“Ben, we need to leave,” Lukas said, prodding his arm.

  Ben stood but took one last look at me. “I would like to have trained you more, but trust your instincts. Get yourself to Šiluva, Audra; promise me you will.”

  Papa had taught me never to make a promise I didn’t know I could keep, and yet Ben looked so desperate, and in such a hurry, I needed to calm his worries so he could do his job. I stood and hoisted the heavy, smelly sack over my shoulders. “I promise, Ben. I will get there.”

  After all, I was going home.

  We set out immediately, each of us from different parts of the city. Ben assigned me what I was sure was the simplest, safest, and most direct route toward Šiluva, but I accepted it without complaint. The faster I got back home, the better.

  I took a path off the main road, making my own way toward the forest but keeping my eyes on the road to be sure I didn’t start doing circles. Mama had once said that with so much of Lithuania was covered in forests, I ought to learn how to pass through them, but in her next breath she’d told me not to leave our farm and wander about on my own. How I wished she’d have let me explore.

  For five exhausting hours, I kept to the edges of the trees, walking as fast as I could. When I crossed deeper into the forest, I finally breathed easier, even if my chances for getting lost had just increased significantly. In fact, a couple of hours later, long after dawn and when I was sure I had become lost, I knelt on the ground and built a small fire, then withdrew Ben’s note from my pocket and began warming it over the flames. Papa had taught me how the milk would heat slower than the paper, leaving the map slightly darker than the rest of the paper. Once it had warmed, I checked Ben’s directions against my current location, then memorized the rest of the map and burned the paper.

  I couldn’t be too careful. If the man who had burst into the church was correct, then the Cossacks had probably come by now, and if they found nothing at the church—and they wouldn’t find anything, Ben and the priest would both make sure of that—then they’d likely continue on this way. I knew I had to be cautious, and I was being more watchful than I’d ever been in my life. But it was a beautiful morning with birds chirping overhead and fluttering happily from one branch to the other, without a care in the world. Fully unaware of the larger troubles in our country.

  So I might’ve been, had I stayed in my little home, a softly chirping bird of little use or consequence to anyone. I would have been miserable, too, without even realizing why.

  Tucked on top of the other twelve books I was carrying was the alphabet book from Lukas. I’d wanted to hide it beneath the rest, for it was my own, but I figured if the first twelve books were found, the alphabet book would be too. The order really didn’t matter.

  I paused to hoist the heavy sack higher on my shoulders, and as I did, I heard the crunch of dry leaves somewhere off to my right. At first I froze, but I wondered if that made me look guilty. So I angled away from the noise and kept walking, faster than before.

  And the noise followed, still out of my sight. By midsummer, Lithuanian forests were lush and somewhat darkened by a thick canopy of leaves overhead. They were breathtaking in beauty but also full of shadows and tricks.

  If only the noises I heard could be explained away so easily. I was being followed, I knew I was.

  For most of the morning, I’d been working on an explanation for why I was out here alone, for why I was carrying the smelliest flowers in all of Europe, and for where I was really going. But my mind emptied. What was I supposed to do?

  If I ran, it would be a sure sign of guilt. I’d be chased, and with my sack weighed down by thirteen books, I’d surely be caught.

  I could try to lose them, but every time I moved away from the noise, it followed my shift in direction.

  Not far ahead, a stick lay on the trail, thin enough to lift, to swing, but thick enough to be useful for protection. I hurried forward and picked it up, using it like a walking stick, but with both hands on it so that if anyone tried to grab me, I’d be ready for them.

  Then I continued walking, listening for the noises, but they’d gone quiet. Immediately suspicious, I walked a few steps more, hoping to detect the sound again, but heard nothing. Perhaps whoever had been following me had seen me pick up the tree branch for a weapon and decided to leave me alone.

  Or maybe they hadn’t. I heard another crunch of leaves, coming closer. I angled the stick over my shoulder, ready to defend myself.

  “Hello!” Lukas darted out from between two trees, a friendly smile on his face. I tried to stop myself, but I was already swinging the stick. It hit him across the chest, and he staggered backward until he tripped on a log and the books from his canvas sack scattered across the ground.

  “I’m so sorry!” I cried. “Why’d you scare me like that?”

  Lukas lay flat on the ground, trying to catch his breath. “I thought you knew it was me, that our paths had crossed. I waved at you awhile back.”

  “I didn’t see that. Are you all—”

  “Shh.” Lukas put a finger to his lips and sat up. “Audra, get out of here.”

  “Your books—”

  “Get out of sight! Now!”

  I scrambled off the road and slid behind the nearby bank of a little stream just in time to see two Cossack soldiers on horseback emerge into the clearing and stop directly in front of Lukas. He’d been trying to gather up his scattered books but had been too late.

  “What have we here?” an officer asked. The markings on his uniform identified him as a sergeant, but it was the cruel smile on his face that filled me with dread. “Are these Russian-language books?”

  “They don’t appear so,” a man with the markings of a private replied. “But how can that be? Wouldn’t books in this dead language be illegal here?”

  The sergeant said, “I do believe they are.” Then he dismounted and addressed Lukas directly. “Do you know what happens to book smugglers?”

  “They are remembered as heroes of Lithuania!” Lukas shouted defiantly.

  “There is no Lithuania!” the sergeant said, marching toward Lukas. “You are Russians and you are part of Russia. When will you accept that?”

  “When will you accept that we cannot be crushed, and that we will not go to our knees for invaders!”

  “Oh, you will go to your knees,” the sergeant said. “Do it, or else.”

  A slight movement from the corner of my eye caught my attention. I jumped at first to see a long snake slithering up the side of the stream toward me, but it was only a grass snake. We had these near our home all the time. They were harmless.

  These soldiers were not.

  I peeked out from the bushes to see Lukas swallow hard, then sink to his knees. The private had dismounted by now and directed their horses toward a copse of trees nearer to me than I would’ve liked. He broke off a branch from a fallen tree, then stood behind Lukas and said, “Count.” From his position on his knees, Lukas lowered his head and got his first lash across his back, receiving it with a grunt of pain.

  “I didn’t hear you,” the sergeant shouted. “If I don’t hear you, it didn’t happen.”

  “One!” Lukas shouted back. It sounded as if his teeth were gritted, but his tone remained angry and defiant.

  Another snap against his back, then, “Two!” in greater pain, as if he was holding back tears.

  By the third snap, I’d had enough. I couldn’t sit here and listen to this, wouldn’t sit here and let it happen.

  I left my sack tucked in the bush where I’d been hiding, then reached down and grabbed the snake from directly behind its head. I carried it up to the horses, releasing it beneath the restless legs of the private’s horse. Eager to escape me, the snake quickly slithered forward, startling the horse, which bolted forward. The second horse followed, though I was out of sight by then and didn’t get to see either of them run.

  I heard the sergeant order his companion to chase after their animals, then he followed. The instant they were out of sight, I grabbed my sack and darted toward Lukas, taking him by the arm. “Let’s run!”

  Holes had been sliced into his shirt from the stick and through them I saw lines of blood. He was still bent over and tears streaked down his cheeks.

  “Gather the books.”

  “They could be back at any minute!”

  Lukas spoke more sharply this time. “Then gather the books, Audra! Or else what just happened here is for nothing.”

  While Lukas slowly forced himself to his feet, I gathered the books. He took as many as he could carry in one arm pressed against his chest, then wrapped his other arm around me to prop himself upright, and we hurried away into an even darker part of the forest.

  Sometime later, I stopped. “I recognize this place.”

  Indeed, I would never forget it. This was the clearing where I had hidden on Midsummer’s Eve two weeks ago. In this very spot, Officer Rusakov had announced to a gathering of young people a reward for turning me in to him, and he seemed to have been pursuing me ever since.

  Me, and Lukas as well. Perhaps he was after all young book smugglers, hoping to suffocate the next generation of smugglers from existence. The old would pass away in time, but if they crushed the young, they would crush the movement.

  Beside me, Lukas let out a soft groan and fell again on his knees. “I’m all right,” he said when I reached for him, more in a whisper than aloud, and probably more as a reminder of it to himself than for me to hear. “I just need to rest.”

  “My home … the place where I’ve lived my entire life … is not far from here,” I said. “Can you make it that far?”

  He looked up at me. “Maybe … maybe you should go check on it, then come back for me if it’s safe.”

  That wasn’t really the reason. Lukas had obviously been holding back his emotions for most of our walk and needed time alone. So I agreed to his suggestion and left. As soon as I rounded a bend, I heard his first sob.

  It broke my heart, too, and I was determined to find some way to cheer him up or to comfort him after I returned.

  Which might’ve been a fine idea, if there had been anything happy inside me once I saw my home, or what was left of it.

  I peered out from the woods behind where my home had been and drew in a breath I didn’t know how to release.

  The entire back half of my home was gone, nothing left but a burnt frame and mounds of ashes. Most of the front was destroyed as well, except for the area around our brick chimney and a few scorched items of furniture that were beyond saving.

  Just as Lukas had done back in the forest, I fell to my knees and finally gave in to the sobs that burst from inside me.

  I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, staring at the remains of my home, the blackened shadow of what had been my innocent childhood, but it must have been a long time, for when I bothered to look, the sun had noticeably shifted in the sky.

  Even then, I was so absorbed in my thoughts, in my pain, that I failed to hear the shuffling footsteps behind me at first. When I did, I turned to see Lukas walking up beside me, dragging his sack of books at his side. He looked at me, then at my home, then sat beside me, putting his arm around my shoulder.

  It shouldn’t have been this way. I should’ve been comforting him. My heart hurt, it was true, but Lukas was so much worse. He couldn’t move a whisper in any direction, nor suck in a breath from the pain his back caused him.

  Finally, I nodded at our barn in the distance. The word itself was perhaps too grand for the small shed it really was, but it was large enough to house some winter feed for our cow, or the cow itself on the coldest winter nights.

  “We can rest in there.”

  Lukas agreed, though he needed my help to get up again, and I carried both our sacks of books with me, one on my back and the other in my arms. Inside the barn, I patted down some hay to make a sort of bed for him, and once he lay on it, he was almost instantly asleep.

  I sat with my back against one wall of the barn, staring at his stack of books, a jumble of thoughts in my mind at what he had just suffered for them, of what my parents had sacrificed for books like these.

  And what would likely happen to me one day if I continued to smuggle.

  I already had some idea. Tomorrow morning I was supposed to meet Officer Rusakov. He’d expect me to betray Lukas and probably wouldn’t let me go until I’d betrayed Ben and Milda too.

  But I would not be there. As awful as it was to have ever considered Rusakov’s offer, after seeing what the Cossacks had done to Lukas, I knew now that I could never turn Lukas over to them.

  Sometime tomorrow, Rusakov would figure out that I wasn’t coming, and he’d order my parents aboard the train to Siberia.

  They were gone for good.

  Tears welled in my eyes, even though I knew I’d made the right decision. It had to be, for how could I ever explain that I’d traded away the lives of my friends in exchange for their return? How could I ever face them again?

  But of course, that was the point. I never would face them again. I never would see them again. Books had taken my family away and were keeping me from bringing them home.

  The pain of such thoughts swelled inside my heart, so much that I knew I’d either burst with sadness, or begin running and not stop until I either reached Siberia or collapsed of exhaustion somewhere along the way. These were my last thoughts as I fell into a restless sleep.

  And my first thoughts when I awoke. It was barely past dawn, I could tell that from the angle of the light seeping in through the cracks in our barn roof. Nearby, Lukas was still asleep, and I hoped he’d remain that way as long as possible. But until he awoke, I need some way of diffusing the deep sadness within me.

  If Papa used distraction to create magic, then I needed a little of that magic to heal my heart too. Which meant I needed to distract myself. Anything. Just anything but having to sit here thinking of all that I had lost because of books.

  Which, ironically, were the only things available for a distraction. Life was full of ironies lately.

  In the sack, beneath those foul-smelling flowers, was the simple alphabet book.

  Lukas mumbled something in his sleep, tried to roll over, then grimaced and remained where he was. I wondered what books were in Lukas’s pack, what he had taken a whipping for. Curious, I reached inside it to find out.

  A thick book on top seemed to be a religious text of some sort, and two or three other ones seemed to be prayer books that the priest likely would have urged me to read for the sake of my soul. I figured that risking my life to bring these books to my countrymen had to be better for my soul than simply reading about good things. So I opened another book, but this one confused me. The words were arranged in short lines running down the side of the page like the letters themselves were art. It might take me time to read it, but Lukas was asleep, and I wasn’t going anywhere without him. I had plenty of time.

  I wasn’t sure how many minutes it took simply to read the title of the book, but I finally deciphered the letters enough to understand that it was about a forest, such as the one where we’d just come from. I thought about the thick lush trees there, and the brilliant green foliage and grasses. I could imagine the forest as if I were still there, its crisp smell of pine, the spongy dirt beneath my feet. This was a waste of time. Why should I struggle to decode the words when I saw these images so clearly in my mind?

  “I know that poem.” I looked over and saw Lukas was awake, though his face was twisted with the pain he must have been feeling. “That’s called a poem, Audra.”

  “Oh.” I stared down at the book for a moment. “What is it about?”

  Lukas reached for the book, and when I handed it to him, he described a forest that had once been thick and green, but now the tall trees had been cut to their stumps and the grasses were gone, leaving black, barren soil behind; life had abandoned it. “What do you suppose happened to this forest?” Lukas asked. When I couldn’t answer, Lukas read the words of the poem, “Long since destroyed, though no one knows wherefore.”

  “Destroyed?”

  Lukas closed the book and gave it back to me. “We’ve transported many copies of that poem, and for a reason. It’s about a forest, but it’s not about a forest. Do you understand?”

  How was I supposed to understand that? Either it was about a forest or it wasn’t. Then my eyes brightened as the deeper meaning I’d been searching for took shape in my mind. “The tree stumps, bare slopes …” I lifted a page, feeling the crisp paper between my fingers and turning it over to a new page. “They’ve destroyed our country, like this barren forest.”

  “The poem was written thirty-five years ago, before the press ban, before the ban on our language, our words. Imagine how much more true those words are today. Especially because the poem itself is illegal now.”

  “Milda told me why our books are illegal,” I said. “Punishment for a failed uprising.”

  “The uprising didn’t fail,” Lukas said. “It’s still happening, and is stronger than ever. That’s what we are doing each time we transport a book, and why we are doing it. You’ll see—one day the tsar will have to admit that he cannot control us, cannot crush us, and certainly cannot force us into his Russian mold. You are now as much a part of the uprising as those who fought all those years ago. But our weapons today are cleverness, and courage, and words.”

  “And you really believe our small country, full of peasants and farmers, will win against the Russian Empire?”

  “I believe the day will come when Lithuania owns its borders and all the land inside it. I believe we will be free one day, and I can only hope I’ll still be alive to see it.”

  I stared at him, wondering why he’d said it that way. Did he think this occupation might outlast him, even if he lived to be a hundred years old? Or did he believe he might not live much longer, not as a book smuggler?