“Just say his name.” Deep inside me, I felt a twinge of excitement. Couldn’t Mikhail see? We were watching the creation of something wonderful. “Maybe we can bring him back, the way Mama did to Papa.”

“I’m not going to—” He was about to say more when Aleksey lunged at him, the bogatyr shockingly fast in spite of his mutilated limbs. Before I even had time to react, he had driven Mikhail to the forest floor, splayed flat across the very soil the boys had bled into the day before.

Any cry Mikhail made was drowned out by the wrenching noises that pushed from Aleksey’s bared teeth—strangled sobs punctuated by guttural gasps and growls that sounded barely human. He was trying to say something. What was he trying to say?

“Aleksey, stop!” I tried to wrench him off Mikhail, but he had the Tsar’s collar in a bone-white grip, the drabcloth already smoldering. Beneath him, Mikhail twisted sideways, his teeth bared in the same pain and grief that contorted Aleksey’s features, as though the same threads I had used to suture Mikhail’s shoulder had irrevocably bound the pair together.

“Long may you reign.” The words left Aleksey’s mouth forcefully and all at once, like he’d had to spit them out with the same desperate strain he’d disgorged the moss and flowers. As Aleksey was about to say more, Mikhail brought his arm up, his fingers locked around a broken pipe snatched from the rubble.

Mouth dry, I reached out. “Mikhail, wait—”

A smatter of cold black blood gushed across my face as Mikhail slammed the rod against the side of Aleksey’s head. Once, twice, until the bogatyr’s grip loosened and he collapsed onto his stomach beside Mikhail.

Lurching to his knees, Mikhail spun the pipe around in his hands. He drove its jagged tip deep into Aleksey’s back, in a motion so fluid it could have only been muscle memory. My stomach turned at the squelch of flesh giving way. As the pipe end tore through to the other side and buried in the soil, Aleksey’s feeble twitching stilled, and the sparks that had smoldered at his fingertips winked out and crusted into white ashes.

Panting, Mikhail sank onto his haunches. Tears rose to his eyes, but even when they overflowed and streaked down his cheeks, he kept his hands unfurled in his lap. Blood gathered like drops of ink in his upturned palms.

“I had to, Toma,” he said distantly, his gaze raised to the cloudy sky. “To leave him this way, spoiled by the Unclean Force, would have severed him from the Three. It would have exiled him to the abyss forever.”

I stared at him, shaken. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the trained and ruthless ease with which Mikhail had handled the broken pipe—he has killed before—or the fact that the two had been close, so close that seconds before the strike, I had watched the pet name Mishka form on the bogatyr’s lips.

We could have brought him back, I thought, biting my inner cheek to keep the words from flooding out.