Somewhere deeper in the castle, a wall or ceiling crashed down with an ear-shattering roar. Surely, the Otzvuk intended to bring the fortress to the ground.

We reached the stairs and took them painstakingly slow. I wished I was strong enough to carry Mikhail. Every second we delayed meant another second closer to Koschei catching up to us or the castle’s destruction. If the Otzvuk swarmed this place, they wouldn’t waste time trying to differentiate civilians from soldiers. Nor would they recognize Mikhail, in his current state, for the tsar he had once been.

“Just leave me,” Mikhail mumbled, his gray eyes as bleak and desolate as urns of ashes.

“I’m not leaving you! You never abandon the people you care about.”

As we reached the bottom step, a door banged open high above.

“Tsar, are you really going to try this again?” Koschei’s voice was hoarse with pain, and even so, it resounded through me with all the power of an artillery blast. “You’ve left a trail for me to follow.”

I swore, looking down. Blood dripped down Mikhail’s side from his soiled bandages, leaving a smatter in our wake.

“I thought that simply taking your powers would be enough to neuter you, but perhaps I was mistaken.” Though his footsteps rang high above, his voice seemed to come from somewhere intimately close, as though he murmured it a mere hair’s breadth away from my ear. “Instead of a bargaining chip, you have become a thorn in my side.”

At the bottom of the stairs, I ducked through the second door I came across, entering a round ballroom whose center was encircled by marble statues on malachite pedestals—larger-than-life depictions of the Three Sisters and the Empire’s founding bogatyri. Shafts of moonlight illuminated their faultless white faces, blind eyes boring down at me as I passed, as though to condemn us.

Mikhail and I split ways, each going down another side of the circle. At the other end of the room, we found ourselves at a solid wall. No way out. Cursing myself for not cutting off Koschei’s head while I had the chance, or at least taking his sword, I scanned the room for another weapon.

My gaze landed on the statue of Voyna. She held a gold balance scale aloft in one hand, and a sovnya in the other. The polearm’s curved blade gleamed lethally in the lingering glow of another artillery blast.

I clambered onto the statue’s plinth and pried the sovnya from her hand. She relinquished the polearm with ease—it was a genuine weapon, the edge sharp to the touch. As I jumped down from the pedestal, the door crashed open behind us. I sank to a crouch, my back against the cold malachite.

“On the train, Toma, I told you that with every death comes an echo,” Koschei said, stepping deeper into the room. His call rippled across the hall’s grand expanse and rising columns, until his voice seemed to come at me from all sides. As for his footsteps, I could barely hear them over my pounding heartbeat and the blood rushing through my ears. “I wonder what sort of echo your death will produce, girl.”