“Yes, ma’am. They’re safe in your stable as we speak.” Vanya gestured toward me. “This is my friend, Toma.”

“Is that so?” Inga’s gaze shifted to me. A faint scar snaked down the right side of her face, hooking beneath her angular jawline. I offered her a small smile, and though she didn’t return it, she dipped her chin in acknowledgment.

“How was your journey?” she asked, turning her attention back to Vanya.

“Oh. I’ll tell you all about it, beginning with what we just saw in Kraylesa.” Vanya glanced at me. “But first, may we continue this conversation in Strannitsky, ma’am?”

She nodded.

Vanya sat down in the chair in front of Inga’s desk, folded his hands in his lap, and began speaking in a subdued murmur. At first, his demeanor was calm and polite. But his voice quickly lost its natural inflection, growing in volume and harshness until his words shot out as rapidly as gunfire.

I had thought that he’d exhausted his anger on the road from Kraylesa, but now I realized that it went much deeper. There was so much I didn’t know about him, so much he kept buried even as he remained honest to a fault.

Slowly, Inga’s expression changed. A muscle ticked in one corner of her mouth, and she stopped fiddling with the inkwell to fold her hands on the desk. Her knuckles tightened, blanching white. Once, her pale gaze shifted to me, but in all other instances it remained fixed on a distant point above Vanya’s head.

Even though I couldn’t understand his language, I knew what he was talking about. Second by second, he took a blind step back down that muddy road, retreating into the hanging tree’s shadow.

“You just stood back and did nothing,” Vanya snarled, reverting back to the common tongue as fluidly as he had transitioned to Strannitsky. His fingers grasped onto the chair arms, twigs sprouting from the carved wood, buds bursting into white bloom. “You say you had no choice, but you could have refused to work with the Otzvuk. You could have done something. Instead, you waited, and because of that, the Old Quarter burned. And do you want to know what happened in Kraylesa?”

“Stop,” Inga said quietly as roots grew wormlike from the chair legs, twining down and burying into the exquisite woven rug. “Ivan. Ivan Zoravich. Vanya. Stop.”

“No, you need to hear this. As a Strannik, it is your duty to hear this. You can’t pretend it’s not happening—”

Inga slammed her fist into the desktop, causing the brass lamp to topple over upon the typewriter with the loud ding of a bell. “I said stop!”

Vanya flinched and looked down at his trembling arms, embraced by slim, willowy branches. With a low moan of surprise, he ripped a hand free and tore at the twigs and leaves, exposing splotches of blood where half a dozen sprigs had nipped his skin.

“That chair is nearly two hundred years old,” Inga said flatly, righting her lamp. “It’s hand-carved cherrywood.”