The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Here,” Birgit repeated, interrupting Dasha’s thoughts. She thrust a waterskin at Dasha. Dasha took it and drank gratefully, gagging only slightly at the water’s warmth and taste of leather, trying not to think about the creature whose dead body she was drinking out of. There was nothing she could do about it now. She handed the waterskin over to Yuliya, who, still refusing to look at her, drank from it greedily.

  “Come,” Birgit said when they were done, motioning to Yuliya and her to follow. She led them off into the woods, out of sight of the others.

  “Tsarinovna!” Yuliya hissed, breaking her sullen silence. “This is your chance! Summon the domoviye and escape!”

  Dasha envisioned herself breaking away, with or without the domoviye’s help. Even on her own she thought she might be able to overpower Birgit and run off. She might even be able to escape in truth: the raiders were stretched thin with guarding their captives and putting out the remnants of the fire and might not be able to devote too many of their number to tracking her. She could do it. She could get free and find help. But then, the visions told her, all this would be a waste. She was meant to stay with the raiders, not go running back to her own people. She had done all she could with them and for them, and she needed to stay where she was until she had accomplished—what? The visions hadn’t told her that yet. But she needed to stay here in order to accomplish it.

  “No,” she said.

  Yuliya gave her a look of deep betrayal.

  “Yuliya,” Dasha said softly. “I’m not just doing this willy-nilly. I have a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?” Yuliya demanded.

  “I can’t tell you,” Dasha said. “If I did, it wouldn’t work.” It also didn’t exist yet as anything more than a vague premonition, but Yuliya didn’t need to know that.

  “Are you going to use your magic?” Yuliya asked, her face brightening a little.

  “Yes,” Dasha told her. “At just the right moment. But in order to do so I need to be here, not crashing through the woods.”

  “Were you planning to get captured all along?” Yuliya asked, her face brightening even more.

  “Sort of,” said Dasha. “It was one possibility amongst many. But now it’s the only one available to us.

  “It’s still a terrible risk, Tsarinovna,” said Yuliya.

  “I know,” Dasha told her. “But it has to be taken. Just…be ready in case I need you to do something. I’ll probably call upon you to interpret for me soon.”

  “I still think I should know the plan, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya said, but Dasha only shook her head, and then Birgit stopped and indicated that they should—oh marvelous relief!—relieve themselves.

  As Birgit led them back towards the others, Dasha thought she caught sight of something moving in the shadows under the trees. And then eyes peered out at her, and she knew that a deer was standing there, just out of sight, watching over her. She could even hear her keeping pace with them as they moved, although the others seemed unaware of it. The knowledge calmed her, and reassured her that she was doing the right thing after all. As they stepped out of the trees and back onto the road, the sun was already above the treetops, its light flooding the forest and the clearing, dispelling the twilight fears and doubts that had been haunting Dasha before. Now if only it could dispel her hunger as well.

  ***

  The rising sun did nothing for her hunger, but once the cabin’s flames had been well and truly quenched, everyone, including the prisoners, was given food. Dasha’s share was a small portion of bread. Actually, it was a large portion of bread, larger than that of any of the other prisoners, but Dasha gave half of it to Yuliya. Yaromir complained bitterly about this, and in her head Dasha cursed the raiders for putting her in this position by trying to show her special favor, but out loud she told them that there wasn’t enough for all of them, and right now they all needed Yuliya to keep up her strength more than anything else. Which did nothing to convince Yaromir, but Ratibor nodded in agreement and told him to stop whining.

  While they were eating, the raiders held a meeting, which involved a lot of disagreement and shouting and pointing, much of it at Dasha. When it was over, it appeared a consensus of sorts had been reached, and the leader—although judging by the way the others spoke to him, his lead was more tenuous than Dasha would have thought—came over and squatted down in front of her and said something.

  “He said his name is Bjorn,” Yuliya said. “He wants to know your name.”

  “Dasha,” Dasha said, looking him right in the eyes. They were a pale blue, and to her sight, freakishly round, just as his face, for all the strength she saw in his expression, was peculiarly soft and edgeless, as if he had no cheekbones. His hair was blond, but was so dirty it looked almost brown, and hung in matted locks down past his chin, as if he had hacked it off with a knife at some point and then not bothered to do anything with it since. Everything about him was paler and rounder than Dasha was used to seeing, even though he was as weathered and muscular as any other man who had spent his life outside working and fighting. There was nothing of the steppe and the East in his blood at all, she supposed. She would have liked to think that meant he was gentle and sedentary, but that, obviously, was not true. She supposed warriors and killers could come from the West as well.

  “Dasha,” he repeated, with a smile that seemed to have genuine mirth in it. “Tsarinovna, yes?”

  “Yes,” Dasha said.

  He said something else, in his own language, laughing as he said it. Dasha looked over at Yuliya for elaboration, but Yuliya was scowling so much that Dasha didn’t need an explanation to know that he had said something bad, probably something about the Tsarina and the fact that she was a woman. Well, that wouldn’t do at all. Dasha’s hand flashed out and grabbed him by the sleeve, so fast he had barely had the time to be startled before a single flame went licking up the fabric. He jerked away, but not before Dasha had slapped his arm with her other hand, putting out the flame.

  “Remind him that one should always be polite to guests,” Dasha said to Yuliya. She hoped no one could guess how surprised she was by her own success in lighting and putting out the flame.

  Yuliya said something, her voice faltering. Bjorn gave her a scornful look, and Dasha a look that had something of calculation in it, and something of respect, and something, she thought, of fear. Good. Let him remember who was the sorceress here.

  “Ask him what he wants,” Dasha said.

  Yuliya, her voice still faltering, asked him the question. Dasha wanted to shake her for being so fearful. For an instant she had a strange sensation of doubling, for the exact same expression that she thought she was trying to repress on her own face flashed across Bjorn’s. Then he composed himself and spoke at length, looking Dasha directly in the face as he did so.

  “He said,” said Yuliya when he had finished, “that it has been decided that we will set off immediately to the Tsarina. He intends to ransom you in exchange for concessions from her.”

  “What kind of concessions?” Dasha asked.

  Yuliya asked. Bjorn answered dismissively.

  “He says that is between her and him,” she said. “He says he can’t tell you everything, since you’re still his prisoner and he has to keep some kind of control over you.”

  “Tell him,” Dasha said evenly, “I wish him good luck with that.”

  Yuliya relayed the message. Bjorn burst out laughing and gave Dasha a hearty slap on the shoulder.

  “You,” he said, poking her in the collarbone. “With I.” He made walking motions with his fingers. “Understands?”

  “I understand,” Dasha told him.

  “Krasnograd,” he told her. “You with I.”

  She shook her head. “Pristanograd,” she said. “The Tsarina is in Pristanograd.”

  “Pristanograd?” he repeated. He looked over at Yuliya questioningly. They had a hurried conversation in which the word “Pristanograd” was repeated several times.

  “He wants
to know why the Tsarina is in Pristanograd,” she said when they were done.

  “She is meeting with people,” Dasha said. “To talk about what to do about the foreigners raiding our lands. What to do about him.”

  This provoked another outburst of laughter from Bjorn, and he said something that Yuliya, her lips a thin line, told Dasha meant that he was going to show all of them what to do about him and his people when he got there. Then he asked where Pristanograd was.

  This, unfortunately, was more difficult to answer. Dasha could have found Pristanograd on a map in a heartbeat, but they had no maps. Where it was relative to where they were now was less clear. Somewhere to the West, she knew, but how to get there was another question entirely. This confession elicited scorn from Bjorn, but he had only the vaguest notion of how to get there himself. Yuliya pronounced herself completely ignorant, as did Lyokha, and Mitrofan was still too dazed to say anything at all. By unspoken agreement no one asked Ratibor and Yaromir. In the end it was decided to start heading West and try to make their way towards Pristanograd by luck and questioning. Not that Bjorn put it that way. He seemed fully confident that they would have no trouble finding their way. Dasha, who found the idea of setting off with only a single compass point as a general direction to guide them to be terrifying—not that she would admit that to anyone around her—wondered if he even knew what doubt was. Doubtful types of people, she supposed, probably did not rise high amongst these Westerners, who did not appear to value serious thought as a virtue.

  Be that as it may, they were shortly all on their feet and heading off on foot, leaving the carts and the carthorses behind. Bjorn explained through Yuliya, with a bright glance at Dasha, that they would avoid the roads until they were well past the village where the rest of her group had stopped, in order to avoid detection, and horses would only slow them down and make them easier to track.

  “Someone will find the horses, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya told her, correctly interpreting the stricken look that crossed Dasha’s face. “And rather quicker than they’ll find us.”

  And then they were striding along through the early-morning forest. The raiders, whatever their other faults, could move swiftly and tirelessly through the woods. Bjorn insisted that Dasha walk beside him, and lifted her up by the arm whenever she stumbled. He made several remarks that Dasha did not need Yuliya’s help to know were disparaging comments about her walking ability and, like as not, the softness of girls of noble birth in general. Which was particularly irritating because it was true, so Dasha gritted her teeth and said nothing. After the fourth or fifth time he added something else that was less immediately obvious without interpretation. Dasha looked questioningly over at Yuliya.

  “He says,” Yuliya panted, struggling to keep up with them (no one had been helping her up when she stumbled), “that you’re very pretty, even if you’re not very strong. He says,” she grimaced, “you would make a good wife.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Dasha, puzzled. “I don’t see why he cares, though.”

  This led to brief but bad-tempered interaction between Bjorn and Yuliya, which ended with Yuliya saying, her mouth pursed as if she had just taken a mouthful of bad cabbage, “He suggests that you marry him.”

  Dasha looked him up and down in surprise. “How old is he?” she asked. “He must be old enough to be my father.”

  Yuliya snapped out something at Bjorn, probably what Dasha had just said. To her surprise, he laughed and laughed, and then said something to Yuliya which made her look even more disapproving than before.

  “What did he say?” Dasha asked.

  “He said,” Yuliya said reluctantly, “that he has thirty-five summers, and a daughter no younger than you, but that you should be grateful for that, because that means he knows how to…” She trailed off in embarrassment.

  “Yes?” demanded Dasha.

  “It was very crude,” Yuliya said primly. “But the basic gist was that he knows how to, ah, please a woman, and he has heard that Zemnian women value that highly.”

  “Don’t all women?” Dasha asked. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Foreign women are very peculiar,” said Yuliya by way of explanation.

  “Well,” said Dasha. “Tell him, that, ah, I am very flattered by his proposal, but I couldn’t possibly answer it either way without consulting with my mother, and I am not of age yet to marry anyway.”

  When Yuliya passed on Dasha’s words, though, Bjorn responded by telling her that he would talk her into it.

  “He is welcome to try, of course,” said Dasha, when Yuliya told her this. “I just don’t see what he could possibly add to change my mind, especially after what he did to Birgit!” She had meant for that to stay between her and Yuliya, but Yuliya, for obscure reasons of her own, or perhaps as a way to get back at both of them, passed on Dasha’s words to Bjorn. Who told her, with apparent honesty, that since she was the Tsarinovna, she wouldn’t have to worry about anything like that ever happening to her. She and Birgit were completely different.

  “No we’re not!” said Dasha. “Anything a person would do to her, they’d do to me.”

  “That’s not how these Westerners see it at all, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya told her. “They don’t think there’s anything wrong with rape, or killing, or things like that, in and of themselves. It all depends on who it’s being done to, and why. In their eyes, Birgit is practically a slave, and a traitor too, since she ran away and ended up with us, so they can do whatever they like with her. They have to, to punish her and teach her her place, like you’d beat a dog or a horse.”

  “I wouldn’t!” Dasha interjected before Yuliya could go on. Yuliya gave her an annoyed look, that Dasha thought seemed to say that someone as silly as she was should never have been born Tsarinovna, before continuing, with a little too much glee, “They probably will, this very night as soon as we stop. But you’ll be safe from them—probably—because you have value as a hostage, and because that’s not how women of noble birth are treated. In theory, at least.”

  Dasha looked at Bjorn, who was striding alongside her energetically, a friendly smile on his face. Right now he didn’t look like a rapist or a killer at all, but she supposed that was what Yuliya was trying to tell her: people like him didn’t see anything wrong with any of that, so they wouldn’t bear any marks of being evil from doing it. They would be friendly and pleasant right up until the moment they weren’t, and go back to being friendly and pleasant as soon as the horror they committed was over, with no conception of what they had done. Like a dog who would turn on another dog for walking too close, and go back to wagging her tail as soon as she had ripped out her sister’s throat. Dasha wondered just how safe she really was from Bjorn and the others. Only somewhat, she thought glumly, just as Yuliya had said. She supposed she could always set any attackers on fire if she had to, providing her uncertain gifts chose to grace her with their presence at the right moment, but when she thought of setting Bjorn on fire, her visions all told her that would turn out badly, or at least be a waste of this opportunity she had been given. She would have to steer all of them to Pristanograd without letting anyone do anything terrible to anyone else, herself included.

  Her visions wandered off in a slightly different direction, and she wondered if her mother really would consider the idea of marrying Dasha to Bjorn, or someone like him. It was a funny thought, especially when she envisioned herself married to this man walking next to her, this foreigner more than twice her age. But the visions told her that it might happen. There was much to be said in such a scheme’s favor, although frankly Bjorn hardly seemed important and powerful enough for her to marry. But he had the advantage of being present, and the visions said that there were circumstances that could make it come about. Dasha considered it. Both her heart and the visions said that it would not be as terrible as one might think. Which was not to say it wouldn’t be terrible, just that he was more trainable than might be immediately apparent. Well, she could always dangle it as a carr
ot until she was safely back in her mother’s care.

  “Tell him,” she said to Yuliya, “that I will consider his proposal, but in the meantime he must prove himself worthy of my consideration. Tell him that you and Birgit are my personal maids, and any offense given to either of you is an offense to me.”

  “He won’t like that, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya warned her, but when she told him, he grinned at Dasha and said, according to Yuliya, “Spoken like a true queen!” and patted her arm in what seemed to be meant as a sign of respect and affection.

  ***

  Despite Yuliya’s misgivings, no one was molested that day, not even Birgit. Dasha wasn’t sure whether that was the result of her own intervention, or because everyone was too tired after spending a very long day moving as quickly as they could through the woods. From what Dasha could glean and guess, Bjorn had a very reasonable fear that the other members of Dasha’s party would come after them, and so was cutting across country as quickly as he could, hoping to keep ahead of them long enough to reach Pristanograd before they were caught. That they would eventually be found was not in any doubt: their trail from the cabin was clear even to Dasha, and surely Oleg could track them with ease. And if Gray Wolf and the other spirits of the forest were to help him, well, Dasha thought she would probably be back with her own people by tomorrow. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she expected it. The domoviye had let her go because she had requested it; whether Gray Wolf would do the same she couldn’t say, but she had little doubt that he could find her in a heartbeat, if her father requested it, and she thought it very likely that her father would request it as soon as he had guessed what had happened to her. Accordingly, Dasha kept her mind and her eyes open as they walked through the woods that day, and kept them open when they finally stopped for the night, as the late-night twilight was already settling over the trees.

  “We won’t be stopping long,” Yuliya warned her, as they sat slumped side-by-side on the ground. “We’ll be setting off again as soon as it starts to grow light again.”