The blizzard raged. Wind shrieked at the corners of the house; the trees streamed, tugging at their roots. Branches rattled against the walls. Bad luck had arrived. Ukashin’s dogs mysteriously disappeared. Nightmares swept the dormitories. We no longer shared our dreams in public, teasing out their meaning. Ukashin met with each of us privately in his kabinyet to unburden us, to explain away the darkness.

  I dreamed I was feasting with Taras Ukashin, gorging on dates and almonds, colored eggs and mulled wine. We made love on the sheepskins while Andrei Ionian stood outside in the cold, miserable, with only that sheet around him, his blue face pressed to the window.

  The temperature continued to drop. Outside the kitchen, the glass tube with its mercury spine showed forty below. There’s a hardness to the air when the thermometer falls this low. The cold is a knife gouging any bit of exposed skin. It slashes your cheeks. You have to close your eyes or your eyeballs freeze in your head.

  The Master ordered everything to be brought into the house—meat from the smokehouse, chickens from the coop, everything edible carried down to the larder under the kitchen. I could not stop thinking about Andrei in the icehouse. I was not so sure that the dead forgive us everything.

  Bad-tempered Lilya and I brought in the chickens from the henhouse, collecting them one by one and conveying them under our coats. She left the rooster to me. I tackled him, wrapped him in my sheepskin as he madly clawed me. I was afraid I’d break his neck or one of his feet. We stashed them under baskets weighted with wood in Avdokia’s room and stood by the hot stove, waited for the shivering to die down before going out again. The boys brought firewood into the hall, and the girls melted snow in barrels in the kitchen. It was as if we were preparing for a siege.

  No more could I escape to tramp the woods. I would experience Ionia undiluted, the full force of the communal mind.

  We assembled in the Practice room. The Master had an announcement to make. “It is time to accelerate your advancement, the adept along with the novice. All together as one.” He would introduce a new Practice—vlivaniye. Inflowing. It was a technique known only to a few dozen human beings on earth. The excitement in the faces of the acolytes was as if he’d announced to a bunch of children that the Sugar Plum Fairy was coming to visit. “A secret teaching,” he said, “kept for thousands of years among the Brotherhood of the Sun.” A sect of monks in the Tien Shan, the eastern Himalayas, where he had spent time learning their mysteries. They took in energy directly from the earth and sun right through their skins. Hale and hearty, they lived to a great age, and some had not eaten in fifty years.

  “Imagine the freedom,” he said. “To no longer have to feed on matter that feeds on other matter. To concentrate energy directly from the cosmos. If people knew, all wars would cease, all craving would vanish. People would know there was always enough to sustain them. That they were truly sons and daughters of the universe.”

  Vlivaniye became our lives. Sealed together by the storm, we were one body, one consciousness. And I went under like a diver, I plunged. In the end I could not bear the loneliness of being outside the circle. I had to trust that there was a boat rocking above me, my own rationality, and that when I returned to the surface it would still be there, and I would not be lost in a featureless sea.

  Ukashin taught us that the material body wasn’t solid but rather permeated with radiant matter capable of absorbing energy, as a sponge can be filled with water. We held on to his voice as if it were a rope across a vast chasm of space.

  First we inflowed with the earth. I was surprised how much I enjoyed descending into the ground, passing the tunnels of moles and lairs of badgers, the nut-filled hideouts of squirrels and rabbits—how surprised they were to see me! I visited foxes with their tails around their noses, and sleeping bears, and proceeded down through the roots of trees, breathing through the earth, reaching the glowing gems and veins of metals. You were safe down there. Nothing could hurt you with the earth tucked in over you. Cross-legged on the carpet, we breathed in the planetary emanations, and they felt like kindness, forgiveness. All things began and ended in earth. Crops, trees, animals. How alive it was, how generous. At least I could say, This was my home. Safe from guilt, safe from the past, safe from Andrei, safe from the Master himself.

  The sun’s energy was brighter, clear and intelligent. “Your light body is activated,” he lectured. “Open your eyes, look around. You’ll know this to be true.” And when I looked, the Ionians had become floating bodies of light, suffused with bright handfuls of energy like glittering fistfuls of confetti.

  I gazed at my own arms, astonished. I could have sworn I saw light like fine hairs rising from them. Movement in the hair and in the beards of my friends, light concentrating in their organs. Yet still I heard Andrei saying, You don’t care, as long as he keeps you fascinated. Well, I was not Andrei, willing to sit in a corner while the others did their Practice, feeding on self-righteousness, alone, hungry, and miserable.

  Those nights I lay on my pallet, trying to see if I could still detect that glow, testing to see if it was only hypnosis. But it was becoming harder to tell what was suggestion and what was real. We were eating very little, and the near fasting exaggerated the effects. I turned over, trying to sleep, but the energy was far too high. I thought of Andrei in the icehouse, his blue face, his bloody head. Don’t listen to him, he begged me. Don’t fall under his spell.

  But I couldn’t be both here and there. Andrei, you shot yourself with my gun, but I didn’t shoot you. You made your choices long before. You should have left when people started kissing his hem, but you could not open your hand.

  I know I was a failure, he replied. But don’t succumb as I did.

  His feud was with Ukashin, but it wasn’t my fight. The Earth Devi was supporting me now. It wasn’t about the Master. The teaching wasn’t the man. The former could be good while the other was corrupt, couldn’t it? Andrei could not do the inflowing, dissolving himself, because he loved only ideas. And without a body, there was nowhere for the light to come in. It entered the skin, it filled you like a wineskin.

  Though the days were dark and the wind shook the house, the sun grew inside us, rushing through the glowing sea anemones of our nerves, our blood vessels like rivers. Sometimes I jerked crazily. Ukashin said it was because I was leaping so far ahead of where I’d been in my Practice, bringing in far larger quantities of energy than my body was accustomed to. The energetic channels had to expand to accommodate the new current, and sometimes there were kinks. I sweated, I shook. Natalya created a dance—coiling in, then uncurling. When others joined her, it became a flower. But no more would Andrei accompany our dances on my mother’s old piano.

  We would not be ready for total inflowing for months, he said. But I could attest that the Practice was already making changes in us. For one thing, food seemed sickening now. We had to be urged to eat. When did that happen, in the Russia of 1919? Avdokia dropped the big pot onto the table with a clang, as if she wanted to startle us from our high vibrational hum. As we passed our bowls I could hear her grumble. “Living on light…we’ll see how well that works.”

  Ukashin lowered his spoon. “The ignorant suffer most, because they brace for the worst. Fear closes you off. You have to be porous, like a sponge.”

  After she left, we could hear her clattering in the kitchen. I wanted to laugh, imagining her curses, her comments about sponges and the Master. She couldn’t see what we saw—that we were feeding on radiance, living in radiance.

  After the dishes were cleared, we brought out our projects, shoes and hats. Ukashin played his flute. The disciples sang. Though our voices were not as strong as before, they were purer. Small motions captured my eye. I was transfixed by the movement of the hanging spindle—long and slender, of carved wood like a top—that Anna used to spin flax. The spinning reminded me of the earth and the stars. Like a wedding ring hung over a pregnant belly—will it be a boy or a girl? I never did that. No wedding ring.

  My head shimmered with strings of sound—the storm’s vowels, oooo ooo oooo. The consonants: Ts, the sizzle of the peppering snow. K—Crack! Crash! The wind clawed the windows, battered the house as if shot from a fire hose. Eeee.

  “Why shouldn’t it storm?’ said Ukashin, brandishing his flute like Aaron with his staff. “Why should nature cut itself down to fit our capacity for experience? Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. Look at Marina. Tell us the storm, Marina Ionian. Be our bard.” He leaned back in his chair.

  I rose, the storm in my mouth. I am the storm. The size of it rose within me, the power. I felt its rage and envy, its hunger. I gloried in my own strength.

  Far my reach my wreck my wrath…

  With my feet of iron and head of ice

  My name is Knife.

  My name is Rage

  Tear you apart like a loose-nailed roof.

  Say you’re not afraid?

  You think this is a children’s game?

  Their faces startled, mesmerized.

  I kiss your lips—aniline blue

  Your hands freeze to the ax

  I’m Winter’s blade

  A Tula sword,

  I’ll ride you down

  With my twelve-legged horse.

  Say you’re not afraid?

  Meet my children, wind and ice.

  They set their shoulders to your door.

  Dig you out of your hiding place.

  Baba Yaga stores her mortar out of sight.

  Stenka Razin flees with his brothers

  Ilya Muromets cowers before my power.

  The throne lies empty.

  The house of ice awaits.

  With Andrei, the house of death awaiting them all.

  Say you’re not afraid

  When branches crack and fly?

  When you’re caught in Winter’s grip?

  I am the storm.

  My name is Be Afraid.

  The thrill and the heart of the chaos, its inhuman force and destructive joy surged within me. The throne, empty. Yes. He could not invite the devil in and stop it halfway. The storm served no one but itself.

  Suddenly heads swiveled to the door.

  My mother stood in the doorway, hovering, in an aura of powder, like a moth. Her long white hair unbraided, her pale cloak awry. Ilya, at her side, her indecisive shadow, looked terrified. “Taras?” came the high, tremulous voice I knew so well.

  Already Ukashin was moving toward her, taking her white hands.

  It was as if some fantastic figure who lived across seas seven times seven had appeared in our humble izba, summoned by my words. “The wolf,” she hissed. “Don’t you hear it?” My mother’s terror ratcheted up their anxiety, even higher than my poem had. “Scratching, scratching. Don’t let it in!” She pointed toward the north, and the storm’s volume rose at that moment, as if in reply. Let me in.

  The Master held her thin hands between his own. “We won’t let it, Mother. What shall we do? Tell us what you see.”

  “Rub the sills! Have them fetch fir and juniper. Lay them across the doorways. Don’t let it in!”

  Ukashin looked around. His eyes settled upon Pasha. “You. Cut some boughs, bring them in.”

  He was going to send Pasha out into that storm? Yes, he was the woodsman, but he was also guilty of a secret personal love, something that excluded the Master. This would be a two for one. It was not a joke to send someone out for the storm to eat. But Pasha rose without hesitation.

  Katrina paled, her face a mask, but the woodcutter bowed to the will of his Master and the prophetess.

  Mother’s urgency breathed life into my metaphor, creating a shape—yes, a wolf, tearing at the windows, trying to get in. “I’ll go, too,” Bogdan volunteered. “Davai,” said Gleb, rising. Perhaps not wanting Pasha to get all the credit for bravery in Katrina’s eyes. The three piled into the kitchen, grabbed their skis and snowshoes, coats and hats, and returned through the hall to the front door to prepare for the bitter cold, wrapping their scarves around their faces, leaving mere slits for their eyes.

  I snatched at Bogdan’s sleeve. “Please—don’t risk your life for a handful of pine needles. If you die, he’ll say it’s because you didn’t believe enough.”

  He stroked my face, gently. “It will be fine. You have to trust.”

  “Don’t say die,” Katrina snapped, trying to pull me back toward the workroom. “Can’t you see you’re just making it worse?” Her worried blue eyes followed Pasha out the door.

  I yanked myself away from her grasp and stood in the cold vestibule after she returned to the others. They didn’t know how quickly death could come. Just in a minute. Tree limbs flew faster than horses out there. Your skin froze in moments.

  Avdokia appeared at my elbow. “You can’t talk a fool out of a fire,” she said and slipped something into my pocket—a packet wrapped in paper. Meat. She must have stolen it from the pot right under Katrina’s nose. I choked it down, threw the paper into a corner so they wouldn’t find it on me. “Can you smell me?” I held out my hands to her.

  “Don’t get too close,” she said.

  In the workroom, my lunatic mother now sat in Ukashin’s chair, white as Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, Winter’s daughter. Maybe she really had seen a wolf, or a spirit, or a Dark Body from a far dimension only visible to her squid eyes, but you didn’t send precious humans out when these creatures were stalking.

  Katrina and I wiped off a window and peered out at the tiny flicker of lantern light swinging off in the lee of the house. Then it was swallowed by the storm. All because of a woman who hadn’t been out of her room for months and talked to imaginary creatures in the dark. Ukashin sat by her side, knitting his brow like a priest at confession as she spoke into his ear. It was the first time I’d seen them together in the open, in the light. How reverently he was listening, his head bowed, nodding.

  And then it struck me like a tree branch in the head. Taras Ukashin believed in my mother. This was no confidence game, not a clever use of her to appropriate her holdings or to lay further claim to the mystical Beyond. It was worse. He truly believed she was receiving insights from other worlds. I’d always assumed that he was controlling her—but what if it was the opposite? What if it was Vera Borisovna setting our course, not Taras Ukashin? Bozhe moi.

  Mother continued speaking urgently to her—what? Lover? Communicant?—while her devotees ranged around the table, nervously resuming their tasks. I noticed that Magda could not take her eyes off Ukashin, the way he practically knelt at Mother’s feet, holding her hand. Jealousy burned in her like an empty pan on a hot stove. Ilya swallowed, his big Adam’s apple rising and falling. I saw that he was ashamed to be inside and safe when the other boys risked their lives on this fool’s errand.

  Five minutes passed. Forty below, with a wind like frozen nails. My mother’s glance slid briefly over the rest of us without interest, as if we were dolls in a shop window. Something struck the house, and we jumped. She jumped as well. Good, she was not so insensible as all that.

  “There are no wolves, you know,” I said. “It’s too cold. They’re asleep in their dens under the snow.” The minnows of her attention hovered over my face, their tickling mouths in my eyes, in my ears.

  “So much red,” she pronounced. Evidently even inflowing had done nothing for my aura.

  “Recent events have disturbed her energy, Mother,” Ukashin defended me. “But she is one with us.”

  “She’s one with no one,” my mother said. “She’ll never be one with anyone. It is her fate.”

  As if balling me into a lump like a greasy piece of paper and throwing me into a corner. So much for me. My lungs froze in my chest. I tried to think of people I had been one with—Genya, Kolya. The Poverty Artel. But a deeper truth uncoiled, like a fiddlehead fern. Around me, glances of pity. A ripple of unease traveled around the room—except for Magda. A pleased smile flickered around her lips.

  “There’s no such thing as Fate,” I said. But what the high priestess said was oracle, and I had the horrible suspicion that she could be right. What if it was true? Damn her—why did she have to come downstairs when she’d been so happy in that creepy room with her weird icons and little polished stones?

  Ukashin leaned toward her. “She’s with us for now, Mother,” he said. “In this time stream. And who can say more about anyone?”

  I should have felt gratitude. Yet I still felt the teeth of the storm in my mouth, my horrible red aura, and wanted to hurt her for handing me such a fate like a slap. I wanted to wipe that otherworldly vagueness from her face. “Did your spirit guides tell you Andrei Petrovin shot himself?” I called down the table. “Your friend Andrei?” The attention swam back to me, regarding my outline as if it wavered in water. “That’s right—Andrei Petrovin. Notice you haven’t seen him around much? He’s lying in the icehouse, rolled up like a carpet.”

  She turned away from me as she used to when I’d said something awkward to one of her guests, simply erased me from her attention. That was her answer. Her friend’s death meant nothing. Ukashin had been more perturbed.

  “What else didn’t they tell you?” I shouted down the table. “Did you know I was pregnant? I’m going to have a child, Mama. This summer. Your grandchild.”

  The devotees shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed that their priestess was being dragged into a matter so unseemly and personal when they’d given up every family connection, even their names. I could see that Magda wanted to get her hands around my throat. Ukashin stared at me. I could almost hear him—I can’t save you forever.

  “Your grandchild, Mama. It’s Kolya Shurov’s.”

  Now her vision cleared, and she saw me. Oh, yes. She remembered me now. Your daughter. She regarded me with something resembling fear.

  “Yes, Kolya. We’ve been lovers since I was sixteen. Did you see that in your multidimensional universe?”