She frowned when she remembered the pigeon they managed to trap in the frantic scattering of other birds and the heavy thud of the crate, how the bird flapped against the wooden slats of its prison, almost lifting the crate off the ground. The crate hopped on the pungent heated asphalt if the yard as if possessed, and they laughed guiltily, and hurried to examine their prisoner. It was an average enough pigeon, gray under most circumstances but blooming with greens and purples, like an oil slick on a puddle, when the sun rays struck its feathers at the proper angle. Masha seemed pleased and stroked the bird. “Its heart is beating so hard,” she said. “I can feel it jumping on my fingers."

It was then that Galina noticed that the bird was not quite right-its feet, clawed and leathery and reptilian, seemed bigger than they were supposed to be, a swollen purple in color.

Masha noticed too, and gasped. “Look,” she said, and pointed at a dirty bit of thin string dangling from one of the pigeon's feet, and cried. Galina tried not to cry too when she realized that someone-probably the boys who terrorized the local stray cats and spent most of their time playing in the concrete pipes of the nearby construction site-had trapped this bird before, bound it with string and flown it like a kite. The string was tied too tight and cut off the circulation in the bird's feet-this is why it was so easy to trap the second time.

Galina wiped Masha's tears and led her home, the poor bird still nestled in her hands, not fighting its capture anymore. The bird with the swollen feet lying passively in the five-year-old's open palms stood clear in her mind, as perfect an image of defeat as she could wish for. They tried to remove the string, but the swelling was too great-the scaly skin bunched over it, and the pigeon trembled every time they touched its injured feet. Soon, it couldn't stand, and they took the bus to the vet clinic. The pigeon died on the bus and they saw no point in getting off but traveled to the final stop and waited for the bus to turn around and take them back home. They buried the pigeon in the remaining orchard patch, and never tried to trap another one again.

The bird on the sill hopped onto the floor of the corridor, hesitant, studying Galina and the crumbled fruitcake with one eye, then the other.

"Just be still,” Galina whispered to Yakov. “Please, I beg you, be still."

He didn't answer but stopped his pacing. Galina couldn't see his face, but she imagined he watched the bird's reluctant progress and frequent backtracking with the same intensity as she.

The bird pecked at the crumbs tentatively, glancing sideways at Galina's hand resting on the floor palm up.

"It's all right,” Galina whispered. “Go ahead, eat."

The bird did, its neck bobbing with each peck. Its crop swelled with fruitcake, and the bird appeared thoroughly absorbed in its dinner. Galina moved her hand, centimeter by centimeter, until it almost touched the bird's foot. The bird stopped pecking and studied the hand that again came to rest on the floor.

Galina chewed her lips, feeling the dry skin peel under her teeth, giving way to tender flesh and pungent wet blood. “Don't move,” she whispered, “be still."

The bird hesitated, and Galina lunged. She hit her head on the metal bars of the door-she had forgotten they were there, and the impact made her cringe with pain. Her hand grasped at the bird and brushed against the wing just as the startled bird took flight, avoiding capture without much effort. It disappeared through the embrasure of the window at the end of the hallway, and still Galina grasped at empty air, her overextended arm aching in its socket, creaking at the elbow. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"It's gone,” Yakov said. “Don't feel bad-you almost got it."

"Almost is never good enough,” she whispered. That's what her mother used to say anyway.

"What would you have done with that bird?” Yakov said. “Think about it-if Likho can talk to the birds, it doesn't mean you can do the same."

"We have to try,” she said. “What, you want to rot here?"

Yakov opened his mouth to answer but a flapping of wings interrupted them. A fat white rook squeezed through the window and half-fell, half-fluttered to the floor. In short hops it approached the cell.

"Finally,” it said. “It took me forever to find you."

"Sergey!” Galina picked the bird up and cradled it, resisting the urge to give it a kiss. “How'd you find us? Why did they let you go?"

"I played dumb,” the rook said, and even its high-pitched bird voice couldn't hide its self-satisfaction. “They didn't think I was important enough to chase-they were talking to Zemun and Koschey."

"What about Timur-Bey?” Galina asked.

"Him? I don't know. He's human, so they probably put him somewhere to get to his luck, if he has any left after all these years underground.” Sergey chuckled, pleased with his wit. “So I went to look for you, but you'll never believe what else I found."

Sergey couldn't fly, since his clipped wings were useful enough to buffer a fall but too short and ragged to support real flight. He hopped and fluttered his way out of the barn and into the first-story window of the palace; there, he traveled from one room to the next. He found many birds and a few more soldiers, some of them French. All of them paid him no mind and he soon discovered why-albino birds perched on windowsills, mingling with black-feathered newcomers, and pecked at the fruit in the tree branches outside. Sergey still found it strange to think of himself as a bird, but he had to admit that in this case it was handy, a perfect disguise. He hopped across the hardwood floors and hand-woven runners striped in red, yellow and blue; he flitted awkwardly up onto the sills and out to the balconies, hopped up the winding staircases, lost direction in the endless corridors and galleries of empty rooms inhabited only by dust bunnies. He stopped caring after a while if he came into the same room as before, and wasn't particularly sure if he was moving up or down.

He didn't remember how he arrived at the entrance of one of the seven towers; he only knew that he had to crane his neck to see the next turn of the wide staircase that swept up and to the left, its steps stacked at a slight angle so that it took them a whole floor to turn all the way around. He hopped upwards, thinking that only a really tall tower would have a staircase with such slow turns. He spiraled upwards, occasionally zoning out and thinking that he was still guarding a silo, still in his human form, and that his corporal had sent him to fetch something from the storage facility. Then he came to and saw that the sun was setting, and then it rose again-funny things happened to time on that staircase.

It was then that he heard the singing. The voice sounded small and ragged, and stopped often to gulp air in large noisy swallows, and resumed again, trembling, weak and uncertain. At first, he imagined a child, a sick child perhaps, a little boy with asthma who passed the time in his sickbed by pretending to be in a church choir. Then another voice joined the first, and a feeble duet echoed in the stairwell. The third attempted to sing but coughed, wailed and dissolved into sobs before falling quiet again.

Sergey hurried up the stairs. The voices didn't sound like Likho or its soldiers, and he decided that there were prisoners. They didn't sound like Zemun or Koschey, or even Galina for that matter, but he hurried, hoping to find out who it was that sang so piteously.

At the top of the staircase there was a single door with a narrow slot at the bottom. Sergey squeezed through the opening with some effort; his biggest worry was to encounter a cat or to be forcibly ejected by the inhabitants, but he did not expect to feel such fierce pity and anger.