Vasilisa by M. L. Farb

Author:M. L. Farb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M. L. Farb

18

Brown tents, shaped like upside-down bowls, filled the grounds around the palace. Cooking fires flickered in the twilight. Had the tsar driven the Khan back here? If so, then the war was almost over. But Dyeda couldn’t wait even another week. I still had to enter the palace.

Four men sat drinking around the cooking fire closest to me. One belched and pounded his chest over his padded jacket. He spoke in a slurred and heavily accented voice. “You Ruskans know your spirits. Arkhi is nothing compared to this—what d’you call it?”

Another man, wearing the simple linens of a Ruskan field worker, responded, “Vodka.”

“Ah yes, vodka. We’ll drink this every day when our Khan rules this land.”

The Ruskan downed his drink. “That’ll be soon enough. The Little Father,” the man cackled, “cares more for his weakling son than all the rest of Ruska.”

The Little Father? That was an affectionate nickname for our tsar, not that this man held any affection for him. What had they done to his son?

A third man, wearing a conical hat, stood and yelled at the others in harsh and guttural words with lots of chr and shc sounds. Almost as though someone had combined a growling dog with a snake.

The others around the fire laughed and waved him away. The man shook a clenched hand at them and stomped toward the forest, and me.

I nocked an arrow in my bow, then lowered it.

He was unaware. This wasn’t a battle. Could I kill him? He’d been part of the army that killed Adrik and almost all the other men. If it weren’t for them, Dyeda wouldn’t be ghost-white and dying.

I raised the bow again.

He thwacked a tree branch as he walked past it, then settled under a pine.

If I killed him, I could steal his clothes and enter the army more easily.

The man pulled out a small knife and a partially carved piece of wood.

I bent my weight against the bow.

He began to hum and carve.

I squinted.

He was carving a doll.

For whom? A little girl? His daughter?

My fingers trembled against the weight of the draw. I relaxed my arm and placed the arrow back in the quiver.

If I shot him, I’d tear and blood-stain the clothes. That would make it harder to go undetected.

I picked up a thick deadfall branch and crept forward. When I was a stride away from him, a twig snapped under my feet.

He looked up as I swung the branch, then fell with a grunt. The doll and knife slipped from his fingers to the ground.

I picked up the doll. The last of the evening sun showed wide-set eyes crinkled with an open-mouthed smile.

I stripped the man of his outer clothes: a long padded tunic that crossed in the front, wide-legged pants, curled-toed boots, and a conical hat.

Then I laid him against the tree and nestled the doll in his hands. “May you return safely to her and never see war again.”

The clothes were baggy over my frame, but they were not too long.

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