“He’s coming for us,” I heard suddenly in a barely audible whisper from the hollow tree. I took a step closer and leaned down towards Erasmus’s back. The illusion of the world around me was complete—I even caught a faint smell of sweat and fear coming from the boy. “The Executioner’s coming to make you talk, the Executioner’s coming to make you keep quiet . . .”

Yes, that was right. They used to call him the Executioner then.

“The Executioner needs blood, the Executioner needs flesh . . .” Erasmus muttered. “The Executioner will drink the blood, the Executioner will eat the flesh, the Executioner will take the soul . . . Not enough, not enough, not enough blood, flesh, souls . . . Never enough, never enough, never enough . . . the Executioner is falling asleep . . .”

That night, separated from me by an abyss of time, was warm. But I was shivering violently.

He was saying almost the same thing as Kesha!

Only in different words . . . the words of his own time . . .

“The Executioner will come, the Executioner will never stop, the Executioner doesn’t sleep, the Executioner is ready for work . . . Only a maiden, born through deception, the daughter of a Great Enchantress who has rejected her Power, the daughter of a Great Magician who has taken Power that is not his own, only a girl, a girl will be able to kill the Executioner . . . the girl Elpis, the daughter of deception, the girl Elpis, the Executioner’s sister . . .”

Feeling as if I was about to black out, I noted that Erasmus had received a good classical education. In Greek, Elpis means the same as Nadezhda means in Russian: Hope.

I had to leave. Turn away. Plug my ears. Not listen.

But I couldn’t do it.

And what good would it do anyway, when my daughter Nadya, the boy-Prophet Kesha, and the old witch Arina were there, like disembodied shadows beside me, listening to Erasmus’s mutterings?

But not a single human being . . .

“The Executioner is all the Power of the world,” Erasmus continued, making his confession to the tree. “The Executioner is all the magic of the world. The girl can kill the Executioner. The girl can kill magic. Kill the Executioner and you kill magic! Kill the Executioner and you kill magic . . .”

But no, after all there was nothing really terrible happening. It was the same prophecy. The same one that Kesha had spoken. It hadn’t frightened the Tiger, so what was the meaning of this situation?

It was a preamble.

An introduction.

A harbinger of the real prophecy.

I flung my hands up and covered my ears. But the world around me was only an illusion, living according to its own laws, and I carried on hearing everything.

First—Zabulon’s despairing cry. And then his strangled howl: “Mercy! I will leave, Executioner! Spare me!”