XXXVI

Vanya cried out. He opened his eyes. He was wet. The sun was dim. The eclipse? No, the sun must have been setting. Someone had thrown water on him. Every part of his body screamed with pain. He didn’t know what was broken and what was still intact. He was shivering from terror more than from cold. He was in a cellar, or a prison. No, a barn. It smelled like manure and rot. Animals. Dirty animals.

“Baba,” he moaned. If only she could help him now. If only Miri were there to fix him.

In the dark, he made out Stepan standing in front of him. Vanya tried to ask Stepan to hurry, to free him before his captors came back, but it came out sounding like a groan, and any relief he’d felt thinking Stepan was a friend evaporated into fear as Vanya realized he was splayed over a roughhewn table, stomach down, while a man leaned on his back to keep him in place. Vadim. Vanya felt his peg leg jutting into the back of his knee.

Stepan and Vadim were the men torturing him.

Stepan leaned down and took hold of Vanya’s hand. Blood already poured from his thumb into a puddle on the straw below him. His fingernail was gone. His vision was going dark again at the edges. He’d never felt his heart beat so fast, the air so thin.

“Swear not to send another eclipse,” Vadim said.

“I swear,” Vanya cried. Still death wasn’t coming fast enough.