It is 1953. Danton Larionov, son of NKVD major Wolf Larionov, lives in Suzdal, ancient Russia's capital and spiritual center. Its medieval fortresses, monasteries, and nunneries are now an NKVD Gulag. Screams punctuate the night. Woman's Wood, a tract of ancient forest, emanates deathly silence. The rasputitsa, Russia's spring thaw, ejects those buried in mass graves, brings the murdered to the surface, as if rejecting Stalin's victims buried with proper rite and ceremony.
An apparition, the fifteen-year-old goose herder, Ekaterina Soroka, appears on Illian Meadow. The all-powerful sixteen-year-old Danton drives off young hoodlums threatening her to claim, a Soviet droit du seigneur, the beautiful stranger for his own amusement, but she transfixed him with a skazka, a tale. All that spring and summer along the banks of the Kamenka River, he attends to her inexhaustible font of tales.
Stalin dies. The executioners are, executed. The Soviet prince is, laid low. On an autumn day Ekaterina disappears. Danton vows he will seek her if he must search beyond the seventh sea and beyond the seventh kingdom. He joins the Army, an engineer, travels to distant lands, Kiev, Cuba, Laos, in service to the Soviet State, seeking his teller of tales. Then, in a distant forest in a distant land, he discovers not, whom he seeks, but the American executioner, US Army sniper, PFC Richard Belisle.
