His kite’s string had wrapped itself around the thin spire atop an onion dome. The kite fluttered in the breeze like a white flag.
Something moved, down on the ground, to his right.
Mikhail gasped, took a backward step, and hit the wall.
A girl in a tawny robe stood about thirty feet away, on the far side of the fountain.
She was older than Alizia had been, probably fifteen or sixteen. Her long blond hair hung over her shoulders, and she stared at Mikhail with ice-blue eyes for a few seconds; then, without speaking, she glided to the fountain’s rim, bent down, and pressed her mouth to the water. Mikhail heard her tongue lapping. She glanced up again, warily, before she resumed her drinking. Then she wiped her mouth with her forearm, swept her golden tresses out of her face, and straightened up from the fountain. She turned away and began walking back to the portal Mikhail had come through.
“Wait!” he called. She didn’t. She disappeared into the white palace.
Mikhail was alone again. He must still be asleep, he thought. A dream had just walked through his field of vision and returned into slumber. But the throbbing pain at his shoulder was real enough, and so was the deep ache of other bruises. His memories-those, too, were terribly real. And so, he decided, must be the girl.
He crossed the overgrown garden, careful step by step, and went back into the palace.
The girl was nowhere to be seen. “Hello!” he called, standing in a long corridor. “Where are you?” No answer. He walked away from the room in which he’d awakened. He found other rooms, high-ceiling vaults, most of them without furniture, some with crudely fashioned wooden tables and benches. One chamber seemed to be a huge dining hall, but lizards scampered over pewter plates and goblets that had lain long unused. “Hello!” he kept calling, his voice becoming feeble as his strength quickly gave out. “I won’t hurt you!” he promised.
He turned into another hallway, this one dark and narrow, lying toward the center of the palace. Water dripped from the damp stones, and green moss had caught hold on the walls, floor, and ceiling. “Hello!” Mikhail shouted; his voice cracked. “Where are you?”
“Right here,” came the reply, from behind him.
He whirled around, his heart slamming, and pressed himself against the wall.
The speaker was a slender man with pale brown, gray-streaked hair and a scraggly beard. He wore the same kind of tawny robe the blond girl had worn; an animal skin, scrubbed of its hair. “What’s all this noise about?” the man asked, with a hint of irritation.
“I… I don’t know… where… I am.”
“You’re with us,” he answered, as if that explained everything.
Someone came up behind the man and touched his shoulder. “This is the new child, Franco,” a woman said. “Be gentle.”
“It was your choice. You be gentle. How can a person sleep with this mewling racket?” Franco belched, and then he abruptly turned and walked away, leaving Mikhail facing a short, round-bodied woman with long reddish- brown hair. She was older than his mother, Mikhail decided. Her face was cut and lined with deep networks of wrinkles. And her stocky, peasant’s body with its hefty arms and legs was vastly different from his mother’s svelte figure. This woman had the memory of field dirt under her fingernails. She, also, wore a similar animal-skin robe.
“My name,” the woman said, “is Renati. What’s yours?”
Mikhail couldn’t answer. He pressed against the mossy wall, afraid to move.
“I won’t bite you,” Renati said. Her languid, brown-eyed gaze flickered quickly to the wounds in the child’s shoulder, then back to his face. “How old are you?”
“Sev-” No, that wasn’t right. “Eight,” he remembered.
“Eight.” She repeated it. “And what name would I use, if I were to sing you a birthday song?”
“Mikhail,” he said. And lifted his chin slightly. “Mikhail Gallatinov.”
“Oh, you’re a proud little bastard, aren’t you?” She smiled, showing uneven but very white teeth; her smile was reserved, though not unfriendly. “Well, Mikhail, someone wants to see you.”
“Who?”
“Someone who’ll answer your questions. You do want to know where you are, don’t you?”
“Am I… in heaven?” he managed to ask.
“I fear not.” She stretched out her arm. “Come, child, let’s walk together.”
Mikhail hesitated. Her hand waited for his. The wolves! he thought. Where are the wolves? And then he slid his hand into hers, and her rough palm gripped him. She led him deeper into the palace.
They came to a set of descending stone stairs, illuminated by rays of light through a glassless window. “Watch your step,” Renati told him, and they went down. Below was a smoky gloom, a warren of corridors and rooms that smelled of grave dirt. Here and there a little pile of pine cones burned, marking a trail through the catacombs. Vaults stood on either side, the names of those entombed and the dates of birth and death blurred by time. And then the boy and woman came out from the catacombs into a larger chamber, where a fire of pinewood logs spat in a grate and its bitter smoke wafted through the air in search of vents.
“Here he is, Wiktor,” Renati announced.
Figures were huddled on the earth around the fire, all of them wearing what appeared to be deerskin robes. They shifted, looked toward the archway, and Mikhail saw their eyes glint.
“Bring him closer,” said a man in a chair, sitting at the edge of the firelight.
Renati felt the child shiver. “Be brave,” she whispered, and guided him forward.
4
The man named Wiktor sat, watching impassively, as the boy was brought into the ruddy light. Wiktor was draped in a deerskin cloak, the high collar sewn from the fur of snow hares. He wore deerskin sandals, and around his throat was a necklace of small, linked bones. Renati stopped, one hand on Mikhail’s unwounded shoulder. “His name is Mikhail,” she said. “His family name is-”
“We don’t care about family names here,” Wiktor interrupted, and the tone of his voice said he was used to being obeyed. His amber eyes glinted with reflected fire as he examined Mikhail from dirty boots to tousled black hair. Mikhail, at the same time, was inspecting what appeared to be a majesty of the underworld. Wiktor was a large man, with broad shoulders and a bull neck. His acorn-shaped skull was bald, and he had a gray beard that grew over his stocky chest to his lap. Mikhail saw that under the cloak the man wore no clothing. Wiktor’s face was composed of bony ridges and hard lines, his nose sharp and the nostrils flared. His deep-set eyes stared at Mikhail without blinking.
“He’s too little, Renati,” someone else said. “Throw him back.” There was jabbing laughter, and Mikhail looked at the other figures. The man who’d spoken-a boy himself, only about nineteen or twenty years old-had dusky red hair smoothed back from his youthful face, his hair allowed to grow long around his shoulders. He had no room to talk, because he was small-boned and fragile looking, almost swallowed up by his cloak. Beside him sat a thin young woman about the same age, with waves of dark brown hair and steady, iron-gray eyes. The blond-haired girl sat across the fire, watching Mikhail. Not far away crouched another man, this one perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, dark-haired and with the sharp, Asiatic features of a Mongol. Beyond the fire, a figure lay huddled under a shroud of robes.
Wiktor leaned forward. “Tell us, Mikhail,” he said, “who those men were, and how you came to be in our forest.” Our forest, Mikhail thought. That was a strange thing to say. “My… mother and father,” he whispered. “My sister. All of them… are…”
“Dead,” Wiktor said flatly. “Murdered, from the looks of it. Do you have relatives? People who’ll come searching for you?”
Dimitri, was his first thought. No, Dimitri had been there on the lakeshore, rifle in hand, and hadn’t raised it against the killers. Therefore he must be a killer, too, though a silent one. Sophie? She wouldn’t come here alone. Would Dimitri kill her, too, or was she also a silent murderess? “I don’t…” His voice broke, but he steeled himself. “I don’t think so, sir,” he answered.
“Sir,” the red-haired boy mocked, and laughed again.
Wiktor’s gaze darted to one side, his eyes glinting like copper coins, and the laughter ceased. “Tell us your
