“Toma?” Mikhail asked, and I slowly shifted my gaze to his calm, composed features. Even now, he kept up his barricades. Cold. Hardened.

“This close,” I said, showing him the distance between my thumb and index finger. “I was this close to touching her, to saving her. And now I’ll never see her again.”

Mikhail sighed, running a hand through his hair. I could tell he was struggling to find the right consolatory words, and that only made me angrier. He was the one who had gotten me involved in all this. It was his fault Galina was gone. He could at least look at me.

“You can’t give up,” he said at last.

I shook my head. “Don’t you get it? It’s over. She’s gone. We’ve lost.”

My mother had known when to give up. She had relinquished her rushnyk to me before stepping between the trees, because she knew that sometimes we could not win. Sometimes, there were no happy endings.

“That doesn’t sound like the Toma I know,” Vanya said, although with none of his usual lightheartedness.

“Now’s not the time for jokes,” I snapped.

“The Toma I know wouldn’t give up like this.” His green eyes met mine. “She would keep fighting.”

A strangled laugh escaped my throat. “How? The train is gone.”

“We go to Eyry,” Mikhail said, rising to his feet. He drew the rifle sling over his shoulder and offered me a hand. “It can’t be far now, so we continue on foot. We walk all night if we have to. And once we get there, we find Koschei and end this once and for all.”

At the boys’ behest, I rested for twenty minutes until the rain lightened to a miserable drizzle. By the time I convinced them that I was well enough to start walking, I had begun to feel a little more in control. They were right. It wasn’t over. This wasn’t like back then with my mother. There was still time to save Galina.

Rolling my lower lip between my teeth, I followed behind the others. I didn’t want to think about all the things Koschei might do to her. I tried to focus on the forest ahead. One step after another. Dead leaves. A slug. A cloud of gnats.

As we walked, I thought I heard soft laughter. I looked around and spotted a mavka studying us through the trees. She was a different creature than the one who had stalked us when we had first left Vanya’s village. This mavka had straight blond hair instead of wild black curls, and a smatter of freckles stood out against her pale skin. A cloud of blue swallowtail butterflies followed her, flitting in and out of the gaps between her exposed ribs, where cocoons hung like crooked teeth.

She tried to catch our attention by beckoning, then by crooning wordlessly in a crackly voice like the rustling of dead leaves. Vanya hurried on ahead, keeping his eyes directed at the ground at his feet, and she followed close beside him, teasing him. Just as I picked up a rock to scare her off, she disappeared into the trees, giggling all the while.