Katrina paled, her face a mask, but the woodcutter bowed to the will of his Master and the prophetess.

Mother’s urgency breathed life into my metaphor, creating a shape—yes, a wolf, tearing at the windows, trying to get in. “I’ll go, too,” Bogdan volunteered. “Davai,” said Gleb, rising. Perhaps not wanting Pasha to get all the credit for bravery in Katrina’s eyes. The three piled into the kitchen, grabbed their skis and snowshoes, coats and hats, and returned through the hall to the front door to prepare for the bitter cold, wrapping their scarves around their faces, leaving mere slits for their eyes.

I snatched at Bogdan’s sleeve. “Please—don’t risk your life for a handful of pine needles. If you die, he’ll say it’s because you didn’t believe enough.”

He stroked my face, gently. “It will be fine. You have to trust.”

“Don’t say die,” Katrina snapped, trying to pull me back toward the workroom. “Can’t you see you’re just making it worse?” Her worried blue eyes followed Pasha out the door.

I yanked myself away from her grasp and stood in the cold vestibule after she returned to the others. They didn’t know how quickly death could come. Just in a minute. Tree limbs flew faster than horses out there. Your skin froze in moments.

Avdokia appeared at my elbow. “You can’t talk a fool out of a fire,” she said and slipped something into my pocket—a packet wrapped in paper. Meat. She must have stolen it from the pot right under Katrina’s nose. I choked it down, threw the paper into a corner so they wouldn’t find it on me. “Can you smell me?” I held out my hands to her.

“Don’t get too close,” she said.

In the workroom, my lunatic mother now sat in Ukashin’s chair, white as Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, Winter’s daughter. Maybe she really had seen a wolf, or a spirit, or a Dark Body from a far dimension only visible to her squid eyes, but you didn’t send precious humans out when these creatures were stalking.

Katrina and I wiped off a window and peered out at the tiny flicker of lantern light swinging off in the lee of the house. Then it was swallowed by the storm. All because of a woman who hadn’t been out of her room for months and talked to imaginary creatures in the dark. Ukashin sat by her side, knitting his brow like a priest at confession as she spoke into his ear. It was the first time I’d seen them together in the open, in the light. How reverently he was listening, his head bowed, nodding.

And then it struck me like a tree branch in the head. Taras Ukashin believed in my mother. This was no confidence game, not a clever use of her to appropriate her holdings or to lay further claim to the mystical Beyond. It was worse. He truly believed she was receiving insights from other worlds. I’d always assumed that he was controlling her—but what if it was the opposite? What if it was Vera Borisovna setting our course, not Taras Ukashin? Bozhe moi.

Mother continued speaking urgently to her—what? Lover? Communicant?—while her devotees ranged around the table, nervously resuming their tasks. I noticed that Magda could not take her eyes off Ukashin, the way he practically knelt at Mother’s feet, holding her hand. Jealousy burned in her like an empty pan on a hot stove. Ilya swallowed, his big Adam’s apple rising and falling. I saw that he was ashamed to be inside and safe when the other boys risked their lives on this fool’s errand.

Five minutes passed. Forty below, with a wind like frozen nails. My mother’s glance slid briefly over the rest of us without interest, as if we were dolls in a shop window. Something struck the house, and we jumped. She jumped as well. Good, she was not so insensible as all that.

“There are no wolves, you know,” I said. “It’s too cold. They’re asleep in their dens under the snow.” The minnows of her attention hovered over my face, their tickling mouths in my eyes, in my ears.

“So much red,” she pronounced. Evidently even inflowing had done nothing for my aura.

“Recent events have disturbed her energy, Mother,” Ukashin defended me. “But she is one with us.”

“She’s one with no one,” my mother said. “She’ll never be one with anyone. It is her fate.”

As if balling me into a lump like a greasy piece of paper and throwing me into a corner. So much for me. My lungs froze in my chest. I tried to think of people I had been one with—Genya, Kolya. The Poverty Artel. But a deeper truth uncoiled, like a fiddlehead fern. Around me, glances of pity. A ripple of unease traveled around the room—except for Magda. A pleased smile flickered around her lips.

“There’s no such thing as Fate,” I said. But what the high priestess said was oracle, and I had the horrible suspicion that she could be right. What if it was true? Damn her—why did she have to come downstairs when she’d been so happy in that creepy room with her weird icons and little polished stones?

Ukashin leaned toward her. “She’s with us for now, Mother,” he said. “In this time stream. And who can say more about anyone?”

I should have felt gratitude. Yet I still felt the teeth of the storm in my mouth, my horrible red aura, and wanted to hurt her for handing me such a fate like a slap. I wanted to wipe that otherworldly vagueness from her face. “Did your spirit guides tell you Andrei Petrovin shot himself?” I called down the table. “Your friend Andrei?” The attention swam back to me, regarding my outline as if it wavered in water. “That’s right—Andrei Petrovin. Notice you haven’t seen him around much? He’s lying in the icehouse, rolled up like a carpet.”

She turned away from me as she used to when I’d said something awkward to one of her guests, simply erased me from her attention. That was her answer. Her friend’s death meant nothing. Ukashin had been more perturbed.

“What else didn’t they tell you?” I shouted down the table. “Did you know I was pregnant? I’m going to have a child, Mama. This summer. Your grandchild.”

The devotees shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed that their priestess was being dragged into a matter so unseemly and personal when they’d given up every family connection, even their names. I could see that Magda wanted to get her hands around my throat. Ukashin stared at me. I could almost hear him—I can’t save you forever.

“Your grandchild, Mama. It’s Kolya Shurov’s.”

Now her vision cleared, and she saw me. Oh, yes. She remembered me now. Your daughter. She regarded me with something resembling fear.

“Yes, Kolya. We’ve been lovers since I was sixteen. Did you see that in your multidimensional universe?”

But then her vision clouded over, and she was scanning me, as she had in the room upstairs, as if she were reading a wall poster, a playbill for a drama at the People’s House. What was I, a little Ibsen? Or maybe Wilde?

“It won’t live,” she said.

The sound echoed like a gunshot in a long hall. When it faded, the only sound in the room was the roaring of the wind.

Doors slammed, and in a gust of frigid air, the trio of boys thundered into the hall. In walked Pasha, frosted white, hat, scarf, coat, boots, gloves, his arms piled high with fragrant fir, followed by Gleb and Bogdan equally laden. The relief was palpable. All uncertainty vanished, and the disciples beamed with the proof: their prophetess was wise, Ukashin was still in control, I was an alarmist and disrupter. You see? said the Master’s sideways glance. We know what we’re doing here. The others grabbed up the boughs and began rubbing the sills and doorways.


I lay on my pallet that night among the others, no longer marveling at our initiation into the mysteries of inflowing. Even hiding within the earth did me no good. I only heard my mother’s voice. I thought of her face, her calm. I wanted to slap her even now. Was she punishing me for insisting that there was no wolf and that she was no seer, only a madwoman? Or was she so crazy that she didn’t understand how terrible was her curse?

But what if it was true?

No. That I would not believe. I might never be one with anyone—fine—but I would not let her kill my baby. I rejected her spell, I spat on it, I walked on it, I pissed on it. I would not believe. To think of how I’d cared for her. She was the reason I’d broken with Genya, the reason I’d gone to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. She had not defended me against my father that October night. I turned over and over, settling the sheepskin back on top of the quilt. As long as I could have my baby, I would endure the rest.

I had not realized how passionately I wanted this child until my mother tried to take it away from me.

81 The Hunter

THE STORM DID NOT abate. If anything, it worsened. Ukashin moved us into the heart of the house, the back parlor, closing off all the other rooms to conserve heat and firewood. We squashed into the workroom like kittens in a sack. After what my mother had said to me, it was agony to have to see her every day. I thought I would go mad. Everyone breathing each other’s breath and that sticky incense, the stove pushing smoke into the room as it would in a black izba. If it wasn’t for inflowing, I would have had to stop breathing altogether. Only under the earth was it still possible to inhale. Meditation was the only escape from the oppressive togetherness. I supposed my mother’s curse of eternal loneliness had not yet taken effect.

I sometimes ventured up the frost-coated stairs to the water closet just to be free of them all. The chamber pots we’d put there had frozen fast—we couldn’t have them in the room with us. They didn’t stink, though you had to wear your coat and hat and boots to visit the convenience. You might as well be outside. White rime built up on the bare risers of the stairs, showing our footprints. Outside, snow buried the first-floor windows, cutting us off from the world, mirroring what was going on inside our minds. Only in the window on the stairway landing could you see what was going on in the yard. Sometimes I stood there for hours, it seemed, in a trance, watching the trees lashing about like souls in some white hell.

Now that Mother had joined us, Ukashin more and more often turned his back on the others to focus entirely on his prophetess. He stopped leading the inflowing meditation, leaving it in the hands of Magda and Natalya. Instead he spent hours in communication with his priestess, meditating with her, or else painting or lying in his hammock, which he’d slung in the corner by the fire next to Mother’s chair. Through the buildup of snow, the storm’s roaring sounded more and more like the blood in my ears. The acolytes worked hard to regain their Master’s favor, as if the blizzard were somehow their fault, as if they could make things better by being perfect little disciples. Mother sat communing with the paintings they’d fetched from her lair and rearranging her little stones with the clicking sounds like waves turning pebbles on a beach. Her spirit guides watched us night and day.

Pasha was the first to collapse. He crumpled during a meditation session. Katrina, surfacing from her trance, jumped to her feet. “Pasha?” she called out, leaning over him but afraid to touch him. “Master? Pasha’s fainted!”

But the Master said nothing.

“He’s all right,” Magda said. “Let him be.”

It was frightening to see Pasha lying on the carpet. It reminded me of Andrei in the snow. Bogdan, our erstwhile doctor, knelt to tend to his fallen brother. Katrina hovered. She brought a cloth as white as her face and a jug of cold water. Wiping his face revived him, and he was terribly embarrassed. I myself was teetering on the tightrope between the need to inflow to keep hunger and terror at bay and my growing anger and anxiety about Ukashin’s detachment from the world he’d built, the one he’d stolen from Andrei Ionian.

Inflowing went on. The meals lightened to suit our more rarefied systems—thin oatmeal, cabbage, kasha, soup with floating bits of meat. The more resentful I became about the figure in the hooded cloak, the less the meat sickened me and the hungrier I became.

It struck me one day—the meat.

Fresh meat.

Not salted. Not smoked. Where did it come from?

Surely those two rabbits I’d caught the night Andrei died hadn’t lasted thirteen people this long, no matter how frugal we were. The vlivaniye was supposed to supply us with new ideas, but in fact I could see that the opposite was true. It kept us from thinking at all. As I fell out of step with the others and my dense body returned, I started to consider things more clearly. For one thing, I recalled the quiet departure of Bonya and Buyan. Ukashin never mentioned them, and no one asked, just as we’d never asked about Andrei’s sorrows. Those dogs hadn’t run off. We were consuming them, bit by bit.