“He deserves a funeral,” Mikhail said, rising to his feet without looking at Aleksey. “If we were back in the capital, he would be burned with full rites and purified by the royal priestess. I would inter him in the royal sepulcher. He deserves that. A burial at least.”

“I’m sorry.” I swallowed hard. “The soil here is too hard, Mikhail. Even now in autumn, we’ll be carving through ice before we can dig deep enough.”

For a long moment, he didn’t answer. His gaze drifted away from me to the line of blood inching across the soil, and his hand strayed to the blisters Aleksey’s fingers had raised on his throat. “Would you go on ahead, Toma? I’d like a moment to pray for him. Alone.”

“Of course,” I said, retreating to the tree line.

Mikhail uncorked his canteen, knelt down, and washed the rancid blood from Aleksey’s face with a trickle of water.

The rites themselves were unfamiliar to me, but I recalled the offering of grain and salt to the goddesses, the washing with water, the purification by fire. When my paternal great-grandmother had died, as a Troika priestess she had been cremated with full rites, in the red shrouds worn only by the most pious. I remembered her funeral—a silent procession of miners and worshippers who had added wheat sheafs and wooden spindles to her pyre, symbols of the Sisters Kosa and Seredina. The eldest sister, Voyna, was not similarly honored—she was the patron of bogatyri and bogatyri alone, and blood and iron were her tithe.

As my birth mother had watched the smoke rising, she had shaken her head in dismay.

“It shouldn’t be this way,” she murmured to my father, or at least that was how I remembered it. “She shouldn’t be divided. There should be someone to guard her.”

And he had looked at her until she fell silent.

I drove the memories from my head as Mikhail returned to my side. In the time it had taken him to wash Aleksey’s face and hands and sprinkle his body with dried oats and a pinch of salt from our supplies, he had reinforced his barricades. His features were smooth and without emotion.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Please.” He drew in a terse breath. “Don’t even say it.”

Now more than ever, I was aware of the differences between us. It felt like we had come from different worlds, and the only thing we shared was the same language.

“About Aleksey...” I began, but Mikhail shook his head firmly, once.

“What matters is that he died for his country. He died protecting me. For a bogatyr, that is the greatest honor—to devote your blood and soul to your tsar.” His silver eyes chilled over. “Anyway, that thing was not him. It was scarcely even his body.”

To that I had no answer, except to wonder if Mikhail expected me to die for him as well, and if that too would be an honor.

As we moved beyond the glade, I was eager to put the memory of Aleksey’s second death behind me. Something about watching Mikhail tend to the dead in this isolated place felt dangerously close to other memories, half-formed snippets from the before that I could only recall in disjointed fragments—bloody water sluicing down the rim of a washing basin, sheet-covered bodies lined along a rocky stretch, a man on fire and yet still walking.