Dmitrii whined that the sun was into his eyes, since he always complained about something. Snot trembled on the pointy end of his nose when his complaints went ignored by his companions, a sure sign of trouble.

Besson wanted to warn the others, but it felt too damn nice to huddle with Osip, Bitiagovskii and Simeon. The annoying kid would keep.

"Cross my heart, I saw her!" Osip, who normally stumbled through his duty with his eyes hooded from boredom, talked fast, gesticulating in front of his face.

"The heathen witch? You're fibbing," Bitiagovskii said.

"Am not! A heathen witch, aye, dressed in breeches like a man. Her eyes... just whoa!" He rounded his thumbs and forefingers on both hands and bright them to the bridge of his nose to make spectacles, then fluttered his remaining fingers like eyelashes.

"If she wore breeches and looked like a man, then you saw a stable boy and conjured the rest," Bitiagovskii said.

Bitiagovskii's personal name was Mikhail, but nobody dared to call him Mishka. He was a lumbering oaf, never hurt a fly, except on his bad days. The bouts of black anger hit him out of the blue, replacing placid indifference. On his bad days, he charged in like a bull.

"I know a wench when I see one, Bitiagovskii. She smiled at me, and stroked her tit—" Osip's hand traced a sinuous curve in the air, which looked more like Himalayan peaks, than any woman's breasts. "Her braid was thicker than two fists!"

"Your fists or mine?" Bitiagovskii shoved one of his fists under Osip's nose. With all the fingers curled tightly, it was larger than another man's open palm.

Osip pushed the enormous fist away. Gently. "Laugh if you wish, but we have a witch at large, casting spells to seduce good Christian men."

"Good Christian men? That makes you safe from her wiles, Osip," said Besson's third comrade, Simeon. He had more freckles than the sky has stars, and whenever he grinned, he flashed a chipped incisor on the right. Thanks to that, he could whistle better than anyone in Uglich.

The trio stared at Besson, who hadn't spoken yet. His vote on Osip's story's authenticity was the tie-breaker.

"Ah..." Besson groped for something decisive to say, but Dmitrii's sniveling reached a disturbingly high pitch.

Bitiagovskii went to crouch by the young prince, breaking up the grown-ups' conference. "Mosquitoes are out early this year, eh? You want to play, right?"

"Aye!" Despite his short fuse, Bitiagovskii never lost his temper with Dmitrii. He looked up at the trio still standing together. "Enough with the stupid wench already. Probably, Osip saw some doxie visiting the guards. Let her be."

"But," Osip started.

"His Highness desires to play, so we play." Bitiagovskii took the knife from the prince's hands to scratch the target circle in the spot of dirt not overtaken by grass. He divided it in half, then divided the second half into more sectors... the smaller the sector, the more points for impaling the knife into it from a distance. That was all there was to the game of knife-toss.

Besson, Osip and Simeon moved out of Bitiagovskii's way, ending up by the wall, near the ladder that went missing since.

Bitiagovskii measured the distance out, then crouched again, his huge knees sticking out. He roughed in the starting line into the soggy turf and passed the knife to Dmitrii. "Here we go. You start."

Besson winced when the toes of Dmitrii's red boots poked a good two inches past Bitiagovskii's line. The royals seemed to suckle entitlement with their mothers' milk, and only another royal could call them out on it. This was a game of knife toss, however, with nothing riding on it.

We let him cheat because he's a child with half our reach, not because he's a prince, Besson said to himself. That's fair.

"Haida!" Osip shouted.

Besson whirled to eye Osip. For someone to call Dmitrii out for cheating would be nice for once, so long as it wasn't him.

Osip wasn't looking at Dmitrii, however. As if moving under water, he lifted a quivering hand and pointed. "She is right behind you!"

Unlike his first exclamation, he said this in a hollow voice, deeper than usual. It matched his dead eyes and slack jaw. As if a witch put a spell on him.

Besson's heart pounded, but Bitiagovskii administered a quick cuff to the back of Osip's head. "Stop following around."

Osip didn't flinch, his face—a mask painted over the bones. "She is right behind you."

Bitiagovskii's head swiveled to look where Osip was looking. "Shut your—" He stammered, gaped.

Besson and Simeon turned too, attracted by an irresistible force. Besson didn't remember what Dmitrii was doing. He didn't see him, didn't hear him, nothing, but the boy was there.

"The heathen witch!" Osip shrieked. "Unholy spirit!"

Besson's heart thumped at his ribcage—and he was running to the shadows by the kremlin's wall where something stirred. Everyone did too... He forgot how he hated running, and ignored the stitch in his side. The important thing was to catch the witch in the shadows.

The other three boys overtook Besson, but he was by the wall only a split second later. He could have sworn Dmitrii was with them and that all five of them groped through the shadows, spooking a flock of ducks. Those waddled toward a pond with annoyed quaking.

Simeon climbed half-way up the wall for a better vantage point. "Nothing!"

Bitiagovskii shouldered his way into a dark space between a shed and a rack of firewood. "No witch, no wench, and no stable boy," he summed up their findings.

Besson poed the dust with the toe of his boot. "Not even a footprint."

"Osip, you dolt!" Bitiagovskii administered another expert slap to the back of Osip's ruffled, sweaty head.

Osip didn't duck. He leaned against the woodwork of the kremlin's wall with a groan, then bent over, cradling his gut.

"Unholy..." he mumbled through bluish lips. "Maybe she was a shapeshifter... a wolf-wench... a dove-princess..."

Goosebumps crawled up Besson's arms, and a chill—down his spine. It felt like he'd just brushed with the supernatural. Something else bothered him, some absence... He glanced around and licked his lips. Dmitrii!

"Where... where is Dmitrii?" he asked and stared at his friends.

They stared back at him, then at each-other, as if expecting one of their number to shapeshift into the child-prince.

Bitiagovskii cussed. "Let's go find him before he runs crying to Eudoxia."

A woman's shriek rang over the grounds, coming from the courtyard they had abandoned for their witch hunt.

"Too late. That's mom," Osip said. "She'll strip my hide for this."

Osip still looked a bit out of it, but if anything could snap him out of his stupor, it was the threat of thrashing. He took off in limping strides, running toward his mother's voice. They couldn't make out what she was yelling, but Besson's breath caught. "Trouble!"

They took off all at once, caught up to dopey Osip and thundered into the courtyard shoulder to shoulder, like herded sheep.

There was no need to rush. Dmitrii lay dead in the pool of his blood, in the courtyard they had deserted just a few minutes earlier.

Besson breathed heavily, reliving the moment of grim discovery, as if he had sprinted like he sprinted four days ago.

Past and present glued together for a second in his head. The body. Smell of blood and piss. The Greek cross twinkled at Besson from the grass, but he didn't pay it much attention. His gaze coasted closer to Dmitrii, on the red blade.

The knife was their toy, and it wasn't rust that tinted it. The killer's hand coated it with Dmitrii's blood. Besson stared at the murder knife till it hurt his sensitive eyes.

***

"Are you sure the knife was the same one that you were playing with?" Matvei shook Besson's shoulder, kicking him and me out of his memories, fast-forwarding from May 15th to today.

In my own strange space, I gulped for air, coping with the jolt to Besson's consciousness, focusing on the present. The birch-paneled walls of the guest house, their honey hue warmed up even more by the lamplight. The smokey scent of burning oil from them. Matvei's face, pinched in concentration.

Uh-huh, Besson's consciousness weaved in, don't forget the bones sticking from the tail end of the kipper my uncle's bitten in.

"I think so. About two hands long, rusty. The... the point was pretty sharp, really good for playing the knife toss."

"Sharp point, huh." Matvei turned to Uncle Vasilii, who stroked his beard. "The monks told me that the slice across the throat was thin, made with a sharper edge than the knife brought in with the body. They are monks, not ruffians, but I trust them."

Besson's fingers twisted together. "There was so much blood on our knife..."

"Thus, the murder wasn't a spur of the moment. The killer brought his blade with him." Matvei said. "But he thought on his feet and dipped the knife Dmitrii was playing with into his blood and left it behind."

"But... why?" Besson asked.

"To throw suspicion on the four idiots who played the knife toss with Dmitrii," Uncle Vasilii barked. The telltale red spots flared in his cheeks again. "Or else to say he did it to himself in a fit of his illness."

Besson gaped, saying nothing. His hands clenched and his thoughts blended into an unreadable mush, punctuated by an occasional, O my God!

Matvei stuck his nose closer to the paper, risking dipping his long nose into his inkwell. He hummed, as if dictating. "Osip said the witch wore breeches and implied she had a heathen appearance... presumably a Tatar girl in chalvars."

"I don't know," Besson whimpered and made a sign of a holy cross. "A dark shadow, a movement, that's all she was."

"If the woman wasn't indeed an unholy manifestation sent by Satan to tempt the inexperienced boys' minds..." Uncle Vasilii also crossed himself with a wide, generous motion. "Matvei, order Nikola to go between the harlots, since the wenches stick to him like flies to marmalade. He must ask after a girl in breeches. If there is one in Uglich, he'll find her."

"He will, no doubt. With Tsar's rubles, he'll find a wench in chalvars, or a wench with a fish's tail, whatever he asks after." Matvei pinched his lips.

The clear condemnation in the men's voice made Besson squirm. I wish my story wasn't so shameful... At least Nikola would be under orders, while I... I... Matvei would roast me alive. God, have mercy on me!

Wait, there is more? And it's juicier than Nikola's mermaid fetish? Can't wait!

I wasn't the only one who noticed Besson's discomfort.

"You aren't an owl, and I'm not a crescent moon, so stop staring at me like that! Lord be merciful, someone will put your eyes out if you don't stop doing it!" Uncle Vasilii growled at his nephew. "Tell us what happened to you afterward, and how you escaped the angry mob?"

Besson winced, forcing the events of the fateful day to the forefront of his mind, determined to make no more mistakes.