“Where were you?” I yanked up my rushnyk to conceal the sheath once more.

“I was waiting there forever. I never thought they’d show, and once they did, you’ll never believe it! It was my friend Ilyushka from Kupalo.”

“Did you get the documents?” Mikhail asked.

Vanya reached into his coat and pulled out several booklets bound in red pebbled leather. “It’s all here, including travel passes to the Kosa interior. Here you go, Kazimir Nikolaevich and Tamara Nikolaevna.”

As Vanya passed me one of the booklets, his fingers brushed against the side of my wrist, just for a moment, but long enough to cause a pleasant shiver to trail down my spine. I would have liked to take his hand and hold it, savor the warmth radiating from beneath his skin—proof that he was alive and human.

As Vanya slipped his own passbook into his dark brown greatcoat’s breast pocket, his gaze lowered to my rushnyk. Ever since we had left the factory, he kept looking at my rushnyk, and I sensed he wanted to talk about it more. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, only that the idea of talking about my past frightened me.

“These look real,” Mikhail said, studying his identification papers as we made our way along the foreshore path.

“That’s because they are,” Vanya said. “They’re made using official seals.”

“How did Inga get these?” I asked.

“Uh, I don’t know, but I had an idea she might know someone who could provide them. My old papers identified me as Strannik, and sometimes that’s enough to get a person killed. Even wealthy Stranniki like Inga Elenovna, and especially now.” His vivid green eyes flickered toward me. “If hostilities against us spiral out of control, it’s good to have a way out.”

Was that what my mother had wanted—a way out? A way to be someone else? She had loved my father deeply. I knew that. I could still remember it. I wondered if that was the reason for it—a love so deep, she had been willing to reshape herself.

On a brick wall ahead, a large poster fluttered in the breeze amid the torn remnants of older fliers. The poster depicted a man in a green greatcoat, breaking the chain of a shackle between his raised hands.

HELP BREAK THE CHAIN OF OPPRESSION! the poster declared in bold letters. NO BOGATYRI, NO TSARS!

I paused. “What’s this about?”

Mikhail’s face darkened. “It’s a Fraktsiya recruitment poster.”

“Who’s the man?”

His jaw tightened, and he hissed out the name as though it were a curse: “Koschei.”

My gaze returned to the poster. The artist had depicted Koschei with his chin raised and his gaze boring down on us, his cropped blond hair brushed back. His face was handsome but in an imposing sort of way, his cheekbones flared and his leonine eyes shadowed beneath the hard shelf of his browbone.

My jaw tightened. So, this was the enemy.

With a scoff of disgust, Mikhail grabbed the edge of the poster and ripped it through the middle. As half of Koschei’s face peeled away from the brick, a water-stained corner of paper was exposed beneath it—the moldering fragments of the same face executed in black and red, his lips peeled back like a dog about to bite. Koschei had been drawn with a cruel touch, his teeth as sharp as any vodyanoy’s, his ears enlarged and pointed, his bulging yellow eyes roving ravenously, and his hair blanched white. Instead of holding a chain, he squatted over a shattered outline of the Kosa Empire, tearing out bleeding chunks of the country, with one gore-drenched hand raised to his mouth as though preparing to feed.