Yu scratched his head. “Our contacts have confirmed there’s activity under the surface, just as the zŏngtŏng suspected. And arming the Waldleute is strategically the wisest way to help dismantle the Imperiya in Deutschland and the rest of Europe.”

I frowned. “The Waldleute?”

“The rebels. Those who resist the Imperiya.” Homer drew me nearer by my forearm, pointing down at the map. “They call themselves the Waldleute in old Deutschland, the Rusalka in Yotunkheym itself, by other names elsewhere. Lang met with a representative at Bertilak’s court—the Sidhe, they call themselves in that neck of the woods.” He rapped his knuckles on the map, against the word that curved around the southeastern edge of the island.

My heart threw itself against the walls of my chest, slammed to a stop.

I’d wondered idly at the start of our voyage how the word was pronounced, what it meant.

With a jolt, I remembered Lang and Yu conspiring in the corridor our first night in Winchester, whispering about she.

Not “she.” The Sidhe. The woman with the cowslips.

I shut my eyes.

I couldn’t get caught up in this. I had my father and Potomac to worry about.

“People are suffering, Seneschal-elect,” Yu said quietly. His dark, angular eyes were so intent on my face I gritted my teeth.

“I know the tsarytsya is evil!” I burst out. “I’ve been telling you for weeks that I don’t want to go into the Imperiya!”

“You don’t know the half of it, girl.” Homer thumped the gray center of the map and fixed me with his steely gaze. “You haven’t seen it. But I’ve fought at the edge of her world. I’ve seen how she takes power first with spies, and then with armies. No one can trust anyone. She’s swift. Cold. Merciless.”

“She’s closed mosques, temples, and churches,” said Lang, dark eyes entreating me. “But she’s also destroyed libraries from one end of the Imperiya to the other. Made bonfires of books and music.”

“And children are raised apart from their families,” Yu added grimly. “Citizens of the Imperiya have to live in registered villages—anyone caught living outside a town is immediately imprisoned.”

Anya had told me as much. That the tsarytsya claimed Yotunkheym’s children.

I thought of Anya and Fredrik, fleeing to Norge with the gray armies after them.

Of Aleksei, adopted for convenience’s sake, left damaged from his childhood in the Imperiya in a way I didn’t fully understand.

When Baba Yaga locks the door,

Children pass thereby no more.

“There’s only enough space for one story in the Imperiya, Seneschal-elect,” Andersen said softly. “Europe is being strangled. People only want room to breathe. To make their own decisions. To live free.”