“Koschei,” he whispered.

Koschei was young. Far younger than I had imagined, younger than my birth mother had been when she died. If he’d fought in the Groznaya War ten years ago, he couldn’t have been any older than us at the time.

At first, nothing happened. Then it was as though the breeze had changed directions, and I felt something pass over me, pass through me.

Beneath my knees, the grass browned. I struggled to my feet despite the boys’ protests and took a trembling step toward the train car. Vanya tried to grab my shoulder and snagged my rushnyk instead, unintentionally pulling it off as I wrenched free of him. Scabs of red rot spread across the toes of my boots in an instant. Before the leather could fall apart entirely, Vanya and Mikhail yanked me back to the shelter of the trees.

Koschei’s head shifted ever so slightly in our direction, his golden-green eyes boring into the underbrush. My breath caught in my throat. Had he seen me?

The bogatyri closer to Koschei didn’t immediately realize what was happening. Not until the Otzvuk commander tried setting him alight, and halfway across the field, the fireball disintegrated into smoke and ashes. The commander himself collapsed to his knees, writhing and screaming. Even from a distance, I could see the way his body distorted—his hair draining of color and his limbs withering into emaciated husks.

Shock and horror swept over me. This was the Unclean Force. This was what it meant to be spoiled, to be cursed—a decay strong enough to tear your power out from within, or cause the body to collapse into bones and sinew, or neutralize the gunpowder in munitions.

“Wait, what about Galina?” I cried as Vanya and Mikhail dragged me deeper into the underbrush. I struggled against them, but by the second, my vision narrowed into a pinhole.

“Galina is already dead, Toma!” Mikhail said sternly. “You’re not.”

Fueled by a sudden burst of strength, I broke free of their grasps and made a dash for the tree line. My legs gave out beneath me after three steps, and the world dissolved into darkness. I never felt myself hit the ground.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I found myself torn between two places at once—a forest ensnared in fog, and then a town high in the mountains, built in the shadow of silver mines. Like the petals of a dying rose, memories peeled free and floated down to me.

I remembered my mother embroidering the rushnyky for the Troika altars, at peace in her sewing. She had always seemed comfortable sitting in the thronelike chairs lining the walls of the sanctuary, surrounded on all sides by frescoes of saintly bogatyri and minor deities.

But every so often on our way home, she would turn down a side street and guide me by the hand down a narrow stairway cut into the mountainside. We’d enter the neighborhood below ours—dark, winding alleys hewn into a precarious cliff overlooking the valley below, either side of us blocked in by tightly-packed shops and houses. She spoke to no one we passed, but she took the streets as though they were familiar to her. And when we arrived at the aspen-shingled Strannik temple perched at the edge of the precipice, she’d peer through the door if it were open—it rarely was—or pause to slip a few coins through the collection slot. She had never explained these rituals to me, except to say that in days like these, everybody needed kindness and charity. At the time, it had seemed no different than why she insisted on teaching me embroidery—not the patterns on Troika rushnyky or northern regional dress, but the symbols singular to the heirloom she had bequeathed me.