18

Steam snaked across the bath’s surface like a nest of silver serpents, coiling sinuously and ever moving, before rising to the vaulted ceiling in a humid haze. Kicking back, I soaked up to my neck in the water, resting my back against the pool’s stone border to ease my aching muscles.

For years now, I had drawn my bathwater from the well and heated it on the stove, filling the old copper tub bucket-by-bucket until there was just enough for me to sit in. When I had the fever chills, I’d lay atop the masonry stove or shuffle out to the dilapidated banya raised against our house’s southern wall—a wooden sweat-shack with walls blackened from smoke, so neglected that over the years, its residential bannik had withered into a scraggily-haired husk glowering from beneath the benches, all splintered claws and eroded teeth.

The bathhouse Vanya brought us to was beyond comparison. Housed in a centuries-old building across the street from the Strannik temple, its pipes were fed by the hot water springs that merged downstream with the Vesna. With its steam baths and tearoom, the experience was a luxury fit for royalty next to my typical rituals, and all for just forty grevka a person.

Rolling my shoulders to work out the knots, I leaned my head back and breathed in the steam until it felt as though my lungs themselves were sweating out their impurities. The scents of myrtle grass, birch tar, and amber resin hung in the air, joined by the aroma of crushed pine needles. In the corner, an offering of fresh fir trimmings had been left for the bannik I’d heard muttering from the pall of steam when I’d first entered, his well-oiled claws scratching across the tiles.

I felt a vague guilt knowing that Galina was still out there alone, and I was sitting here soaking blissfully. But Vanya was right—we all needed a bath. When the attendant had plucked my clothes up by her fingertips, dust and dead leaves had sifted to the ground from the garments’ folds. No doubt, we’d be denied entry at Detskaya’s gates for violating the laws of common decency.

As I soaked, I allowed my thoughts to wander, but all I could think about was what we had just witnessed. The hanging tree roused something in my memory, a vague and troubling sense that I had seen the same exact moment before, sometime far in the past. The corpses dangling from the branches, the guards in black waiting to cut them down if they returned, and of course, the Tribunal in their crimson frocks and greatcoats.

Stifled laughter came from nearby. On the verge of drifting off, I cracked open my eyes reluctantly. The only other patrons at this odd hour were two girls my age or slightly older, resting languidly at the bath’s edge with their dark hair spilling across the water like twin oil spills. Both watched me with suppressed smiles.

“Tza slovanakh,” the hazel-eyed one muttered, and my cheeks prickled. Something told me she wasn’t exactly lauding me with compliments.