“So, we’re supposed to believe that you’re half rusalka?” Mikhail asked sarcastically.

“I’m not telling you to believe anything.” Vanya shrugged. “It’s just a story. If I had to make a guess, I’d say that my mother was probably a girl who lived in a neighboring village. Still, I’ve always felt drawn to the Vesna—” he looked at me, one corner of his mouth lifting in a vague smile “—and it’s nice to think that the things you’ve lost will come back to you.”

“I’ve seen dead rusalki before,” Mikhail said. “They’re not beautiful. They’re grotesque.”

“Well, maybe that’s because they were dead, Tsarushka,” Vanya said bluntly.

Mikhail frowned. “Didn’t I tell you to stop calling me that?”

Vanya cocked his head. “Did you?”

“What about you?” I asked, turning to Mikhail. “Do you have a story to tell?”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t think I’ll be able to top that one.”

“Try,” I said with a smile.

He gave it some thought. “Well, you know the legends about how bogatyri came to be, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I said, recalling the heroic stories I had grown up on, and that for years now, I had retold to Galina. “Many centuries ago, nobody could use powers, and people worshipped different goddesses and gods. When the monsters first appeared, humans weren’t able to defend themselves. They had to build fortresses and walled cities, but even that wasn’t enough. Many people died before the first bogatyri were born into ruling families.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Mikhail said. “After my father died, I inherited the throne, and the imperial archives along with it. I read everything I could get my hands on, including the holy writings of the Oracle of Serebrograd. In her prophecies, she explains that it is our destiny as bogatyri to cleanse this land of the Unclean Force. In the future, a great evil will spread across the land, setting into motion a final war between bogatyri and monsters. During that time, a bogatyr will rise to usher in a new golden age and liberate all of humanity.”

I felt a twinge of disappointment. I had hoped for a story about heroic ventures or castle life, not a tale about the bogatyri’s divine destiny less than a day after seeing their violence and cruelty.

As for the Unclean Force, I was beginning to wonder what exactly Mikhail meant by that. I had heard that phrase used more in the last several days than in the last seven years, and it was beginning to seem vastly more complicated than I had previously thought.

From the scholarly books and religious texts I had salvaged over the years, I knew the Unclean Force was supposed to be the malevolent energy that gave kolduny their powers. Except Mikhail had told me that it was also the power that resurrected the dead, while the militants in Kupalo had accused the Strannik villagers of being carriers of it. Men and women who had been going about their daily lives, shopkeepers, children playing in the shadows of the market stalls. Innocents.