by K L Conger
He kissed her on the mouth. “Don’t worry about Inga so much. She has her soldier to protect her.”
“Does he love her, do you think?”
Alexander chuckled softly. “He does. Believe me, he does.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw the way he gazed at her when she visited you. A man who is himself in love, understands these things.” He took her wrists gently and pressed her hands to his chest. “Do you feel the joy you bring to me, Natalya?”
She smiled. He'd said this to her before, but not often. Only a handful of times since they married, during the deepest, quietest, most intimate moments they spent together. She took her hands away from his chest and kissed him there, over his heart. Then she reached up and kissed his lips. He took her in his arms, pulling the blanket over their heads, as though they could hide together from the world.
SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long she and Alexander had slept when a racket from outside woke them. The low, underground vibrations of horses’ hooves were unmistakable. Someone—many someones, from the sound of it—had come to the Andreev estate.
Alexander already sat upright, utterly still. Natalya leaned up beside him, clutching his arm. He was listening, trying to get a sense of events outside.
A deep, overwhelming fear settled on Natalya. It wasn’t a rational fear. Surely any number of things could explain horses here in the middle of the night. Yet, the fear refused to abate. Something was happening. Something...wrong.
When the gunfire came, it sounded close—too close. She and Alexander flinched as one. The next instant a tiny weight pressed on their mattress. Dmitry landed in her lap, his skinny arms closing around her neck. She hugged him to her, running her hands up and down his back, trying to bring a comfort she herself did not feel.
The door to their hut burst open. Alexander leapt out of bed in an instant, standing between Natalya and the intruders. The...thing that entered the hut must surely have come straight from her nightmares.
It had vaguely the shape of a man, but loomed in the doorway so darkly, it appeared demonic. Swathed all in black—some sort of shapeless black robe and mask—she saw the whites of its eyes, peeking out through eyeholes. No hair, no skin, no features were visible. Only blackness.
“Everyone out,” a man’s deep voice commanded. “Into the courtyard.”
Alexander held his hands out in front of him, as though telling the man to in black to stay calm. “What is happening?”
A brief pause. Then the man-thing floated across the room. It produced a club of some kind and, before Alexander or Natalya could react, he slammed Alexander on the forehead with it. The whack echoed loud enough to make Natalya scream, wondering if she’d witnessed her husband’s death. Dmitry held more tightly to her neck, choking her, and buried his face against her.
The man-thing called orders to men outside. Two more of them, dressed exactly as the first, appeared and each took one of Alexander’s arms. He moaned as they dragged him out of the hut. Hope swelled in Natalya’s chest. He still lived.
“You,” the man-thing addressed her now. “Woman. Outside. Bring your child. Now.”
Natalya obeyed. Throwing her legs over the side of the bed, she hurried after Alexander’s disappearing figure. The man-thing didn’t give her time to dress or find a blanket for Dmitry. Her bare feet flinched when they sank into the snow, but she dared not stop or ask for special treatment. The man-thing stalked along behind her like a wild animal. She ran as much to keep her distance from him as to keep Alexander in her sight.
Her feet moved swiftly through the stages of cold, pain, numbness, and, by the time she reached the courtyard, she could barely walk because she felt absolutely nothing from the ankles down. She willed herself to stay upright, for Dmitry’s sake. Still carrying him, she fell beside Alexander, who'd been dropped in the snow. He’d left a trail of blood from the hut. Natalya set Dmitry down and ripped several strips from her nightgown, trying to staunch the flow of blood coming from the gash on Alexander’s forehead.
Everyone on the estate was being herded into the courtyard. Maids, grooms, stable hands, groundsmen, household servants, and the entire boyar family all clustered there. Whoever these demons were, they made no social distinctions.
The crowd milled about, seeming as confused and fearful as Natalya felt.
Dmitry began to cry. His feet were submerged in snow. Natalya tore more material from her nightgown and wrapped his feet. She put him up on her back to keep him from getting wet. He held on without having to be told, and Natalya went back to Alexander. His eyes had opened. They rolled about wildly.
After a moment, Alexander shook his head in several quick jerks, as though trying to dispel vertigo. A few minutes later, he managed to sit up.
Another rush of hooves brought everyone’s heads around toward the front gates of the estate. What rode up made Natalya wonder if hell had opened its doors and spat out demon cavalry. Men—she assumed they were men—wearing the same costumes as those who’d ordered her family from their home rode up. In the moonlight, she saw them more clearly.
The robes they wore flowed long and blacker than tar, covering the men from their shoulders to below their feet. If they dismounted, the robes would drag on the ground. The shapeless, flowing quality made them look like dark sorcerers. The same black material covered their heads—more like hoods than masks—and fanned out over their chest and shoulders. The hoods came to a tall point and had two tiny holes for the eyes.
Their horses were also black. Natalya wondered how they'd found so many midnight black horses. There must have been more than a hundred of these men, and each of them straddled a midnight-black stallion. The horses groaned and stamped, snorting steam and flaring their nostrils. If they’d had red eyes, Natalya would have been sure they too were demons.
Most of the horsed men carried a torch in one hand and a broom in the other. Large, round objects hung from many of their horses' necks. Hideous, snarling things, many still dripping blood. They looked like the heads of dogs.
“Listen well!” The demon at the front of the group didn’t have to raise his voice much to be heard. It boomed like a gong in a well. He waved both torch and broom as he spoke. Except for the crying of a few women and the whimpering of children, the people of the Andreev estate silenced. “We are the Oprichniki. We are sanctioned of the Tsar, and therefore of God. We smoke out traitors,” he waved his torch, “and sweep their treachery from before us.” He held the broom high. “This estate has been known to speak out, in recent months, against the Tsar. Tonight, all bear punishment for that sin.”
Something about his voice struck Natalya as familiar, and not in a good way. She couldn’t place it, but it sent sickly chills coursing through her.
“Please, my lord,” a man from the side of the courtyard said. He moved forward, until he stood in front of the leader of the Oprichniki. Natalya recognized him. The eldest son of Andreev. The head of the household, Aleksey Andreev, was an old man—in his fifties. The eldest claimed nearly thirty winters and had married some years before. He bore the name Aleksy, like his father. Now he made his way into the space between the black horses and the crowd of people and fell to his knees.
“Please, my lord, there must be some misunderstanding. My father is loyal to the Tsar. Anything you have heard is either untrue, or perhaps taken out of context.” As he spoke, the leader of the Oprichniki walked his horse to where Aleksey the younger knelt. The horse walked circles around the man kneeling in the snow. “Please do not punish the entire household for a misunderstanding. Let us straighten this out. Let us prove our loyalty—”
He didn’t get any farther because the leader of the Oprichniki produced a massive knife from somewhere in his robes, longer than the man’s arm. In one swift stroke, the younger Andreev was decapitated. His body fell to the ground, his head rolling to one side. Steam rose from the snow where his blood landed, melting it.
When the knife went up, gleaming in the moonlig
ht, Natalya turned away, not so much for herself as for Dmitry, who still clung to her back, watching everything over her shoulder. She didn’t want him to see such a thing. When she turned away, Alexander wrapped his arms around both her and Dmitry, and she didn’t try to turn back around. She didn’t want to see what happened next. Dmitry didn’t try either. He buried his face in her shoulder, his tiny hands wrapping around his father’s fingers.
A collective gasp went up when Andreev's head flew. From one side, the older Andreev ran forward, yelling and thrashing. “My son! My son!”
He reached the front of the crowd, but not his son’s body, before two of the Oprichniki grabbed him, holding him in place. The leader on the black horse spoke again.
“Hear me. There is no way out. No negotiating. No mercy. Mercy is for the weak. The Tsar is not weak. God has spoken. Punishment will be meted out against the sinners. As many of us as you see before you, that many again comb the grounds of the estate. We will find everyone. None will escape their punishment. Let all see, hear, and understand what happens to traitors in Russia.” He nodded down at the elder Andreev, whose legs had given out. The old man hung limply between his two captors. “Spit him.”
The two Oprichniki soldiers dragged him off. Natalya didn’t want to know where. The old man didn’t fight. His head hung down, chin resting on his chest. His feet dragged behind him through the snow.
“Divide the others into groups. Hell must claim her spoils. We will help it do so.” Natalya turned her head to look at the leader, realizing why he sounded familiar. Sergei. She couldn’t see his mouth behind the hood, but felt certain he sneered.
“Alexander,” she whispered, turning to meet her husband’s fearful gaze. “What do we do?”
Alexander swallowed. His silence proved his terror. The black-clothed demons moved among the crowd, dividing up families and shoving them into groups. A sickening, terrified feeling settled in Natalya's belly. She had to find a way to protect Dimitry.
ANATOLY, STAYING IN a small hut not far from Natalya, also heard the first stirrings in the earth that marked the sound of many hooves. Having lived his entire life in the Kremlin, Anatoly had learned to obey his instincts. The soft, thundering sounds made fear blossom in his chest, and he reacted quickly.
A few days after leaving Taras’s service and moving into the hut on the Andreev estate, he'd discovered a secret compartment of sorts in the hut. A section of planks making up the floor came easily away. Underneath, a hole had been dug in the earth. Large enough to hold two or three men, he supposed it was meant to be a cellar. Especially during the winter, the earth stayed cold enough to keep food from spoiling.
Anatoly suspected the last tenants of the hut hadn't known of its existence. Cobwebs and mold showed disuse. Anatoly served as a Russian soldier in his youth, before his family went bankrupt and he was forced into servitude. His powers of observation never left him.
Not that he had anything to use it for. He certainly wasn’t privileged enough to have food to squirrel away in a hidden store. An old man, he required little to sustain him. At the time, he merely filed the secret spot away in his mind, storing it up against future need.
When he awoke to the thundering of hooves, deep in the night, he knew something was amiss. There might be legitimate reasons for soldiers to come in the darkness, but given the Tsar’s moods of late, and the violence in the city, Anatoly knew better than to trust to good fortune. Without hesitation, he grabbed his clothes, boots and the blankets off his cot, and secreted himself under the floorboards. Realizing he’d forgotten the box on his washstand, he emerged again to find it. Anatoly owned few physical possessions. All he had—mostly sentimental mementos of no value to anyone except him—were contained in the box. By taking the box and the blankets, the hut would appear vacant to the casual onlooker. The only other furniture was the washstand and a stool by the fire. Anatoly only brought one set of clothes with him, so he did not even have a chest of drawers.
He dressed quickly and silently in his hiding place. Or as quickly as his injury allowed. It had healed somewhat since the riot, but not completely. He'd begun to suspect it never would. Once dressed, he sat with the blankets wrapped around his frail body, and waited. Long minutes passed. Voices, screams, and gunfire came from outside.
The door of his hut burst open, rebounding against the wall.
Heavy boots clunked slowly across the wooden floor above him. When the boots came to stand atop his head, right over the loose floorboards, small motes of dust fluttered down, peppering Anatoly’s face with dirt.
The boots moved back and forth for several minutes, as if the man was unconvinced of the hut's vacancy. From the motes of light shining through the floorboards and the hissing sound accompanying them, the man above him held a torch large enough to dispatch most of those shadows. It should be obvious the hut was empty.
It occurred to Anatoly that he’d lit a fire earlier in the evening. The hearth grew cold before the hoofbeats awoke him, but if any embers remained red, it would be sign enough that someone had slept here tonight. Anatoly held his breath, waiting for either death or relief.
Death did not come. After several agonizing minutes, the heavy boots clomped out of the hut. The crunch of snow came from outside, then faded away toward the main house.
Anatoly stayed in his secret place most of the night, not stealing away until almost dawn. He did not witness the events outside, but the sounds piercing his ears over the next hours, coupled with the mephitic smell of charred flesh, made him want to stop breathing more than any injury or illness ever could.
Chapter 21
INGA, AS USUAL, WOKE long before Taras. She left him sleeping and went to the kitchens to help Bogdan start breakfast.
As the sky began to lighten in the east, and she knew the boyars would soon awaken, Inga became conscious of a stir in the palace. More people than usual hurried through the corridors at this early hour. Poking her head out of the kitchen, she stopped a pageboy to ask for information.
“News has arrived. Some sort of terrible tragedy at one of the outlying estates. The army is being awakened.”
Inga frowned. “What sort of tragedy?”
The boy shrugged, then used her silence to hurry away. She went back into the kitchen and relayed the news to Bogdan, who shrugged it off. Twisting his mustache, which held more white than brown these days, he muttered about boyar affairs not being any of their business.
Inga said nothing, but a nettling worry stung the back of her mind. Three years ago, she’d have been quick to agree with Bogdan, but with Taras being a boyar, and part of the army, she found herself entrenched in the affairs of the nobles often.
Inga went about her work for another half an hour. Servants coming in and out of the kitchen reported the army officers were meeting. An informal meeting, though. Not orchestrated by the Tsar. Apparently, they'd clustered in a small group out in the courtyard to discuss this ‘tragedy.' None of the servants seemed to have any idea what the tragedy was, though.
Inga felt the presence before she saw it. She was focused on cutting up cabbage for the day’s borsch when the room went still. She raised her head and her eyes fell on Bogdan. He stared worriedly at something behind her. She turned to see Yehvah in the doorway. Yehvah looked...ill. Shocked. Like she couldn’t believe what she saw, though her eyes were out of focus, not seeing anything. One of her hands grasped the doorframe for support while the other rested on her chest, as though to quiet a fluttery heart.
Yehvah was many things, but not panicky. If she were to be panicked, Inga thought it would look like this.
Inga dropped her knife and crossed the room. “Yehvah, what is it?”
Fear etched itself in the lines around Yehvah’s mouth and eyes. Her chest heaved silently, her breathing erratic. She shut her eyes for several seconds. When she opened them, she made a visible effort to take hold of herself. She stared Inga in the face, and her forced façade of calm scared Inga more than anything else.
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br /> “Inga, something happened.”
That much was painfully obvious. Inga fought the urge to shake Yehvah’s shoulders and demand to know what she knew. Doing that would take more time, not less, so she waited, trying not to tap her foot.
“Anatoly arrived an hour ago.”
“Anatoly? But he’s...”
It sunk in. Perhaps it wasn’t rational, but Inga understood right away. A tragedy on an outlying estate? News Anatoly—an old, injured man—brought? Her hand went up to cover her mouth.
“Natalya?” She whispered.
Yehvah shook her head. “I don’t know. No one seems to know how bad it is. It’s the work of this...Oprichniki Ivan’s been gathering.”
“What does Anatoly say?”
“Only that something terrible happened. He seems dazed. At first, we thought he'd been injured. There’s not a mark on him. Except for soot. As though he escaped a fire. Perhaps the smoke warped his mind.”
Or perhaps he saw something so terrible, he cannot speak it. Inga did not voice the thought, but she didn’t need to. One look at Yehvah, and Bogdan for that matter, told her they thought it too.
As Inga considered the possibilities, her chest heaved in an opposite rhythm with Yehvah’s. Natalya. Natalya’s husband. Natalya’s son.
“The soldiers—Taras and Nikolai—will they go to see it?”
Yehvah nodded. “Yes. They are mounting up as we speak.”
Inga needed no more compulsion. She turned and flew through the door, out into the courtyard.
“Inga, where are you...?”
She heard no more. She'd already left the palace and now searched the courtyard for signs of the officers. There were none. The courtyard stood empty and still. Frigid air burning her throat, she raced around the side of the palace toward the stables. There, directly outside the wooden structure, several dozen horses had been tethered. Grooms worked busily to saddle and bridle them. The officers lolled around, talking quietly and waiting for their horses to be ready.