“Please.” Galina scrounged through her dress pockets and came out with a handful of faceted barrel-shaped beads. “Look what I found in one of the houses.”

“Is that how you lost your finger? You shouldn’t be digging around in those kinds of places.” I took the beads from her, rolling them around in my palm so they caught the firelight. “These are beautiful, Galechka. They’re so blue, they look just like sapphires.”

She smiled in excitement, revealing teeth like river pearls. “You think they’re sapphires?”

“They could be,” I said, although I doubted sapphires would be so heavily chipped.

“I didn’t know they were blue.”

I felt a twinge of sadness. Did Galina even remember what the color blue looked like? She admired things for their shape and feel, but she’d never know the ring of embroidery around her finger was as crimson as the berries of a guelder rose.

“I want to see if I can find the rest of the necklace, but I don’t want to go alone.” Galina pocketed the beads when I handed them back to her. “It’s scary in there.”

I sighed. I wasn’t looking forward to caving my skull in with a fallen beam, but how could I refuse her? “It’s going to get dark soon. If it stops raining, we can go tomorrow, all right?”

“Oh, fine.” Galina rose to her feet. A draft intruded through the door as she opened it, rustling the bundles of herbs and wild garlic nailed to the rafters. She looked so fragile standing there, framed by the bruised sky and dark tree line, as though the world might swallow her whole. There wasn’t much of her left to give—year by year, more hair fell out in chunks, and just in the last summer, she had started carrying her lost milk-teeth in a sachet I’d sewn myself. It frightened me. Someone as small and delicate as her seemed prone to disappearing.

“Don’t lose anything else!” I called after Galina as she closed the door. If she answered, a resounding thunder blast stole her words.

To fight off the chill, I busied myself by cleaning my supplies in the water basin. Once everything was put away, I added another log to the massive masonry stove that occupied nearly a third of the room. Every night, I cleared the ashes and made sure there was enough wood and tinder. I needed to be careful to keep the fire going. It wasn’t as though I could conjure flames with magic.

Magic was a gift reserved for bogatyri and witches, not someone like me. Thinking back to my childhood among the living, I could recall only a handful of magically endowed individuals, all high-ranking soldiers or nobility. While the heroic bogatyri in Galina’s storybooks were occasionally peasants, in reality the Three Sisters never bestowed their gift on commoners. It was always the duchesses, the earls, the captains, and the commanders who wore the deep-purple epaulets and sashes of the bogatyri. And in the tales, it was them who hunted creatures like my family for their kingdom’s honor.