As he had done once before, Batu Khan of the Golden Horde clapped his hands in dismissal. “Go!”
They went.
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(Epilogue)
Ivan heard the door of the kremlin library open then shut, he heard footsteps descend slowly and wearily down the long flight of dressed stone stairs that led out at last into the courtyard, and he stood in the falling snow, and he waited.
Mar’ya Morevna and Nikolai and Anastasya emerged blinking into the pallid light. The children were holding their mother’s hands, and all three looked tired to the point of exhaustion. That didn’t stop first one child and then the other from running through the snow and leaping up into their father’s embrace.
“Will it work for both?” he said. “You promised, remember?”
“It will,” said Mar’ya Morevna. “For both of them.” The last time Ivan had heard such deep satisfaction in her voice had been after the birth of the twins, when the doctors had assured her that all had gone well and she had at last believed them. But this time ‘both’ didn’t mean the children. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Ivan set his son and daughter down with a little grunt of effort because they were sturdy, well-grown, and getting no lighter. He watched as they ran off across the snow-covered courtyard, and that same gaze took in all the hopeful, or nervous, or downright fearful faces staring at him. “I’ve been ready for months,” he said softly. “And never more ready than now. Say the words.”
“Nothing so crude, my loved one. The Great Gate is open and ready.” She smiled, and kissed him lightly on the lips, regardless or maybe because of the watchers. “What is they say in the stories? ‘Just wish, and you’re there.’ So wish …”
A sudden gust of warmth swept through the courtyard, a breeze laden with a tingling scent of flowers that was the very breath of summer. The falling snow stopped, and that on the ground began to melt into little, chuckling rivulets of clear water. Ivan looked upwards as an arch of light came sweeping from the east in an impossibly swift dawn. It was like a rainbow with no colour but sunlight, and as it advanced across the sky the grey, snow-laden clouds were driven before it and only clear blue remained in its wake.
“They won’t care about my domain,” said Mar’ya Morevna thoughtfully. “But they’ll say you ran away.” Half the sky was grey now, and the rest was blue.
“Let them say it,” said Ivan, grinning. “At least I won’t have to listen any more. I’ve spent my life being concerned over other opinions. This is my Tsardom, these are my people, and if this is the way that I choose to protect them, so be it.”
Somewhere away in the distance, among the shadowed green woods, a wolf howled. Though the long, smooth rise and fall of the voice sounded melancholy, Tsar Ivan knew better. There was no heartbreak in this wolfsong, nor threat either. He nodded acknowledgement of the greeting, then reached out for Mar’ya Morevna and they walked hand in hand across the kremlin courtyard, enjoying the warmth of the sun as they awaited the arrival of their first guest.
There was only a new-moon curve of winter grey remaining low in the west, for the realms of Khorlov and Koldunov were slipping quietly sideways out of Russia, out of the world, and into the Summer Country.
A single brightly-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few confused seconds on a gust of cold air, its wings spattered with flecks of falling snow. Where there had been a city, and a fortress, and a great kremlin palace, there was just a sliver of blue summer sky against the grey clouds and white snow. A warm scent of flowers flowed from it, and already the sliver had narrowed to half of its previous width. With all the stern purpose that an insect could summon, the butterfly plunged back to the Gate, and through it, just as the magic winked shut.
With no errant summer heat to interfere, the snow began to fall again in earnest. Wind sifted it and sculpted it across the open steppes, and the snow kept falling. Within an hour, or perhaps a little longer, there was no trace remaining to show that the Tsardom of Khorlov had ever existed in the wide white world.
And if the chronicles of the Golden Horde and of Aleksandr Nevskiy can be believed, it never did…
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Table of Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
ПОСЛЕСЛОВИЕ
The Golden Horde Page 35