“You mean kill him.”

Vanya smiled dully. “Blood for blood.”

13

As the sun set, Vanya took me through the Old Quarter. Unlike Mikhail, Vanya had a lot to say about everything. He couldn’t take more than twenty steps without pointing out another landmark, bringing up the Old Quarter’s historical past, or telling me about his friends and neighbors. I began to wonder if he loved the sound of his own voice or if he viewed this as a rare opportunity to practice the common tongue instead of Strannitsky.

I liked the sound of his voice, too, but I didn’t want to sightsee when Galina was still out there. Vanya had generously allowed us to spend the night, but every moment I wasn’t actively searching for Galina, I felt trapped in inertia. For Mikhail, I suspected it was much the same—when Vanya and I had left, he had been pacing the room restlessly.

“Didn’t you say that you had something to show me?” I asked, rubbing my arms. “Something about my sister?”

“Don’t you want to see the town?” Vanya frowned, looking a tad offended. He kept his hood raised, and every time we passed another Strannik, he turned his face away, as if a little afraid they might attack him.

“I just want to find Galina.”

“Relax, Toma. You only have control over what you have control over. Look around. Look at the town you helped save.” He gestured toward a tan three-story building with marble cornerstones and a pitched roof of black slate. Climbing ivy ensnared the high walls, red leaves quivering in the breeze. “That’s where Yuriy, the boy we rescued earlier, lives. It was a scary thing, but I think he’ll be okay.”

We turned down an alley and climbed a flight of narrow limestone stairs to the street on the hill above. Vanya stopped on the top step and glowered at the scenery. Steeples and towers cut through the haze of smoke that lingered in the air. On the other side of the river, a ruined limestone castle stooped over Kupalo like a widow in mourning. The mountains that Mikhail and I had crossed the day before were mere shadows past the rise of forested hills.

“The way we’re living now, it’s disgraceful,” Vanya growled. “After we fled the Black Steppe, the nobles welcomed us here. Now we’re living like cattle.”

Papa had grown up in a border town at the Steppe’s edge and had described it to me in detail—an expanse of rolling grasslands ridged with bald mountains. Entire stretches of the Steppe were littered in black glass and molten sand, and of the once-great cities, only centuries-old ruins remained.

When Papa had been alive, nomadic tribes had still occasionally passed through the Steppe, although due to the scarcity of resources, most travelers preferred instead to go by sea or on the winding, southern tributary of the Vesna River. Unlike the empire and its surrounding lands, the primary danger of the Black Steppe wasn’t monsters, but starvation and dehydration. Yet Papa told me that some still believed the burning hadn’t destroyed the undead, but simply trapped them beneath the surface, and that one day they were bound to re-emerge.