Previously

The five kids stared at the newly reopened trunk of the car.

“So. Um. Yeah,” clarified Artemis.

A boom resounded in the distance, the universally identifiable calling card of the Siberian Miners’ Industrial Union, better known as Sibgorprom. Perhaps they were dealing with an abomination, as per usual. But perhaps…

“Fire,” said Tosha. He pointed at the hills, in the exact direction of their former residence, at a bright flare of orange.

“…did the Gvezdins do that? Or did they have Sibgorprom nearby?” wondered Sofia out loud.

Alexey felt strangely at peace with the whole issue. “Whatever. That place was a shithole. If we’ve really got the Ryzhaya fortune on our hands, then we can buy twenty matchbox houses and still have money left over to feed us for the rest of our lives. All of us.”

“We can’t buy my notes back,” Vasilisa responded sadly, still staring at the trunk.

The car’s initial frantic descent down the hill had been a ballistic trajectory of sorts, and none of the open trunk’s contents had been lost. But Sofia’s subsequent ridiculous right turn that by all rights should have toppled the car, before it had shut the trunk, had caused absolutely everything to fly out of it, even the gigantic, furnace-sized, forty-kilogram storm kettle that had barely fit in in the first place. This included nearly all the worldly possessions of Vasilisa and Tosha, and most of Artemis’s save the car itself. This had only dawned on most of them now that they’d arrived at Shtchavel House and opened the trunk back up to unpack. (Artemis, the most familiar with this problem thanks to her days as a sledge courier, had had a sinking feeling about it for the whole ride.)

Vasilisa had passed years of free time by making notes and drawings at home, sometimes of mathematics and science, sometimes of her friends, but most often of fictional worlds that she imagined. Her cargo had been clothes, a toothbrush, medication, makeup, about thirty small books of varying rarity, four fountain pens, and roughly a thousand sheets of paper inscribed with lists, maps, sketches, prose, and occasionally even isolated bars of music. All members of their group besides Alexey and Sofia had at least a few pages of personal writings or treasured letters and other documents to bring, but none of them had lost nearly as much as Vasilisa had.

“So? Write new ones,” said Tosha. This earned them a glare from Vasilisa. “Sorry, I mean… you’re really good at writing and drawing. You’re still the same person as who wrote those notes. You can just write them again. Or write better ones. Either way. …sorry.” Having expended his entire emergency cache of extra words for resolving hurt feelings, he awkwardly ambled in the direction of the front door of the house, perhaps with the intention of finding a way in.

Still somewhat hurt and not wanting to acknowledge any merit to Tosha’s position out loud just yet, Vasilisa pondered their words in the privacy of her own mind. She was only barely familiar with the concept of Zen, but supposed it might apply here; it did feel like some kind of personal progress had been forged in the crucible of the disaster, a waning of her attachment to earthly possessions. Knowing that the truly valuable thing, herself, had not been lost, and that new notes were right there at the tip of the next pen she picked up, did make her feel better, and feel more powerful.

“…look, I’m sorry for everyone’s losses, but are we just gonna stand out here like a bunch of idiots?” asked Artemis. “There’s mosquitos.”

“I meant what I said to the Gvezdins,” said Sofia. “You should let them bite you. If we’re going to do this together, then it wouldn’t hurt for everyone to be in the good graces of the mosquitos.”

“And if I get, like, HIV?” asked Vasilisa.

“Mosquitos don’t—” started both Alexey and Artemis. “Sorry, go ahead,” said Artemis.

“Mosquitos don’t spread HIV,” said Alexey. “Malaria, yes. Dengue, yes. West Nile, also yes. But not HIV. It doesn’t spread into their spit, and the spit is what gets into your blood.”

“…so what if I get malaria?” insisted Vasilisa.

“There’s no malaria in Keleykh,” said Alexey. “But just for you, if you do somehow get a bloodborne disease, my family has ways of exorcising it. In fact, we want to meet as many disease spirits as possible. We can use them to protect ourselves. The reason nobody with two brain cells ever goes near this house is there’s, like, a hundred of them already bound up in idols and stuff here.”

“So, then, we’ve all got, what, either one brain cell or zero brain cells?” said Vasilisa. “I guess I’ll just… shut up and get bitten. Sorry guys, can’t talk, busy sharing my blood.”

“Am I supposed to just get used to the itching, or what?” asked Artemis.

“Yes, you get used to it,” assured Sofia.

“Bullshit, you absolutely do not get used to the itching, that’s such a bald-faced lie,” said Alexey. “But your body sort of reacts less over time. I don’t think my mother’s bites were even inflamed anymore.”

“Says Alexey Pankratyevitch Balandin,” said Sofia with a slight smile.

“Well, whatever. So, anyone got a key?” asked Artemis.

“Mom gave me one,” said Sofia.

Alexey groaned. “Oh, goddammit. I’ll go look around for a mirror so we can reverse it.”

Sofia strode over to the door Tosha was fumbling with, and unlocked it in one practiced motion.

“Correction: Mom gave me two keys,” said Sofia. “Mirror images of each other.”

“Okay, Alexey, I’m sorry about your childhood, but that’s fucking awesome,” said Vasilisa, walking inside.

“Oh, yeah,” grumbled Alexey while trying to find the oil lamp he knew should be on the table immediately inside the doorway, “Making a reversed key is so fucking cool. Not like just anyone can do that.”

“Considering how much Sibgorprom hates us, I wonder how our family even got the metal for any of this,” observed Sofia. “Maybe we have less notoriety in Norilsk?”

“You’re going to have to catch us up on all the Ryzhaya lore over the next few days,” said Artemis, as Alexey lit the oil lamp. “Most of what I know about Alexey’s family I learned from the Sump, and I sure as hell don’t trust that. You seem to be a little more, um… at peace… with your childhood than Alexey is.”

Vasilisa was quickly running out of rail blocks at which to house her trains of thought, and feared that a collision was imminent. On the one hand, she was moving into a vast, new, and scary house, which she had dozens of comments on and questions about. Such as: Boy, you weren’t kidding, Alexey, there sure are a lot of idols here. Or: why was the house’s hearth cold, if Sofia Nikolaevna had been inhabiting it only hours prior? For that matter, where was her body, or the site of her murder? This second concern crossed over into a separate matter, namely that she was starting to feel very out of her depth regarding her place in the web of loose alliances that comprised Keleykh’s magical underworld. Who exactly were the five of them now at war with? What were they capable of? Normally, she would be fascinated to hear the answers to these questions, but faced with the fact that they comprised a list of people who would probably gladly see her and her friends dead, she felt understandably more somber about the topic than usual. And on another, entirely different hand, there was the thought she’d been holding her breath to deliver since Sofia brought it up:

“Norilsk probably doesn’t care about Ryzhayas because they eat abominations and disease spirits for breakfast,” she blurted out. “I still dunno how they built it but there’s no way they moved that much earth without just not caring about all the random stuff they freed.”

It was one of Vasilisa’s favorite subjects to give long lectures on. Norilsk was a miracle of modern engineering, so much so that there were numerous conspiracy theories (which Vasilisa kept abreast of but did not credit) regarding how it had actually been accomplished. Technically, “Norilsk” was metonymic for the 400 kilometer-wide Putorana Crater, a plateau that had been carved out of the surrounding Peykovy Mountains by forces scarcely within human comprehension. Directly at the crater’s center sat the city of Norilsk, which directed strip mining operations on scales such that their yields could supply all of Russia and then some with earth, sand, metals, and dimension stone, obviating the need for mining elsewhere, and etching cryptic dents in the crater that would have registered to any sane geologist as scars left in volcanic traps by glaciers, rather than the work of humans. The resulting lowlands were home to more than a few lakes and forests, whose seemingly paradoxical age fuelled rich debate on their origin among armchair scholars who had never so much as set foot in Siberia. A perhaps more reasonable source of doubt in that field was Sibgorprom’s strict ban on mining elsewhere in Siberia, which while nominally to prevent the unearthing of more abominations, was routinely accused of being motivated by a desire to protect Norilsk’s monopoly on mining, to unknown or controversial ends. Vasilisa, on her part, just longed to visit the crater’s edge one day, to see where sheer vertical facets had been hewn out of mountains, cutting them in half, visceral proof of some higher power’s hand.

All this and so much more was on the tip of her tongue, but she managed to hold it in so that she could take in the scenery instead. From the outside, Shtchavel House was a large box that could have been mistaken for a small hotel or hospital, with elaborate concrete paneling forming pastel stripes of multiple primary colors, and three storeys of windows, capped off by gently sloping, ruby red roof tiles. But seeing it from the inside was an altogether different matter.

“Is the entire house a library?” wondered Artemis aloud. “How has this house not burnt down yet? No offense, Alyosha, but if I hated everything your family stood for and wanted to destroy everything you had, it would take me a can of kerosene and about five minutes. I can’t see a single wall that isn’t covered in books and idols.”

Sofia grinned. “If you actually tried that, the first spirit you came across here would skin you alive. Then, another would turn all your fat into lichen, and your muscles into mushrooms. Then we’d use your kerosene to light our lamps, and feed you to our reindeer.”

Disturbed, Artemis shot back, “You don’t have reindeer. What kind of super-rich family doesn’t even have reindeer?”

“Okay, guys, cool it,” said Alexey. “First thing’s first. We light the hearth. We’re all cold and tired, and I don’t think Sofia even dried off after the broken sink got her wet. We can go over… Ryzhaya lore… and whatever after we’re all situated. Sofia: Tosha and I are going to light the hearth. In the meantime, could you please show Artemis and Vasilisa where they can stay? And light all the lamps along the way.”

“It’s my house. I’ll light the hearth. You can show everyone to their rooms.”

Alexey ground his teeth. “It’s our house. And legally, it’s my house, and if you have any plans to take it away from me and my friends, I’m afraid you won’t be able to. Even the guys who want us dead agree. It’s mine.”

Sofia shifted a bit, uncomfortable. “Okay, okay… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t want you to think I’m you or your friends’ enemy, and I definitely don’t want to take the house, or the Ryzhaya fortune, for that matter, away from you. It’s just that I was told my whole life I’d get to be the heiress, and I’d get to light the hearth. It’s important to me. I want to light it because I want to show everyone that they’re welcome in my home, and that I… want them to feel alright. Want them alive.”

Alexey was silent for a bit. “One of my parents’ favorite insults was that I’m a waste of firewood. Especially my mother. She said that all the time when she felt like I wasn’t being useful enough to her.”

Sofia gave a small, sad smile. “Yeah, same. That’s exactly what I mean. I want to show your friends that they’re not at all a waste of firewood.”

“Yeah. Okay. You get the hearth, then. Which room do you want?”

“Third room on the left of the second floor.”

“Seriously? You still want our old room? I figured you’d want to move into our… into Mom’s room.”

“No way. I’d have to de-Mom it first. Who knows what creepy stuff she kept in there?”

Vasilisa couldn’t hold the question in for any longer. “Uh, speaking of creepy stuff. Is your… is your mom still here? I mean, her body?”

Sofia didn’t move a muscle, but her eyes suddenly seemed far more distant. “Not a chance. The murderers couldn’t have set foot within half a kilometer of this place. She was captured downtown, taken to the seashore, and executed. Her body was taken out to the sea ice, on a sledge, and left there.”

“I’m afraid to ask, but… how do you know?” asked Artemis.

“I was there.”

An uncomfortable silence followed. After enough of it had elapsed, Tosha decided that as the one least sensitive to social tension, they should be the one to break it.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” he said. “That sounds traumatic.”

“…how did you escape?” asked Vasilisa.

“My mom turned me into a lemming earlier yesterday, and put me in her coat pocket,” explained Sofia. “I was in the pocket the whole time. Even when they… when they shot her in the head, right next to me. By the time I came out, her body was abandoned on the sea ice, in the Kingdom of the Dead. The wind carried her voice, and told me where to find Alexey. I ran home across the ice, turned back into a human, and sought him out.”

The three non-Ryzhayas looked at each other. No element of this story was grounded in the common reality they’d been living in their whole lives, save for the gunshot. Not even Artemis had heard of magic like this outside of folktales, for all her apprenticeship under the man who billed himself as Keleykh’s most powerful shaman. She supposed she’d never gotten deep enough into the Sump.

“…Jesus fucking Christ,” said Artemis quietly.

“What was it like, being a lemming?” asked Vasilisa, and mentally cursed herself for asking such an insensitive question, instead of offering comfort.

“Scary,” said Sofia. “I think lemmings naturally assume they’re in a fox’s mouth, if they’re in a tight, warm space against a larger mammal’s body. The whole time, I was ready to escape the moment I thought it was safe. I ended up chewing my way out.”

“Oh,” said Vasilisa, “I was hoping it would have been more fun.” She then realized what she’d just said. “I mean, um, before your mom got murd— I mean, sorry, obviously ‘fun’ isn’t—” (Stop talking! she screamed at herself in her brain.) “I mean, I’ve always wanted to try being an animal.” (Vasilisa, you are an idiot.)

Sofia, despite everything, smiled. “We can arrange that.”

Alexey, who’d been ruminating during the discussion and cataloguing the different sorts of smiles his sister seemed to use to communicate her emotions, finally spoke. “I’m sorry, Sofia. Thank you for sharing. You don’t have to talk about it again, if you don’t want to. How about we all get our minds off it by doing all that stuff we said we were gonna do around the house? The sooner we light the hearth and find our rooms, the sooner we can all go to bed.”

There was a chorus of mumbled affirmations, and the group split. Sofia wandered in the direction of the ground-floor hearth, oil lamp in hand. (A house this big did not have merely a single hearth, after all, and Sofia’s intent was to light all four.) Meanwhile, Alexey led the rest of the gang upstairs to the second floor guest rooms, armed with a box of matches.

Sofia sat down in front of the fireplace. She shoveled some of the ash out of it and into a large green jar to the side, blown in the shape of a tunicate akin to the matchbox house’s lost storm kettle, and many other jar-shaped apparatuses in the city besides. It was simply the local style. Next, she placed fresh, dry logs on the andirons, in fairly plentiful supply in Shtchavel House. Finally, she steeled herself for the part she couldn’t help but hate: lighting the kindling using the lamp. She rolled some spare newspapers from a nearby pile into a tight cylinder, opened the door of the lamp, and lit the cylinder’s end on fire, watching it curl and turn into scraps. Now it was up to the whim of the Fire-Mother whether—

A stray scrap of lit paper escaped, blown harmlessly onto the reindeer skin lying in front of the hearth. There was a noise of rushing wind. A sudden audible pounding entered Sofia’s head, and her vision became a blizzard of grey. She collapsed on the floor, dizzy. Breathing seemed to make it worse, so she stopped breathing…

A few seconds later, her vision came back. The pounding receded, although it didn’t leave completely. She looked down. The lamp was extinguished. All the remaining light in the room came from the Moon, lensed by windows and curtains, reflected and refracted off of varnished wood. Sophia took a deep breath, and sighed.

“Thank you,” she said out loud. She stood up, and met an idol on the mantel shelf eye-to-eye, stained with the blood of past offerings.

This idol was unusual for being one of the few in Keleykh to be made of birchbark, rather than wood, stone, or metal. It had originally been a series of notes a Nenets man had found in his tent over the course of multiple nights, some 120 years ago, detailing his inventory of furs. He grew concerned about their origin, fearing that he was being threatened, and asked the Ryzhaya matriarch at the time for advice. It so transpired that the notes had in fact been written by him, in his hand. He had just forgotten he had written them, thanks to his progressively worse carbon monoxide poisoning, due to the smoke hole on his tent being too small. Once the Ryzhaya pointed this out, he was deeply thankful to both her and the notes, and let the Ryzhaya exorcise his poisoning’s spirit and bind it to the notes for use as an idol, as payment for services rendered.

In the present day, this idol bore a simple face drawn on it in charcoal, two circles for eyes and a vertical line for a nose. Since it wasn’t sturdy enough to wear garments like an average figurine, it had knotted white silk threaded through small holes instead, giving it the appearance of having a ragged, greyed beard. Sometime in the past century, a Ryzhaya had trained the spirit to aggressively swallow any loose flames near the hearth. This came at the cost of inflicting it on everyone and everything in the room, but as far as the defensive sensibilities of the Ryzhayas of the past were concerned, this was nothing but an advantage.

Sofia felt a little more ambivalent about it, considering that, apart from the horrible experience of browning out, she now also had to go fetch the matchbox from the lamp’s table near the doorway. Normally, she’d have the fortitude to try lighting the fireplace the proper and traditional way again, so that she might master it, but it was four hours and tens of minutes in the morning, and she was using all her remaining patience to bother to light all four hearths in the first place.

Sofia grabbed the matchbox and brought it over. She made a neat nest of paper kindling in the fireplace, and tucked a lit match into it. She stayed a little to watch the fire grow, making sure that the firewood all properly caught alight. Then, understandably and through no fault of her own, she fell asleep on the reindeer skin.

Alexey led the group to the second floor, up an elegant, zig-zagging staircase. Shtchavel House was built at a time when the most prized wood in Siberia was a strange sort of pine heartwood impregnated with resin, a local attempt to replicate the properties of aloeswood by more modest and readily available means. As a result, all the most prominent wooden fixtures in the house smelled pleasant, had a red tinge, and were pliable without being creaky, but were ever so slightly and disconcertingly sticky despite (or perhaps because of) the liberal application of varnish. Neither Tosha nor Vasilisa were fans of this, and one failed attempt to slide their hands up the railing as they ascended convinced them both to keep their hands to themselves unless they could place them on cloth, fur, or metal instead.

Alexey, to his credit, noticed the issue immediately, and responded, “Yeah, the railing is kinda sticky. I think my mom was thinking of getting it replaced with brass. I guess I could look into that, if we’re really gonna be staying here long-term. But, I dunno, maybe there’s better things to use the money for. I haven’t really thought about what I’m gonna do with the money yet. Obviously, ‘cause, you know.”

When Alexey got tired, he got chattier. He likened it to being drunk, and supposed that it said something deep about how mentally taxing his everyday inhibitions must be. But the late hour was just beginning to hit Tosha and Vasilisa again, and they were much the opposite. Vasilisa managed a meek nod, and Tosha didn’t acknowledge the long-winded comment at all. They were both already imagining crawling under multiple layers of heavy covers.

Artemis, meanwhile, didn’t seem to be affected by the pull of the dream realm at all. Alexey secretly hypothesized that Artemis did not, in fact, have a sleep cycle of any kind, and was able to defer sleep whenever it was convenient to her.

“Hey, guys. Can I ask a question?” she asked, with the self-awareness to note that this phrasing would make everyone steel themselves for a question they’d really rather not hear at the moment, but without the inspiration to be more tactful.

“Okay,” said Tosha. Alexey just sighed.

“Now that we’re out of her earshot since the first time we met her, what do you all think of Sofia?”

There was a pause as the other kids absorbed and processed the question.

“She’s cool,” replied Vasilisa somewhat numbly. “I thought Alexey’s family sucked. But Sofia doesn’t suck.” She yawned. “Prob’ly ‘cause she’s, like, Mirror Alexey. Alexey’s cool, so Sofia’s cool.”

“You weren’t even a little creeped out by her?”

“…no?”

“Objection,” said Alexey dryly, “Leading the witness.”

“I don’t know what to think of her yet,” volunteered Tosha. “She saved Alexey. I think. And us, kinda. She’s kind of scary? But most people are scary. You have to make friends with them before they stop.”

“Honestly, I’m just relieved you guys didn’t bring the ‘just transition already’ joke back,” said Alexey. “Literally my first thought when seeing her was, god dammit, I’m never gonna hear the end of this.”

“…is that what you think of us?” asked Artemis, a little hurt.

“No,” said Alexey. “When was the last time I ever worried about something reasonable? And not deeply, insultingly dumb?”

“Hah, okay,” said Artemis. “Well, I guess on my part, I don’t really trust her yet. But she seems nice. And some ridiculous part of me thinks she needs me to protect her. Her! A Ryzhaya! She could melt my bones, or whatever it is she said.”

“For the record?” said Alexey, “I don’t think she could. I sincerely mean it. A hundred spirits and nightmares aren’t as powerful as one Artemis Metchnikov.”

“Right,” said Artemis. “I have a car.”

The whole group burst into giggles at that. It was a better end to the night than they’d planned.

“Anyway, here’s the guest rooms,” said Alexey, gesturing at the doors in the hallway they’d been idling in for the past few minutes. “There’s actually only three spares, so either me and Tosha are gonna have to share, or I’ll have to move into my mo— mother’s room. Mother fuck, I can’t believe Sofia’s already rubbing off on me. I’ve never called her ‘Mom’ before.”

Artemis held up her right hand. “Witnessed.”

“Anyway… yeah. Tosha, are you okay sharing a room?”

Tosha shifted, very visibly uncomfortable. “…yeah.”

“…I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you lie before. Wow. I guess I’m taking my mother’s room. Sorry, Tosha, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I just can’t really share a room with the girls.”

“Me and Artemis could share a room, I guess?” said Vasilisa.

“No,” said Alexey, as Artemis simultaneously said, “Wow, no.”

“No offense, Vasilisa, I just need my personal space,” continued Artemis.

Vasilisa shrugged in response.

“Okay, so…” began Alexey as he opened one of the doors. “Um. Oh.”

The four kids stared not at the impressive mock-aloeswood poster bed with three layers of covers, nor at the full body-sized standing mirror with an elaborate white-gold trim detailed in traditional Samoyed branching patterns, nor at the somewhat out of place red and green Persian rug, but at Alexey’s breath. It came out in crystals that sparkled in the firelight.

“I guess we can’t sleep here tonight,” said Alexey. “Dammit, I should have remembered. I don’t think the second floor hearth was lit even when my mother stayed here. Nobody was staying here, so it would’ve been a waste of firewood. This floor hasn’t been warm all winter.”

“…wanna go see how Sofia’s doing with that fire downstairs?” asked Artemis.

“Yeah,” said Alexey, to nods from Tosha and Vasilisa.

The kids wearily shuffled back downstairs to the grand living room (which exceeded an entire matchbox house in size), only to find Sofia lying on her side on the skin in front of the fire.

“…fair,” said Artemis.

“Will the fire burn out at night?” asked Tosha.

“Nah, there’s a disease spirit that keeps it from burning out. I think a chronic pain spirit,” said Alexey.

“Oh. Makes sense.”

“Probably not the way you’re thinking. The guy it came from was a lumberjack. He got it from hauling lumber.”

“Oh. Ohhh, I see. Right. If you didn’t need wood then you’d just keep the fire running all the time.”

“Yeah.”

“So guys, are we gonna go curl up with Sofia?” asked Artemis.

“Yeah,” said Alexey.

“Yeah,” said Vasilisa.

Tosha had gone and already lain down.


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