Two of the bodies hanging from the trees were men, but the other three were women. One girl appeared even younger than we were, her face bloated and purple with gangrene.

Coming to a stop beside me, Mikhail stared up at the corpses, his jaw slack with shock and his eyes dazed.

“Who are they?” he asked, looking from Vanya to me, although neither of us could have given him an answer.

“Kolduny,” the woman said blandly, her accent so thick it took me a moment to recognize the word.

“By whose decree?” Vanya spoke in the common tongue, likely for our benefit.

“Sudrekht.”

“The Holy Tribunal, she says.” Vanya’s lips rose in a mirthless, bitter smile. “Of course. Even in the middle of a civil war, the imperial courts never fail. Very effective system, no?”

Mikhail’s jaw tightened as Vanya looked at him for validation. “I had no part in this,” he hissed. “The Tribunal is under the Ministry of Heritage’s jurisdiction, not the crown’s.”

“Yes, and the upyr rots from the head down.”

It was just a saying, one even my birth mother had used, but it left a sinking weight in my stomach anyway. Under the shadow of the hanging tree, I felt a growing sense of disquiet, as if Vanya had predicted the future soon to come.

“Let’s go,” Mikhail muttered, steering his horse away.

“They are kolduny,” the woman said as the boys turned to leave, her voice rising in defiance, “and our neighbors, and our sisters.”

Her eyes flared as I met them. She knew we were strangers, that we didn’t belong here, but she needed to say this. To leave her mark and remind us of the dead’s.

Vanya rode across the market square and didn’t look back, but I found myself still immobile, gaze lifted to the hanging tree. Sudrekht. The Holy Tribunal. A memory circled around the edge of my consciousness with the slow, malevolent prowl of a lynx—my mother bending over the porcelain washing basin, scrubbing at her hands until a pink cloud spread through the water. She turned around and stared at me, her nostrils flared and urgent breaths pushing from her lungs.

“What are you waiting for?” She seized me by the shoulders. “Don’t just stand there, Tomochka. Get your coat on.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, love. No. Not me.” Tears welled in her eyes, and her grip tightened. Bloodied water dripped down my arms. “Someday, you will understand all that we sacrifice for the ones we love.”

I flinched, stirred back into the present by Mikhail’s voice.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked, looking back from the other end of the courtyard.

“Y-yeah.” I lightly tapped my foot against my horse’s flank, catching up to Mikhail and Vanya.

As we turned down a winding alleyway, I avoided glancing back, unable to shake the conviction that if I looked over my shoulder, one of the women’s swaying bodies would turn slowly, slowly, until those distorted features revealed themselves to be my own.