“They think the monks made liqueur. You know, some monks do that. These monks in Solnechny Strana, not so much.”

“I thought they were coming for the women.”

“Or they want the women,” Aarne murmured.

Hugo’s chest, below layers of wool and cotton, felt an unexpected, untidy chill. “The women, how do you know them?”

“The liqueur, it simply isn’t there. The Bolsheviks don’t know that, or they don’t care. They are savages, completely unlike you or me.” Then Aarne dug into a pocket. “See. Look!”

Hugo recognized the blood-red border, an inch thick, that always graced Bolshevik propaganda. Always a Garamond typeface when it was in English. Peasants, rise up; soldiers, join your true brothers; workers, realize the power that lies in your hands. Wasted on Hugo, who rather enjoyed the lost ages of royal rule, if only for its vast inequalities.

Aarne clapped his hands together and declared he had a fascinating story about the town’s coat of arms, a blazon, the upper part showing God’s hand extending an alb from a cloud; the lower part showing—a badger. Badgers were incredible creatures, Aarne continued, key to the hagiography of St. Barlaam, and Hugo realized Aarne wasn’t answering about the women. He thought about underground streams of water, women dipping scuppernongs into them, women thick and heavy as bread loaves, catching trout in midair, swiping at them as if they were bears. He wondered if he would be killed.

But his feet padded forward in the Shackletons, and when the pathway narrowed, and he had to follow Aarne into the pines, he had tranquilized himself into a low, dull obedience.

It grew darker (“light enough to see your hand before your eyes, but too dark to see the thief who drives the knife into your back”); Hugo was led along switchbacks that folded in on themselves until he could no longer sense what direction he walked in. He tossed the broadside onto the ground, just for the pleasure of littering.

Hours after they’d started, they crested a low hill within view of the crown of another hill, and, tucked between them, half hidden among the trees, turned blue by the rising moon, was a buttressed wall interrupted by odd little arches. The wall was all that was immediately apparent, as if it were the last fortified remnant of a fallen town. But if you looked twice, you might finally notice behind it the shape of a single, low tower with a round roof domed like a grain silo. The wall, the tower, the arches, the entirety of the structure was whitewashed, and seemed to blend into the snow around it. It looked in no way, to Hugo, like a monastery.

“Here is the monastery,” Aarne said.

“What happened to the monks?”

“We should hurry—when the moon rises, well, I don’t need to say. Where is that broadside?”

Hugo patted himself down. “I don’t know.”