to see the left one intact - small, freckled, light brown, with interphalangeal joints like knots on a length of rope.

The hand curls into a fist. She drives it into the trunk of a cedar, the bark scratching her knuckles. The sensation ripples through him - sadness, anger, pain.

He is unsure whether the ache in his bones is from the blow or from her grief. The physical and the emotional blend together in this strange half-world.

The forest fades from view and something else unfurls around him; a scene around a roaring fire. He vaguely recognizes his surroundings from archaeological maps of old Sawirk sites - it's a fairly typical village from around the 20th century before the Revolution. She recognizes her surroundings as one recognizes one's own heart, one's own flesh. It is her home.

She smiles at a joke an elderly woman on her left tells her. He does and doesn't know the language they speak. He knows that the joke is funny, and the ticklish warmth of amusement gathers beneath his breastbone.

It's vaguely uncomfortable, laughing at something utterly beyond his understanding. Makes him feel like he's losing it, like maybe the Third Section wouldn't need to buy anyone's cooperation to get him committed.

But she throws her head back and laughs uproariously. She is content.

Steinberg was right in one respect: it is nothing like the memory he was confronted with when his hand came into contact with the seal vertebra. It is neither disorienting nor inherently painful. His mind meshes easily with hers, the way it never could with the mind of an animal.

But - there's another consideration. When she hit the cedar tree, he felt her pain. And although he doesn't know her name nor even her language, he knows one thing about her, and that is how she died.

He knows she will be in a lot more pain, soon.

Part of him thinks he should stop now, while he can. He retains control of his hands, even if the sensations are distant and indistinct. Letting go would be a trivial matter.

But he thinks also of what he might have to do in Parlevo. Any information about this is precious, any experience a chance at gaining a strategic advantage. He thinks that he owes it to the Artzishevskys - and to Nella - and to Steinberg.

He adjusts his grip a little, holding the clavicle gently but firmly.

There's a series of other memories, some happy, some sad. There's a kiss - he doesn't like witnessing that through her eyes. It's too private, never meant for anyone else to know. Divorced from its meaning, it's lifeless, wet and awkward. She's enraptured by it, though, like that little touch of flesh is the sweetest thing in the whole world.

There's various food, remembered because it was enjoyed in the company of the people she loved. Sharp-smelling venison stews, mostly, and hot brews made out of honey and lingonberries. One time it's bear meat. It tastes oddly sweet, though not, in his opinion, especially repulsive. Rhoden himself never hunted bears - all that did was allow deer to flood the local forests and demolish the grass meant for cattle.

There's death. That hurts a great deal, perhaps more than it should. He suspects his own experiences make an unfortunate combination with hers.

She doesn't weep over their bodies, only grits her teeth and stares blankly at the frozen ground just to the side of the funeral pyre. Someone offers her food, but she rejects it. The fingers of her left hand play mindlessly with the little amber beads in her pocket.

His mouth tastes like iron. His eyes sting. There's something wet dripping down his face, and he's not sure that it is tears. That it is tears and nothing but, at any rate.

As she herself contracts the disease and begins her final descent into darkness, dehydrated and alone, he struggles to slowly, torturously unclasp his fingers. It's much harder now that the pain has seized him in earnest. It's like his connection to her has been tightened by their shared suffering, dragging him down with her to the end of all things.

Finally, the grip of his prosthetic relaxes with a light clank . He catches the clavicle with his good hand and leans against the wall, faint with both pain and relief. Now that he's back in his own head, with all the sensations of his own body coming sharply into focus, he knows that the taste in his mouth was that of blood. There's blood on the front of his coat, too, and on his cuffs, and on the linen he used to wrap the clavicle in.

Rhoden takes a moment to breathe. Then, after clumsily undoing the buttons of his coat, he tucks the bone back into his inner pocket. With that out of the way, he stumbles towards the lavatory.

As is the way in Venlish trains, the place is dark and smells of piss. The tap is tricky, too; it requires him to push and hold a metal button with one hand, and as he’s reluctant to get his prosthetic wet, the logistics of the process are less than clear.

Sighing and cursing in Estlish, he takes his coat off and then wriggles out of his shirt. Undressing hurts, and not in the way a minor injury hurts, either; his whole torso protests indignantly at his actions.

He examines himself, patiently, painstakingly, tracing every major muscle and bone with his fingers. Nothing seems torn or broken; but there's bruising everywhere. He gets the impression that entire networks of capillaries in his dermis have burst. Possibly some of the superficial muscle fibres have been ruptured, too.

Extensive damage to small vessels would seem to explain the bleeding, as well. He still has a nosebleed, although it is slower now than when he first came to, and the blood dripping into the sink is almost black. He coughs up a bit of blood. His lips sting. Alarmingly, the corners of his eyes appear to be bleeding, too.

Rhoden concludes that he's not in immediate danger. However, there's absolutely no way he can show himself to the Steinbergs looking like that.

"Kuradi raisk," he hisses.

It takes him some ten minutes to scrub himself clean. He thrusts the collar of his shirt under the tap in a valiant attempt to restore it to its former ivory white shade. Naturally, there's no hot water, but the icy cold liquid that gushes out of the tap is perfect for washing out blood. He learned about using cold water for this purpose the hard way, back when he did dissection and a corpse spurted the contents of its carotid all over Rhoden's prized button-up lab coat.

Finally, he puts his clothes back on and makes his way back towards the compartment. He feels as though he's been put through a coarse meat grinder.

Steinberg is standing outside at the window, clearly waiting for him. The weak yet vivid yellow light of the overhead lamps illuminates the right half of his face. His expression is absently uneasy, like that of an anxious man trying and failing to read the same sentence over and over.

"Rhoden, where the hell have you been?" he whispers. Then he takes in Rhoden's dishevelled state, and his face changes. "What happened to you?"

Rhoden winces. "An experiment," he says, "gone somewhat wrong."

He walks closer to Steinberg and leans against the grimy soot-stained frame of the neighbouring window, trying not to slump too much. It's pleasantly cold there, with the wind whistling through the chinks in the metal frame of the train.

Steinberg scrutinises him carefully, his mouth twisted with concern. Rhoden feels as though he's being graded on a performance, and as though his grade leaves something to be desired.

He fumbles with the buttons of his coat, again, and takes out the long-suffering Sawirk clavicle.

"Remember this? I showed it to you back in Kronstadt."

The clavicle rests in his gloved hand. The defect in the middle of its body - the patch of exposed spongy bone - no longer swirls with colours. It's pale now, quiet, with the slightest hint of pink and blue somewhere in the depths of the marrow.

"You touched it," Steinberg guesses, out loud. "You decided to see if you could access its memories."

Rhoden says nothing, but Steinberg evidently doesn't need his confirmation. He quickly steps forward, as if to catch Rhoden in case he should fall.

"When I spoke of this, I meant it hypothetically," he cries quietly. "Hypothetically! Leman hashem, why would you-"

He spots something on Rhoden's face and his eyes widen. Then he raises a hand and carefully touches Rhoden's right zygomatic. His fingers are warm, and there's a minute, almost imperceptible tremble to them that seems to intensify at the touch.

"Is this blood?" he asks, his voice changing.

Evidently Rhoden's clean-up was not thorough enough. He sighs, feeling at once weary and moved by Steinberg's reaction.

"Yeah, well," he says, awkwardly. "As they say in the Ühendriik, there's good news and there's bad news.

"You were right, Sasha. Their memories are easy for me to see and to make sense of. But they can hurt me, too, because as they suffer, so do I."

"You don't just mean emotional pain," Steinberg says. "You mean physical injury. Can they… can they kill you?"

He asks the question quickly, as if plunging into cold water.

"I did not hold it long enough to find out," Rhoden says, reluctantly. "But - I suppose - it is possible that this could be the case."

He avoids looking at Steinberg as he trudges into the compartment and sets about preparing for sleep. He can feel rather than see an anxious shadow hovering behind him as he slips off his left glove and squeezes some of the bright blue grease into the crevices between his artificial joints.

"You couldn't be sure this wouldn't happen," Steinberg whispers, after a moment's silence. "You took the risk all the same. Why?"

"Knowing how this works is vital to our activities in Parlevo," Rhoden says, equally quietly. Esther is fast asleep, and Steinberg proceeds to carefully unbutton her coat and take off her washed-out blue socks, even as he eyes Rhoden with a measure of scepticism.

"To put it bluntly," Rhoden says to his unvoiced doubt, "there's a good chance the remains may eventually be lost to us for good. And if that happens, it is crucial that every last drop of information is extracted from them beforehand."

"You're not going to do this again." There's a harsh, raw note to Steinberg's voice. Esther stirs a little in her sleep in response.

Rhoden inclines his head in agreement. "There's not much use in obtaining this information if I don't live long enough to convey it to anyone else."

"Even if there were-" Steinberg begins, but then thinks better of it. "Never mind. You look unfit for conversation, doctor. You can tell me more about this tomorrow."

Rhoden is unspeakably grateful for this - he does, in fact, feel unfit to talk, or to do much else except for sleeping. His skin stings mercilessly and his mouth tastes revoltingly of curdled blood, but his tiredness is stronger.

He settles down on the cot in his shirtsleeves, not bothering to crawl under a blanket or indeed to do much else in the way of making himself comfortable. The lurching of the train promises him a quick and profound oblivion.

Through the haze of approaching darkness, he feels someone carefully peel the glove off his flesh hand. Then the same fingers fiddle with the button of his collar, and finally they return to give his bare hand an awkward squeeze - half a gesture of affection, half a plea for reassurance.

"Don't worry about me, Sashen'ka," he murmurs, without opening his eyes. "I'm sturdier than I look."

And you’re young, he adds mentally, by way of assuaging his own conscience. There will be many other teachers in your life, many other friends. In the end, whatever happens to me will be only one of many memories.

He doesn't know if Steinberg can see him smile in the uneven twilight of the compartment, but he makes an effort anyway. He can feel the grip on his hand relax as he slips away into a heavy, dreamless doze.

***

They arrive in Pleskov at the crack of dawn. As they change trains and board a local elektrirong to Parlevo, the city sleeps, fresh morning dew sparkling on the sun-wilted leaves of plane trees. Esther, dishevelled and not entirely awake, looks around with some interest; Rhoden is given to understand that she has not visited Pleskov in several years. As the early morning twilight blossoms into hot all-permeating sunshine, she clearly notices the bruising and discoloration on Rhoden’s face and wrists, too.

“You’re hurt,” she says.

“Mm,” Rhoden agrees. He’s not sure whether he can explain what happened to her.

“You should think about something nice,” she tells him, evidently unsurprised by his injuries. “Always helps me when I’m hurt. And then, after a while, it goes away.”

She would be used to the idea of sudden inexplicable injuries, realises he. And to the fact that the injured person may be reluctant to talk about them.

“Thank you,” he tells her gently. “That’s a helpful suggestion, Esther. I will try.”

Steinberg buys her and himself a couple of peremeches and two glasses of boza from a passing Tatar train hawker. He offers a peremech to Rhoden; Rhoden eyes it suspiciously and refuses. Hot food from train hawkers is a toss-up at the best of times, and he rather wishes the Steinbergs desisted from eating it, too.

But Esther chews her peremech merrily and seems unharmed, so he relaxes a little.

“So,” Steinberg says, clearly eager for a happier subject. “Dr Vinogradova. What’s she like?”

Rhoden pauses and shrugs a little with one shoulder. “A bit taller than Rubinstein, smarter than both of us combined, smokes cigars, great with a guitar. Are you wondering about anything specific?”

“Are you and her… close?”

“Close?” Rhoden repeats, obliviously, and gives it some thought. “She’s one of my oldest friends. I owe her and Leon’s patronage much of my early career. Yes, I would say so.”

Then he considers the question a little more and arrives at the conclusion that Steinberg’s meaningful tone and Esther’s curious glance signified something other than an inquiry about the depth of his and Nella’s friendship.

“Ah, you mean close close. You’re asking if we-” He barks a little laugh at the idea, even though his bruised flanks hurt in response. “No, nothing like that.

“Nella likes women, and I,” he gropes for a concise explanation and can’t quite find one, “have never been that way inclined?”

Steinberg’s eyes widen a little in surprise and admiration. “She’s open about that?”

“Open enough. You should speak to her, maybe. I think it may be a helpful thing to share, no?”

Steinberg smiles, wiping the peremech grease off his knuckles with a handkerchief. “I’ll certainly think about it.”

They spend a few moments in contemplative silence. Finally, Steinberg squints at him with an expression of curiosity and queries, "you said that you've never been that way inclined?"

It's a damned awkward thing to try and explain, there being no word for it - not even a euphemistic one. Rhoden makes a vague stilted gesture. "Men, women," he says, "and whatever other kinds of human beings there may be, it's all the same to me. People have only ever been of interest to me as friends, if that makes sense?"

To his surprise, this answer appears to wholly satisfy Steinberg. "It makes sense," he nods.

No one's ever simply accepted Rhoden's explanation of this idiosyncrasy before. It's a strange, disarming experience; but certainly not an unpleasant one.

***

When they get off the train at the tiny whistle stop that services Parlevo and a few other surrounding villages, Rhoden is surprised to find that they have been expected. Standing on the creaky wooden platform, haloed by the light of the warm midday sun, are two women. One is taller and lankier, the yellow working gloves on her hands like two oversized daffodils; she is unfamiliar to him. The other, with a head of closely shorn blonde hair, the firm line of her mouth painted madder red, is Nella Vinogradova.

Rhoden steps towards them and briefly puts two fingers to the brim of his nonexistent hat. “Nella Nikolaevna,” he says, with a touch of bemusement. “And - I haven’t had the pleasure of your acquaintance?”

“Asya Kogai.” Nella’s companion smiles at him a little. The name is Koryo-mar, Rhoden notes mentally. Koryo-saram are not a large community back home, but they’re more numerous here, near the Venlish border with the Koguryo lands.

“She’s a local historian,” Nella supplies. “We have a, hm, very productive professional relationship.”

She shrugs and rolls her eyes at the word professional. 

A romantic partner, then. "A friend of Dr Vinogradova's is my friend, M-lle Kogai." Rhoden gives Asya a half-bow, half-nod. He notices the tension drain from her shoulders; she clearly didn't share Nella's confidence that he'd react well. He’s glad to reassure her in this regard, at least. 

Nella, meanwhile, has turned her attention to the Steinbergs.

"Well, well," she says, eyeing them with curiosity. "El telegraphed ahead, but I had trouble believing that he wasn't bullshitting me about your new friends."

"Alexander Osipovich," she says seriously, offering Steinberg her broad square-knuckled hand. Once he's shaken it, she does the same for Esther, bending down a little to allow for the difference in height. "Esther Osipovna. It's lovely to see you."

Esther seems unfazed by the gesture. Her own hand is a little too small, but she grips Nella’s fingertips instead. Rhoden remembers the way she curtsied to him during their first meeting. She seems to prefer formal greetings - not unlike him, in a way.

Alexander is much more flustered, staring down at the dusty platform boards and fiddling with the button of his collar. And there’s a sharp gleam of something almost like longing in his eye when he looks at Nella and Asya.

“Dr Vinogradova,” he says, after clearing his throat.

Nella grins at him. “I surmise you did something stupid to end up here, Steinberg. That’s okay, though; all of us did. Even Asya, who’s otherwise a bulwark of common sense, had the stupidity to involve herself with me. So welcome to the Parlevo group - or what remains of it.”

The five of them leave the station and start down a sandy countryside road that, if Rhoden remembers right, leads to the fork between Parlevo and Sviblovo. The road is surrounded by a young forest, its undergrowth full of wild strawberry and forget-me-nots. It’s a peaceful, healing sort of place. Rhoden understands why the Steinbergs have a soft spot for it - even setting aside the personal bond they have with the village.

“You said you all did something stupid to end up here,” Esther pipes up, unexpectedly. She’s looking up at Nella, the bridge of her nose wrinkled in a familiar expression of contemplation. “Even Arno?”

This startles a laugh out of Nella. “What, Clocktower?” she cries, slamming Rhoden’s shoulder in a companionable gesture. He winces from the pain this causes his still-bruised skin, but Nella is too endeared by Esther’s enquiry to notice. “Why, of course. He’s the stupidest of us all, child! The heroics he is prone to are positively brainless.”

Rhoden would be annoyed at this from someone else, but there’s pride in Nella’s voice, of all things. He smiles a little to himself, even as he feels a pang of sadness. It is certainly a good thing Leon didn’t come with them; he’d hate this turn of conversation to the depths of his kind, anxious soul.

In some ten minutes they reach the fork. It rained recently, and the sand is soft under Rhoden’s boots. Tiny frogs have come out in force from the nearby pond, making their monthly migration to the lake on the other side of Sviblovo. He steps around them carefully, not wanting to crush their kopeck-sized mint-green bodies.

On their right is a large meadow overgrown with flowering hogweed. On their left, emerging from behind the corner of the road, rise the red tiled roofs of Parlevo.

“We’re renting a house from baba Valentina,” Nella informs them. “For one bottle of moonshine, five eggs, and two roubles a week.”

Steinberg takes a few moments to process this information. “I remember baba Valentina,” he says. “But where are you getting the eggs?”

“I have a chicken,” Asya answers. “I’ll show you when we get there.”

When they do get there - a small brown wooden hut five houses to the left - the chicken in question actually comes out to greet her. Rhoden watches as Asya lowers herself on her haunches and pets the bird’s flanks, causing it to fluff up into a happy feather-ball.

“Good girl,” Asya croons. “Good girl, good girl, Morkovcha.”

“She named her chicken after a salad.” Nella’s expression is something between dry amusement and hidden tenderness.

Leaving Asya and Esther - who seems utterly entranced by Morkovcha - in the front yard, Rhoden goes into the house. It’s a cosy enough little place, even if the only piece of furniture in it is a single chair. There’s also a massive stove and a bear rug made out of an entire bear. In short, it seems adequate compensation for a bottle of moonshine and five eggs.

He sets his suitcase down, takes off his coat, and sits on the floor in his shirtsleeves. Pain still reverberates through his muscles, dripping down his ribs into the diaphragm. But it’s more bearable now. He’ll live.

“So,” he says, addressing Nella. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve asked us to come? Forgive me, but your telegram was rather vague.”

Steinberg looks unsure where to settle down, for a while - he clearly wants to avoid hogging the only chair - but finally decides on the bear rug. He, too, looks closely at Nella.

“Oh, I knew you’d come all the same.” She flashes him a smile, dunking a kettle into a bucket of cold water. A fire is already smouldering behind the black cast iron bars of the stove door. “But more to the point - there have been some, hm. Seemingly supernatural happenings around the dig.”

“Come, Nellochka,” Rhoden says. “You and I both know there is no such thing as the supernatural.”

“Which is why I said seemingly,” she counters drily. “But the Third Section is interested. And truth be told, Arno, so am I. I don’t like this.”

He hmphs a little.

“Even if there’s nothing to it,” Nella persists, “they may decide to relocate the Artzishevskys’ remains permanently or, worse, destroy them. And I cannot allow that to happen.”

Rhoden frowns. “No, of course not. Very well; we will go there first thing tomorrow morning and see about these… supernatural happenings of yours.”

After a while, the kettle boils. She sets grey aluminium mugs in front of both Rhoden and Steinberg and pours the tea.

Rhoden pokes his mug with one of the fingers of his good hand. It’s roughly the temperature of the inside of an active volcano. “You should probably let it stand a while,” he warns Steinberg. “And in the meantime… Care for a smoke, Nellochka?”

She does, and they go outside to stand on the porch. On the other end of the yard, Asya and Esther are still engrossed in petting the chicken. Nella looks at them and makes a little pleased noise.

Rhoden responds with a pleased noise of his own. “Finally,” he says, “another smoker.”

Nella hums in agreement, lighting a match and holding it to the end of a chunky brown cigar. A brief glance tells Rhoden that it’s a “Port” - a second-rate brand, acerbic and irritating to the mouth. Her fortunes have clearly changed for the worse; she never used to buy anything worse than “Sever”.

He puffs at his pipe. They stand side by side, enveloped in each other’s smoke. There’s an odd kind of intimacy in this moment of casual mutual destruction.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed what happened to your face,” she tells him. “Shit, Clocktower, you look like you got into an argument with a battering ram. You decide that losing a hand wasn’t enough for you, hm?”

Rhoden sighs and tells her about the Sawirk clavicle. She listens attentively, without interrupting - indeed, without reacting much at all. At last, when he’s finished, she offers a slight frown. There’s a strange spark in her powder blue eyes.

“Risky,” she says. Then, slowly, the corners of her mouth curl up. Belatedly, he recognizes that spark of feeling for what it is: approval. “But admirable. It was a possibility worth exploring. Being able to use your prosthetic to preserve this information would’ve certainly been helpful.”

“Yes,” Rhoden says, satisfied that someone finally sees his point of view on the matter. “That was also my thinking.”

“Steinberg wasn’t happy with what I did, though,” he adds after a pause, inhaling another lungful of smoke.

Nella shakes her head. “Yeah, well. He looks like he’d sell his soul for you, Arno. Of course he wasn’t happy.” The smile fades from her face. “But there’s more at stake than our feelings. As my granny used to say, there’s such a word as ‘must’.”

***

There’s a rifle hanging on the wall.

“Came with the house,” Nella says, from her place in Asya’s lap. They’ve curled up on the only chair, Nella’s head resting on Asya’s collarbone and a heavy woollen blanket around her shoulders. Between that and the warmth of the fire grumbling in the stove, Asya looks like she’s about to doze off. “Maybe baba Valya uses it to scare the wolves away?”

Rhoden runs a finger along the barrel. It’s a three-line bolt-action rifle, old and well-used. There are whitened hollows in the smooth brown wood of the forestock where it has been eaten away by skin grease and the pressure of someone’s fingers as they held it up to shoot - again, and again, and again.

There are also traces of fresh oil around the muzzle. Wolves or no wolves, someone has certainly been keeping the gun action-ready.

“I’m sure she won’t mind if we expropriate it for a while,” he mutters.

Steinberg, who has been nibbling at some oatmeal biscuits in the corner next to Esther’s sleeping form, shoots him an alarmed look.

“Only as a precaution,” Rhoden says, raising one hand in a soothing gesture. “I’m not planning any shoot-outs with the Third Section just yet. But incidentally, this does remind me.”

He leans down a little and slips something long and narrow out of his left boot. "I mentioned I had something for you, too," he says. He holds it out in both hands, nodding for Steinberg to come closer. A hunting knife.

Steinberg stares at it, captivated. It's a lovely weapon, if Rhoden does say so himself. He's polished and sharpened it every week for many years.

As he turns it this way and that way, the blade gleams white like a thin, predatory smile.

"It used to belong to my mother, Õnne, and to her mother before her. Now it is mine. I haven't used it for much other than cutting kielbasa over the past decade or so, but it's every bit as good as it was when it was first forged."

Behind Steinberg’s back, Nella tears herself away from kissing Asya's nose just enough to give Rhoden a suspicious look.

"Is that the knife you nearly cut someone's fingers off with, Arno?"

"The very same."

"And you've been using it to cut kielbasa?"

Rhoden shrugs, deadpan. “I did clean it once I got out of Narov."

Steinberg doesn’t seem to share her reservations on the subject. He looks at the blade and then at Rhoden, wide-eyed. “You want me to have it?”

He does. It means something to him, for Steinberg to own this weapon. It feels like atonement - both for Ostrogarsky’s maimed hand and for the evil he, Rhoden, inadvertently brought into Sasha and Fira’s lives.

And on some level, too, he simply wants to be rid of it.

A few months ago Rhoden wouldn’t have thought himself capable of giving voice to feelings such as these; certainly not to Steinberg. Now, he nearly says it out loud. But he bites his tongue at the last moment, still unwilling to show this much emotion in front of Nella and Asya.

“I want you to have something,” he tells Steinberg, instead. “Since I was planning to take the rifle for myself, I thought this would do nicely. But I want to look at how you handle a knife, first. Without the necessary skill this could be more of a danger to you than to your opponent, city boy.”

Steinberg reaches out for it almost reverently, his eyes burning with all the earnestness and determination of a new recruit out to prove his mettle. That should, perhaps, be a warning sign.

He takes the knife from Rhoden’s hands. Rhoden watches him - the way he grips the weighty deer bone handle, where he points the bulat steel blade. It’s… passable, he supposes.

“It’s not a bayonet,” he admonishes gently. Stepping slightly to the side, he positions himself behind Steinberg’s back and takes him by the wrist. “Here. I’ll show you.”

He gives Steinberg’s knuckles a light tap, and, when Steinberg relaxes his grip in response, turns the knife so that its cutting edge faces outwards.

“This is for whittling and skinning game,” he says. Obeying Rhoden’s touch, Steinberg’s flexor carpi ulnaris contracts, acting on the wrist joint and swaying the tip of the knife lightly to the right. “It’s much like reflecting a flap of skin on a human body. Insert the tip of the blade into the fatty subcutaneous layer and gently press.”

Then he turns the handle over once again, this time pointing the cutting edge towards the ceiling. “This,” he says, with an emphatic sway of the knife upwards, “is for killing.”

He feels Steinberg’s arm go tense. “Self-defence, you mean?”

“If killing to defend yourself is your plan, then sure,” Rhoden says. “This is a deadly weapon. Once it is unsheathed, you no longer have a say in whether your opponent lives or dies. You can only use it if you’re ready to take a life.”

There’s an uneasy silence for a few moments. Finally, Rhoden’s fingers encircling Steinberg’s wrist relax and slip away. “How are you with a rifle?” he asks.

Steinberg shrugs noncommittally. “I had Defence of the Motherland lessons like everyone else. I wasn’t the class champion - Artem Lunin could hit the mark at five hundred yards - but I can shoot.” He grins at Rhoden. “I was great with those wooden dummy grenades, though.”

Defence of the Motherland. Rhoden has clean forgotten that that’s a part of the standard Venlish high school curriculum. Was that what the Venlish recruits storming Lambahanna thought they were doing? he wonders. Would Steinberg have thought that, too, if the Skein had drafted him during the War of Unification?

But no, Steinberg is not that kind of person. Rhoden has to believe this about him.

“You’ll have the rifle for now, then,” he says, and takes the blade from Steinberg’s hand. “Don’t look so wretched, Sasha - the knife is yours. I just want to teach you some things about it, first.” He offers a slight smile. “Although I do permit you to use it for cutting kielbasa. I trust you will not need my instruction for that.”

“How am I to know?” Steinberg grumbles, clearly a little slighted by this perceived rejection. “Perhaps you have some kind of special technique for kielbasa too.”

He looks Rhoden in the eye; what he finds there seems to mollify him, because after a beat he smiles back. Rhoden feels ashamed of the thoughts he was entertaining only moments ago.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he says, a touch abruptly. “Nella and I will probably be up at around seven. I want to get to the dig site before noon.”

Steinberg nods his understanding at this and wanders off towards where Esther is still curled up under his long black coat.

Rhoden undoes his collar, takes off his gloves and boots, folds his own coat into something resembling a pillow, and stretches on the floor parallel to the wall. It’s uncomfortable but survivable. A brisk walk through the forest tomorrow should alleviate any resulting pain and stiffness.

He closes his eyes and wills himself to sleep.

“Rhoden,” a voice says timidly from the darkness. Rhoden blinks and stares up at Steinberg standing over him, Esther slumped awkwardly in his arms like a heap of straw.

Rhoden raises a questioning eyebrow.

“Would you mind if I put her next to you? I’m afraid she’ll get cold, and I’m a terrible sleeper. I toss and turn and always wake her up.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rhoden allows, patting the floorboards next to his right shoulder. “Put her head on my upper arm. Softer this way.”

This is going to absolutely kill his brachial plexus, but if he has to be in pain, he figures, it might as well be for a good cause.

“You could sleep on the other side,” he offers, somewhat unexpectedly for himself. And there goes my other musculocutaneous nerve, he thinks. “It’s not like you’re going to be warm by yourself, either.”

Steinberg hovers over him, full of embarrassed hesitation. “But won’t I keep you awake?”

“It is impossible to keep me awake,” Rhoden reassures. “I am told Yulechka and Leon once used my unconscious form as a picnic table. The Third Section could probably perform a direct airstrike on baba Valya’s house and still I would be sleeping.”

Esther is a warm weight at his right flank. She reaches out and stretches one arm across his chest, her face buried in his waistcoat. She smells like soap and wood shavings - probably from Morkovcha’s coop, Rhoden reflects.

Sasha does, after a few moments, settle in on his left; his curls tickle Rhoden’s ear. Rhoden holds them both in a sort of half-embrace. It feels odd. He hasn’t slept next to anyone other than Rubinstein since the Skein took his family.

He finds that the sensation is not unenjoyable. He might as well savour it before both of his arms go completely numb.

***

“How are the Rubies?” Nella asks him, as they make their way through the thin undergrowth of an aspen copse.

He hesitates for a beat. “Well enough,” he says. This half-lie comes easy to him. Even if he thought it his place to tell her about Iakov’s betrayal, he would not do that to Rubinstein.

Steinberg eyes him a little reproachfully but says nothing. He has come to appreciate the difficulty of choosing between one’s friends and one’s beliefs, perhaps.

It’s a mellow, cloudy day, with the sun peeking out every now and then to dry the night’s dew from the aspen leaves. Rhoden knows this place well. Indeed, there are still remnants of a footpath visible through the young grass where he and the rest of Nella’s team walked to the dig a year and a half ago.

“Huh,” Steinberg says. “I used to bring Fira here to play. Who knew I’d return like this.” He reaches behind his back and gives the stock of his rifle a companionable pat.

Not like this. Yes. Rhoden himself thought they might come back to Parlevo quietly, after the dust had settled a bit, to give the Artzishevskys a proper burial somewhere deeper in the surrounding taiga. But men propose and gods dispose; the choice was never theirs to make.

“This phantom of yours,” he says. “What’s it like?”

Nella shrugs with one shoulder, moving a fragrant linden branch out of her way. “They say it’s one of the Artzishevsky girls. All red and glowing, they’ve told me, like the air around her is burning.”

Rhoden makes a sceptical noise.

“They say also that she’s responsible for the death of ded Martyn last month. That’s how the bluecoats got involved in this in the first place.”

“I did like ded Martyn,” Steinberg supplies, regretfully. “But to be fair, at his advanced age it’s far more likely that he tripped and broke a leg than that the ghost of a Parlevan counter-revolutionary came for his soul.”

The dig site is just ahead of them. Rhoden steps out into the clearing and looks around, taking it all in. Most of the place is much as he remembers; he can see the remnants of a mossy stone wall peeking out of the hard orange clay where it surrounded the original graveyard some three hundred years ago. The weighty blocks of limestone Nella used to mark the location of the burials are still there, too. A year's worth of rain has rendered them smoother and rounder, turning them into giant fantastical pearls.

They didn't mark the site where they put the Artzishevskys, but Rhoden doesn't need a landmark to remember it. Just outside the main wall, in a little shady corner under a thuja tree, in a single shallow grave.

He walks over to it, carefully stepping over the limestones, and gives the soil a critical once-over to determine where to start.

"A spade and a brush," he says, putting one hand out in a gesture of a surgeon asking for his scalpel. "And give me a hand, Sasha. Gentle, though. We didn't bury them deep."

Nella is skilled enough at excavation, but recovering human remains is not her speciality. She nods at him briefly, sharp dimples in the corners of her resolute mouth. I'll keep an eye out for trouble.

He and Steinberg set about digging. Despite the circumstances, Rhoden finds himself enjoying the familiar motions of excavation. It has been a long time since he's been able to do this. The brush - a regular painter's tool, repurposed for something altogether different - takes off layer after layer of soil. Like restoring a painting, younger Rhoden used to think, poetic as he was.

Steinberg, understandably, seems uneasy, even as he dutifully drips water from a flask onto the hardened clay. Rhoden briefly pats his upper arm: I’m here. Don’t worry.

When the bones finally begin emerging around fifteen minutes later, the first thing to show up is a cranial vault. Rhoden knows who it belongs to; he put the skull there himself, gently resting the girl’s head on top of her stacked long bones.

What he doesn't expect is the colour. Rather than being a subtle iridescent landscape muted by a layer of semi-translucent ivory, the bone burns a dark scarlet, like congealed blood or the petals of a black rose. It's saturated, bursting with colour the way an overripe fruit is. And though he doesn’t yet understand what caused this, it sends a jolt of alarm down his spine and tendrils of unease into his stomach.

Next to him, Steinberg gasps and sits back on his heels.

“You see it too, don’t you,” Rhoden murmurs.

“That is certainly not how I remember the remains looking when we buried her,” Nella says, from behind his back. She must’ve walked over from her post at the edge of the clearing in response to a pause in the sounds of their work. There’s tension in her voice; if Rhoden didn’t know her as well as he does, he might almost assume that she’s afraid.

He, however, certainly feels fear. And it is more than simply the effect of their unexpected discovery. There’s something else at work here, something that reaches into the depths of his ribcage and takes his heart by the nerves.

A flood of red bursts out of the ground before him, filling his vision with fire.

I recognize you, a voice says, half sound, half physical sensation. You’re the sad man with cold hands. It was you who woke me up.

What stands before him is not quite a person. Pieces of her are missing, her eyes flooded with a blind and uneasy glow, the patterns on the hem of her knee-long dress flickering and changing shape.

The memory of what she was wearing that day is uncertain. Maybe gone together with the fragment of bone that stored it; maybe never stored at all. Was the fabric printed with lavish garlands of local wildflowers? Was it stitched with the swirls and whorls of traditional Pleskov embroidery?

She reaches a hand for him - she takes him by the wrist - she hauls him to his feet.

I knew you’d come back, her voice rings in his head. You’ve come to take away my pain.

He can sense her fingers around the cuff of his glove, moving searchingly, feeling the stitch between his forearm and the metal structure of his prosthetic, so like and unlike the bones of her own dead body. Perhaps it is that she knows it instinctively as a way to relieve her suffering; perhaps, too, she’s simply reaching for the only dead thing she sees in a world full of life.

“Martyn Vassiliev,” he says, forcefully, ignoring her words. “Was that your work?”

Crimson light streams from her eyes like tears. He wanted to destroy us. He meant us harm.

Vassiliev decided the best way to get rid of the Parlevo ghost was to eliminate the Artzishevkys’ bones, no doubt. And he paid for it dearly, the poor bastard.

Distantly, Rhoden feels Steinberg’s hand on his shoulder. Nella’s voice is saying something, too, but it is hard to make out.

You can help me, the thing before him tells him, and her voice is clear as a bell.

“I cannot,” Rhoden says. “It would kill me.”

Steinberg’s fingers give his upper arm an urgent squeeze. Rhoden isn’t sure if they can hear her, but his responses, at least, seem to reach them fine.

Does that truly matter to you? I could feel it when you unearthed us. Are you not dead already, an impostor walking in another man’s skin, a liar who claims to have survived a disaster that spared no one?

The words sink into his flesh and joints, squeeze his lungs with a sick and hopeless sensation. They’re his words, of course. His own thoughts hurled back at him. His own feelings, articulated with such cruel precision-

“It matters to me now,” he says, through the bile rising in his throat. “It didn’t used to, but things have changed. It does matter.”

Her image flickers at that, as if in an expression of - anxiety? Disapproval? She certainly doesn’t seem happy with his newly found desire to survive.

Then, in the space of a breath, she’s gone. All he sees before him is the pieces of upturned topsoil, like thick slices of brown honey cake, and the dark red bones between them. When he looks down at his gloved hands, they’re specked with fine ash grey dust.

He begins to mindlessly wipe the dust off. It occurs to him that it is peculiarly reminiscent of cremated bone.

“Some kind of physical anomaly connected to her osteological memory, no doubt,” Nella comments at length, in a tone of poorly concealed fascination.

“She said Vassiliev died because he meant to damage their remains,” he mutters, half to himself, half to Nella and Steinberg. “Can you imagine what kind of carnage it’ll be if the Third Section comes for them?”

Steinberg lets out an audible scoff.

“Your young friend suggests that this would not be a bad thing,” Nella translates helpfully. “I am inclined to concur.”

Rhoden tilts his head to one side, surveying the edge of the treetops where they’re burned into the sky by the hot midday sun. “Perhaps not,” he says. “But would it stop at the Third Section? Vassiliev’s idea is hardly an original one.”

He sits back down on his haunches and carefully covers the Artzishevskys’ remains back up with a few handfuls of soil. Then he gets up again and motions for Nella and Steinberg to follow him.

“Perhaps we need to try and convince the Parlevans not to touch them,” Steinberg says, with a note of uncertainty.

“That’ll go great for us.” Nella shrugs with one round, muscular shoulder. “We’ll run into a Third Section informant sooner or later and our noble undertaking will come to an abrupt and anticlimactic end.”

Steinberg stares at her, the bridge of his freckled nose wrinkling in confusion. “What choice do we have?”

Nella spits. “Heard the food in the Pleskov insane asylum is pretty bad,” she says, not quite answering the question.

For a while they walk in silence. Then, Steinberg makes his way towards him, the buckle of the rifle’s sling clanking against the metal buttons on his shirt as he hops over a fallen tree to catch up with Rhoden.

“When you said it matters to me now,” he begins, and squints at Rhoden inquisitively. “What was that about?”

Rhoden feverishly scours his mind for a lie. “Nothing,” he blurts out finally, like a petulant child. It’s probably the most embarrassingly obvious falsehood he has ever attempted.

Steinberg seems torn between amusement and concern. “She asked you to take her memories, didn’t she?”

“It is not a person,” Rhoden says. “It’s an artefact of a personality that once existed and now exists no more. It cannot want or feel any more than an ember in a hearth can sprout leaves.”

“It seemed plenty alive to me.” Steinberg absently fingers his own collar.

“It’s an impression of life, not life itself.”

“Not sure that makes a practical difference,” Steinberg says, and once again there’s a spark of concern in his eye, like he knows exactly what words she spoke to Rhoden that made him answer, it does matter.

To distract Steinberg, Rhoden begins talking about the forest around them, drawing his attention to the wealth of bird songs audible from the surrounding foliage. He identifies the birds one by one and names them, first in Venlish and then in Estlish. Starling. Kuldnokk. Song thrush. Laulurästas. Swallow.

“Pääsuke,” Steinberg supplies. “I know this one. Found a description of it in an old book on Yoldia’s heraldry and vexillography.”

“Yeah, I’m aware.” Rhoden huffs a little, remembering the lifeless body of a swallow in Esther’s little hands.

Are you not dead already? Lilia Artzishevsky’s melodious voice asks in his ear. Is Arno Rhoden himself not a man who once existed and now exists no more? A liar, an impostor, a fraud…

Now it is he who requires distraction. He casts about for a suitably cheerful topic and finally says, “you know, Sasha - it is, of course, important to reflect on what we’ve just seen and decide what to do - but in the meantime - shall we take Fira to the river? I did promise her I’d take her for a walk if it proved to be safe. And Lilia, while no doubt a danger, seems fairly confined to the dig site.”

It is not like him to put aside an event like this in favour of something so insignificant. He and Steinberg are both aware of this as they eye each other carefully.

Then Steinberg cracks a little smile. “Of course,” he says. “Fira would be happy to return to the river Yahra. We’ve missed playing on its banks.”

Rhoden feels a flood of such desperate, ferocious love for them that for a moment, Lilia’s plea doesn’t seem to matter at all.

***

The Yahra’s riverbed consists of a mass of dense, slippery clay, reddish with ferric oxide. The branching green braids of hornwort rise out of the clay and into the Yahra’s cool, slow-moving waters.

This clay and this hornwort are also all over Esther as she barges through a patch of blue-buttons and slams her whole body against Rhoden’s right shin.

His boots are kirza and easy to clean; the trousers, however, he handwashed only yesterday and these carmine stains are going to be hell to get out of the fabric, even with lye. He groans a little to himself as he looks down at her. Her big brown eyes are watching him with no small measure of interest even as her mud-splattered face splits in a toothy grin.

It’s like she’s gauging how far she can go with him.

He bends down, takes her under the armpits, and raises her in the air. She surveys him for a few moments before lightly kicking her bare foot smack dab in the lapel of his very white shirt.

She’d never do it to any other adult - only a few months ago, she wouldn’t have done it to him. Perhaps it is that she is no longer afraid he’ll hurt her?

“All right, enough,” he says, with some exasperation, and carefully wrangles her under his right arm. As she crooks her neck to look up at him, her expression is that of defiance.

The thought that she feels safe with him is flattering. But - it is not that. Esther is afraid, still. These childish antics are not a gesture of trust; they’re a desperate attempt to provoke.

She wouldn’t know that the last time he brought physical harm to anyone, it was a soldier of an invading army, and that he regrets even that wound.

“I want to go play with Sasha,” she snaps.

Rhoden makes his way through the still-green branches of a fallen willow towards where the river splashes gently against the shore. “That may be so,” he parries, “but what you need is a wash.”

He wanders into the stream until the water is licking the calves of his boots. When he extracts Esther from under his arm and holds her up again, he sees a flicker of terror in her expression - it’s like she thinks he’s here to drown her.

There’s nothing he can say to assuage that doubt. Hers is not a pain that can be soothed with words.

So he carefully lowers her into the current, keeping a light hold on her hand - not to restrain but to give her something to grip should the bottom of the river prove too slippery. Then, using his other hand, he makes a half-hearted attempt at restoring at least the lapel of his shirt to its former whiteness. Instead he just makes it sort of pink. Pink is not exactly his colour.

Esther silently rinses the skirt of her dress and then her braids; she washes her face, also with one hand. The fingers of her other one are tight around Rhoden’s right thumb.

Once she’s done, however, she lets go of him, climbs out of the water, and rushes off into the undergrowth of the aspen copse surrounding the Yahra. He hears her tear through the branches of the elderberry bushes; then, nothing.

“Fira,” he calls after her, but to no effect.

“She’ll come around,” Steinberg says, from behind his back. Rhoden didn’t notice his approach. A narrow hand briefly rests on his shoulder; then, Steinberg walks into the water to stand next to him. “What we’ve gone through - it makes things complicated sometimes.”

Rhoden breathes in the cool, damp river air. “Yeah.”

“Fira’s young, she has it worse.” Steinberg clears his throat. “But it can be difficult for me, too. It’s - strange. That you don’t want to harm us. You’re not even angry. The things I said to you - in Reval - you would’ve been in your right to never speak to me again. But instead of shouting at me, instead of leaving me to grapple with the consequences of my own decision, you- even before I asked for your forgiveness, you helped-”

He chokes on his own words, his breathing heavy with effort. “I have difficulty accepting it,” he gets out. “What you did was beyond selfless, and I had done nothing to deserve it. Nothing.”

There’s an expression of such feverish devotion on his features when he looks up it is as if he truly believes that Rhoden stood to gain nothing from saving him and Fira.

Rhoden can no longer abide perpetuating this misconception. “Sasha,” he murmurs. “Selfishly, I value your high opinion of me. It pains me all the more to say that it is not accurate.”

But he never gets to finish that thought. Someone approaches the river bank; unlike the light rustle of grass under Fira’s feet or Steinberg’s quiet tread, he has no trouble hearing these heavy, careless steps.

“Arno Ottovich,” a terribly familiar voice says, and even though Rhoden feels relief - happiness, even - at the sound of it, there’s also a flare of irritation at this use of a patronymic.

It is not his name.

“Lieutenant Ostrogarsky,” he says, nevertheless, as he turns around.

How did he find them?

Perhaps Poltanov decided that reporting Rhoden to the Third Section was, after all, too much of a social gaffe. Or maybe he saw Ostrogarsky - a respected veteran of the Skein, now indebted to him - as another source of potential profit.

They have not seen each other in years. Ostrogarsky’s jaw has grown heavier, his features harsher. His temples are grey. But, standing knee-deep in blue-buttons above Rhoden and Steinberg, he still assumes a stiff, straight-backed military stance.

“Please,” he chides genially, “it’s Kolya to you.”

Rhoden makes his way up the bank and shakes Ostrogarsky’s outstretched hand. It doesn’t escape his notice that Ostrogarsky eyes his other hand with a great deal of interest.

“How’s the prosthetic?” he asks.

Rhoden makes a noncommittal sound and folds his arms on his chest. “You’re not here to ask after my health, Nikolai. Your presence can hardly be a coincidence.”

Ostrogarsky stops smiling. “It is not. I’ve come to warn you, Arno.”

“In this case I am sorry you’ve made a trip for nothing.” Rhoden gestures expansively at the river, the blue-buttons, and the sun setting behind the angular roofs of Parlevo on the horizon. “I am all too aware the place is full of bluecoats. It is the reason I’m here.”

He gives this some more consideration; finally, his features soften, and he looks at Ostrogarsky with a measure of warmth. “I do appreciate your concern.”

Their relationship is awkward; always has been. It is why they do not speak. They may have all the goodwill in the world towards each other, but there’s a distance between them that is exactly equal to the length of Rhoden’s hunting knife. He feels it now, the tip of its sheath fitting comfortably into the hollow between his fibular malleolus and the calcaneal tendon.

Ostrogarsky’s right hand is gloved, too. His ring finger is angled awkwardly, and the little one is curled in on itself as if in preparation for forming a fist. Dorsal muscle injury. Permanent.

Steinberg walks up to them and stares. “Is that..?”

“Nikolai Ostrogarsky,” Rhoden supplies. “My friend and saviour in the flesh.”

Steinberg gives a little half-nod, half-bow. “It is my pleasure.”

There’s a pause as Ostrogarsky squints curiously at Steinberg, a little smile fluttering in the corners of his mouth. “I’ve seen you before,” he says, at length. “With a little lassie, about yea tall. Is he your kid, Arno?”

“No!” Rhoden says, and then, almost immediately, “yes.”

He isn’t sure why he said that. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Steinberg raise an eyebrow. His expression is that of bafflement, but there’s a surprising glimmer of vulnerability, too.

If he believes Steinberg is yours, he will be kinder to him, something whispers at the back of his mind.

He will be kind to Steinberg as it is, Rhoden thinks irritably. He is a friend. There’s no reason to lie.

But he doesn’t correct himself again.

“Arno, you old devil,” Ostrogarsky snorts with a mischievous wink. He has clearly misinterpreted Rhoden’s hesitation. “It’s all right, your dirty secrets are safe with Uncle Kolya.”

Even if the Steinbergs were his illegitimate children, Rhoden would be offended at this description of them - at the implication that the fact of their existence is a mistake, an inconvenience. But now he lowers his head and he stays silent.

It is when he looks down at Ostrogarsky’s jacket collar that he notices something unusual. The right buttonhole seems oddly worn out in comparison to the left, with a small patch of darker fabric surrounding it, almost as if something has protected this area from being bleached by the sun. Almost as if-

“They seem Jewish,” Ostrogarsky says, conversationally. “The girl, at least. But if they’re siblings, it would follow that so is the boy.”

“He’s Hayastani,” Rhoden says quietly. “I met his mother in Vostan Hayots.”

For the first time in years - for the first time ever, perhaps - lying comes naturally to him. He doesn’t have to think of an untruth; he speaks it with the wild inspiration of a man whose very soul depends on being believed.

Steinberg cannot come to harm.

He will not be harmed. That’s not who Ostrogarsky is.

“Oh, it must’ve been very romantic,” Ostrogarsky says.

Rhoden looks him in the eye. “It was.” He smiles, even as his whole body is rigid with tension. “The view from Khor Virap is unforgettable. There’s no colour quite like the shade of mountain snow touched by the first rays of morning sun.”

He cannot lie about doing anything with Steinberg’s hypothetical mother - it wouldn’t ring true, coming from him, who knows romance only in the abstract. But the view from Khor Virap is unforgettable. And he does love Hayastani sunrises.

Just as the truth dawned on Rhoden a few moments ago, it now dawns on Steinberg.

“He’s not here to warn you,” he realises, out loud. “He’s here to warn you away.”

“Sasha!” Rhoden cries, throwing his hand up in a gesture of warning. But he is too late. Before he knows it, Steinberg has reached for the stock of his rifle - and Ostrogarsky, who is, naturally, much quicker on the draw, is already holding up a small dark TT gun.

“Stand down, whelp,” Ostrogarsky barks, with an emphatic jerk of the muzzle at Steinberg’s chest.

“Eyes on me, Nikolai.” Rhoden makes a swift, deliberate step forward, his mouth stretching in a snarl. The gun sways towards him - and away from Steinberg - like the needle of an unmoored compass.

He feels a swell of enraged triumph. Something disturbing rises in him in response to this threat to Steinberg’s life. Not quite outright malice, yet; but a clear understanding of his own strength. He looks at Ostrogarsky from above, realising, for the first time, just how much taller he is than this little Venlish man. He sees the fingers maimed by his knife and knows that he could break them with his hands like a fistful of twigs. Those warm brown eyes - they could be gouged out as easily as baked plums out of a pie.

Another step forward. A minute tremor passes through Ostrogarsky’s arm.

For good or for ill, Nikolai has always been a good judge of human character. It is why he knew, all those years ago, that he was not in true danger from Rhoden; it is why he must see that now he is .

“Rhoden,” Steinberg says, desperately. “Arno.”

Rhoden stumbles, as if punched under the ribs. He stops, his sternum inches from the muzzle of the TT. This broken voice, this use of his first name tether him to life. He can no more condemn himself by hurting Ostrogarsky than if he were physically chained.

“Sasha,” he croaks, through the unbearable pain of tenderness and fury in his chest.

Ostrogarsky, the bastard, senses the scales tip in his favour. A shadow of relief passes over his features. He relaxes a trifle, and even allows himself an ugly little smile.

“I understand this outburst, Arno,” he says. “Even an animal knows to defend its own. It is one of our most primal instincts, and I’m all the more surprised that you do not recognize it in others.”

“You’re insane,” Rhoden breathes. “You’ve saved me, befriended me - and for what? What justification can your actions possibly have now?”

Ostrogarsky narrows his eyes. “I saved and befriended a civilian kid caught up in a war not of his making. I stand by that decision. That doesn’t mean I will let you continue harming my country and the order I serve.”

“You’re with the Third Section.” If he could spit, he would. Only his mouth is too dry, almost too dry to speak.

“And I make no apologies.” Ostrogarsky spreads the fingers of his injured hand, leering at Rhoden. “Not much work for a crippled war vet in peaceful Venäjä. They took me in the way I took you in. As I have said - we Venlish do look after our own."

“I don’t understand,” Rhoden says, slowly, trying to stall for time. “Did you not go against your own superiors by rescuing me in Narov? Why take their side now?”

Ostrogarsky waves this off with a tinge of impatience. “Killing civilians was an unfortunate command decision in a brutal time. Unlike my generals, as a lowly lieutenant I could afford mercy.”

He pauses and scrutinises Rhoden for a few moments, as if trying to figure out an answer to some question puzzling him. “But how did you repay me, Arno? How did you repay my people? We gave you an education. A new hand. A career. And you - you just couldn’t leave a bunch of dead counterrevolutionaries well enough alone, could you? Even with your flawless Venlish, after spending decades here, you still continue to be a foreign body embedded in the flesh of my long-suffering land. Like a bullet still bothering a wounded soldier, you keep undermining us, waging an insidious campaign against the very nation you owe your survival to.”

What scares Rhoden is that he doesn’t remember - can no longer tell if Ostrogarsky has changed for the worse or if he has always been like this. Was it simply his imagination that young Nikolai sympathised with the plight of the Estlish? Did he delude himself to make his own life less unbearable, in some unconscious act of self-preservation? Or was there really a flame of true compassion there, now extinguished by the rotten breath of the Leviathan that is Venäjä?

And the antisemitism - has that always been there, too? Did it truly take befriending Rubinstein and Steinberg for him to spot that hateful poison?

Whatever the case, he knows beyond certainty that there will be no mercy now.

“Take me if you wish,” he tries, nevertheless. “Leave Sasha be. He’s hardly more than a child. You’ve no quarrel with him, Nikolai.”

“No,” Steinberg snaps. “You can’t do this to me. I will not stand for it, do you hear?”

Rhoden turns a little to look at him, for the first time since Ostrogarsky drew his gun. Steinberg is so pale he’s almost green. His eyes are on the muzzle of the TT, still trained on Rhoden’s ribcage. His hands, frozen in an aborted attempt to draw his own rifle, hover in the air, palms open.

His gaze flickers to Rhoden’s face. “Please don’t send me away,” he says, quieter.

“Sasha,” Rhoden murmurs. “You have much to live for. I need hardly remind you about Fira. And your ambitions, your future-”

"-would not exist without you." There's a tone of finality to that statement, a conviction Rhoden feels he cannot break. Not in a matter of minutes, at any rate; and they're running out of time.

“You know better than that, Arno,” Ostrogarsky says, and clicks his tongue in admonishment. “You must know better. I cannot let him go. What do you think he’ll become if this is his last memory of you? That’s how you make terrorists. I am not so foolish as to let another enemy of Venäjä rise in your wake.”

There’s a slight movement of grass behind Ostrogarsky’s back; a rustle just on the edge of hearing. Esther, Rhoden thinks instantly. But he hasn’t the time to react - hasn’t even the time to properly feel this new fear. A violent shudder passes through Ostrogarsky, his left knee buckling, his stance suddenly visibly lopsided. His grip on the TT tightens. Rhoden shuts his eyes; for a moment, his heart beats violently with the certainty of imminent death.

But no shot rings out. When, after a few seconds, he dares to look, Ostrogarsky has sunk to the ground, curled in on himself. Dark venous blood is spreading over his trouser leg. Sticking out of it at an almost straight angle is the pin he, Rhoden, had gifted Esther. A good three inches of steel have pierced Ostrogarsky’s gastrocnemius muscle and, Rhoden reckons, damaged the tibial nerve. It must be excruciatingly painful.

Esther stands over him, barely visible in the tall grass. She’s very still.

“I see you’ve raised your kids to be just like you,” Ostrogarsky gets out, through gritted teeth. His voice sounds hoarse and high-pitched. “Backstabbing bastards.”

Steinberg is holding him at gunpoint now, his grip on the rifle remarkably steady and confident. He clearly did do well in those Defence of the Motherland lessons.

“Look,” Ostrogarsky says. He’s making a clumsy effort to clamp down on the bleeding with his palms. It’s ineffective; Rhoden can see the currant-red liquid soak the fabric of the man’s trousers to the point of saturation and drip down onto the fluffy blossoms of the blue-buttons. “Look, Arno. I spared you once. You can repay the debt and spare me now. We will be even.”

If it were him and no one else - if the lieutenant never referred to the Steinbergs being Jewish - in a word, under different circumstances, he’d consider it. He would. But as it stands, the risk is too great. There must be no chance of Ostrogarsky ever reporting back.

“He will go tell the others,” Esther says quietly, echoing his thoughts.

“I will not.” Ostrogarsky’s eyes dart from Esther to Rhoden. “As God’s my witness, Arno, no other living soul will ever know.”

The risk is too great.

Rhoden can see Steinberg’s features harden and his head tilt a little the way an experienced hunter’s would before a clean shot. This, too, he feels, cannot be allowed. Ostrogarsky cannot be left alive; Steinberg cannot be permitted to kill him. The way a murder would eat at his heart, endanger his sanity, live in his dreams - it is an unacceptable, unthinkable sacrifice.

“Sasha,” he says, quickly, and raises a hand in warning. “Wait. Give me a moment.”

Steinberg obeys him unquestioningly, loyal to a fault. He thinks, no doubt, that Rhoden wishes for a last talk with the man who saved his life and then nearly ended it minutes ago.

Rhoden approaches Ostrogarsky’s collapsed form. He lowers himself into the grass nearby, one knee against the side of Ostrogarsky’s chest. He unhurriedly reaches for the collar of the lieutenant’s jacket, the way one would if wishing to grab another by the lapels in the course of a particularly unpleasant conversation. Ostrogarsky recoils a little, though without any true understanding of what is to come. Steinberg, too, appears to be without suspicion. That is as it should be. Rhoden is satisfied.

He reaches past the collar, closes his metal fingers on his adversary’s voice box and crushes it flat. Ostrogarsky is left to struggle for air, gasping ineffectually through the stream of blood now flooding his trachea. Without letting go, Rhoden smoothly reaches with his other hand into the calf of his right boot and produces the very hunting knife that once maimed Ostrogarsky’s hand. He drives this knife deep into the right external jugular vein and the external carotid artery and up, up underneath the coronoid process of the mandible. Then he slides it back out.

Owing to the damaged larynx, Ostrogarsky’s death is quiet. His body makes a series of slight wet noises, like bubbles being blown into a glass of water. His fingers claw convulsively at the bloodied grass; his face grows pale and then bluish. Finally, there’s no more movement, no more sound. It is done.

Rhoden stands up. He doesn’t quite dare look at Steinberg.

“It has been a long time coming,” he says, in someone else’s ice cold voice. “But we need to make sure identifying him proves a problem even when he does wash up downstream.”

It takes him a while to cut all the labels off the lieutenant’s clothes. Corpses are inert, inflexible, even immediately after death. Without the living will animating this ingenious musculoskeletal apparatus, every little movement becomes a chore.

“Rhoden,” Steinberg attempts, once.

“Not now,” Rhoden snaps. He feels bad for that outburst - so uncharacteristic of him and so strange to Steinberg. But he’s barely in control of himself as it is. This, he realises with a sinking feeling, won’t end in a few dignified tears. This cannot be made to go away by letting himself cry it out in some dark corner.

The Steinbergs should not have to see him like that.

He takes Esther’s pin out of Ostrogarsky’s calf and meticulously wipes the blood off. Esther reaches out for it without a word; and without a word, he gives it back.

The lieutenant's body goes over the edge of the river bank and gracelessly rolls down into the water. The stream is quiet, dark; it drags him into the dense cover of hornwort below, to float along the cold red clay of the riverbed. It will be some time before the bloating forces him back up, and by then he will be dozens of miles from here.

And even when they find him, even if they do identify this correctly as a murder and establish the victim's identity, there will be no mark on him but that of Rhoden's knife. No evidence of anyone's involvement but his own.

"Come," he says to the Steinbergs, turning away from the Yahra.

As they walk back through the meadow, Salme Rüütli’s voice rings in his ears. You were truly Yoldian then, she says, viciously. Now, you’ve forgotten.

And so he has. He recalls his own impassioned defence of the Venlish and feels ashamed. What was he protecting? The likes of Ostrogarsky? He accused Salme of being a coward; in truth, she showed more bravery than he had possessed in his entire life. For she at least had the strength to acknowledge the truth, if not to withstand it.

He has forgotten. He looks around and remembers, suddenly. Venäjä is a disease. Grassless soil, skinless faces; a plague of a nation, the destroyer of everything good and gentle. The enemy. He has not thought of them like this in a long time, but that is what they are. Even Nella. Even-

But he glances at Steinberg and something in him lets up. His breath comes easier.

Can’t hate him.

He was wrong in defending the Venlish, perhaps; but he wasn’t wrong in defending Sasha Steinberg. The Steinbergs may have grown up here, but they’re not of this festering land.

And Nella - if the Third Section was kinder to her than to the rest of the group, it was only because they did not know. She belongs in this place of hate as much as the Steinbergs, the Rubinsteins, or he, Rhoden.

To his right, Esther’s hiding her face in Sasha’s shoulder. Sasha’s eyes flicker at Rhoden over the crown of her head.

“He was your friend,” he says quietly.

It is an expression of sympathy, not an accusation. But all Rhoden feels is a stab of guilt, and he turns away with a grimace.

When they reach the house, Nella is sitting on the porch in her shirtsleeves. She’s hammering away at some loose board or other, making sure it’s joined tightly to its brothers. She raises her head at their approach, a dozen nails sticking out of her mouth like some sort of strange needle-like teeth, and takes in their appearance: Esther, barefoot and clinging to her brother; the sombre expression on Steinberg’s face; and the stains of red clay all three of them are covered in. Rhoden wonders if she can also see the fresher, darker stains on his shirtfront.

“One of them is dead by my hand,” he tells her without prelude. “You will testify as much if that ever becomes necessary.”

She’s silent for a few moments; then, she nods once.

Steinberg, fortunately preoccupied with Esther, goes inside. Rhoden stays with Nella for a while. He looks down at her hands holding the hammer; his own fingers fiddle with the seam of his right sleeve, just a little too violently. The pain of the rough fabric’s friction against his skin gives him a measure of calm.

Nella studies his expression. He fears it betrays altogether too much.

He gestures at the hammer and asks, with a touch of rueful humour, “Don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d kindly club me over the head with this? Might do me good to rest for a while.”

Her lips tighten around the mouthful of nails in acknowledgment of the joke. Finally, she raises her other hand and takes them out. Their shanks are stained unevenly with bright cherry lipstick.

“I do care for you, you know, Arno,” she says in low tones. “But-” unlike Rubinstein, she doesn’t say, “I won’t press you. You will tell me what pains you, if you like; or you will not.”

He offers her a wan smile, and jerks his chin a little. “Forgive me, Nellochka.”

“As you wish,” she says after a short pause, inclining her head. Then she puts the nails into the pocket of her trousers and retreats into the house.

Rhoden, in the meantime, walks past the summer kitchen into the backyard. There, finally alone, with no one around to witness his weakness or be inconvenienced by it, he leans against the sun-heated wooden wall and shivers as if freezing cold.

Everything is so close, and yet in a million of tiny incomprehensible fragments; every sensation assaults his nerve endings, and yet the things producing these sensations are vague and unreal. The world collapses in on him, and his respiratory muscles refuse to work as they should, suddenly no more than a dead weight of flesh on his ribcage and shoulders.

He half-wants to stick Õnne’s knife into his own throat. He wasn’t meant to survive the occupation; wasn’t meant to keep going after the fall of independent Yoldia. This feeling of wrongness at the realisation that he’s alive is stronger than it’s been in years.

After Venäjä’s victory in what they call the War of Unification - in what the Estlish called Häda, woe - reality stopped, and a nightmare began. And even though Uku Lillenberg and his forest brothers died in the autumn of 45 while he, Rhoden, lived, a piece of his mind exists forever in that rainy red-leafed October, behind a stained-glass image of another time.

Rhoden, a voice says. A pair of hands clutch his wrists. A face comes into focus - darkened eyes, a concerned frown, mouth tightened with worry.

He gasps for air, silently cursing himself out for not having hidden his emotional state better.

“Don’t need to,” he gets out, between laboured breaths, “don’t need to worry yourself with this. I will - be fine.”

“He left you no choice,” Steinberg tells him. “He left you no choice - there was nothing you could’ve done. Rhoden, please-”

“Don’t care about him,” Rhoden bites out vehemently. “Would take his life ten times over, twenty times over for what he wanted to do to you.”

Steinberg puts his arms around Rhoden’s torso, presses his cheek against the blood-soaked shirt. Rhoden’s hands grab fistfuls of Steinberg’s jacket. He can feel himself cling . It’s childish, embarrassing and all-around undignified, and he can’t stop it. 

“You don’t know who I am.” He has to take a pause and breathe some more, his chest heaving. “I should’ve died when the Venlish crossed Lambahanna. Instead, I’ve spent twenty years trying to justify my survival.”

He would’ve done anything for it to make sense. Lie to himself about his saviour’s true nature, blind himself to the human rot of Venäjä, and, of course, rescue every vulnerable kid he encountered, no matter the corruption it entailed. He could leave no one behind; not out of any great love for them, an insidious voice whispers in his ear, but out of pure self-interest.

“I am everything you accused me of,” he rasps, and his fingers ache with effort as he tightens his hold on Steinberg’s sleeves. “Corrupt, selfish, cowardly. Complicit.”

He can feel rather than see an emphatic shake of Steinberg's head, and ploughs on before he can be interrupted. "You were my atonement. I convinced myself there was a reason I wasn’t killed; and you and Fira nearly paid the ultimate price for my arrogance and my selfish pursuit of- of personal meaning."

There was no reason. Only a rotten man's whim; only a postponement of the inevitable. And Ostrogarsky wasn’t proof that there are good people among the Venlish - he was proof that there are not.

He may be crying; he doesn’t entirely want to know, so he refuses to process what exactly is happening to his face and his eyes. He knows only that incoherent pleas for forgiveness mix with salt in his mouth, and that he’s trembling and weak and altogether unwell. When Steinberg relaxes his embrace, Rhoden actually sways on his feet, he’s that out of it.

Steinberg's hands grip his shoulders in a steadying gesture. When Rhoden looks at him, he discovers that there's a wine-red stain of Ostrogarsky’s drying blood on Steinberg's face where his zygomatic was pressed against Rhoden's sternum.

The expression in Steinberg's eyes is not that of hate or disappointment. It is- it's-

“There’s nothing you need to apologise for,” Steinberg says, almost harshly. “Nothing.”

He’s definitely crying now, and there’s only so much he can do to stop himself from physically cringing at the knowledge. Last time he truly wept in front of someone was back in Narov. Erika found him like that, hiding in the woodshed, making terrible sounds like a wounded animal.

The feeling of tears on his skin reminds him of the sensation of candle wax on clumsy fingers - hot and uncomfortable and entirely his own fault.

"What you're talking about," Steinberg adds, in low tones, "is not unfamiliar to me. The searching for meaning, the need to be something more than an accidental survivor of senseless cruelty - yes. I recognize that.”

Although his chest hurts and thin blue lines constrict his field of vision, Rhoden is breathing a little less convulsively. He’s still wary of collapsing, though, or something equally embarrassing, so he carefully sits down on the ground, the rounded tips of his army boots sinking into the mixture of woodchips and dry grass covering the backyard. He undoes his coat buttons and drapes the coat around his shoulders, blanket-like.

Steinberg, too, lowers himself to his knees.

“I hope I have not offended.” His tone is grave. “I would of course not dare to draw a parallel between our experiences. What happened to you is nit tsu fartrogn. Intolerable.”

Rhoden raises a soothing palm and makes a workmanlike attempt at a smile. “I would hardly describe what happened to you as tolerable, Sasha. Do not worry; I am not insulted by your compassion. How could I be?”

Steinberg cradles Rhoden’s right hand in both of his. “I didn’t befriend you selflessly, either,” he insists. “You were the only light in the darkness my family created around me. What did I care for the source of that light? You could’ve been anyone; it would’ve hardly made a difference then. I used you, not vice versa.”

Rhoden raises an eyebrow. “I very much doubt-”

“It is what happens,” Steinberg interrupts hotly. “Pain twists people, makes them cling onto the smallest things. Your pain saved others. Saved me. So what if it wasn’t selfless? Is it really so bad that you had some motivation other than sympathy?”

For a moment Rhoden almost hears Rubinstein’s voice. You’re not a lamed vovnik, Arno, and so what? No one is. The righteous thirty-six? Bah, you’ll be lucky if you find one, and he’ll be a little eyfele whose only wisdom is in how to soothe himself by suckling his thumb.

It’s not like Steinberg to say things like that.

But then again, this feeling, this experience Steinberg knows better than anybody. Better than Rhoden, whose life was once happy and whole. Steinberg’s never had a sliver of happiness to call his own; and there is no stained-glass image of another era in his mind - there’s only darkness and a handful of coloured shards.

Rhoden’s fingers curl around the edge of Steinberg’s narrow palm. It is a comfort he can’t refuse.

***

When Rhoden wakes up the next morning, it’s to the sensation of someone staring at him. He opens his eyes and finds himself looking directly at Esther Steinberg. She’s standing over him, hair brushed and face washed, dressed in the chequered rosewood shawl Steinberg had bought for her in Reval. She’s holding a steaming cup of freshly brewed tea.

The slight silvery light filtering through the thick glass of the windows suggests that it can’t be later than six in the morning.

“What’s that, then?” he asks, his voice hoarse from sleep. He turns over and sits up on his makeshift bed, the grimy wooden floor cold against his bare feet.

She thrusts the cup into his hands. He accepts it, reflexively, and takes a sip. The sheer amount of caffeine that hits his system makes him feel like he’s been struck by lightning. The tea was clearly brewed by someone with very little understanding of how much tea leaf is too much.

“Thank you, Estherke,” he says, using the Estlish diminutive of her name, and rubs his left eye with the heel of his artificial hand.

“I wanted to say sorry,” she says.

Rhoden wonders how long she’s been waiting here for him to wake up. “Sorry for what?”

“There, in the meadow. He could’ve killed you.”

“Ah.” He takes another sip, for her sake. The taste is truly terrible. “But he didn’t.”

Esther frowns, clearly taken aback by his response. She hesitates for a few moments before confessing, “I waited until he was pointing the gun at you. I didn’t want him to hurt Sasha.”

She stands up a little straighter before him, as if preparing to be punished. The shawl falls down her stiff shoulders the way a soldier’s cloak does as he stands at attention.

Rhoden considers her over the patchily gilded rim of the teacup. “Estherke,” he repeats, gently. “It is as it should be. I am glad you risked my life and not his. If of the three of us one must die, I want it to be me.”

Her dark eyes widen at this, and she doesn’t protest when he leans forward, puts the teacup on the floor, and takes her hand. They’ve come a long way since their first meeting, when she didn’t like for him to even stand too close to her.

“You’ve done well,” he murmurs. “And you need never worry about me wanting to hurt you, all right?”

“All right,” she echoes, jerking her chin down in a tense nod. Her lips wobble a little, and she furiously rubs at her eyes with a fist. He’s a trifle worried she’ll hurt herself.

He lifts the teacup again, takes a moment to steel himself, and gulps the entire thing down. He will not sleep again today. Possibly ever.

Esther takes the cup from him and wanders off, head ducked low. How is she handling her part in Ostrogarsky’s death? he wonders, with a twinge of anxiety. They may have come far, but he wouldn’t know how to talk to her about that -  he can only hope that Sasha will.

As for himself, Rhoden knows what he must do. But not just yet. There’s still some time left.

He gets up and gets dressed, and goes outside to wash his hands. The village sleeps around their house, only a couple of chimneys emitting the first rings of smoke - these are people who go to work early and whose shifts at the porcelain factory in Pleskov are due to begin in another hour or so.

Asya Kogai stands in the middle of the garden, under a young cherry tree, and feeds Morkovcha sunflower seeds. Rhoden remembers her talking rather passionately at yesterday’s dinner about their high caloric content and the need to use them sparingly in a chicken’s diet - it is really rather remarkable how much Asya can talk about chickens and the welfare thereof. He can only imagine the sheer number of poultry facts Nella must’ve been treated to during the courtship period.

“Your little one was waiting for you,” Asya says, as she notices him approaching.

“I know,” he nods. “We’ve had a chat just now. Thank you, M-lle Kogai.”

Asya is silent for a while, brushing the striped shells of the sunflower seeds off her fingers.

“She seems a bit,” she begins, and halts, searching for the right word.

“Strange?”

“You could say that.”

Rhoden inclines his head a little. “She’s somewhat different from an average child, that is true.”

Asya frowns and mulls over this for a moment, clearly thinking of how to convey her meaning without offending him. “You’re not - not worried about that? She’s not just quirky. She’s, she’s cold. I haven’t seen her smile once since I’ve met her. Not even at Morkovcha, and Morkovcha normally has kids grinning from ear to ear.”

“Esther doesn’t smile.” There’s an edge of warning in Rhoden’s voice. “But you shouldn’t think her cold. Just because she doesn’t express her feelings like others doesn’t mean she is without emotion.”

“I’m sorry.” Asya lowers her head in guilty embarrassment and leans against the cherry tree. “She unsettles me a little; that is all. But of course she’s just a child.”

Morkovcha walks over to Rhoden’s left boot, contemplating him from below with one sly cocoa-brown eye. Unlike humans, Rubinstein’s voice says in Rhoden’s head, birds do not possess much ocular motility. Instead, they have to turn their entire head to focus on the object of their interest.

“I’m sure that with a guardian like you she’ll be all right,” Asya tries.

Rhoden makes a noncommittal sound and shrugs uncomfortably. “I’m not certain I’ll be around long enough for that.”

He doesn’t really mean to say it. It just does come out of his mouth, possibly because lying about this even by omission has been so tiring. Perhaps, too, it is because he has no meaningful relationship with Asya - he knows this confession will not hurt her the way it would Steinberg or Nella.

There’s a sick, hopeless feeling in his chest at these words that makes him realise two things - that he does want to live. And that, in the end, what he wants does not matter.

“What do you mean?” she asks, obliviously. “Are you going somewhere?”

But the lack of answer from him is itself an answer, and a crease forms between her thin chestnut eyebrows. “Is it really that dangerous?”

If one of us must die, I want it to be me. “I don’t see a good way out,” he admits.

The crease takes on a distinctly wrathful character. “Is that how she thinks of it, too?”

Rhoden feels like an insect pinned under a microscope. Oh, he should not be the one talking about this to Nella’s partner. “I think she believes you can take care of yourself, should anything happen,” he says, quite exhausting his capacity for diplomatic wording.

“But I don’t want to take care of myself.” Her voice breaks, and her dark eyes burn when she looks at him. “I want to take care of her. Forever and ever, in sickness and in health, and all that crap.”

How did he fuck this up so badly? He’s distantly astonished at how quickly this fairly casual conversation derailed into matters of life and death. “Asya, Asya,” he says, now a little panicked, and puts a hand on the yellow sleeve of her flannel shirt. “If I have any say in this at all, she will not have to risk her life.”

There are tears trailing slowly down her cheekbones. “I love her,” she says, helplessly.

“I know,” he says.

“You promise she’ll live?”

“Asya,” he repeats, in low tones, and draws her closer so she can hear what he says next. “Give me your word you’ll look after the Steinbergs, and I will make sure Nella is safe.”

She wants to believe him. And she also has a vested interest in not examining the implications of his promise. It is just as well; hers is precisely the kind of support he needs for this. She doesn’t care for him as a person, and she has a strong motivation to fulfil his wishes.

“You love them very much, don’t you,” she says.

Something raw and painful in him twists into a knot. “More than anything in the world,” he whispers hoarsely.

“Then it’s a deal.” Clearly she, too, has made the same calculation.

Asya shakes his other hand - the prosthetic one - and does a small double take; then mumbles an apology once she realises it’s artificial. But he grips her hand back and repeats, “It is a deal.”

Rhoden thought, somehow, that he’d have more time before having to do this. More time to spend with Nella, to chat to Esther, and, of course, to express his gratitude to Steinberg for the kindness he showed yesterday.

But every additional hour the remnants of Lilia Artzishevsky’s memories stay in those bones increases the danger to Nella and the Steinbergs. Every extra minute is that much more time the Third Section spends in Parlevo. And what alternative is there? This was always going to happen. Venäjä never intended for him to live. That is why she made him this prosthetic hand - so that one day he could die for her. The fact that their encounter with Ostrogarsky ended with Ostrogarsky’s death was a miracle; next time they will not be so lucky.

He bends down to take out Õnne’s hunting knife from his boot. “That’s for Steinberg, later,” he tells Asya, hurriedly thrusting the knife into her hands. Then he rummages through his pockets and produces two hundred-rouble notes and a sour pear caramel. “The caramel is for Esther. She loves these. The money is for, for whatever you feel is best.”

Asya looks like death. Fearing that any more sentimentality may make her renege on their agreement, Rhoden gives her a dry nod, turns around and walks out of the garden through the back gate.

The fields and the forest are full of birdsong this time of the day. The delicate light of the waking sun cannot quite dispel the morning fog, and everything appears as if under the thinnest sheet of smoked glass.

When he reaches the cemetery, he notices a series of large fresh prints in the clay floor of the dig. Someone’s roughshod ridged boots walked between the graves, not quite reaching the shaded spot under the thuja.

No time, no time, no time.

He hops over the low stone fence and sits down at the edge of the Artzishevskys’ resting place. Then he takes the glove off his flesh hand and gently removes the thin layer of soil off the remains. When the pads of his fingers brush against something warm and smooth, he stops and looks at it for a while - at the glistening surface of Lilia’s left parietal. 

The colour of the bone seems to have darkened, like a fruit or a slice of flesh teetering at the very brink of decomposition. A thread-thin black fissure snakes between the parietal and the frontal, a slight hitch in the texture of the skull - the coronal suture. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown; which, in the end, is every head.

He takes off his other glove. The cool of the gentle wind blowing through the forest undergrowth seeps into the metal of his fingers.

Rhoden’s feelings on his handicap have changed many times over the years. When it happened, he took a while to get used to the practical side of things, but emotionally he was at peace. It didn’t trouble him overmuch, having a stump where there was once an appendage. The stump was still his own - a part of his body, if imperfect.

The prosthesis wasn’t a part of him. He wasn’t sure why osteological prosthetics never went very far in Venäjä, but he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his case had somehow contributed. After he recovered from the surgery, his new hand was quickly branded a failure. It had a mind of its own, the memories of the person he once was no longer neatly mapping onto the man who woke up on that operating table. Whatever he wanted to do, it either resisted utterly or did something completely different. It broke cups, crushed bottles, twitched uncontrollably, tapped wild rhythms against his will. It hurt him.

In a way, he was lucky. He was discharged quickly and forgotten; what they did to him was no longer of interest to them. It was just as well.

It took years, but eventually they learned to live together - Arno Rhoden and this odd metal shard of his past life. 

Yes, the hand tapped rhythms. It knew music, remembered everything he’s ever played. With time, he found pleasure in that deep, unchangeable memory.

It crushed things - it was strong. He could break anything with it. It was great for making firewood into little chips, which were excellent for starting fires in his sputtery, sooty burzhuika.

It twitched; well. Sometimes that was the only part of his body he allowed to express emotion. He could always chalk it up to faulty wiring.

And now, although it is the instrument of his death, it is, at the same time, an instrument of salvation.

Steinberg was right - if Rhoden’s pain helped someone, it is not of much consequence that that pain wasn’t selfless. But he was right, too, when he said that they have a duty to resist. Venäjä wanted him gone; but this isn’t how she wanted him to die. This will be his last act of defiance against her and her monstrous, soulless children.

This will be his last act of love. This will save Sasha and Fira, and for that he will give anything, anything, anything.

“You were right,” he tells Lilia’s bones. “I am here to help you. I’m here to help those I love and everyone else in Parlevo. This will fix everything. You will no longer have to be in pain.”

He sits in the heart of this land that hates him and sings an Estlish lullaby to a dead child of another era who also once dared to oppose its nation of torturers.

“Kasva, tamme, jõua, tamme,” he sings to her. He sings the story of a magical oak that grew from an acorn found in the sea. Its roots were burned to please the gods, its trunk was made into a temple, the little tender branches at the top made a children’s mandolin, and out of the larger branches an organ was created. And finally, the small chips that were left behind served as material for a fair bride’s dowry - a wooden chest.

When he was young, it was always vaguely funny to him that the word for chest in this song was also the word for coffin. But maybe that was the songwriter’s intention all along. A good coffin is, after all, at least as important as a good dowry. A marriage may be short-lived; but death is forever, and taking care of the dead is a man’s last and best gesture of kindness.

“That’s what you deserve,” he tells Lilia. “A good burial. A comfortable rest.”

Then he turns her skull around and carefully, gently lays his metal fingers into the little hollows of broken bone at the borders of her fragile eye sockets.

His last thought is of Pavel Artzishevsky and of the burning, soul-crushing love he must’ve felt in his last moments for the children he would never see again.

***

The anger is all-consuming. His mouth is full of fire, his stomach is heavy with hatred, his hands crave soft, vulnerable flesh.

He could destroy it all - burn their cities like they burned his, shatter their churches like they’ve defiled the Estlish temples, eradicate their very being until every last one of them finally understands what it is to suffer.

But the Venlish would not be the Venlish if they knew that.

If Ostrogarsky understood pain, he would not have joined the Third Section. Would not have been a soldier in the Skein.

She’s grown up with this - with the dark roots of this corruption snaking through her community. Now, as she stands in this empty field, looking down the barrel of a rifle, she’s conscious of having failed to stop the darkness.

She’s the last one. Her father and her sister are already lying at her feet in the tall soft grass, the smell of their blood mixing faintly with the smell of gunpowder and yarrow. Her father’s beard sticks out awkwardly towards the sky, baring his throat above the collar of his white tunic. Maria’s face is buried in the soil, as if she had become tired of sunlight and hid herself from it.

The anger is all-consuming. She’d kill their families in front of them a thousand times over to watch them suffer like she’s suffering.

Lilia fixes her darkened, mad eyes on their faces, as if trying to commit each one to memory for eternity. Efreitor Lychagin on the left; his patchy ginger beard has only just started growing in. Lieutenant Tuchin in the middle; his chubby cheeks are rose-coloured under the cold Parlevan wind. And, finally, Ryadovoi Chelyabinsky - he’s the one holding the rifle pointed at her stomach.

“You will burn until the end of your days,” she growls at them, and then a shot rings out, and there’s nothing but pain, and it is she who’s burning.

It is he who’s burning. He feels his bones come apart with this unbearable torment. A rib cracks. A finger joint twists. His artificial hand is white hot, and as he claws at his sternum, it leaves welts on his skin.

He chokes, again and again and again. For a moment, torn out of his body, he sees his own eyes, blind with blood. The next moment, he feels it: the warmth on his cheekbones, the smell of iron in his nostrils.

There cannot be much more of this to take. He will die soon.

For them, he thinks desperately with the remnants of his darkening mind. It is worth it. He would do it again.

Why? Someone screams at him. He has never heard such anguish in another human voice. Why would you - Arno, Arno, I beg of you, have mercy-

The words turn into an incoherent sound of rage and grief. Rhoden attempts to stay conscious, to look up at the man mourning him; through the red haze of arterial blood, all he sees is a shadow.

A cold hand is pressed to one side of his face as if in an ineffectual attempt to stop the bleeding. His first name is repeated over and over, until finally it sounds less like a name and more like a prayer.

Sasha, he thinks, with a pang of painful tenderness. He doesn’t have the strength to question what Steinberg is doing here, or how he found Rhoden in the first place.

He does, however, notice when the hand is withdrawn and the shadow moves, something metallic glinting in its grasp.

That’s Õnne’s knife, he realises, in a sudden moment of clarity. Whatever does he need the knife for?

The rest of it comes to him in flashes he can ill comprehend. There’s an odd flat sound, like a cleaver going through a deer’s fetlock, and a grunt of pain. His vision swims and his body goes limp; but before he can fully succumb to unconsciousness, something catches him and arrests his fall through that darkness.

Another’s flesh is pleasantly cool against the searing heat of his artificial hand. Another’s blood hisses and steams as it runs down his metal fingers.

Lilia’s pain and anger recede from his heart, now merely a shallow brook rather than a river flooded to bursting. The memories flowing through his bones are darker, quieter, a blessed reprieve from the blinding light of that suffering.

And yet they’re still not his memories. There’s an unsettling fluid, malleable quality to them he has never felt before - not in the Sawirk clavicle, not in Lilia’s remains.

For the first time in his life, Rhoden is touching a living mind.

A shudder passes through him. He recoils from this knowledge, trying ineffectually to shut out these sensations. This is not for him to know - not for him to see. If witnessing the private life of the Sawirk girl felt wrong, this, he feels, is tenfold that violation.

But whether he likes it or not, he can neither close his eyes nor turn away.

The scenes and feelings he finds himself submerged in are an odd strain of quietly comforting, as if carefully curated to cause the least hurt.

There’s an image of Esther as a baby. She’s lying on the floor on her back, crying her little heart out the way babies are wont to do. Steinberg sits nearby, careful not to touch her - she hates being touched. Hates being picked up, too. Other babies are soothed by being held, but she only screams harder, the added stimulation of someone’s body against hers an unbearable imposition on her already irritated senses.

He leans over her, muttering the words to Oyfn pripetshik, and rocks back and forth a little as he would if he were holding her. Slowly, the crying ceases. She looks up at him through wet black eyelashes and reaches for a stray lock of his hair with her plump little hand.

“Nu, there’s a gute meydl,” he smiles, and lowers his head a bit so she can tug on his curls.

There’s the taste of cold margarine in a bowl of pearl barley. Steinberg is not fond of pearl barley. It’s what they got today, though, so he hasn’t much choice. He’s thirteen now, an adult, and being an adult means eating food he doesn’t like because he knows it’ll save him from feeling hungry later.

They’re sitting on the Yahra's bank, slow transparent currents swirling around their ankles. It’s very early in the morning. The North star hangs in the champagne-pink skies above their heads. A large sea buckthorn tree hides them from view, creating a comfortably secluded little spot near the village they can have all to themselves. He reaches for the nearest branch and pours a handful of amber berries into his green metal bowl.

Maybe pearl barley is not all that terrible.

These are not Rhoden’s memories, but some of them are memories of him. There’s his own face smiling at him over a shatranj board. His own tired low-pitched voice slipping unconsciously into an Estlish accent. His own hands carefully holding out a glass of tea.

He hasn’t felt much affection towards himself in years, so it’s a profoundly strange thing to look at himself and think such warm thoughts - to listen to his own words and experience such admiration.

He’s also very unused to being this worried for his own wellbeing. The thought of the Parlevo report is an excruciating twist in his gut. Suddenly, he’s aware of the pain surrounding the memory, like fire at the edges of a smouldering piece of paper.

The mind touching his is at its limit.

Hot rakhmones.

A trembling hand wipes his eyes. For a brief agonising moment of consciousness, Rhoden sees Steinberg sitting on the ground, clutching Rhoden’s prosthetic hand to his heart, blood running down his forearms and torso in scarlet ribbons. The fingers twined with his feel familiar and yet not; something is terribly off about this touch. The wet, fleshy, gritty texture of the medial aspect of Steinberg's palm belongs in a dissecting room, not on a living human being.

“Sasha,” he whispers, ill with foreboding. But the effort of speaking takes from him what the pain could not; and, finally, the image of Steinberg slips away from him, as does everything else of any consequence.

***

He dreams of Venäjä. A wreath of rosehip flowers is carved into her marble hair. She stands tall, a picture of health and strength. She looks like any working woman, but everything in her is permeated with subtle malice. Her strong arms are not for gathering wheat but for squeezing blood out of human flesh. Under her feet the dead turn into bone meal. Her eyes are flooded burial grounds.

She towers over Rhoden, her stone cold fingers around his throat.

“You’re no foe of mine,” she says, in a voice like a distant rockfall. “You’re too insignificant to be anything but a momentary inconvenience.

“I will not fight you. I will erase you from history, Arno Rhoden. You will be nothing but a name and a set of dates. No one will remember who you were.”

“Steinberg will,” he says.

Something like a smile curves the grey-veined white lips. “Yes; at first. But it will hurt so much that he shall wish desperately to forget. And eventually, he will. That is the only way for him to survive.”

Her hand on his trachea squeezes tighter. Rhoden chokes; it feels like he will never breathe again.

Her other hand grips his bare prosthetic. No matter how much he tries to pull away, she holds him and she makes him see .

There are no horrors beyond his imagination - nothing to make his blood freeze in his veins. He’s seen more than his fair share of that. No, what she shows him is merely a snowy urban landscape, the squat sooty barracks interspersed here and there with the dull sparks of streetlights. There’s a concrete building by the rail tracks, and a tired young woman in a red headscarf reads a thick stack of yellowed archive documents.

His name is there, one among a million names. Rhoden, A., it reads. 22, Dorpat, the Dorpat Land of Yoldia - 67, Parlevo, Pleskov region of Venäjä. KK.

KK stands for kõrgeim karistusmäär, the highest measure of punishment. Execution by firing squad.

It is not quite a name and two dates, but it is, indeed, a very small paragraph. Merely a line on a page that, judging from its smooth edges, does not enjoy much attention even from the archivists.

It seems, furthermore, curiously devoid of meaning. These words are a ghost of a whisper of the flesh and blood person that is him. More than denoting a human being, they denote an aching, yawning void where a human being once was.

Rhoden looks into her black granite pupils. "It is worth it," he says, spitefully, even as the icy sensation of utter loneliness spreads through his bloodstream.

"Haven't you been listening?" She inclines her head curiously. "You've made no more difference than a woodchip against a felling axe. You're all but sawdust to me in the end - you, and your friend, and the strange girl child, and every single soul in your godforsaken little land-"

His prosthetic fingers chip the marble on her wrist with how hard he grips her hand. The surge of anger he feels is so violent that for a moment it seems as if his body can sustain itself on wrath alone; that he has no need of breathing.

But the convulsive spasming of his lungs gives the lie to this illusion. His heart beats once, twice; finally, the world around him shatters, and he comes awake, gasping and soaked in cold sweat.

He’s lying still, enveloped in soft darkness. It takes him a few seconds to parse the reason for this: his eyes are covered with a narrow strip of layered gauze. As his breathing slowly calms, he automatically reaches to slide the bandage off; but someone seizes his forearm in a steely grip.

“Nella,” he says, hoarsely. He recognizes her smell, a vaguely spruce-accented eau de cologne she pours on herself with the generosity of a sweaty teenage boy.

“Yeah,” she says, relaxing her hold. “And you would do well to stop trying to take your eye band off, unless you want to end up blind as well as handless.”

He leaves his eyes alone and attempts surreptitiously to move his other hand. It obeys, after a delay; tap-tap-tap it goes against the rough woollen blanket he’s lying under, in a lightly musical rhythm he finds comforting.

“What’s that?” Nella asks suspiciously.

“The Golden Rowan-Tree, the Parlevan counter-revolutionary anthem,” his own voice informs her, completely without any prompting from his brain. “It’s an old Soomish tune used to highlight Pleskov’s ethnic origins.”

“How do you even know that?”

“I don’t think I do,” he says, sounding to his own ears mildly bewildered. “I think Lilia did, perhaps.”

He cannot see her but he practically feels her squint at him with concern.

“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, and attempts a smile. “I’m still me. Mostly.”

There’s a pause. He rifles through his own thoughts, trying to puzzle out what exactly happened to him. It’s all jumbled in his mind - the blood, the bones, the forest. And the pain is starting up in earnest. Where the sweet blanket of unconsciousness protected him before, there’s now only broken flesh.

As if on cue, her hand returns, hot and dry against his mouth. She holds a few pills she’s trying to slip between his lips. Rhoden turns his head away a little.

“It’s morphine,” Nella explains, in the tone of someone trying to make a kid eat his porridge.

“Give me a few minutes.” It’s important that he remembers. Even if it hurts.

The last thing he can recall is the desperate plea of Asya Kogai.

“How did you know?” he asks, with a tinge of anxiety.

Nella sits next to him, the weight of her body shifting his blankets a little. “I was asleep when you left. She came into the house and got back into bed with me. Have you ever felt a person radiate guilt? Asya didn’t say a word to me, but her silence was telling. You and she have something in common: she’s a terrible liar. And when I gave her a hug by way of comfort, she was still holding your knife.”

Despite the eye band, there must be a visible change in his expression, because she sounds gentler when she adds, “Don’t look so miserable, R. I do not blame Asya for what you did. It’s a fucked up world, and we do fucked up things in it. She seems like an emotionally healthy goody two shoes, but she wouldn’t have chosen me if she were that, would she now? We ain’t together ‘cause she’s the light to my darkness or somesuch crap, you know.

“So in short, you don’t need to be haunted by the fact that your suicide attempt ruined my love life.”

There’s a metallic clatter he recognizes as her opening the lid of her cigar box. She doesn’t light one, though.

He is grateful for her words, mocking as they are: he was, in fact, beginning to feel a little haunted.

“It wasn’t a suicide attempt,” he murmurs.

There’s a pause. “No,” she says, “I suppose not.”

His lips taste like old, dried blood. The movements of his prosthetic, normally smooth and fluid, are jerky and unsure now. As he lifts his fingers, they make a slight crackling sound: no doubt his joints are full of blood too. It’ll take him an eternity to clean.

“Aren’t you going to ask how bad it is?” Nella’s voice has a tinge of something like scientific curiosity to it.

Truthfully, he doesn’t need to ask; he can feel it with his every nerve. “How bad is it?” he inquires obediently, nevertheless.

“Two cracked ribs, two broken fingers, a fractured collarbone, and a whole lot of blood loss. We couldn’t risk putting you in the local hospital, so we had to improvise with the help of a friendly medical student and some coagulants.”

“Kuradi raisk,” he reacts to that. “How am I still alive?”

“Dunno,” Nella says. There’s a hiss and a crack as she lights a match. “Ask your kid.”

Steinberg. Rhoden’s mouth goes dry. That’s what he was trying to remember.

“I want to see him.”

“You can’t see shit,” she points out, reasonably. “And he’s been utterly beside himself ever since we found you at the cemetery. He’ll make a scene. You can’t be dealing with this right now.”

Rhoden’s chest aches with more than just physical pain. “Is he all right?”

“Better than you are,” she says, suddenly sounding defensive. “How was I supposed to stop it? Before I even understood what was happening, the lunatic went directly for your knife and hacked off most of his left little finger.”

“He what?”

It makes sense, of course. Steinberg came to the logical conclusion - one Rhoden has never contemplated himself, for the lack of practical applications - that if Rhoden’s artificial hand could connect to dead bone, then it could also connect to living osteological tissue. And knowing that Rhoden was dying from Lilia’s memories, he saw no other way but to share that pain.

Tears spring to Rhoden’s eyes. He’s grateful for the bandages, now - both because they let him hide his emotion from Nella and because it hurts like hell.

“Very well,” he says, in a changed voice. “I’ll take that morphine now, Nellochka.”

The pills are almost painfully bitter, and he chokes on them. Nella pours water down his throat and sits by his side until the morphine kicks in, turning his insides from smouldering coals into something soft and warm.

He drifts back into unconsciousness, hoping that Steinberg will forgive him for postponing their reunion; for a long while, he dreams of nothing.

The next time he finds himself awake, the bandages are gone from his eyes. Mercifully, the light doesn’t hurt him; it is a soothing, uniform grey. The pain in his ribcage and right hand isn’t gone, but it’s quieter now, more bearable. Somewhere in the background, he hears music crackling through the soft cloth of a radio grille. He recognizes it as the first phrases of the Vinteuil Sonata as performed by Joyce Hatto. Sol-si, sol-si, sol-si…

He blinks and turns his head a little. A despondent figure is bent low over him, its pale hands clasped over its heart.

He’s never been entirely clear on Steinberg’s relationship with religion, but this, he feels painfully certain, is a prayer.

“Steinberg,” he calls quietly. His voice sounds uneven and discordant, like a new owner’s first attempt to play an untuned instrument.

Steinberg’s head snaps up. “Rhoden,” he echoes, his own voice rough with disuse.

He looks dreadful - unshaven, dishevelled, bruised, his plaid shirt covered in burn-like brown blossoms of poorly-cleaned blood. His left hand is bandaged, and the fact that there’s an empty space where the fifth digit is supposed to be makes Rhoden queasy.

“What did you do,” Rhoden says, not quite questioning. “Why did you-”

Something like a ripple passes over Steinberg’s expression. “No,” he interrupts forcefully, and for a moment he seems to be on the verge of fury. “Why did you ?”

Rhoden rolls his head to the side. His vision is beginning to blur with effort - he should possibly put the bandages back on or close his eyes for the time being. But he doesn’t want to just yet. He didn’t think he’d ever see the kid again when he took Lilia’s skull in his hands.

“I saw no other way,” he replies, slowly. “I had the means to do it, and every second Lilia’s memories remained at the dig site meant that much more danger to Parlevo. That much more danger to you and Fira. It was a calculation I had to make.”

He does shut his eyes, finally - partly because he’s tearing up so much from the light that he can hardly see anything anymore, and partly out of cowardice. He’s not sure he could quite stand the sight of Steinberg’s reaction to his words.

Back in Reval, he said he was not intending to abandon them. He thinks now that he’s always known that to be a lie. That he didn’t want to, that he didn’t choose to is a feeble justification.

“I can feel her memories among mine.” He is silent for a while. The radio is not well-tuned and the gentle crescendo of the sonata mixes with bursts of static. “It’s as if a part of me has been given to someone else. I remember things I shouldn’t, and think thoughts I know aren’t my own.”

“Yes,” Steinberg says. “Me too. I feel her… her love for Maria Artzishevsky. For her father.”

Something in his tone makes Rhoden look again. He can barely think straight for the haze of the morphine, but the intensity of the grief in Steinberg’s features sinks into him like a knife.

“When you said we have a duty to resist,” Rhoden rasps, “I resented that. I was tired and afraid. But you were right, Sasha. I hated to cause you pain, but I thought - thought you might be proud of me, too. For that.”

“Proud!” Steinberg exclaims, and his voice breaks. It all finally seems too much for him. "Rhoden," he murmurs, feverishly. "I don't know what I would've done to myself if you had died like this. The thought of you losing your life at their hands-"

Rhoden grasps the implication of these words well enough, and a chill runs through his limbs. “You can’t possibly mean that,” he says, horrified. “The publication of the Parlevo report was an inherent risk, and you stood up for us then. Stood up for me. You said our integrity was important to you.”

There’s an unsteady flicker of pale fire in Steinberg’s eyes. “I also said that you were not expendable, and did you listen?”

He didn’t. The truth is, he’s been making an effort not to listen - to Rubinstein, to Esther, to Nella, and, of course, to Steinberg himself. It was easier to ignore what he and the Steinbergs were becoming to each other than to confront the question of what would happen to them after .

“I’m sorry,” he says, uselessly. “I’m sorry.”

He isn’t certain he could’ve done anything differently. No, he’s certain he couldn’t have done anything differently.

He desperately wishes he had.

“You’re the closest I have to a family.” Steinberg presses an awkward kiss to his singed, bloodstained palm. Then he leans his forehead against the back of Rhoden’s flesh hand. Rhoden can feel the warm inflamed edges of the knife wound where Steinberg’s holding his wrist, and the heat of the tears falling onto his skin. “I thought I could live with this if the cause were sufficiently important. But Lilia stood in that field and wanted to die when she looked at their lifeless bodies. And if I couldn’t save you, I wanted to die with her.”

In his analgesic-addled state, Rhoden doesn’t trust himself to come up with an intelligent response - or to speak without completely losing his composure even if he did know what to say. He wordlessly runs his thumb over Steinberg’s curls, hoping that this clumsy gesture of affection will speak for him.

“You’ve done good, Sashen’ka,” he says finally. “The idea that living bone would work as a tool of dissipating the memories - that was clever of you.”

I love you, he means. I love you, I love you.

Steinberg looks at him, the expression on his tear-stained freckled face somewhere between a smile and a grimace of pain. Finally, he blinks; the corners of his mouth hitch up a little; it is as if the fact of Rhoden’s survival is starting to properly sink in for the first time since they’ve left the graveyard.

“Your prosthetic needs to be cleaned,” he remarks, clearing his throat. “I could do it if you like.”

As far as Rhoden can tell, it’s his right ring and middle fingers that are fractured, both somewhere at the level of the middle phalanx. Devilish inconvenient, that - and Steinberg, who’s observed him clean and oil his artificial hand many times, has had the kindness to think of how difficult it would be for Rhoden to scrape all the blood and dirt out of his metal joints with an added handicap like this.

He has to admit, however, that he’s a trifle wary of trusting his hand to someone else. Even if that someone else is Steinberg. Even now.

“You don’t have to agree,” Steinberg says hurriedly, correctly interpreting Rhoden’s hesitation. “I just thought it might be better not to leave it the way it is. You can tell me how-”

That, too, is a consideration. The alloy is not prone to rusting, but leaving it crusted over with blood cannot be honestly described as taking good care of it.

“I suppose it’s not that complicated,” he relents. “Much like cleaning any other bone, really. And I know you’re good at that, poiss.”

Rhoden offers Steinberg a half-smile, and is unreasonably gratified to see his eyes light up in response.

It’s an odd sensation - someone else gently, methodically scrubbing his carpals with a soft brush. When he looks down at Steinberg’s hands holding the prosthetic, he can see that the blue grease is working up into the familiar pale cyan lather. There are scarlet and black blots on it from the blood - not all yours, his mind reminds him traitorously, giving him a momentary jolt of nausea - and the graveyard soil.

“Is that all right?” Steinberg asks anxiously, stopping for a moment.

“Fine,” Rhoden reaffirms. “Tickles a little, is all. Thank you.”

Thank you for saving me. Thank you for thinking I’m worth it.

In the background, the lilting cascade of the Vinteuil Sonata slowly rolls to a stop. There are a few breaths of silence from the radio; and finally, as if after a hesitant pause, it starts up again. Sol-si, sol-si, sol-si…

Rhoden will wonder about that, later, when it finishes once more and begins playing anew for a third time. For now, he is content to lie there and listen to it as Steinberg brushes the dirt off his phalanges and wipes his tendons clean.

***

“Well,” he says, brightly, “it’s one of the two - either someone has died or there’s been a revolt.”

Joyce Hatto’s tireless electric fingers are playing the Vinteuil Sonata for the fifteenth time this morning. They haven’t turned it off, even though Rhoden, for one, is starting to feel himself go slightly crazy from the repetition.

“A rouble on death,” Nella responds immediately.

“Two on revolt,” Asya chimes in.

“Three on both one after the other,” says Steinberg, entering the room. He nudges the door open with his elbow; in his hands is a steaming bowl of soup that smells pleasantly starchy and sour.

“You’re an optimist, Alexander Osipovich,” Nella says wryly. “Do you even have three roubles?”

Steinberg shrugs in response. “Wouldn’t be alive if I weren’t. And you wound me, Dr Vinogradova - I have three roubles and twenty kopeks, even.”

Their banter, Rhoden thinks, is a way to shield themselves. They’re all exhausted from dealing with the dig - they simply haven’t the resources to handle any more.

But, too, there’s an edge of hysterical elation to this nonchalant betting on world-shattering events. For whatever it is - a death or a revolt - it is good news. For the remnants of the Parlevo group, it is the first good news they’ve had in years.

The Vinteuil Sonata starts up again. It’s a pleasant piece, subtle and heartrending. It also makes one think of red carnations and cold halls with high ceilings.

It’s the same on every other frequency - not that the United Venäjä normally has a particularly diverse array of radio stations. But here, close to the border, some of the programming must be coming from Yoldia, and that makes Rhoden’s heart beat a little faster. A revolt.

It didn’t end well last time they tried to resist. He can’t let himself think about that.

“I made you green borscht,” Steinberg tells him, holding the bowl out with a smile.

Rhoden gingerly takes it with both hands - left, still jerky and imprecise, although now squeaky clean; and right, with two fingers immobilised with splints. Between them he sort of has one functional upper limb.

Eating has been an exercise in pain over the past few days. Holding things is difficult and swallowing hurts his ribs and, bizarrely, his collarbone. Rhoden still tries his best, mostly because Sasha’s face grows tight with worry every time he refuses food.

Soup is probably the most painless option available, as it doesn’t require much chewing and can be sipped straight out of the bowl. He sees that Steinberg has also had the kindness to cut everything into little pieces. Since the disappearance of Rhoden’s parents and Erika’s death during the occupation of Narov, only Rubinstein has ever tried to take such care of him.

“Thank you,” he says hoarsely, in Estlish. Family. That’s what he called me.

“I helped Sasha gather the sorrel leaves,” Esther pipes up proudly. She’s standing on the doorstep, barefoot, Morkovcha held snugly under her left arm. The chicken doesn’t seem to mind; its feet are relaxed, and it surveys its surroundings with a measure of quiet curiosity.

Esther makes her way over to Rhoden and jumps on his bed, Morkovcha coming perilously close to being dunked in his bowl.

“No chicken in the soup, please,” he says, in warning tones, and for a moment has the diabolical urge to add at least not living chicken. Both Asya and Esther would probably kill him for suggesting this even in jest, though.

“She made you an egg,” Esther says. “So she’s contributed.”

“Thank you for the sorrel, Estherke.” Rhoden offers her a lopsided smile, sets the bowl down, and reaches for Morkovcha’s head with his right index finger. “And you’re a good girl, too.”

Morkovcha lets him pet her throat, soft brown feathers yielding under his clumsy fingers,

The Vinteuil Sonata starts again. Nella opens her cigar-box, takes a cigar out, and starts cutting it with a small red penknife.

“I hope he’s had a stroke,” she says, pensively.

They find out soon enough. As if someone on the other end also tires of waiting, the music is interrupted by the familiar low, rumbling voice every citizen of the United Venäjä can recognize in their sleep.

There’s a peculiar ringing in Rhoden’s ears. He’s not entirely certain whether this is an emotional reaction or if coming into contact with Lilia’s memories has disrupted something in his otic capsules, but the one phrase he makes out against the sudden high-pitched buzz is “Cheyne-Stokes respiration”.

He rummages through his outdated, hazy knowledge of soft tissue medicine. Cheyne… Cheyne-Stokes…

“He’s dead,” Nella says, her voice discordantly loud.

“Or if he’s not, he will be in a few hours,” Asya concedes quietly.

Rhoden doesn’t know what he’s feeling.

Happiness. Excitement.

Disappointment.

A selfish, unwelcome feeling squirms in his gut that whispers, not for you. Not for you.

The Gensec’s death is balm upon the soul of every Venlish dissident, but what good is it to Yoldia? His land still lies burned, his language censored, the graves of his dead unmarked.

“The Cockroach is gone,” Steinberg’s voice rings. Rhoden smiles at him a little numbly and raises a glass of cold tea. But Steinberg understands him better than Rhoden gives him credit for. He comes over to sit on the covers next to Rhoden, the expression of giddy excitement on his face slowly changing into a kind of contemplative concern.

It’s not that he’s unhappy, truly. The last few days have given him more than he could’ve ever wanted. Against all odds, he is alive. More importantly, so are the Steinbergs, and they’re staying with him not out of necessity but of their own free will.

But he hasn’t had much cause for hope in a long time. He allowed himself to think that perhaps-

Never mind that. Structures like the United Venäjä don’t come crashing down in a single day. Chances are, it will not be within his lifetime.

“Now might be a good time to get out of here,” he says, reflexively reaching into his trouser pocket for his pipe. But Nella and Steinberg must’ve taken it away to avoid hurting his hip when they laid him down on the bed after the graveyard.

Perhaps it is time he quit, anyway. After all that’s happened, it would be a shame to kill himself with lung cancer.

“Can you even make your way to the station without collapsing?” Nella asks, sceptically.

Rhoden feigns offence. “We’ll see which one of us gets there quicker, Nella Nikolaevna,” he says, with completely unjustified confidence. He is, in truth, rather weak and probably anaemic due to blood loss. But he reckons that with a helping hand from Sasha, he can manage.

And even though he knows nothing’s changed, he still desperately wants to go home. To see.

There’s the practical aspect of it, too. Whatever else might be on the Third Section’s mind right now, it won’t be arresting them. 

Nella understands his line of thinking without being told, just like they understood each other that evening two years ago after they first unearthed the Artzishevskys’ remains.

“All right, then,” she says, as she begins to gather the green aluminium mugs from the stovetop. 

“What did you do with the remains?” Rhoden asks, in low tones.

“Asya reburied them.” She chucks the mugs into her equally green rucksack, leans down to take a critical look at the bear skin she and Asya had slept on, and gives it a perfunctory dust off. “Out in the juniper grove by the hunting lodge, you know the place. They’re not going to look there.”

“Any further, uh, incidents at the site?”

“None.” She offers him her arm to lean on as he gets up. She’s wiry and strong, her brachioradialis a sure grip for his trembling fingers to cling onto. Steinberg hovers over him anxiously, although Rhoden is fairly sure Nella could hold up the weight of his body if need be. Not that this amounts to much, in his current condition.

His gamble has paid off, then. And there’s nothing else left to do here, in this little village that once dared to resist the Revolution.

They leave a five-rouble note for baba Valentina, anchored to the table with a large smooth egg the colour of onion peels. No moonshine, though. It seems injudicious to leave large quantities of alcohol lying around when there's such an obvious cause for revelry.

The light outside blinds Rhoden momentarily. He has to blink and squint like a befuddled cat, his eyes watering at the cool white brilliance of the early May sun.

The air smells bitter and sweet with hagberry blossoms. That means the year will be cold, Rubinstein told him during his first spring in Venäjä. Rhoden didn’t question it, then. The Venlish had all sorts of odd superstitions - some of them much stranger and bleaker than the cold summers supposedly caused by the premature blossoming of P. padus.

Take this, for instance: “if you were born in May, you’re fated to suffer”. Or that business with overturned slices of cake leading to matrimonial failure.

The consequences of the Venlish ill omens are always dire - death, illness, pain, years of misfortune. Sometimes Rhoden thinks that it’s an attempt at justifying the unjustifiable. Better to believe that one’s life is ruled by accidents of birth and the whims of gravity than to know that the unrelenting misery is a product of conscious, watchful malice.

“We should buy you some red wine,” Steinberg says. He studies Rhoden’s features with some concern. No doubt the clear daylight makes his skin look even paler and his bruises even more colourful.

“I’m sure I can recover without the need for alcohol.” He leans on Steinberg’s shoulder and gives the grey woollen lapel of the kid’s coat a soothing pat with his bandaged hand.

“Well, we have to get your haemoglobin up somehow,” Steinberg persists, frowning.

Rhoden offers a half-shrug and instantly winces at how much it hurts his ribs. “Isn’t there anything else I can get around here? Perhaps the Tula gingerbread is secretly rich in iron?”

The only thing the Tula gingerbread is rich in is five different kinds of sugar, but the quip serves its purpose - Sasha’s mouth curves in a smile. Esther, who’s clinging to the thumb of Rhoden’s prosthetic, lets out a little snort.

“I think maybe I do love you, Arno,” she says quietly. “A little bit.”

It would be an awkward and underwhelming confession to anyone else, but it means everything to him. He’s just about to start getting properly emotional about it when, out of the corner of his eye, he notices a flash of familiar light blue.

They have reached the station without him noticing. And there, on the wooden platform between the loudspeaker-crowned pillars, stand two officers of the Third Section. One of them looks straight at Rhoden, her hazel eyes squinting a trifle.

Rhoden's whole body grows tense. He gently disentangles his left hand from Esther's and can't quite stop himself from reaching for the weapon he knows isn't there.

The station radio is playing the state anthem. It sounds distorted and mournful through the loudspeakers, the low notes merging with the rumble of the departing trains.

When Ostrogarsky asked him if the Steinbergs were his, Rhoden's first reaction was to say "no". He tried to lie, after, to protect them as best he could. But now thinking of them in these terms doesn't feel like lying; it is nothing but viscerally right. His Fira. His Sasha. He has killed for them once and he will do it again if he has to.

Judging from the tightening of Steinberg’s grip on his elbow, he, too, is thinking similar thoughts. Rhoden throws him a brief glance; Steinberg’s mouth is set into a furious thin line, a fiery glint in his eye. It reminds Rhoden of the glint of the hunting blade in Steinberg’s hands back at the Parlevo graveyard.

But as they approach the creaky wooden steps leading up to the platform, the bluecoat swiftly averts her gaze.

"Better to leave them alone," he catches a murmured explanation to her companion. "Who knows what the new orders might be?.."

This new world, the world where it is not he who has to worry about being detained by the Third Section but the Third Section who has to be wary of detaining him, hardly seems real to Rhoden. He wanders along the platform, somewhat dazed, and looks down at the golden hawkweed blossoming between the train tracks.

“Triumph’s thunder louder, higher,” the choir sings above them. “Venlish pride is running high; Venlish glory sparkles brighter-”

He knows the words. He’s never learned this song and never sang it of his own free will, but he knows them. They’ve wormed their way into his bones, became a part of him like a hateful scar that is always there to remind one of a wound one would rather forget.

They speak of conquest, of divine destiny, of military might. They’re not shy about who the anthem is for - and who it is against.

And now, suddenly, they stutter to a halt.

“Venlish glory sparkles brighter,” the loudspeakers attempt again, but the sound crackles and fades, drowned out by static.

The bluecoats are looking up in alarm. No wonder - the state anthem has been interrupted mid-stanza. The woman who was looking at him earlier leaves her partner on the platform and disappears into the depths of the station building.

And then the music resumes playing - but it is no longer the anthem of Venäjä. Rather than a choir, it is carried by a lone woman’s voice. Familiar. She sounds a little rough and breathless but very clear, like she’s leaning down to the microphone to ensure that she is heard.

These words he knows by heart, too. But unlike with the Venlish anthem, it is because he wants to know them; in fact, he worked not to forget. The song is Yoldia meri on mu arm, and the voice is Salme Rüütli’s.

His heart skips a beat so violently that for a moment he’s worried it’ll stop and he’ll never make it out of Parlevo after all.

“Rhoden,” Sasha calls him, in a changed voice. Rhoden isn’t sure whether he recognizes the singer, but he’ll have certainly recognized the song. Rhoden played it for him, back in Reval.

His bones are full of memories that have at times made him regret his survival. This moment, though, makes every osteon’s worth of pain feel worth it. Standing there next to Sasha and Fira, listening to Salme Rüütli sing - he hopes that this memory will imprint itself in his marrow in gentle clear colours. He hopes that it will remain there forever, and that a hundred years from now someone will find it and see the world through his eyes; if only for one hopeful, fleeting instant.