Galina sat back in her chair. “I thought nymphs were extinct.”

“So did I.”

“Huh.” Galina contemplated the fact for a moment, then leaned forward again and said, “The girl really isn’t your daughter, then.”

How like his sister to be able to shrug off the existence of a magical creature in order to torment Sergei some more. He grumbled. “Blood determines nothing. Vika is my daughter, no matter what you say.”

“For someone as surly-looking as you, you’re disgustingly soft.”

“It’s better than being surly on both the outside and the inside like someone else in this room.” Sergei reached over and helped himself to Galina’s tea, ignoring her scowl. “I suppose you’ve remained cold and distant from your student, haven’t you? You are so very talented at alienating people.”

“Why would I form an attachment to a half-breed orphan from the steppe?” Galina scoffed. “I trained him because it was my duty to do so, and because I want to see my enchanter demolish yours. I like winning, you know.”

Oh, yes, Sergei knew. Although more accurately, Galina should have said she liked winning against him. It had always been about beating him, beginning when they were small children and she wanted more of their father’s attention. She’d never outgrown her insecurity at being born a girl, even though their parents hadn’t played favorites between them.

“It’s a pity raising Nikolai didn’t stir any maternal instinct in you. It would have been nice if Vika had grown up with a friend in the family to play with.”

Galina plucked her teacup out of Sergei’s hands. “Maternal instinct? Ha! You can’t stir something that doesn’t exist, thank goodness. And as for Vika having a friend, that is ridiculous, and you know it. They are enchanters, Sergei. They were always going to have to fight each other and die. They couldn’t know who the other enchanter was, let alone be friends. Besides, you hate Saint Petersburg and would never have come to visit. I would never have visited you on that godforsaken island, either, because I hate . . . nature.” She glared again at sheets of freezing, tumbling white outside the window.

“You honestly don’t love Nikolai, then? After all those years, you can’t say that even a single beat of your frigid heart belongs to the boy?”

Galina smiled, and her teeth gleamed at the points, as if she filed and polished them to appear that way. Except Sergei knew she’d always looked like that. She had always been a wolf.

“Every beat of my heart belongs to myself, mon frère. You’d do better if you kept yours to yourself, as well. We did our jobs as mentors, and that’s that. No need for us to hurt unnecessarily when one of them dies, but that’s exactly what will happen if you insist on remaining attached to your student.”

Sergei snorted. As if he could so easily discard every memory of Vika—from watching her go from crawling to walking to leaping through trees, from teaching her the alphabet to how to conjure a doll to how to summon rain from a barren sky, from telling her she could grow up to be Imperial Enchanter to finally leading her to her fate at Bolshebnoie Duplo. No, it was impossible to extricate Vika’s life from his; he wouldn’t be who he was now without her.

Sergei plucked a slice of slightly burnt onion bread from the plate on the table. Even this reminded him of Vika, not only because she would have brought him a perfect loaf from Ludmila’s bakery, but also because she would have shared it with him.

“Bread?” he said to Galina, a peace offering, of sorts. Or as close to peace as was possible for siblings in a cramped Siberian cottage.

She waved it away. “You know I don’t eat peasant fare. Besides, why you insist on baking bread yourself when you can simply conjure it, I will never understand.”

He wagged a finger at her. “Food is one thing magic does not do well. You know that. That’s why you hire a cook at home. Although I can’t imagine you in the kitchen, even if it were possible to conjure decent meals.”

“I doubt magic could make bread much worse than what you bake.”

Sergei shrugged, slathered butter on his burnt slice, and crammed the entire thing into his mouth.

“I’m going to die of hypothermia before they finish the Game,” Galina said. “It’s only October, for heaven’s sake. It’s downright indecent for there to be a blizzard in the middle of October.”

Sergei chuckled and opened a book on the medicinal herbs of Siberia. He didn’t mind the snow—he rather liked it, actually, especially when it fell so heavily that one forgot it was composed of individual snowflakes rather than a single blanket of fleece—and he enjoyed how much the blizzard upended his sister.

“A little precipitation never hurt anybody,” he said. “Settle in, dear city girl. It may be a very long winter.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Aizhana rose with the sunset at her back, casting a long, barbed shadow on the dry earth. It had taken her much longer than she’d anticipated to traverse the distance from her grave, but now, finally, she’d reached the cluster of yurts she’d seen shortly upon resurrection. The brown grass snapped and whimpered under her feet.

She clomped her way to the fire pit, her left leg dragging a bit behind her right, for the left foot hadn’t fully reanimated. The women who’d been tending the meat on the spit shrank back. Aizhana recognized a handful of them, their faces the same but for age-cursed wrinkles.

“Where is my child?” she asked Damira, who in her fifties was the eldest of the women.

Damira stared at her with unblinking eyes. Perhaps it was at how Aizhana looked. Her face was skeletal, with yellow-gray skin stretched taut in places and sagging in others. Her hair was missing in patches, and what she did possess hung limp and dirty like decaying fishing nets. Or perhaps it was how Aizhana smelled, as she had been dead for nearly two decades, and simply infusing a decaying body with new energy would not undo that unfortunate fact.

“Wh-what are you?” Damira asked. “What do you want?”

“I want my baby.”

“I don’t know who—”

“You don’t recognize me?” Aizhana bared her yellowed teeth.

“Someone run to the pastures to summon help,” Damira whispered to the other women.