“Ah, Strannik, this will be interesting to you,” Emre said, picking up a slim black blade. “Made of glass salvaged from the southern steppes. Your homeland, no?”

“Kosa is my homeland,” Vanya said dryly, and Emre chuckled.

“Aren’t we all strangers here?”

As the man continued on, I turned to Vanya. “What was that about?”

“I suppose my accent is a little more obvious than I thought.”

As we followed Emre down the winding aisles, Vanya explained to me that the Stranniki had arrived here many centuries ago from that region, fleeing an event known only as the Great Burning. Before the disaster, they had lived in small tribes strewn along the steppes. Though those communities had long since vanished beneath plains of molten ebony sand and scorched rubble, the refugees of that crisis had brought with them their own language and interpretation of the divine, along with the tools and skill for blacksmithing. With the restrictions imposed by Tsarina Yelena on the crafting of armor and weapons, Stranniki had applied their training to tinkering and jewelry making.

“What caused it?” I asked.

“Some say it was a dragon,” Emre said, smiling our way. “In Yezmirny, we believe it to be the work of what you imperials call a koldun. We won’t even cross through the Steppe. To get to Kosa, we braved the rusalki and traveled upriver.”

Fire to the south, ruin to the north. If the Great Burning had been the work of a koldun, I wondered if the same witch had cursed the wilds.

“But enough about that. The rusalka is waiting.” Emre led us into the next room. It was smaller than the first, only large enough to contain a towering tank of glass and brass, riveted along its sides with bolts as large as my knuckles.

The rusalka treaded water beneath the surface, her long burgundy hair streaming behind her. All of the rusalki I had seen had come bare as the day they’d been born, although they weren’t uninclined to steal the clothes I hung up to dry by the riverside. I had always viewed it as a mischievous sort of game instead of any genuine desire, but this creature seemed to favor her flowing blue gown, which was adorned with seed pearls and silk ribbons. She fingered it as she drifted in the water, smoothing it down in startling modesty.

Her clothing wasn’t the only unusual thing about her. Even under the lamp’s sallow glow, her skin was the rich brown of burlwood, unlike the bloodless tones of the rusalki back home. I supposed that Emre had brought her with him from beyond the Black Steppe, somewhere warmer and sunnier than here.

She couldn’t have been much older than us when she died. A year at most, perhaps less.

Mikhail nudged Vanya in the shoulder. “I think that’s your mom.”

“She’s too young,” Vanya muttered, but his gaze lingered on the tank. “And we look nothing alike.”

“A moment of silence, please.” Emre cleared his throat before continuing in a loftier tone: “Renowned for their beauty as much as their viciousness, the rusalki are rumored to seduce men to their watery graves. However, our friend here is different. She was a fair maiden before her husband grew jealous of the attention doted upon her and drowned her in the river as she was collecting flowers. Ever since then, she has been searching for the love she was denied in life.”