Matrona stood and smoothed out her skirt, searching for the sound until Jaska appeared between two dwarf linden trees. He looked tired, but alert. He wore older clothes, gray with a few faint stains of clay on them. His sleeves were rolled up again, but for once his hands and arms were spotless.
Matrona tried to ignore the twitching in her chest. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”
“Ignore a cryptic message left for me in the bottom of a cracked pot?” Jaska asked with a small smile. “I couldn’t resist.” He glanced toward the village and stepped back, masking himself behind the linden tree. Matrona didn’t know whom he saw, but she slipped closer to the aspen until Jaska relaxed. It would do no good for either of them to be seen together.
“I have to show you first,” Matrona said, “before you’ll believe me.”
“I’ll believe you.”
The simple words brought a smile to her face. “I know. But I’d rather show you.”
She stepped away from the tree, moving deeper into the wood, and motioned for Jaska to follow her. He did so without complaint, taking long strides until he reached her side, ducking under the branch of a thorn tree as he went.
“You’ll not be missed?” he asked.
Matrona scoffed. “My mother thinks I’m discussing my future with Feodor. I have all the time in the world.”
Jaska frowned.
“And you?”
“Little work today. Nowhere else to go, for now.”
She glanced over at him as the ground dipped and rose again. “How are you faring?”
He shrugged. “Worse than usual. The key is to wait for someone else to become a more alluring topic of conversation.”
They walked a moment in silence, their footsteps almost in sync with each other.
Jaska sighed. “Viktor won’t speak to me. He thinks it’s all my doing . . . and I suppose it is. I don’t know about his wife yet. She hasn’t . . . been around. Neither has Galina, helping with the Zotovs. Put my mother in a fit last night to have me walk her to bed, instead of my sister.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your doing.”
No, it was Slava’s.
“I opened the doll,” she reminded him.
He looked at her and began to speak, but a stone concealed by clover caught Matrona’s toe, and she pitched over it. Jaska caught her elbows and stopped her fall. When Matrona glanced up to thank him, his dark eyes were dangerously close to hers, reminding her once more of his doll’s loudest secret.
Clearing her throat, she pulled away and continued the trek eastward.
“Where are we going?” Jaska asked after another quarter mile.
“That’s part of what I want you to see.”
He nodded and fell silent. They moved easily together, crossing a brook, spooking a deer, passing a spiderweb strung with a few stubborn dots of dew.
“Have you heard the children’s rhyme about me?” Jaska asked.
“I have, unfortunately.”
Jaska wiped a hand down his face. “Kind of catchy.”
“The children have a gift for meter.”
Jaska laughed.
They walked farther still, talking of small things. Normally Matrona didn’t notice the loop in the wood until she passed through it, but today she saw something different. Her steps slowed until they ceased altogether. Jaska paused two paces ahead of her.
“What is it?” he asked.
Matrona blinked, but yes, it was there. A strange thumbprint pattern across the trees, filling even the empty spaces between them. Identical to the one she’d seen in the sky.
Beyond it, the wood seemed to go on forever. Yet Matrona knew what would happen when they passed through it.
Licking her lips, she gestured ahead of her. “Do you see it?”
Jaska eyed her, then scanned the wood ahead of them, and Matrona knew he did not. Gesturing to a bush with yellow flowers, he asked, “The pea shrub?”
“Follow me.” Matrona resisted the urge to clasp his hand and pull him through the spell he still couldn’t see. She walked forward first, toward the grain across the wood. There was no sudden wind, no change in sensation whatsoever, save for the sudden absence of a pintail’s cry.
Jaska followed after her, looking around as though expecting something to jump out at him. Before Matrona could ask if he noticed a difference, he looked skyward and said, “The sounds. They changed.”
Relief lifted Matrona’s shoulders. She’d only discovered the loops after opening her second doll, so she hadn’t been sure he would sense them yet. “We’re in the west wood now.”
His gaze dropped to her.
“A loop of some sort. From north to south, too.” She walked westward now, back through the subtle pattern. “I found it after opening my second doll.”
Jaska caught up with her and paused, perhaps listening to the sudden return of the pintail’s song. “What else have you ‘found’?”
“There’s a pattern.” Matrona glanced over her shoulder. Sure enough, the faint lines wrapped through the wood as though painted on the air itself. “A pattern of lines where the loop starts, and in the sky.”
Jaska looked up again, but Matrona could tell by his frown that he didn’t see it. It hadn’t been revealed to her until the opening of the third doll.
“I’m hiding again today.” She chuckled, though there was no humor in the words. “It’s the third day.”
“I know.”
“You’re attentive.” She shared a look with Jaska that threatened to make her flush, so she shifted her focus to the ground ahead of her.
“You don’t want to open it?”
Her steps slowed. “Jaska, if you understood—”
“I want to.” He reached out and clasped her fingers, stopping her. His brow lowered. “Why doesn’t he just open it for you?”
“So I’ll stay ‘independent.’” A shiver traced Matrona’s shoulders. “And because of your mother.”
“Not again,” Slava had said. It felt wrong to disclose Slava’s secret to Jaska, yet it seemed just as wrong to withhold the truth.
“You said she’d opened her dolls.”
But Matrona shook her head. “She didn’t. Slava did.”
Jaska stiffened.
“He didn’t know the consequences.”
Jaska’s expression darkened. “He’s not the one who must suffer them.”
Perhaps only a broken heart, she thought.
Jaska turned away from her, pulling his fingers from hers, placing his hands on his hips. His body was tense. She stayed quiet, letting him sort through the revelation on his own. She shifted toward a tree and picked at its bark. Noticed an animal trap not far off and made a note to be aware of others on this uncharted path.
“I want you to open my second doll.”
Matrona turned back to him, feeling herself pale. “It’s the worst one. Jaska, I could never do that to you.”
“I want to know what you know.”
“All you’ll know is the horrors of your own existence.” She continued to walk westward. “That’s the one I had opened when you found me outside his house, Jaska. It’s dark and horrible.”
“Do you think I won’t survive it?”
Matrona frowned. “It’s not a matter of survival.”
His face softened. “I think it is. And I think you want to survive alone.”
The accusation jarred her, forcing her to stop once more. She could have laughed. “Survive alone.” Isn’t that what she’d been doing even before Slava insinuated himself into her life? Isn’t that why she pined after her lost sister, why she had jumped at the chance to marry Feodor? So she wouldn’t have to survive alone . . .
Jaska sighed. “Matrona, when you opened my first doll—”
His words sent a cool thrill through her. There was one secret they hadn’t discussed. And yet the shadows still lurking in the dark corners of her mind screamed at her, reminding her how wrong it would be for them to acknowledge the way they both felt. Her parents had sacrificed so much to keep Feodor for her, hadn’t they? It had been an act of love. Love they rarely showed anymore.
“Please, Jaska.” His name was just louder than a whisper.
Jaska’s mouth closed so quickly, Matrona heard the snap of his teeth. He ran a hand back through his hair. “Just let me know what snow is like. Let me see it for myself. To help my mother.”
Matrona looked away, blood coursing too fast, pretending to study the crooked bough of a hornbeam. “There is no saving her,” she murmured. “Or Roksana. Slava said as much.”
“Matrona.”