by E. P. Clark
Dasha nodded in understanding. It was what she would have done if she had been in charge, too. Since she wasn’t ready to be rescued yet, she didn’t even mind too much, tired and sore as her legs were. Yuliya did not look so accepting of the situation, though. Her face was drawn, and she was covered with mud and scratches from where she had fallen over and over again. She was not fit for this kind of walking at all.
Dasha wished, so desperately her heart seemed to squeeze in her chest from the pain of it, that she could give some of her strength to Yuliya, that she could pour some of her strength and vitality into her just by clasping her hands in her own, or at least heal some of the worst scratches and bruises, but she couldn’t. Once again she wished that she had been gifted with healing, instead of these irritating visions of dubious usefulness, but she hadn’t, and when she tried to imagine herself healing Yuliya, she could picture it so easily as a delightful flight of fancy, but there was no answering rise of energy in her body, nothing ready to flow out of her and into another, and her visions remained stubbornly blind and silent.
Dasha bent over and rested her head on her bent knees, wrapping her arms around her legs and closing her eyes, drawing herself up inside of herself and trying to let a vision rise up inside of her. All day they had been whispering to her and flitting before her eyes, telling her things that she needed to know, being almost…cooperative, surprising as that was. Instead of attacking her like starving wolves desperate for any mouthful of flesh they could snatch from her, they were playing with her like a spirited horse, trotting this way and that, jumping and shying out of sheer high spirits, but always moving in more or less the right direction, more or less carrying her where she wanted to go. She couldn’t say that they were obeying her will, but she thought—saw—that they never would, no more than a prize racehorse would obey her rider’s will. A prize racehorse was in the business of winning races, and would always be bursting out of her rider’s control, leaping forward and straining for the finish line. The best a rider could do was point her in more or less the right direction, and urge her to do her best. The more her rider fought with her and tried to impose her will on her, the more she would fight back, until instead of winning the race, she would run off the course entirely, throwing her rider to the ground in the process. In order to win, her rider would have to trust in her. Have faith. And Dasha would have to have faith in her visions, rather than fighting them. She had been so afraid of them, the way she would fear a vicious or violent horse, but the horse, she was now seeing, was bucking and rearing and biting at her because she herself was being vicious and violent. She was the one jerking on the reins and driving in her spurs, in a fruitless attempt to control what couldn’t and shouldn’t be controlled, and her visions were fighting back in the only way they knew how. She needed to drop her whip, take off her spurs, and loosen her reins if she were to have any hope of keeping her seat and reaching her destination.
She looked up. As if her earlier thoughts of Gray Wolf had conjured them, or maybe they had conjured up her thoughts, two slanting golden eyes were looking at her out of the trees. No one else seemed to see them. She shook her head at them.
Are you sure? they asked. I am not yet here in my body, but I could be, as quick as thought.
I am sure, Dasha told them. This is something that must be done, and I must be the one to do it.
Oleg will not like it. He will come after you anyway, no matter what I tell him.
Then let him come. But not right away. He mustn’t catch up with us right away. I need a few more days.
For what?
I don’t know yet. I just know that I need them.
It is a week to Pristanograd, maybe less, if you keep your current pace. I do not think I can hold him back that long.
I don’t need a week, Dasha answered. Just a little more time. Just another couple of days, until what needs to happen can happen.
I will do what I can to give you those days, then, Tsarinovna, said the eyes, and then winked out, leaving behind nothing but the thickening twilight.
“There’s something out there,” said Yuliya, shuddering as much as her exhausted body would allow her. “Maybe wolves.”
“Yes,” agreed Dasha. “But they won’t harm us.”
“You can’t know that, Tsarinovna.”
“I can,” Dasha told her, putting her head back down on her knees. “Now let’s try to rest while we can.”
***
She was running through the field, through waist-high grass. Something was running behind her, gaining on her. She looked back, trying to catch sight of her pursuer, but all she could see was a dark shape bounding through the grass. She tripped and went down on her knees. When she scrambled to her feet, the grass was already higher than her head. She started running again, pushing through it, her arms growing tired and her whole body feeling like lead.
The grass ended and one foot swung out over an abyss. She threw herself back, just managing to keep from tumbling over the edge. She was standing on the shore of a river. The only way forward was to dive in.
The figure pursuing her came bursting through the grass. It was Svetochka. Or was it Oleg? It was both at once.
“Come back with us,” said Svetochka. “We’ll save you.”
An animal came leaping out of the grass. It was a deer. Or a wolf. Then a bear. By the time it was standing next to Dasha, it was Bjorn. Svetochka screamed, her face transforming into a striking snake. Quick as thought, she struck, sinking her fangs into the bear.
“NOO!” screamed Dasha, too late. She dropped to her knees beside the bear, who was now Bjorn again, or maybe Gray Wolf. Her deer’s muzzle tried to lick up the venom, but her hands kept getting in the way. She leapt to her feet in order to strike Svetochka down. But Svetochka was already sinking into the earth, being dragged down by vodyaniye into a bog that had opened up in the grass, which was now a forest.
“NOOO!” Dasha screamed again, trying to grab Svetochka with one hand and the bear who was Bjorn with the other, in order to save them both. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t save them both. She would have to choose, and no matter what she chose, she would be wrong.
“No,” she said, and dove off the cliff edge into the river.
The water was cool and welcoming, and tasted of salt. The sandy beach was behind her, and the waves on the surface wanted to carry her back to it, to dry land and safety. She dove deeper, to where a current could carry her to the dark abyss that was before her.
“Just a little farther,” Vika told her. “Just swim a little farther.”
***
Dasha jerked awake. Her whole body ached, especially her neck from how she had been resting her head on her knees. She pulled herself stiffly upright, and staggered off into the woods to relieve herself. No one tried to stop her. Either they trusted her, or, more likely, they were confident that she wouldn’t have the nerve to run off on her own.
The waning moon shone brightly through the twilight over her. Her moonblood would start soon, she thought. What if she were still with the raiders? She didn’t have any cloths to catch the blood, or any willowbark to stop the pain. The thought was so awful that for a moment she wanted to cry, or possibly run off into the woods and try to fend for herself. But, just as her captors had guessed, she did not in fact have the nerve, so she told herself that she had the courage to stay with them for as long as she needed to. And then promised herself, even as she knew it was a hollow promise, that she would be free of them and back to safety and comfort before her moonblood started. She straightened up her clothing and returned to the others.
Everyone was already stirring when she got back, and very shortly, without even waiting to eat first, they set off again through the lightening twilight, keeping as brisk a pace as they could manage in the semi-darkness. Every now and then Dasha thought she saw golden glowing eyes, or shadows that were a little more solid than the others around them, but no one else seemed to notice, and she knew she was being watched over.
They stopped briefly once the sky had turned white with dawn, and ate scant portions of stale bread. They would have to get more food soon, Dasha knew. Which meant raiding for it, like as not, since they didn’t have time forage or hunt. What would she do if they decided to raid a village while she was with them? Should she try to stop them? She couldn’t, not without killing them. Should she do that, if it meant saving her own people from them? Yes, of course, but if she killed them…her visions whispered to her, formlessly, without explanations or details, that she needed these raiders, and she mustn’t let any harm come to them just yet. They had a purpose to serve, even if she couldn’t see it yet, and she needed to let them serve that purpose. But if they decided to carry out a raid before that purpose had been served? Unless maybe the raid was that purpose? What if the purpose she needed them for was to cause harm to her own people, because in the long run that would bring about some greater good…what if, what if, what if. Her visions were growing darker and darker, and a shudder ran through her, the harbinger of a fit. She closed her eyes and tried to think only of her breath, hoping to clear her mind. Because what would happen to her if she had a fit in front of everyone? Her instincts and every observation told her that these raiders would not take kindly to a person who had fits, or any other form of deformity or lameness. In her case they might take it as a sign of her sorceresshood, but they wouldn’t like it, no, they wouldn’t like it at all, they wouldn’t like it at all, it would put her in danger, it would put her in danger…
Stop it! she told herself, just as Bjorn called out something that must have meant “Let’s go,” for everyone jumped to their feet, and they were off again.
She tried to stop herself from worrying, and to bolster her spirits with the certainty that she was doing the right thing and it would all work out, but the dream she had had kept following her, no matter how fast she walked, and she kept finding herself sinking back down into it, as if she had never really woken up from it. Even when she managed to wrench her mind away from it, she could feel it nagging away at her, poisoning her, turning all her thoughts dark and wretched, filling her head with threatening visions of what terrible things might come to pass. The brief midsummer darkness had brought with it a much more profound darkness that was infecting her brain, filling her mind…she had to clear her head, she had to clear her head, she needed to stop this nonsense and follow her breath until she could clear her head…just count, don’t think about all this, just count, just count…by all the gods, she couldn’t take another step—was that a pain in her belly? Was her moonblood starting right now? Or was she about to be sick?—visions of blood and pain rose up before her, visions of raids, of the deaths of her people, while she stood by the side of their killers…no, no, that wasn’t going to happen because her visions were warning her of it, so she wasn’t going to let it happen, not that she had control over anything, especially over other people…stop it, stop it, just count until your mind clears…
“What are you doing?”
Yuliya’s voice snapped Dasha out of her gloom-filled woolgathering. Dasha turned her head, which seemed to belong to someone else’s body, to look at her, and realized she was asking not for herself but for Bjorn, who was looking down at her with goodwill and concern.
“I’m clearing my mind,” Dasha told them.
This led to an exchange between Yuliya and Bjorn in which he seemed to be asking what Dasha could possibly mean by that. They finally settled on the idea, after consulting with Dasha, that she was doing something essential for her sorceress magic, which delighted Bjorn no end.
“Strong!” he said, giving her another clout on the shoulder. He then said something more, winking at her, which Yuliya told her meant he was telling her she would make a good wife and a good queen.
“Of course I would,” said Dasha. “It’s what I’ve spent my entire life training to do.” Which answer pleased Bjorn very much, and set him to laughing for a long time.
When he sobered up, he started talking to her at length, paying little attention to how Yuliya, who was panting from exertion and kept falling behind, was struggling to translate and keep up.
“You remind me of my daughter,” he began. Which Dasha thought was a bit strange, seeing as how he had proposed marriage to her, but, oddly enough, there was nothing icky in it, nothing that reminded her of the man at the inn who had said much the same thing before grabbing at her. Bjorn was almost too strangely innocent for that kind of awfulness, Dasha thought: he was fond of his daughter, as much as he was capable of being so, and the fact that Dasha reminded him of her made him fond of Dasha as well, even as he plotted marriage with her.
His daughter’s name, he told her, was Ragnhildr, which Dasha thought was a ridiculous name for a girl, and impossible to pronounce besides, but he seemed to think it was quite beautiful. She had just reached her sixteenth summer, which meant—Dasha calculated quickly—she would have been born before he had come of age himself. But it seemed these Westerners didn’t care about such things, for he told her he had been married when he was Dasha’s age, but his wife had died bringing Ragnhildr into the world. His face fell as he told her this, and she had to believe that he was still saddened by his wife’s loss, as much as that went against everything she had heard about Westerners and their treatment, or rather mistreatment, of women. Although, she told herself, many people were fond enough of their pet dogs, but that didn’t stop them from cruelly abusing them when the mood struck them, not to mention killing other animals whenever it suited them. Like as not Bjorn’s feelings about his wife and daughter were much the same. And in fact he went on to tell Dasha that he had married Ragnhildr off to a kind of tribal leader—“Kind of like a Khan, but less powerful—these tribes aren’t very big,” Yuliya explained to her—last year, which meant, Dasha thought, that she had only been fifteen!
“She didn’t want to go,” he told her. “She shouted and fought like a wolf.” His voice was filled with pride as he imparted this information, and Dasha could detect no doubt that he had done the right thing, and no worries that perhaps his daughter had fought like a wolf because she didn’t want to, and shouldn’t, marry this man who was twice her age and had already had another wife, who, Dasha gathered, had died under suspicious circumstances, possibly because he had killed her. All of which Bjorn thought was evidence that this chieftain would make Ragnhildr a good husband. And, of course, there was the fact that this chieftain, who had some name Dasha couldn’t even begin to puzzle out or remember, had raised up Bjorn to chief war leader, or some such thing, as a result of this marriage, with the promise to help him become tribal chieftain himself some day.
“But then the foreigners came,” Bjorn told her, his eyes going hollow. “And this man”—he spat to the side, his face twisting in disgust—“sold us to them.”
“And Ragnhildr?” Dasha asked, pronouncing the barbaric name carefully.
He gave her a look of approval. “Of course you ask,” he said. “A good queen! She came to me and warned me, and said I must run off before they came to take me as a slave. So I did.”
“You didn’t take her with you?” Dasha asked.
“She wanted to stay,” he told her. “And this is no life for a woman.” And then he changed the subject, his face sad.
It was easy enough then to steer him to talk of the foreigners, and how they had been moving North for the past several years, until they had much of Tansko firmly in their grasp, and were encroaching on Rutsi.
“They don’t fight like men,” Bjorn told her, his disgust evident even through Yuliya’s translation. “They bunch together like sheep, and never leave their flock.”
Dasha was sorely tempted to point out that fighting like men must not be very effective, if these Southern sheep could defeat Bjorn and his people so easily, but she managed to hold her tongue just in time, nodding sympathetically instead. Bjorn went on to tell her about how they had taken village after village, and no one could stand against them because none
of the villages would stand together. His own village, she gathered from his tale, had thought to have an ally with another, larger village due to the marriage of Ragnhildr with this other, more powerful, chief, but they had instead been betrayed when the foreigners had offered the chieftain riches and power beyond what he could expect from his own people, largely, according to Bjorn, in exchange for his help in capturing slaves for the Southerners.
“It’s one thing to take slaves in battle,” Bjorn said. “Every warrior does it. But what they are doing is…not right. Taking more slaves than any man could ever have use for, sending them far away…” He shook his head. “I’ve taken many slaves.”
Dasha nodded, hoping that her face wasn’t betraying what she thought of that.
“But I took them honorably, and for myself, not because someone else ordered it. The power he gets from being someone else’s slave-catcher—it’s false power. The power of a dog or a slave with a fierce master. Not the same as power you carry inside of yourself, that belongs to you. No real man would take such power.”
Dasha nodded sympathetically some more, which seemed to soothe his feelings, and then she asked him if he thought he could ever go back to Rutsi.
He shrugged. “Not when these foreigners are there. All these cowards and cravens crawling around now—there are no real men left. We all had to leave. Find a place where we could live like men again.”
“And where will that be?” Dasha asked. He gave her a sharp sideways look, making her fear for an instant that she had gone too far, but then he said, “Asked like a queen! We thought to go East, across the mountains. But now,” he grinned at her, “maybe we’ll stay here. Or go back home, with an army at our backs.”
Dasha wondered if her mother would really give him an army in exchange for her freedom and safety. Or maybe Vladya? There was more than one army floating around Zem’ these days; Bjorn could have his pick of them, if he could convince someone that their army, which had been raised to stand against him and his kind, should be handed over to him, or at least put to his service. Her visions were all muddy and unclear on this point, and her logic was no better. Bjorn and his ilk could hardly be called good allies. On the other hand, getting them out of Zem’ and back to their own lands, and driving back the Southerners from Zem’’s borders, would be worth quite a lot.