“You coped. You’re a man, you react differently. If push comes to shove, you can always get drunk and abuse Gesar. But I realized that I would just fly off the handle and run wild, create a real mess . . . And I stopped using magic. Well—apart from at home. I hate ironing the laundry!”

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?” I asked.

“You were busy. You were saving the world.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt unbearably ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“For being a blind, self-satisfied ass. For not seeing . . .”

“You couldn’t have seen anything, I didn’t put up a block. I just stopped using magic.”

I looked into Svetlana’s eyes. Then I glanced at the bedroom door.

“She’s asleep,” said Svetlana.

After that we didn’t need any magic.

In the dead of night I lay in bed, listening to my wife’s breathing and thinking about prophecies.

There were two of them—and something about them didn’t add up . . .

No, there weren’t just two of them. That was my mistake.

There was a third one, too. The prophecy that Svetlana would have a daughter, who would become an Absolute Enchantress. An Other of boundless Power. Someone who could alter the balance of Light and Darkness, change the entire existing order of things.

Somehow I’d almost forgotten about that. But after all, it was a prophecy that had come true. Olga had rewritten Svetlana’s destiny for its sake, and for its sake Gesar had brought us together, intrigued, taken risks, got involved in confrontations with Zabulon and the Inquisition. The stakes were monstrously high—and now suddenly it was all over? Zabulon had resigned himself to defeat?

But that could never happen . . .

So that game wasn’t over yet. It was still going on. The prophecy had been realized: Nadya was an Absolute Enchantress, but the prophecy hadn’t specified what that would lead to.

All right. Let’s hold that fact in our memory, it’s obviously important. Nadya is one of the pieces on the chessboard. Maybe the most important figure—the White Queen.

What was next?

The boy Kesha’s prophecy. Arina already knew it—so the Tiger was after her . . . Or was he? According to the classical theory, the Tiger tried to eliminate the Prophet in order to prevent a prophecy from being pronounced and realized. And that fitted perfectly with what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. When he stormed the Night Watch office, the Tiger had said: “The prophecy must not be heard.”

Right? Right.