I could tell that he was beginning to recover from the shock of his friend’s death, or at least suppress it. Maybe he had a dark place inside him, too. A little hole where he buried all the things that were too painful to think about.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The Fraktsiya. They’re a political group, or at least that’s what they call themselves, but the fact is they’re nothing more than anarchists controlled by a madman named Koschei. They say that power should be transferred from the nobility to the peasantry, in a rule of majority. It sounds good in theory, but when you get down to it, something like that would never work. Not in our country. My family has ruled this empire for centuries, and it has prospered under our guidance. Our dynasty was consecrated by the Three Sisters themselves.”

Sometimes I liked to believe it was the Three’s power that had brought my family back to life, but this raised painful questions. Such as, why hadn’t the Three Sisters shown my birth parents the same mercy? Why did they bless noble families with powers, but never peasantry?

“What do you believe in, Toma?” Mikhail asked, when I didn’t respond. His gaze landed on the dusty corner where an altar to the Three would have hung in a believer’s home. “Are you Strannik?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”

I hesitated. There were holes in my memory, dark spaces where time had gnawed away at my past. How could I even be sure of who I was, when I could no longer recall the name of my town or my birth parents’ voices?

In the end, I supposed it didn’t matter if my family had worshipped the Three Sisters like most of the Kosa Empire, or if they had been Strannik and worshipped the triple-faced goddess Voserka. Whichever entities my family had prayed to, they had forsaken us just the same.

“I don’t remember enough to know for sure,” I said. “But we had an altar to the Three in my home, and I remember the Stranniki who lived in my village. I remember the clothes they wore.”

At one point, this area must have had a significant Strannik population, because even to this day, Galina still uncovered examples of their goldwork from the ruins surrounding us. She showcased the fragments of black silk on the wall by the stove, so that the firelight would glisten across the embroidery. Even the copper threads aged beautifully, and the rare gold and silver examples were remarkable, covered in lush, raised designs meant to resemble flowers and leaves.

I remembered there had been many Stranniki in my hometown too, because they specialized in metalwork and our mines were rich in silver and copper. Base ores were sacred and pure, with iron’s red color representing the lifeblood of the Three and copper’s green verdigris colored by the water of life itself. But it was considered cursed work to tear precious silver and gold ore from the earth’s bosom, and just as heretical to smelt and shape it—work apt to spoil oneself with the Unclean Force—so by royal decree, the Stranniki had labored in both professions.