“You didn’t,” I assured him.

Slowly, his smile faded. His gaze focused on something over my shoulder, and his jaw tightened. Anger flashed in his eyes. “Get out.”

“What?” I whispered.

Vanya reached into the stall’s lower shelf and shifted aside a roll of black cotton. The sunlight gleamed across the barrel of a rifle.

9

“Go now!” Vanya snapped at me, his voice cutting. “What are you just standing there for? You don’t belong here!”

I stepped back, knocking into someone. Turned around. Nothing significant appeared to have changed since my arrival, except there was a tension in the air that hadn’t been there before.

For the first time, I noticed the young men loitering around the fountain and near stalls. Some had their hands in their pockets, and one boy gripped a section of iron pipe partially concealed inside his coat. Their faces were drawn rigid with agitation.

Vanya reached for his rifle but didn’t take it from under the stall. His fingers curled around the edge of the shelf. Where he touched, hairline fissures formed. Buds and leaves threaded from the dead wood.

I froze. He was a bogatyr, but he was a commoner. Only in Galina’s storybooks had I ever heard of a magic-user being born to the peasantry, and always at the blessing of the Three Sisters and to devout Troika families. Could he be a koldun?

At first, I thought the other boys were the source of his worry, then I followed his gaze to the eastern horizon. Black smoke billowed past the rooftops. Not benign wood smoke. Something was burning. Something big.

The whole market seemed to be holding its breath.

The boy smuggling the lead pole walked over and spoke to Vanya in a gruff, hushed voice. It took me a moment to realize they were talking in a different language.

Vanya pulled a square of felt over the buds of new growth stemming from the wood, concealing his magic from the other boy’s view. He eased into his seat and drew the rifle from its hiding space, angling it across his knees.

They glanced my way, and the other boy raised his eyebrows. “Iohna, hayst e Strannikit?”

Vanya shook his head.

“E’nitz Strannikit,” Vanya said with a nod to my rushnyk. “Dreynikit.”

“I need to go,” I said, taking another step away.

“That’s a smart idea,” he said quietly, switching back to Koskiy. “Best if you head across the bridge.”

As I retreated to the edge of the market, searching for Mikhail amid the huddles of anxious townsfolk, a low chanting rose in the direction of the fire, growing steadily louder. Boot heels clattered against the cobblestones.

A woman turned to me and said something. Her words were drowned out as dozens of men stormed into the town square, shouting.

“Get out of our country, you damn kolduny!”

“Punish the filthy traitors! They helped the Fraktsiya kill the Tsar!”

“The Tsar’s blood is on their hands!”

“They carry the Unclean Force!”