“Yes. They’re Koschei’s men.” Mikhail hesitated. “I need to know... There was a boy my age with me. My...friend. Aleksey. He pretended to be a Fraktsiya soldier and helped me escape. Is he... Did he...”

“I’m sorry.” I looked down at my feet. “He died saving us. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

A low, anguished moan tore from Mikhail’s lips as though I had shot him myself. The hand he pressed over his mouth failed to suppress the miserable noise, nor did it hide the way his features contorted as he struggled to regain his composure. Pain darkened his gaze, and then he closed his eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly that wrinkles formed between his brows.

“I...I see.” He spat out the words as if they were as heavy as bullets, like he wanted to force them out and be rid of them.

“He didn’t suffer,” I said softly.

When Mikhail didn’t answer, I walked over to the window and peered through the cracks between the boards. It was pouring even harder now, and the droplets splattered against the glass as a grainy, half-frozen sleet.

I gauged Mikhail’s emotional state before I spoke next. Although his eyes were glazed with unshed tears, the creases in his brow had smoothed out, and his hands were unfurled across the blanket. When his eyes met mine, a stir of surprise passed through me. His gaze blazed with fury.

“If you’re the Tsar, why did they try to kill you?” I asked.

He answered my question with one of his own, his voice curt. “You sound like you’re from the Kosa interior, so what are you doing in the Edge? Where’s your family?”

I took a deep breath. If I tried hard to remember, I could conjure my birth parents’ faces in my mind. But each year my memories of them grew fainter, and that haunted me.

The Edge was the name for the Kosa Empire’s westernmost territory, which centuries ago had been a separate kingdom. Centuries of imperialism had stolen the different territories’ individual languages, but the accents were unique enough that Papa, who had grown up in a border town along the Black Steppe, sounded different than Mama, who had come from a town in the Edge’s verdant south.

“You’re right, I’m not from the Edge,” I said. “My father died in a mining accident when I was just a child, and my mother and I... We were traveling. She said we were on our way to a faraway place, and then...”

Something terrible happened.

“...I lost her. I think I was ten or so. It was after the war.”

“The war with Groznaya?”

I nodded. “About a year after.”

“Seven years...” His voice was soft with awe. “You’ve been out here for seven years?”

The way he said it made my skin prickle uncomfortably. He made it sound like far too long.

“What about you?” I rested against the windowsill. “Shouldn’t you be in your palace?”

“It’s not my palace anymore.” Mikhail gave a cold laugh. “It’s been stolen by a bunch of barbarians who don’t know the first thing about governing an empire.”