“I don’t think we should stop for a bath, Ivan.” Mikhail tugged at his coat collar, eying the dark windows warily. “Or even a bite to eat.”

I rode up alongside the two. “I have to agree with Mikhail. Washing up can wait until Detskaya. Besides, we still have enough grain left for porridge, and if it comes down to it, I know how to make a delicious roasted squirrel. Let’s just keep riding.”

It wasn’t just the town’s silence that put me on edge. The Holy Tribunal disturbed me, too. There had been a sect in my village. During prayer, they took the seats of honor at the same Troika temple where my great-grandmother had served as priestess—rows of stern-faced men in crimson frocks embroidered upon the shoulders and back with a breaking wheel, the symbol of their devotion to wiping out all evils. I remembered looking up at them during the services from their straight-back chairs on the second-floor balcony, and how they would peer down, cold and distant.

“We’re going to the bathhouse,” Vanya said, his voice oddly flat and off-key. His grip had tightened around the reins, and when he shifted in his saddle to scan the crossroads, I caught it in his eyes—a shadow of dread rising from their emerald depths.

Kraylesa was on the road from Detskaya. Now that we were out of the mountains, it was likely the same route the Otzvuk troops had taken upon fleeing the city, before marching to sow blood in Vanya’s hometown of Kupalo.

A sick nausea grew in my stomach. And if the Holy Tribunal was here...

We crossed a bridge built over a dry canal and found ourselves in a part of Kraylesa still enclosed within a segment of its defensive wall—the narrow two-story structures built precariously into the soot-blackened limestone. The signs propped in windows and hanging over doors were inscribed with Strannitsky’s flowing script, the letters all circles or interlocking lines with flame-shaped terminals.

“Are you really that desperate for pancakes?” I asked in an attempt to make Vanya smile and was about to say more when we entered a market square. At this time of day, the area should have been bustling with life, but the only loiterers aside from the masses of crows were a Strannik couple sitting under the shadow of an ancient oak growing in the square’s center. One slept with an axe resting across his thighs. The other rose as we approached, her short field cloak shifting to reveal a pair of hunting knives strapped to her belt.

Long, dark silhouettes hung from the oak tree’s lower branches. At first, I thought discarded clothes had been strung up to scare away the crows. As we neared, the shapes’ true nature became apparent to me. Soiled black tunics whose goldwork lay tarnished beneath a liver-toned patina of filth and dried blood, naked ankles bound together.

Horrified, I squeezed my eyes shut. The reins nipped into my palms as I clenched down hard, trying to escape from the agonized faces and bulging eyes that assaulted my mind.