Though the garden shed sufficed for testing ritual ingredients, it was too close to Ivan and Peter’s home to safely perform their ritual. Though the town of Khargrad was large enough a traveler might pass through anonymously, the same was not true for a member of the Smertsky clan, especially due to the long-standing suspicion the townspeople held towards them. It was for this reason Ivan was forced to concoct an excuse for why he and Peter needed to borrow a wheelbarrow and were going off into the woods and would not be back for supper.

  “You have no reason to be out that late in the dark,” his mother said.

  Peter thought her tone disproportionately urgent for what ought to have been two young men out for an evening stroll.

  “If we wish to have a walk, that is for us to decide. You have no authority over us,” Ivan replied.

  This was true in a technical sense, as Peter had become the patriarch for their family branch the moment Vladimir Smertsky was proclaimed dead. In practice, however, Smertsky sons, in the rare case where they were prematurely thrust into the role of patriarch, were expected to defer to their mother’s wisdom until they were a master necromancer at the age of 50. The reason given was that sons were liable to make rash decisions with the powers afforded to a patriarch. To contradict this was unthinkable, and it was not Ivan their mother turned to but Peter who stood behind him, wringing his hands.

  “Peter, this is ridiculous! You are the head of this household now, you cannot be running around into the woods like a child! Least of all should you be dragging your brother along and allowing him to speak to me like this!” said his mother.

  Peter had thought before that moment that he was incapable of being cruel towards his mother who he so admired, yet as she stood before him, balling her robe in her fists and looking at him through hysterical eyes with frayed gray hair falling over them, he found in himself a font of something less than pleasant. Repugnant, even. Who was she to tell him where he was permitted to be and at what hour? Peter was twenty. A grown man in any corner of the world.

  “I am the head of the household and if I have business to attend to after dark that is mine to decide. Not yours,” Peter said.

  A look of hurt flashed across his mother’s face. After his moment of spite passed he regretted not only his words but the unexplainable malice which had overcome him. Though he wished to say something in reconciliation, to do so would be to betray Ivan in turn. It was clear a threshold had been crossed in that moment which he would not be permitted to retreat from. Nor was he allowed to view his mother as the unshakeable authority she had been for much of his life. In her absence was a frightening sensation of being untethered. Or, perhaps, to be tied to something else which was not altogether innocent.

  Katerina Smertsky’s lip quivered and a strange fear passed through her eyes and then she spoke not in admonishment but in a kind of anxious fear. “Your father used to say similar things. And your uncles…”

  “And it was their right to do so,” Ivan added.

  Ironically, Peter felt something petulant, even pitiful in the way his brother made the same claims as he. Placing his hand on Ivan’s shoulder, he squeezed. If they were going behind their mother’s back, he wanted to minimize the harm they caused her. Nonetheless, at his brother’s outburst, their mother’s face adopted a strange, uncomfortable smile and she laughed. Her eyes focusing intently, almost fiercely upon him in a way that Ivan had to avert his gaze from.

  “You have no idea what I’ve done to keep our family together. To keep us presentable. To keep us safe! From—”

  Peter had some idea, though he didn’t care to think too hard about it. There hung in the air of any Smertsky family manor things that were known but never said, as though they would lose their power if spoken aloud. Ivan, for all his earnestness, felt this as a centrifugal force, something which pushed him out.

  “Don’t come looking for us. We will be back by midnight,” Peter said, his voice firm.

  Her fierce eyes flicked to him but she said nothing. In her gaze he thought he saw something probing, as an inquisitor might press a suspected apostate. Fearing his own indecision might give away their transgression, he turned and fled the house.

  Ivan joined him at the door and the two walked in silence to the shed where the ritual tools had been packed into a wheelbarrow and covered with layers of linen. Deciding he ought to take the blame should they be caught, Peter took the handles of the wheelbarrow as his brother followed along beside and they made their way to the forest trail on the edge of town.

  “We should not have spoken like that to mother,” Peter said.

  “I won’t indulge her obsession with reputation anymore. It’s not as though it helped me when the other children teased me about being a necromancer,” Ivan said.

  “You chose to go to school in the town,” Peter said.

  “I chose not to insulate myself like you did and like the rest of our family does. Father didn’t hide behind the walls of a family compound and pretend not to hear what the townspeople said. He confronted them directly. He fought for and won their respect. No one called him a corpsefucker.”

  Peter raised an eyebrow. He knew some of what his brother had been subjected to, but the worst of it Peter escaped by taking his primary schooling with the other children of the Smertsky clan. This was the preferred way, as the townspeople did not like or trust them, even as they single-handedly propped up Khargrad’s economy with their family business. Ivan alone rebelled and mingled with the townsfolk, and he had learned firsthand why the clan kept to themselves. Peter could still recall the day his brother came home in tears because the other boys stuffed a bloody pig’s head in his pack and asked him to speak with his dead sister.

  “Don’t take out your frustrations on mom. She has good reasons for what she does,” Peter said.

  “She didn’t do anything to defend me. It was dad who went into town to get them to stop. They knew not to mess with him. That’s how I want to be,” Ivan said.

  Peter let the matter drop. The winds were picking up and it felt cold enough to strip the leaves from trees if such a thing were possible in Khargrad. They were lucky in that respect. It would have been harder to hide their work in the deep woods if the trees weren't covered in autumn foliage.

  After an hour’s walk, Peter pointed out a spot off the path where a bent tree formed a half-arch over a rocky path just wide enough to fit the wheelbarrow. The sun was below the horizon now and what light remained cast a dim purple shade over the woods. The moon was nearly new, a slivered crescent in the sky hardly brighter than a planet for their purposes. Neither brother dared light a lantern, however, as their work belonged in the dark.

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  Far enough into the woods they could not be seen from the road, Peter announced they had arrived. Under the minimal starlight, Ivan saw the dead husk of a stately yew tree, its petrified trunk the span of three men. He ran his hands along it, feeling the hard, smooth crystals which had long replaced the living tree. While he did so, his older brother rolled the ritual ingredients out onto the linen sheet: The wooden bowl, the scrap of journal, sticks of myrrh, and an urn with the ash and half-charred bones of their father.

  “Are you ready?” Peter asked.

  Despite the autumn chill, Ivan felt a dark cold prick him from the inside. Hesitation crept up upon him, but he was not one to second guess his decisions. No Smertsky ought to be, in his estimation. In this way he was like his father, a man who never stumbled or minced his words but always knew what he wanted and acted.

  “I am ready,” Ivan replied.

  The two sat down cross-legged on either side of the linen sheet. It felt strange to skip the step of guiding a patron through the process, telling them their role in the ritual and how they ought to think and speak and act. Instead, they went straight on to the incantations. Ivan chanted the words in a baritone register as Peter chanted them in the tenor and the two proclaimed the empty self-nature of life to the cold, dark forest around them.

  Suddenly, there came a scratching along the wooden bowl. Peter, with a piece of flint, lit the sticks of myrrh. Upon touching the wooden bowl, the ember tips of the incense sticks flared and burned down to the end. The incense smoke filled the bowl to the lip where it roiled as though an invisible piece of glass enclosed it. Into this bowl Peter poured their father’s ashes and chips of bone and the smoke rose from the bowl first as a pustule which burst forth into the air, threading in and out of the darkness.

  The two brothers felt their skin prickle with goose flesh and the cold around them became as hot as it was cold. In the dark, a hazy outline was formed like something half-seen, the contents of a feverish dream transposed onto the harshly rational edges of reality. The spectre didn’t speak so much as the world around the two brothers seemed to speak for it. Nocturnal animals scratched and scurried to form the consonants and the wind and leaves whistled the vowels.

  “Awake again…”

  “D-Dad?” Ivan asked.

  “I am he. I was Vladimir Smertsky in life.”

  Ivan’s heart thumped in his chest. This was undeniably his father in another form. Nonetheless, he felt mild disappointment that it must be in this dreadful, half-alive state where his father could only answer questions posed to him. Though Ivan himself might find joy in hearing tales from his father once again, it soured the experience to know his father felt nothing in turn, that the blissful reminiscence was one-sided. He envied the family’s patrons who could delude themselves that the dead shared their pleasure.

  Peter swallowed. “How a-are—” He bit his tongue. Force of habit had made him ask how his father was. But that wasn’t a question the dead could answer.

  “D-Do you remember us? Your sons?” Ivan asked.

  “Yes…” the spectre hissed as rustling leaves. “The elder… and the younger… your names… Peter… Ivan…”

  “Do you miss us?” Ivan asked.

  Their father was silent.

  “We miss you.”

  Their father was silent.

  Seeing his brother’s face scrunch in dismay, Peter leapt to ask the next question:

  “Could you tell us again how you met our mother? Katerina Smertsky?”

  “Katya Zhiznov…” the father said ponderously. They had never once heard him call her that. In life he referred to her as ‘mum.’

  “Katya was in my year… was in school with me… in town… the other children despised me, but not her… she shared her cakes with me… the other children said if I ate them… she would smell like a… corpse.”

  Ivan had heard this story a hundred times, but never in the cold, halting way their father’s ghost was telling it now. But besides this feeling of unease there was comfort at knowing that this story lingered after one of its tellers was gone. Ivan was born from the events of this tale, and with it he would go to his grave.

  “We grew older… and were teenagers… her family forbid us… but her grandmother died… and I performed the ritual… without payment… in secret… and her family gave us… their blessing… I gave her the ring… in coffin wood… she laughed…”

  Peter couldn’t help but imagine the woman as someone other than his mother whenever their father told the story. The girl who threw her reputation to the wind to be with the son of a necromancer could not possibly have been his mother. But it was. When he asked her about it, his mother said simply that the two cases—concern for the family’s reputation and concern for her own—were two different matters. The former was far more important than the latter.

  While Peter reflected on this, Ivan’s eyes were full of stars. His mother and father never hid the fact that they had broken the family’s rules to perform the ritual for his mother’s parents, but on this night it was even more significant. Ivan and his brother might have been committing a sin by speaking with their father’s ghost, but this sin was part of a family lineage. His father had broken with tradition to go to school in Khargrad and to court the woman he loved. This was the blood flowing through Ivan’s veins.

  “Thank you, father,” Ivan said.

  Their father was silent.

  “I-I want to hear another,” Ivan said. “I want to hear about the family’s travels to the dwarven ruins.”

  He waited for the chuckle with which his father would preface the story, sometimes followed by a joking groan at having to ‘tell that old story again.’ There was none.

  “Katya and Peter… he was young… when we went abroad… to Tolyumborg…”

  Gone too was the meandering attempt to recall how old Peter was, which fluctuated between 18 months and three years old depending on the telling.

  “The ruins… were disappointing. There were… three gears… in a cave…”

  Ivan laughed at that only because it was his part in the retelling to laugh. There was much more to the story, including his mother’s excitement and Dwarven history obsession leading up to it, Peter mispronouncing ‘dwarf’ in front of the tour guide in a way that sounded like a swear word, the worst borscht his father had ever had, and several other tribulations which crescendoed on the winds of his father’s booming voice to the punchline that the ruins had mostly been sent to an academy’s antiquarian for study.

  “How was the borscht at the sledge stop?” Ivan asked.

  “Bad…”

  Ivan chuckled again. “So I have heard!”

  His brother gazed at him. “Ivan…”

  “Well! We’ll ask him about another,” Ivan said. “Why don’t you ask him one, eh? Don’t let me have all the fun!”

  Peter’s jaw clenched. Neither he nor Ivan wanted to admit what they knew was true. What they knew beforehand would be true: That this was a pitiful farce.

  “Father…” Peter said. “Could you tell us about— about what you hoped for the future?”