Vanya and I exchanged a look before picking up our guns and hurrying after him.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said, shaking out my damp hair. My body trembled from the cold, and with each step I took, water squelched between my toes. “You just made things worse.”

“I can’t help it, Toma,” Vanya insisted. “When I get scared, my mouth develops a mind of its own.”

By the time we returned to the roadside, Mikhail had wrapped a blanket around himself and was glowering at the ashen remnants of the campfire.

“We’d better get the fire going before I freeze my—” Vanya chuckled awkwardly. “My feet off. Toss me the matchbox from my pack, will you, Tsar?”

“Get it yourself, Ivan,” Mikhail said without looking up. “Or better yet, don’t. If we’re lucky, maybe you’ll freeze your tongue off, too.”

“I’ve got it,” I said. After gathering a few handfuls of dry golden grass to feed the dying embers, I rasped the sharp edge of my flint along my fire-steel’s curved length. Sparks flew onto the tinder, and with a few soft breaths, I coaxed a flame to life.

It made me feel good to be able to do this for them. Vanya and Mikhail weren’t my family like the upyri were, but I felt like I had the potential to hold us together just the same. Or at least keep Vanya and Mikhail from going for each other’s throats.

Vanya returned to the campfire with two more blankets.

“You need to take off your clothes,” I told Mikhail, who was shivering miserably beneath his own blanket.

“Excuse me?” he said in disbelief.

“You’ll never get warm with your wet clothes on,” I explained.

“She has a point,” Vanya said, handing one of the blankets to me.

For a long moment, Mikhail just stared at us. Then he huffed and rose to his feet, retreating behind a nearby tree to change in private. When he returned, he had the blanket wrapped around himself. He cast his drenched clothes over a log by the fire and settled down once more.

My buckskin coat, skirt, and blouse were soaked through entirely. Not to mention my shoes. While Vanya stripped out of his pants and boots beneath his blanket, I found privacy in the bushes and did the same. It was strange, knowing that if I had been among upyri, I wouldn’t have felt the need to hide my body. But there were different rules out here, even this far from civilization.

Across the fire, Mikhail drew the blanket tighter around himself. His hand strayed to his throat, fingers slowly closing and opening, closing and opening.

“Mikhail, did you once have a necklace?” I asked, eating a heel of bread left over from our dinner. The blanket’s voluminous folds of wool enveloped me.

He blinked and looked up. “What?”

I mimicked the motion.

“Good eye.” He gave a small chuckle, running a hand through his dripping hair. “It was a triptych icon of the Three Sisters in gold and niello.”