“The tsarytsya is deep in Yotunkheym, far, far from Terytoriya Shvartsval’d.” Lang dropped his voice. “We’re going to keep you safe. You’re going to be fine.”

“Lang, you’re a well-traveled man. You must have heard the stories.” I spoke lightly, but my voice was thin and strained with worry, remembering the epigraph to the tale I’d first read so long ago.

When Baba Yaga locks the door,

Children pass thereby no more.

I gave a sad, weak laugh. “Inside the Imperiya, nowhere is safe.”

12

The next morning, I entered the galley quietly and sat down near the sailors companionably sipping their coffee, grateful for a few moments’ peace.

“Always chicory,” sighed Andersen.

“Pauvre Andersen. La vie est dure!” said the woman beside him, pouting in jest—I’d heard the others call her Jeanne. Her skin was a beautiful light brown, her amber eyes almost catlike, and her accent lilted romantically.

“It’s giving me a headache.” Yasumaro passed a hand over his forehead.

Basile, a thick-muscled sailor with a deep golden-brown complexion and a bushy mustache, raised his eyebrows. “They got the real thing where you’re from?”

Yasumaro shook his head, smile benevolent as the moon. “Nihon, and no. Tea.”

“Chicory is a staple in La Nouvelle-Orléans,” Jeanne said with an elegant shrug. Made from the little blue flowers that traipsed wild alongside the road, it was our standard in Potomac as well.

Basile gave a mischievous wink, mustache twitching. “In New York, we just go ahead and start the day with whiskey. One glass and you don’t notice the city’s smell so much.”

My stomach and my grip around my mug tightened as I wondered, for a moment, if I should be nervous about Basile being from New York—if he was connected, somehow, to Perrault and Alessandra.

But judging by the affronted look Perrault gave Basile as he joined me at the table, ceremonious, folder in hand, he and Basile were from very different sides of the city.

“You cut our meeting short last night,” Perrault said to me superciliously. Jeanne scooted away from him, amber eyes widening a little, making to return to her work.

“I knew you’d find me again.” I turned my mug around and around on the wooden table. “There are only so many of us here.”

“That sort of emotional petulance is intolerable in a public figure, Selah.” Perrault shuffled the pages in the folder, plucking a sheet from their midst and scanning it with a practiced eye. “As a matter of fact, a lot is going to have to change.”

I stared at him. “Like what?”