And falling.
She woke with a roaring headache and a view of five half-shaved men standing over her. Half-shaved wasn’t entirely accurate. One had only a bit of shaving lather on his chin, two had it spread across their entire cheeks and jaws, and the remainder had taken but a swipe or so at their cheeks before they’d been interrupted. All wore uniforms with an unfamiliar badge on their left arms. Nadia squinted so their collar patches would come into better focus. They weren’t officers.
“Are you all right, miss?” The words were Russian, polite enough but not polished.
The warm boots and charcoal-gray riding habit she wore failed to stop the winter chill from seeping through her skin, but the weather was the least of her worries. She needed to find Konstantin.
Then there was the problem of the men. They didn’t look menacing, but Nadia wasn’t so ignorant as to not recognize the extreme vulnerability of her position. She was all alone, far from manor or village, surrounded by five soldiers.
“Miss, can we help you?” The man who spoke had curly brown hair and a face hidden by shaving lather. “Some of the artillery lads were testing one of their pieces. I’m sure they didn’t mean to frighten your horse.”
She ought to have paid better attention. She hadn’t meant to ride into the path of a field gun. Smoke circled skyward to the west—the explosion hadn’t been close enough to harm her, but the fall had left pain gripping her head and each of her limbs. The hatless man with the curly hair waited for her answer, and her governess’s oft-repeated advice about dealing with the unrefined elements of society came to Nadia’s mind: be polite, but display no warmth. Showing fear would make them bolder, so she would have to look brave. From her position in the dirt and snow, she did her best to straighten her shoulders. Movement accelerated the pace of the thumping in her head. “I need my horse.”
The man nodded. “I’ll find it.”
“Plan to ride it again?” Another man asked. He’d almost finished shaving the stubble along his jaw but not the blond mustache, and a bit of shaving lather still dotted his chin.
“Naturally.”
He held a hand out, and she accepted his help back to her feet. She squeezed her eyes shut as her vision swirled. Perhaps staying on the ground would have been wiser.
The blond man grasped her elbow to help her balance. “Perhaps you should sit again. That was a hard fall. I daresay you knocked your head soundly enough to earn a rest.”
“I’m quite all right.” Nadia absolutely would not lounge about with a group of enlisted men. “But I do need my horse.” Would they steal Konstantin? It wouldn’t be the first horse her family had lost to theft, but it would be a long walk back.
“Filip will find it. He’s our best scout.”
“I thank you for your assistance, Mr. . . .”
He tugged at the brim of his cap. “Dalek Pokorný. At your service, miss.”
The others spoke their names as well, far too quickly for her to remember them all, but any questions about their nationality disappeared. “You’re Czechs?” According to Papa, the Czechoslovak Legion was the best fighting unit in the Ukraine. Everyone else was demoralized or torn between old loyalties to the tsar and new loyalties to myriad other factions. The Czechs, on the other hand, were united in their goal to overthrow the Austro-Hungarian Empire they’d once been part of.
Two of the remaining men nodded. The third, a man with fair skin, wavy brown hair, and a cut on his jaw, didn’t. “I’m a Slovak. And I spent a year assisting a doctor in a camp for war prisoners, so I’d be happy to examine your head.”
Nadia lifted a hand to the coiffure below the brim of her riding hat where several smooth strands of hair had escaped the hairpins. The Slovak had undoubtedly picked things up from the doctor in the prison camp the same way she’d learned from the doctors in the Petrograd hospital where she’d volunteered as a nurse, but her injury wasn’t serious. “I’m sure that isn’t necessary. I must be on my way.”
“You’re barely standing straight. How do you expect to ride?” That was the blond one.
Nadia repositioned her feet. He was right—she was in no condition to ride, but if she didn’t return home before Papa, he’d scold her for going out alone, no matter what her intentions had been. She shouldn’t have ventured out, not if the steady ache in her head and the nervous anticipation in her chest were to be believed. “I’ll be missed if I don’t go home at once.”
“Would you like us to see you safely there? These aren’t exactly calm times.” He gestured toward the fields. “You might run into Bolsheviks, and they might mistake you for one of the grand duchesses.”
Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Ukrainian Nationalists, and a dozen other groups harbored resentment toward former Russian aristocracy. Nadia shared a birthday with the Grand Duchess Tatiana, and both were descendants of Peter the Great, but too much Tatar blood flowed in Nadia’s veins for anyone to mistake her for a Romanov. “I doubt anyone would think me a grand duchess. The tsar’s daughters all have brown hair, and I have black.”
“Even so, there are bandits about. And peasants who think revolution means the freedom to rob at will.”
“Which is why I require my horse. He’s quite fast. I thank you for your help, and I apologize for interrupting both your shave and the artillery test.”
The blond, Dalek, if she remembered correctly, motioned behind her. “There’s Filip with your horse.”
She turned. Her bay gelding cooperated with the soldier who held his reins. He’d wiped away his shaving lather since leaving to find her horse, revealing a jawline darkened with thick stubble. She took a few tentative steps toward Konstantin, keeping her head high and her shoulders back. She managed to walk in a straight line, so the fall must not have hurt her too badly. “Thank you for retrieving my horse.”
Filip nodded. “Happy to help, miss. Are you hurt?” His Russian, though accented, flowed easily from his tongue, and his voice had a pleasant timbre.
“I am well, thank you.”
He raised an eyebrow as if he wasn’t sure he believed her. “I imagine the explosion is the reason the horse threw you, but he also has a loose shoe. We have a farrier back at camp who could shoe him for you.”
If she went to their camp, she’d most certainly be late. And though the man had kind honey-colored eyes, she didn’t trust him or his friends. Maybe she was spending too much time with her father lately—it was hard to trust anyone. She scanned Konstantin’s hooves. None of the shoes looked off to her, but she’d never shod a horse before. “Is the horse injured?”
“Not that I could tell, but I’m infantry, not cavalry. That was no small crash.”
“It must have looked worse than it was.”
“If you say so, miss.”
Goodness, he was polite, but something in the twist of his lips suggested he wasn’t convinced. His expression revealed no hostility, and she was stretching the truth, so she wouldn’t hold his skepticism against him. Her head swirled and throbbed, but she was well enough to stay on her horse, assuming nothing else spooked him.
Filip scanned the ground and bent to pick up a rock. A flash of panic churned in her chest, and she took a step back. But he hadn’t picked up the rock to attack her. He took Konstantin’s right front fetlock and pulled it up, balanced the hoof on his knee, and used the rock to pound the horseshoe back into place.
“That should get you home, but I’d recommend seeing a farrier as soon as you can. And I wouldn’t gallop on that shoe, even if you weren’t recovering from a crash.”
Her hand went to the back of her head again. Her hair was no longer flawless but was not disarrayed enough to reveal just how much her head ached. She wondered what they’d seen. Memory of her fall was like smoke. She couldn’t quite grasp it, no matter how hard she tried to hold it.