“What’s wrong with the women’s bath?” Mikhail asked, still pressing his drenched towel over his lap. He had left his bandages on, and the lowest fold of gauze drooped in the water. I could just barely make out my crimson embroidery against his chest’s mottled bruising.

“There’s nothing wrong with the bath.” I flushed, embarrassed to even say it. “All right, the girls there laughed at me. And one said, ‘Tza slovanakh.’ What does that even mean?”

Slowly, Vanya turned back around, staring down at the water. “Um, that you smell a little...ripe.”

My mouth twitched as I recalled the other girl’s neigh. So, it meant that not only did I stink, but that I stank like a horse. Lovely.

“But don’t worry,” Vanya added quickly, glancing up just for a moment. “We all do after two days on the road. I mean, even Tsarushka here isn’t exactly pissing perfume.”

Mikhail shot him a disgruntled look.

I sighed. “You’re not helping. You’re supposed to say something nice, like tell me I don’t smell like horses.”

“All right, how about this?” Although a blush lingered on his cheeks, Vanya smiled easily as he lifted his gaze from the water. “You have beautiful hair. It’s dark in the shadows, but when the sunlight catches it just right, it glows like embers. And you can tell from your eyes that you’re kind. And your skin...”

As Vanya’s gaze lowered from my face, his smile faltered.

Across the pool, Mikhail stared at me, looking stricken. “Toma, what...”

I stared down at the parts of me the flax cloth failed to hide, and all in a brutal instant, I saw myself through their eyes—the old burn scar encircling my upper arm like a grasping hand; the pale, raised scars scoured across my limbs from years of hunting prey through thickets and thornbushes; fresh scabs, and a patina of bruises atop older bruises, and the livid suckling of ticks and leeches.

Vanya cleared his throat. “Your skin—”

“It’s not bad, truly it’s not bad,” Mikhail added, but I was already turning away.

I didn’t want to hear the lies they were going to say. I didn’t want Vanya to tell me that my skin was beautiful, when he had not a blemish to mark his own ivory complexion, as if all the harm the world poured out on him did not linger.

As I rose from the ledge, warm fingers locked around my wrist. I looked back.

“Your skin shows just how strong you are, Toma,” Vanya finished, smiling at me sadly. “It shows that you survived.”

19

Long after we had left Kraylesa behind us, I lingered over Vanya’s words. He and Mikhail might not see it the same way, but if scars were proof of one’s survival, then so was monstrosity. And there was beauty and power to be found in that—becoming something different, something not just capable of surviving the agony that took you from this world but paying it back threefold.

As our shadows lengthened across the cobblestone road, the first glint of Detskaya appeared in the valley below—a soot-stained sprawl of rising stone towers and temples crested with slate-shingled onion domes, with the Vesna River coiled along its length like a black eel.