When the chronometer read 12:16 p.m., the rain stopped in Brovary but the clouds were thick. Vanya stood in the middle of the front yard with his arms held up and out to the sky, begging for it to clear, but he didn’t have much hope. He couldn’t see a speck of blue and it terrified him. All he’d done. All he risked. He was being beaten by clouds. And he wasn’t the only one scared. The farmers and townspeople, he understood from Cook, were all terrified, too. Hiding from the eclipse and the evil it would bring.
“There’s still a chance,” Dima said, pacing with Vanya now. “Still time.”
“This weather can’t clear quickly.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
A folktale centered on an eclipse and its darkness ran through Vanya’s head. His favorite. The myth of Prince Vseslav. Many Russians knew it and recited it in different forms, but Vanya loved the original. He never met anyone else who did. The old language was clunky, hard to understand. He’d dug it out of a library and read it for Miri and Baba at the hearth in Birshtan so many times he’d memorized it. Miri loved it, like she loved all stories. Vseslav was a prince born during an eclipse with a caul over his head—the mark of evil. By day the prince grew to become a fearsome warrior who never lost in battle. By night he turned into a werewolf, torturing and killing without remorse. It was said he was reborn on the eve of every eclipse.
“Might it not become us, brothers, to begin in the diction of yore the stern tale of the campaign of Igor, Igor son of Svyatoslav. Let this song begin according to the true tales of our time.” Vanya called out the twelfth-century epic across the lawn in a voice as loud as he could muster. A bird, in the distance, took flight.
“Your eclipse will come. We’ll see it,” Dima said.
“How can you be so sure?” The chronometer read twelve twenty. They had eleven minutes left.