“We don’t have time for that,” I said, although hunger gnawed away at my guts.

“Toma, you look like you’re going to collapse.” He tucked an errant curl behind my ear, his fingers lingering on my cheek. “Twenty minutes, that’s all I ask.”

“But Mikhail and Galina—”

“You won’t be able to help them if you’re too weak to stand.”

“All right.” Sighing in defeat, I placed my hand over his, drew his knuckles to my lips, kissed them. His skin was soft and warm. I tried not to think about how, just hours ago, I had picked this hand from the dirt. How still it was. How cold.

There must also be parts of him that hadn’t been there before. There was river water flowing through his veins and rusalka hair entangled in his guts. He had once said that he felt drawn to the Vesna River—and now she was inside of him forever.

As if sensing my thoughts, Vanya pulled his hand away and tucked it against his stomach, hiding the embroidery with the folds of his greatcoat. His smile was strained, like it might crack at any moment. Something told me that he needed this even more than me.

“Just rest,” he said quietly, and turned away.

While Vanya picked berries, I sat down in the grass and leaned against the well, the stones blissfully cool against my back. The moment I relaxed my tensed muscles, I became aware of a dozen aches and pains. My feet throbbed so badly that I didn’t have to take off my boots to know that blisters covered my tortured soles.

Vanya gathered the berries in the hem of his coat and returned to me with several handfuls. When he tried to sit, one leg nearly collapsed beneath him. I reached for him with a low cry, but he shook his head and said, “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

The stitches necklacing his throat were gummed with blood and worse, and I was afraid to look at them for too long, as if to acknowledge them might cause them to bleed anew. Whatever thread of magic I had used to bind his soul to this world, it was fragile, and I didn’t know how long it would last.

Even the undead could die again, and it scared me to wonder if in bringing him back to this world, I might have deprived him of eternity in the world to come. But perhaps his killers had already done that when they had discarded his body in the water, and that whatever feral power flourished within those patches of wilderness—the forest, the swamplands, the potter’s field—it had gone into him and cut him off from the divine forever.

But in the end, maybe the Unclean Force and the divine were two sides of the same coin. Maybe it was by the divine’s will that the dead were brought back in order to finish what they had been unable to complete, or so that they may have a second chance at the life they had lost.