'Is that meant to make me feel good?' I asked, trying to keep it lighter than I felt.

'Don't you deserve the best?' she smiled.

I stood up and started to clear the things from the table. Then I noticed her face drain of its colour. I followed her gaze to the replacement wooden sword that I'd been working on, lying half-finished on the desk in the corner of the room.

'What happened to the other one?' she asked.

'Dmitry broke it,' I said.

She sensed my desire not to give her any more detail, and did not ask. 'They must break very easily,' she said simply.

'It's never a problem to make a new one,' I told her.

We spent the following day wandering around the city. It was below freezing and a layer of snow coated the ground – nothing compared with what was to come. We both wore heavy coats to keep warm.

'I hate to see Moscow like this,' said Domnikiia after we had been walking for a little while. 'So devastated – so empty.'

She didn't see it as I did. Although I saw the burnt-out houses and the empty streets, what stood out for me above that was the appearance of growth. Like the first green shoots of spring, it was not obvious, but for those who had eyes to see it, it was ubiquitous and unstoppable. At every turn, someone was repairing some damage to their home or reopening a shop. Even the winter cold could not spoil my optimism. Recovery would take time, but it would inevitably come.

We had come to a churchyard in Kitay Gorod that I knew well.

'This is where we stayed after the fire,' I said to Domnikiia, 'with Boris Mihailovich and his daughter.'

'That reminds me. One of the girls at work knows her.'

'Knows Natalia?'

'Yes, I was going to tell you.'

'Tell me now. Are they all right?'

'Yes, yes. She saw her a few days ago.'

'Have they found somewhere to live?'

'They're sharing with another shoemaker on Ordynsky Lane, in Zamoskvorechye. Shall we go and see them?'

'No,' I replied. 'Not today.'

'You'll tell Dmitry about them, though?'

'Yes, yes.' But I wouldn't tell him straight away.

We said goodbye outside her door in Degtyarny Lane. The square was covered in snow and I couldn't help but be reminded of the scene the first time I had laid eyes on her, just under a year ago. I scooped up a handful of snow and made a snowball, which I hurled across the square at no particular target. She smiled, remembering, and held my hands.

'My saviour,' she said, but then she became more serious. 'How long will you be gone?'

'Two days out there – two days back.'

'You will come back then?'

'Of course I will,' I smiled.

'Straight back?'

'I can't promise that. It depends what happens. But I will be back.'

'And then we can be together for ever?' She smiled wistfully as she spoke, knowing that the dream was unrealizable. My only answer was to kiss her. As I walked away, I looked over my shoulder and saw her watching me all the way to the end of the street.

The following day, at dawn, Dmitry and I mounted our horses and rode south, out of the city. It was not difficult to be reminded of another departure from Moscow, months before, when four of us had set off with our hearts full of optimism that the then twelve Oprichniki with whom we were working would help us to rid Russia of the French invaders.

Now there were only two of us and there were five of them – their losses, as a proportion, marginally greater than ours. If we continued at the same rate, then we would be the victors, but only just – and at what cost to ourselves?

As we rode, we talked.

'So tell me, Dmitry,' I asked him, 'what were you doing after you left Yuryev-Polsky?' It was asked innocently enough, but he knew as well as I that it was a debriefing, if not an interrogation.

'Well, obviously I didn't go to join back up with the army. I skirted round Moscow to the south and then went in to find Pyetr.'

'They're not easy to find if they don't want to be.'

'Pyetr and I had made some other arrangements. The meetings with you were more for show as far as they were concerned.'

'I see.' I had suspected as much. 'But why should they be concerned about us at all?' I asked. It had been puzzling me for some time. Their whole motivation for travelling to Moscow still evaded me.

'You may not accept it, but they genuinely believe in the cause. Zmyeevich does, anyway, and they're all afraid of him,' explained Dmitry. His mood swung, almost sentence by sentence, between self-pity and self-justification.

'They seem to believe more in satisfying their own hunger than in any cause,' I said.

'They're like any soldiers. Like you and me. They like to fight, but they like the idea that they have a just cause to fight for.' I snorted in disagreement. 'Oh, come on, Aleksei,' continued Dmitry. 'Would you be fighting this war if it wasn't for something you believed in? They're the same.'

'They've made it very clear that they are not the same as you and me. For them, killing comes above all things. You can't persuade me that they're just a gang of latter-day Don Quixotes looking for a noble cause for which they can employ their knightly skills. Have you forgotten what we saw in that room?'

'No, I haven't,' said Dmitry, sombrely. 'There are two factions amongst them – Pyetr versus Iuda. The ones I knew before – Ioann, Andrei and Varfolomei – all stuck with Pyetr. Now that there's only Pyetr left, I think he's pretty much fallen in with Iuda.'

'As easily as that?' I asked.

'None of them has the strongest of personalities, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think the self-selecting nature of vampires tends to prevent that. Pyetr was under Zmyeevich's thumb for a while, now he's under Iuda's. I don't suppose seeing his last ally so ably decapitated by you in front of him would have done much for his independence of spirit.'

'And so it was only Iuda who made them turn on innocent Muscovites?'

'I like to think that.' But he had reached the limits of his own credulity. 'I would like to think that,' he added, 'but I don't.' It marked the end of a prolonged transformation in his view of the Oprichniki that had begun back at the house in Moscow where he had first seen the mutilated corpses of his fellow countrymen. Perhaps – I hoped, though I had seen no sign of it – it had started even earlier.

'So, what happened when you met Pyetr?' I asked.

'They had already pretty much worked out that it was you who killed Matfei and Varfolomei. Pyetr explained to me what happened in the fire – when you locked me in.'

'I didn't know you were there,' I said, more apologetically than was really necessary.

'No, I know that – despite the way that Iuda tried to tell it.'

'So Iuda saw the whole thing?'

'Apparently.'

'Apparently?'

'He had already gone by the time I got there. His coffin was empty. He must have hung around to watch.'

That was not the story that Iuda had given me, in the house in Moscow as I stood beside Vadim's rotting corpse. It was interesting that Iuda should choose to lie on so minor a point. Perhaps it was to make me doubt Dmitry. On the other hand, perhaps it was Dmitry who was lying. If I thought that, then clearly Iuda's plan was working.

'Why didn't he help?' I asked.

'It was Ioann. Iuda's position was better without him.'

'So what else did Pyetr say?'

'He said he thought that they could probably let you get away with murdering two of them. It wasn't like with Maks, he said. Maks killing them was treason. With you, it was just instinct.' Or perhaps Maks' instincts were better tuned than mine.

'And you believed him?'

'It was what I wanted to hear,' Dmitry explained with uncharacteristic self-awareness. 'I'd have killed Maks, but I wouldn't have killed you.'