“Hey, can you help us?” I called, against my better judgment.

Vanya looked around in confusion, noticed who I was talking to, and hid his eyes as if afraid the mavka might enchant him. “Toma, what are you doing? Why are you talking to her?”

“We’re looking for a way inside the castle,” I told the mavka, taking a step closer. “Do you know of a way we can get up there?”

The mavka looked from me to Vanya and then back again. She smiled slyly, as if she knew a secret, and dipped her chin in a slight nod.

“Can you show us, please?” I asked.

She didn’t respond.

Remembering what Vanya had once said about mavki coveting human clothing, I took off my medic’s capelet and held it out to her. She edged forward and took it in both hands, marveling at the wool and brass buttons.

Cradling the garment against herself, she stepped onto the natural path Vanya and I had followed from the roadside. Even when she walked on thorns and stones, her movements were as smooth and agile as those of a stalking lynx.

“I can’t believe it,” Vanya murmured, slowly lowering his hands. “You just let her steal your clothes.”

“Come on,” I said, hurrying after her.

Vanya sighed and followed beside me. “If she tickles me to my second death, I’m blaming you.”

“You wouldn’t be the only one.”

Our conversation faded into tense silence as we pursued the copper-haired mavka through the woods. Moths flitted from the crevice in her back, battering harmlessly against my hands and face.

We wove in and out through the trees. Leaves crunched beneath our boots. She teased me and Vanya every time we lost ground, stopping only long enough for us to catch up, her lips curled in a playful smile.

We reached a creek engorged with rainwater and followed it along. The mavka strode through the shallows, her legs immersed up to her knees. It almost seemed as though she had no feet at all. Bile flooded my mouth as I recoiled at the memory of how Vanya had looked. How his legs had looked.

“Are you all right?” Vanya whispered as I closed my eyes, struggling with the urge to vomit.

“I’m fine,” I choked, forcing myself to open my eyes and look down at his legs.

I told myself the worst was over. I’d never have to see him that way again. Like mine, his scars would never be beautiful, but they would be proof that he had survived.

As I walked, I fumbled through the bag I had taken off the dead soldier’s body. I came across a tobacco tin, dried bundles of monkshood and moss wrapped in wax paper, a small bottle of gun oil, and, aha, matches.

When I lifted my head, the mavka was gone. Confused, I looked around before spotting her waiting for us near a narrow cleft in the hillside. From a distance, it looked like a rock formation or a vein of darker stone, but as we neared, the streak acquired a depth that betrayed it as something more than simple shadow—a cave blocked by an iron grate.