‘So do I,’ said Miska, coming forward and taking her hand.
Tears pricked Katarin’s eyes at the comfort she took in the innocent compassion of a child and the realisation of how close she had come to abandoning all she held dear.
‘It’s like all the sadness and pain in the world isn’t there, as if it never happened,’ continued Miska. ‘But it did happen, and when the sun rises it’s going to be worse than it was yesterday.’
‘I know,’ said Katarin as a wave of guilt surged hot in her chest. ‘And it’s all my fault. I was entrusted with Kislev’s protection and I failed.’
‘I think you only fail if you don’t try,’ said Miska. ‘Whether we live or die is of no matter.’
Katarin knelt beside Miska and ran a hand through her wild hair. The girl was clearly of Gospodar ancestry, and her eyes matched her own. She wore a silver chain with a blue stone wrapped in silver wire around her neck. Katarin saw something of herself in Miska’s steely determination.
‘That’s a pretty pendant,’ said Katarin, lifting the stone and rubbing her thumb across its smooth surface.
‘Mistress Valencik wanted me to have it,’ said Miska.
Katarin sensed something unsaid in the girl’s answer.
‘Then you are very lucky indeed,’ said Katarin. ‘This is an elven cynath jewel. I wonder how Sofia came to own it.’
‘I don’t know.’ Miska smiled, and its warmth was a ray of sunlight after a storm, a breath of life when hope failed.
Katarin took a deep breath, letting the frozen chill that lay at the heart of Kislev fill her lungs and spread through her flesh.
‘I think you and I should go back,’ she said.
‘Will your warriors be angry you came up here alone?’ asked Miska, nodding towards the wall of ice being steadily demolished by kossar axes.
‘I expect so,’ said Katarin, ‘but they love me and they will forgive me.’
Morning brought an end to the unseasonal rains and the sun dried the earth hard, making it ideal terrain for the Kislevite horses. Though nothing else had changed, this fact alone lifted the spirits of the Tzarina’s riders.
Sofia was exhausted. After doing what little she could to restore the Ice Queen, she and Ryurik had spent the night passing through the camp. She tended injured warriors until her supplies ran out while he recorded the words of those who would not live to see the dawn.
Miska was asleep by the smouldering remains of the fire by the time they returned, but she stirred as Kurt threw his heavy saddle onto the gelding’s back.
‘Gather your things,’ said Kurt, bending to tighten the girth before hanging his scabbard from the horn. ‘We are leaving.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Ryurik.
‘West,’ said Kurt. ‘To Erengrad.’
Once again Sofia and Miska rode with Kurt on Pavel’s enormous back. Sunlight lifted the human spirit like little else, and she heard faint hopes that Dhaz now favoured them.
They rode in the lancer krug surrounding the Tzarina, who had decreed – for reasons known only to herself – that Miska was now an honorary hearth-maiden. This pleased the young girl immensely, and her proud smile illuminated all who saw it.
The Tzarina’s frost-sheened horse had died in battle before the walls of Kislev, and she now rode a roan mare that was slowly becoming dappled grey. Sofia had no doubt it would be purest white by the time they reached the coast.
Just over a thousand men, women and children followed the course of the Lynsk as it flowed westwards. Fell stormclouds pursued them as they rode into the sunset for five days. The hope that sunlight had brought turned slowly to shadow as each dawn brought more vistas of utter devastation, a land brutalised beyond endurance: burned villages where carrion birds circled in flocks thicker than any had seen, roads lined by corpses impaled on barbed lances.
Howling steppe wolves picked at the bodies of those who had fled the destruction of their homes, bold where once they would have feared the dwelling places of men.
Worst of all were the many hideous flesh-totems the northmen had left in their wake, idols to Dark Gods wrought from corpses threaded into the wiry branches of black trees that grew where no tree should grow. Lifeless limbs writhed with piteous motion and fleshless skulls muttered dark curses on any who came near. Hung with brazen icons of the northmen’s gods, the blood-nourished trees squirmed in the earth and men’s hearts despaired at the sight of these grotesque obelisks.
Ryurik spent the journey filling his book with soldiers’ memories and the deeds of their forefathers. A wealth of oral tradition unknown to anyone beyond Kislev’s borders was laid down in his book of living history.
‘They understand it’s the only way anyone will ever know of them,’ said Miska one night when Ryurik marvelled at the newfound willingness of the warriors to speak to him.
The dawn of the sixth day brought ocean scent from the Sea of Claws and gave Sofia hope they might reach Erengrad without attack. As the light faded on another day’s ride, they made camp in the rising haunches of Kislev’s coastal marches, finding shelter in a soaring ice-canyon of a great waterfall.
Hateful winds surged from the Northern Wastes, but the Tzarina’s warriors kept them at bay in a krug around a towering bonfire that burned with a wild and exuberant light.
Sofia sat next to Kurt, with Miska dozing across her lap. Beside her, Ryurik scribbled noteworthy turns of phrase and deeds in his book, a book that was rapidly filling with all manner of colourful tales of Kislev’s last days.
Across the fire, the Tzarina listened to the boyarin swap easy banter, good-natured insults and ludicrously exaggerated boasts with an indulgent smile.
‘I should not put much stock in these tales, Master Tsarev,’ said the Tzarina. ‘Perhaps one word in ten will be truth.’
‘Still better than most history books,’ roared Wrodzik.
‘You can read?’ demanded Tey-Muraz. ‘Next you’ll be telling me your horse can play the tambor.’
‘I read about as well as you ride,’ admitted Wrodzik.
‘Then you are a scholar worthy of Athanasius himself.’
‘Who?’ asked Wrodzik, and the krug laughed as the koumiss passed around the fire.
The laughter faded and Tey-Muraz asked, ‘Norvard by noon?’
Heads nodded around the fire.
‘Norvard?’ said Kurt, leaning towards Sofia. ‘I thought we were heading to Erengrad?’
‘Norvard is the Ungol name for Erengrad, before Tzarina Shoika and her Gospodars captured it and renamed it.’
‘Midmorning if the ground stays dry and there’s good grass left on the hills,’ said Urska Pysanka, one of the hearth-maidens Sofia had met in the Tzarina’s tent.
Urska had not been born a warrior, but when Kyazak raiders had attacked the Kalviskis stanitsa five years earlier, she had rallied its widows, mothers and daughters to fight back. When the men returned from the pulks at the onset of winter, they found their women with swords, clad in armour and bearing grisly war-trophies. And when the tribes came south the following year, they stayed away from the Kalviskis stanitsa.
Urska Pysanka still wore a shrivelled pouch around her neck that had once belonged to the Kyazak war-chief.
‘Urska Seed-taker has the truth of it,’ agreed Boyarin Wrodzik, passing the koumiss onwards. ‘That horse of Tey-Muraz needs all the grass it can eat to carry him further. Yha, you should swap mounts with levubiytsa and spare it more misery.’
‘Pah!’ sneered Tey-Muraz. ‘Ride a soft-bellied Empire steed? I’d sooner walk.’
‘My horse is glad you think so,’ said Kurt.