"Grandma's joking," I said, and thumped myself on the chest. "We do have a real man here, and he'll paint the fence. If necessary, he'll paint all the fences in the village."

"A real man," Nadka repeated and laughed.

I buried my face in her fine hair and blew. Nadiushka started giggling and kicking out at the same time. I winked at Svetlana as she came out of the house and lowered my daughter to the ground.

"Run to mommy."

"No, better go to grandma," said Svetlana, sweeping Nadya up in her arms. "For a drink of milk."

"I don't want milk."

"You have to," Svetlana retorted.

And Nadiushka didn't argue anymore. She set off meekly to the kitchen. Even ordinary human mothers and children have a strange, unspoken understanding with each other. So what could you expect from our family? Nadya could sense perfectly well when she could play up, and when it wasn't even worth trying.

"What did Gesar say?" Svetlana asked, sitting down beside me. The hammock started to sway.

"He gave me a choice. I can look for the witch on my own, or I can call in help. Will you help me decide?"

"Take a look at the future for you?" Svetlana asked.

"Uh huh."

Svetlana closed her eyes and lay back in the hammock. I pulled up her legs and put them across my knees. From the outside it looked perfectly idyllic. An attractive woman lying in a hammock, resting. Her husband sitting beside her, playfully stoking her thigh…

I can look into the future too, but not nearly as well as Svetlana. It's not my specialty. It would have taken me a lot longer to do it, and my forecast would have been unreliable…

Svetlana opened her eyes and looked at me.

"Well?" I asked impatiently.

"Don't stop, keep stroking," she said with a smile. "You're in the clear. I don't see any danger at all."

"The witch is evidently weary of her evildoing," I chuckled. "All right, then. I'll issue her a verbal warning for not being registered."

"It's her library that bothers me," Svetlana confessed. "Why would she hide away in the middle of nowhere, with books like that?"

"Maybe she just doesn't like the city," I suggested. "She needs the forest, fresh air…"

"Then why just outside Moscow? She should go away to Siberia, where the environment's less polluted and the rarest herbs grow. Or to the Far East."

"She's local," I laughed. "A patriot of her own little homeland."

"Something's not right," Svetlana said peevishly. "I still can't get over that business with Gesar… and then suddenly this witch."

"What's so strange about the Gesar business?" I asked with a shrug. "He wanted to make his son into a Light One. And I for one don't blame him. Imagine how guilty he must feel about his son… he thought the child had died…"

Svetlana smiled ironically. "At this moment Nadiushka's sitting on a stool, dangling her legs and saying she wants the skin taken off her milk."

"Well, and…?" I asked, puzzled.

"I can sense where she is and what's happening to her," Svetlana explained. "Because she's my daughter. And I'm not as powerful as Gesar or Olga…"

"They thought the boy had died…" I muttered.

"That could never happen." Svetlana said firmly. "Gesar's not a block of stone-he's got feelings. He would have sensed that the boy was alive. Do you understand? And Olga certainly would. He's her flesh and blood… she couldn't have believed that her child had died. And if they knew he was alive, the rest was straightforward enough. Gesar has the power, and he had it fifty years ago, to turn the entire country upside down in order to find his son."

"You mean they deliberately didn't look for him?" I asked, but Svetlana didn't answer. "Or…"

"Or," Svetlana agreed. "Or the boy really was an ordinary human being. In that case everything fits. In that case they could have believed he was dead and found him entirely by chance."

"Fuaran," I said. "Maybe this witch is somehow connected with what happened at the Assol complex?"

Svetlana shrugged and sighed. "Anton, I want desperately to go into the forest with you, find this kind botanist lady, and subject her to intensive interrogation…"

"But you're not going to," I said.

"No, I'm not. I swore I wouldn't get involved in Night Watch operations."

I understood everything. I shared the resentment Svetlana felt for Gesar. And in any case I preferred not to take Svetlana with me… it wasn't her job to go trailing through the forest looking for witches.

But how much simpler and easier it would have been to work together.

I sighed and stood up.

"Right then, I won't put it off any longer. The heat's eased, so I'll take a stroll in the forest."

"It's almost evening," Svetlana remarked.

"I won't be far away. The kids said the hut was really close."

Svetlana nodded. "All right. Just hang on a minute and I'll make you some sandwiches. And fill a thermos with compote."

While I was waiting for Svetlana, I took a cautious peep into the barn. I almost flipped. Not only had Uncle Kolya taken half the diesel engine apart and laid the pieces out on the floor, he had another local alcoholic, Andryukha or Seryoga, rummaging furiously in the engine beside him. And they were so absorbed in their confrontation with German technology that the "little bottle" softhearted Svetlana had brought for them was still standing there unopened. Kolya was crooning an old folk ditty to himself:

My very best friend and I Worked on a diesel engine…

I tiptoed away from the shed. To hell with the car anyway…

Svetlana outfitted me as if I weren't just going for a walk along the edge of the forest, but about to be parachuted into the middle of the taiga.

Sandwiches in a plastic bag, a thermos of compote, a sturdy penknife, matches, a box of salt, two apples, and a little flashlight.

And she also checked that my cell phone was charged. Bearing in mind the forest's minuscule dimensions, that wasn't a bad idea. In an emergency I could always climb a tree-then the signal would be bound to reach the network.

But it was my idea to take the disk player. And as I strolled toward the forest, I listened to Hibernation of the Beasts:

The medieval city sleeps, the worn-out granite trembles,

The night maintains its silence out of fear of death.

The medieval city sleeps, the dull and washed-out colors

Speak to you like some distant echo-but don't trust it.

In libraries books sleep, storehouses are bloated with barrels,

And geniuses lose their minds on the night watch,

And darkness averages, levels everything: bridges, canals and houses,

Capitols and prisons, all in a single pattern…

I wasn't really expecting to meet the witch that evening. I really ought to have gone in the morning, and with a team. But I wanted really badly to locate the suspect myself.

And to take a look at that book, Fuaran.

I stood at the edge of the forest for a while, looking at the world through the Twilight. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not the slightest trace of magic. Except that in the distance, above our house, there was a bright white glow. A first-level enchantress can be seen from a long way off…

Okay, let's go in deeper.

I raised my shadow from the ground and stepped into the Twilight.

The forest was transformed into an eddying haze, a phantom. Only the very largest of the trees had twins in the Twilight world.

Now, where had the kids come out of the forest?

I found their tracks fairly quickly. A couple of days later the faint line of footprints would already have faded away, but now it was still visible. Children leave clear tracks-they have a lot of power in them. Only pregnant women leave tracks that are clearer.

There were no tracks from the "female botanist." Well, they could have faded already, but it was more likely this witch had been careful not to leave any tracks for a long time.