“Quiet, all of you!” said Alexei. He rapped on the wall, but it didn’t stop the chatter. “Listen—listen to me!” He was obviously struggling. Children were even harder to marshal, Feo thought, than wolves. She grinned and gave a tiny howl. Black picked it up immediately. The windows shook.
Everyone jumped several inches. Quiet dropped on the room.
“Thank you. So!” said Alexei. “What was I saying? Oh, yes—there are lots of things the guards have that we don’t. They’re trained. They have guns. But we’re fast, and light. We can climb up drainpipes; they can’t follow. Our feet make less noise. They’ll have forgotten things they once knew—they’ll have forgotten how to bite, and how to spit, and how to use their nails. And we’re not going to fight like gentlemen—you understand?”
Feo raised her eyebrows.
“Or like ladies,” he added. “When we get inside the jail, there are no rules. You can pull hair and kick them in the groin and bite earlobes, all right?”
“Can we tie them up?” said Sergei.
“Yes,” said Alexei. “Good. Yes!”
“Can we pull out their beards?”
“Yes. Although, actually, I think beards are quite well anchored. But you can try.”
“Can we kick people in the shins? I’ve always wanted to, but Mama says they break easily.”
Feo, from her windowsill, grinned. She knew what Sergei meant: Shins were so tempting.
“Yes!”
“Can we—”
“Yes! Everything, yes. Remember: The most vulnerable places are nose, groin, shins, and eyes.”
The children stared up at him. Every single face was blazing with pleasure.
“What weapons will we have?” asked Irena. She looked a lot like Alexei, Feo thought, though less right angled and less disconcertingly beautiful; perhaps she was another cousin.
“I’m not sure yet. We’re going to have to see what we can make. But for now,” he said, “we’re going to practice.”
By the time the afternoon sun had made its way into the ballroom and thawed some of the frost that lined the windows, Feo was exhausted. But it had been a shining kind of morning.
First, Alexei cut the sleeves off their shirts—“It frees your arms,” he said—and wound them into ropes.
Then he sent out expeditions to cut down branches from the oddly shaped bushes and trees—waiting until snow was falling at its heaviest, to mask their prints.
They sharpened flint from the gravel path into knives, and bound them to the tips of sticks for spears, wrapped securely with scraps from their shirts.
Alexei lined them up—from the smallest five-year-old to Yana, soft skinned and bold and brave, at the far end—and taught them to parry, to stick and twist.
“Jab,” he said. “No, grip with your thumb, Sergei. Good, Zoya!”
Feo and Ilya, who Alexei had exempted from training—“Soldier and wilder,” he said, “I’ve seen you with a knife, Feo”—sat by the fireplace and made more weapons.
Feo warmed some yew she found over the fire until it was supple again. “Look!” She tugged some string from the curtains. “A bow. Do you know how to make arrows?”
“I think they taught us in the camp,” said Ilya, “but I wasn’t listening. That was the day I worked out how to handspring.”
Every twenty minutes or so Alexei used Feo and Ilya as targets for flint-throwing, and they would be forced to duck and jump, or retaliate with whatever they had around them. Trying to ignore him didn’t work.
Alexei hustled the children into doing push-ups, helping the littlest ones, nudging the older ones with his toe. He ran up and down the ranks, panting and shouting orders. “Quiet, Sergei! You can talk later. For now you can nod, but only when I say so.”
“Being around him is like being around an alarm clock. One that doesn’t turn off,” said Ilya. There was admiration in his voice. Alexei, Feo thought, went from zero to fiery in thirty seconds. He seemed to have no middle range: only hurry, anger, bossiness, laughter, and sleep.
“It’s not that he’s not good,” Feo said to Black, as dusk fell. “He is good. It’s that there’s so much of him.”
Feo, used to days of silence with her wolves, of whispers and fur and snowfall, found the roomful of children took some getting used to. The little ones came clamoring to her after their training sessions, pretending to be wolves and biting her knees, tying and untying her shoelaces, stroking the pup as he lay in her arms, begging to plait her hair. But when Alexei called, they returned without needing a second call.
“It would be easier to dislike him,” said Ilya, “if he weren’t so beautiful.”
“He’s like weather,” said Feo. “You can’t dislike weather.”
But it was Feo, not Alexei, who taught Yana and Irena and Ilya to fist fight. Nobody, she explained, can grow up with wolves without learning to understand and measure pain.
“Fighting is as much about knowing when you’re hurt as knowing how to hurt,” said Feo. “There are certain kinds of pain you can safely ignore, and some you can’t.” They wrapped their hands in cloth and learned to punch. “Don’t tuck your thumb into your fist or it’ll break. Twist your fist as you make contact. Make your knuckles sharp.”
That evening, Vasilisa and Zoya came running from their visit to the outhouse, full of news.
“There’s a greenhouse! It’s only got nettles, but they’re alive!”
Feo allowed herself to be led by both hands out to the greenhouse. The glass was smoke stained, but there were indeed whole beds of nettles, nettles sprawling in pots and climbing to the ceiling, growing where flowers once had been. Feo whooped. “Here—don’t get stung. Wrap your hands in your cloaks. Can you carry some of these pots inside? Wonderful!”
The girls seemed tiny, but they piled the pots in their arms. Feo grinned down at them. They had the same eyes, she thought, as the pup: young and clever. “Thank you!”
The rest of the plants Feo pulled up by the roots. Keeping her hand safely inside her cloak, she scrunched the leaves into a ball and welded them together with a little snow.
“If you got that in the face,” she said, “you wouldn’t be able to see for at least a few minutes—maybe a few days.”
Vasilisa and Zoya gave thin, piping cheers from behind their pots of nettles.
“You two are far, far tougher than you look,” said Feo.
The girls turned pink.
“People usually are, I suppose,” she went on. “If you need them to be. Come on. Alexei smuggled some potatoes out from your village, and we’re roasting them with bacon.”
They were just settling the little ones down for the night when Feo first felt the jolt of something wrong.
“Listen,” she said. Ilya, settling a blanket over Clara, stopped midtuck. But there was only the snuffling of the children’s breath.
Then she heard it again: the crunching of snow.
Footsteps.
“They’ve found us,” she whispered.
“What is it?” asked Clara, half awake.
Feo held her finger to her lips.
“What’s going on?” asked Alexei. He had been standing in the window seat, the better to keep watch. “Are they coming?” He tore a strip off the curtain and wrapped it round his fist.
“Can you hear that?” asked Ilya.
More footsteps, the shaking of the iron gate at the end of the drive. “That’s a person,” said Feo, looking out the window. “I can’t see anything, though. It’s too dark.”
“Rakov?” said Alexei.
“I don’t know.”
“You should leave, Feo,” said Ilya. “Take the wolves now and go.”
“Yes! We can hold them off,” said Sergei.
“You’ve never fought anyone before,” said Bogdan.
“That’s why I should start now, while I’m still young,” said Sergei.
It took an immense effort not to hug him.
They took branches from the study fire for light and marched down the marbl
e stairs, Feo first, Yana bringing up the rear with Clara on her hip.
Feo looked at the pile of glass from her break-in. “We can make snowballs with glass in them. Who wants to do that?”
Unsurprisingly, Sergei wanted to.
“And, Bogdan, you’ve got good aim. Will you?”
Bogdan blushed and sniffed and nodded, all in one fluid motion. “All right.”
“And there are nettles in the hall. Put them in the snowballs too. Make a big pile of them, if you can. We’ll need lots. Yana, will you stand guard over them? And here—Vasilisa, Zoya—here’s my knife. If anyone comes through the window, I’m giving you permission to stab their ankles.”
“I’m scared,” whispered Vasilisa.
“I know, lapushka. Me too.” Feo crouched and stared them in the eyes, speaking double speed. “And I don’t know where courage comes from. But I do know that if you can scrape together just a bit, more of it comes without your trying. All right? So you don’t need a great lump of bravery: only a tiny breath of it. Can you do that?” They nodded, eyes solemn, hand in hand. “Wonderful!
“I’ll be right back!” She ran upstairs: Her bow lay by the fireplace. She snatched it up, slid down the banister back to the hall, and skimmed over the marble floor to the kitchen. Ilya followed, rolling up his sleeves. The kitchen felt arctic, and icicles hung from the ceiling.
“Look!” She pulled off one of the icicles, latched it onto the bow like an arrow. “See?” She pulled them down in handfuls: Some were blunt at the end, some as sharp as pins. She handed the bow to Ilya. “You take this.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got the wolves. Alexei,” she called, “I think everyone should be in the hall.”
Alexei’s voice rang out. “Everyone on the staircase! Bring a torch!”
The children grouped on the staircase, their hands full of snowballs and burning torches. Feo looked up at them—a band of beautiful would-be criminals—and her nose prickled with love.
And somebody knocked on the front door.
Feo swallowed. She hadn’t expected knocking. Ilya pulled back his icicle arrow.
The door swung open.
Ilya sent an icicle shattering against the wall. The laughter that came from the man in the doorway did not sound very military. And the body was tall, lean and strong, gray-haired, and dressed in rich blue satin.
The children let out a battle yell.
Ilya gasped. “Don’t attack!” he cried. “Cease fire!”
“This,” said the stranger, raising two heavily ringed hands above his head, “was not what I expected. I was looking for a boy. I seem to have found an army.”
He stared up at the children on the staircase, cast into flickering bronze by the fire in their hands; at the wolves, still clad in gold. “Is this some kind of theater?”
“No,” said Ilya. “It’s . . . a mistake, I think.”
A change came over the man, the change that you see at sunrise. He laughed at Ilya, still standing with an icicle fitted into his bow. “Not a mistake at all!” he said. “It was you I came to find.”
It took a while to persuade Sergei to stop trying to tuck nettles in the man’s socks, and to send the others to bed. The night was well advanced by the time they sat down on the floor of the small parlor room, with its charred pink paper and smiling cherubs on the ceiling, and the burnt piano. Feo had boiled water on the fire and made mugs of sweet nettle tea, which the man held at arm’s length, as if it might be contagious. Feo and Ilya sat cross-legged and waiting; the man looked awkward, as if he was more used to armchairs. Black sat in the doorway, a just-in-case glare in his eyes.
“As you may know—as you should know—young man, my name is Darikev.”
“Darikev?” Ilya looked from Feo to the man and back again. “Igor Darikev?”
“Who’s that?” said Feo.
“That’s me,” said Darikev. “This seems a rather circular conversation. Young man—when we last met I was chasing you.”
“Um. Yes. Sorry about that.”
“I was not, as you seemed to think, pursuing with intent to eat you, nor to arrest you.”
“So why are you here?” said Feo.
“I came to offer this young man a place at my ballet school. Presumably you did not think I came for vodka or coffee? Given you seem to be living on snow and plants here.”
His voice, and the smartness of his clothes, had made Feo suddenly shy again, but she managed a whisper. “Is Ilya—is he very good?”
“No,” said Darikev. “He’s not.”
Ilya’s face went suddenly white, and he stared hard at the floor. “But you said—”
“He’s not good yet. But his elevation—”
Feo shook her head. “I don’t know that word.”
Darikev raised his hand above his head. “The boy has height when he jumps, greater than anyone I have in my company. He has a body built for flying!”
Ilya’s white cheeks immediately turned purple. Feo nudged him, and resisted the urge to bite his shoulder with the glee of it.
“So, he’ll be famous!”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Darikev heaved himself to his feet. “It’s hard work, young man. I offer you a place only if you understand that. Some grow rich, many do not. Dancers—they are not always respected. They often find it hard to marry.”
Ilya fiddled with his lip. “That’s not a problem, for me,” he said. “I’ve always known I wouldn’t marry.”
Darikev nodded. “And your feet will bleed. Your body will ache, every day. And on the few days that your body doesn’t ache, your brain will—understand that! Nobody joins without learning our history, the stories behind our dances, reading, recitation.” He waved one jeweled hand into the other. “Hard work always hurts somewhere.”
Feo grinned. It sounded so familiar: so much like living with wolves. Ilya grinned back at her.
“But,” said Darikev, “it’s a living. You will dance for millions of people in your lifetime. If you’re good enough, they will never forget you. You will become fluent in a new language. Thousands of children will see your feet talking a kind of language they will long to know. You will unearth other people’s dreams for them. Do you hear that, boy—and you, girl? People come away from the ballet knowing more than they knew before. You become strong.”
“As strong as Feo?” said Ilya.
“I imagine so. Who is Feo?”
“I am,” Feo said softly.
“Ah! The young woman with wolves. I’ve heard rumors about you. Yes, I imagine so. So—what’s your answer, boy? Come back with me? There’s a horse waiting outside the gates, and a driver.”
Ilya’s hand reached out and searched for Feo’s: Feo grabbed his tight. He said, “I first saw a ballet when I was six—you said that was when you first wilded a wolf. It wasn’t very smart—there were gravy stains on some of the tutus. They wore gloves, and some of them were quite slow. But everything there made sense to me. Like with you and the wolves, and the snow.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” she said. Her smile was so huge that she felt it might split her lips at the sides.
Ilya turned to Darikev. “No. I can’t,” he said. “Not now.”
“You need to inform your parents? We can do that. There is a secretary who looks after the students’ affairs. We are a business, my boy.”
“No—not my father. He wouldn’t care. But—I’ve got to do some things here.”
Darikev raised the edge of a perfectly pointed eyebrow. “I have no time for those who are not fully committed, boy. Come now or not at all.”
“Truly, it’s not that I don’t want to—I can’t.”
Feo towed him across the room to the window. “Ilya, what are you doing? You have to go. There are enough of us without you.”
“Don’t you want me? To help? I thought we were . . . friends?”
“Of course I want you!” Feo tried to think of words to explain. None of them fit the special circumstance
s: of a boy who could dance like a war song and who was scared of the cold and who had followed her for miles without once complaining. “You’re in the pack. Me, and Black, and White. And the pup. And you. Gray let you ride her. That makes you one of us.”
“Yes,” said Ilya. “Well, then. I’m staying, aren’t I?”
“But that man’s offering you so much. He’s offering you years. He’s offering you a whole life.”
“No. If it’s one or the other, I choose you and the wolves.”
“Do you think Darikev would let you stay a bit longer if I bit him?” she asked. “Or if the wolves did? They would, I think, if we showed them how. Probably. They’d want to help you.”
From just behind her came a roar of laughter. Darikev had stepped soundlessly across the room and stood inches away from them. “No need!” he said.
Feo colored. “It was just a suggestion.”
“I’m a superstitious old man,” he said. “I choose not to interfere in the business of wolves. If those animals have some need of you, young man, it will be best to go. I can give you three days. Ask at the front door for Igor, and they’ll organize everything. You will need a haircut. And I would be grateful if you left the wolves behind. I can show myself out, thank you—as long as there are no nettle-wielding children awaiting me.”
Feo slept very little that night. It was barely dawn when she woke the children.
“Wasshappening?” said Sergei. “What happened to the man you wouldn’t let us kill?”
“Ilya’s . . . dealt with him. Come. Let’s go,” said Feo. “Let’s go and find Rakov.”
FIFTEEN
The children who came tearing up to the stone gates of Saint Petersburg on Thursday had faces filled with fear. Their panic was impressive, and had been practiced diligently the night before.
“Wolf! Wolf!” they cried.
“What?” The guards looked around. “Where?”
“There! Behind us!” An attractive young woman of about seventeen, with a tiny girl on her hip, gripped his wrist. “In the trees! Look! Let us in, dear God!”
The soldiers pushed open the gates, and the children streamed through, a dozen of them, led by a girl with men’s boots and a red-hooded cloak. A boy with a missing front tooth shouted something—it might have been, “We’re in!”—and quickly had a hand clapped over his mouth, but the guards’ attention was on their guns, and on firing at the animals who suddenly veered, as if at a signal or a whistle, and disappeared back into the snow.
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