Page 6 of The Bone Doll (The Ruthenian Chronicle #1)

The Thaw

South and east of Bereza, the narrow road passed through thick and wild forest. Fortunately, the oppressiveness of the forest was lightened by Syra’s thawing.

Viktor wouldn’t call their relationship congenial, but their silences no longer felt like the depths of winter; and Syra answered more easily when he asked her a question.

Daily, Viktor breathed a sigh of relief that his traveling companion didn’t hate him.

Or not as much as she had. It made traveling decidedly more comfortable, though it did cause him to catch himself admiring her starling-black hair and warm brown skin a bit too frequently.

Viktor knew she wouldn’t appreciate his ogling.

On the tenth day of their journey, they came to a fork in the road.

“What’s the matter?” Syra asked.

“I’m just trying to read these.” He squinted at the weather-worn waystones. One said Bel– and the other Belu–. As if both paths went to the city by the lake. No matter how hard he tried to read the other letters, he couldn’t make them out.

“Which way did you come from?”

Neither, if he was being honest. Viktor didn’t remember this fork in the road. He had taken a straight, uninterrupted shot from Beluvod to Bereza and then the tundra. He scratched at his hairline, glancing between the two waystones. Well, he couldn’t stand here forever.

“That way,” he decided, jerking his chin to the southwesterly path.

Syra hesitated, her hand twitching towards the waystones minutely before she closed it into a fist. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course,” he said with all the confidence he could muster.

“I feel like–”

“Beluvod and Zoldrovya are southwest of here,” he said. “That path goes southwest. It must be that path.”

“Okay.” She gestured flatly for him to lead the way.

Viktor forced a smile to reaffirm to Syra – and himself – that of course he knew the way.

He didn’t want her to think he was incompetent or so forgetful that he didn’t know how to get back home.

It was easy: just head southwest. He would recognize the trail soon enough, and Syra would never be the wiser.

However, as he guided her down the trail, he didn’t see any familiar landmarks. His hands began to sweat inside his gloves.

He tried to distract himself. “You said your grandfather made the Bone Doll. He was a shaman, yes? What I wanted to ask is: what do Sarnok shamans like your grandfather do? They have magic, it seems. They can make these … talismans.”

Her lips pressed into a fine line, and for a moment, Viktor worried he might have hit a sore subject. But then her expression eased and she said, “Our shamans deal in one of the three worlds – the sky, the earth, or the underworld. My grandfather was a vidutana, meaning he was a sky shaman.”

“Did he teach you any of his magic?” Viktor asked.

Syra shrugged. “I’m a vidutana as well, but I don’t have magic like him. I can’t even read omens in the stars. I can’t make my soul leave my body and I definitely cannot make a talisman like the Bone Doll. Only the most powerful can do that.”

Viktor recognized the shame in her voice. He had it too, buried deep inside. His father had wanted a strong and violent son. Instead, Igor Sviatopolkovich got Viktor, a coward and a liar. “It can be hard when we don’t live up to expectations.”

“No one expects me to be a sky walker,” she said. “But it would have been nice to at least prophesy.”

He admitted silently that prophesying might have helped him pick the right path. Because he still didn’t recognize the thin trees with bluish-green needles that surrounded them, nor the stretch of yellow-brown grass ahead.

“I’m sure you know lots of stories, though,” he said to change the subject. “Holy people are a font of stories.”

She gave a noncommittal grunt.

“Perhaps you can tell me one of your grandfather’s stories,” he said. “Even a true one. I’ve never heard of a man who could walk in the sky.”

She eyed him sidelong and said instead, “Something’s rotting.”

“It’s just the thaw,” he insisted as the trees gave way to waterlogged grass and large spans of yellow mud. “Dead leaves being exposed after a long winter, and all.”

“The spring melt can make low-lying areas dangerous,” she said. “It turns solid ground into a mire.”

“The road is still raised here.” He gestured. “If we stay on it, we’ll avoid the mud and any quagmires there might be.”

Syra wrinkled her nose but said nothing else.

Viktor adjusted the straps of his pack as he led onward. He wasn’t a pampered lordling anymore. He had been traveling for two years. He knew how to handle bad roads. And here, he could show Syra how capable he was.

The path narrowed as the patches of mud and snowy slush widened. Gnats swarmed, and he batted them away from his face. Ahead, trees and more solid ground awaited. This muddy field wasn’t that large. They’d be out of here in no time. And the road was fine, just slick.

He glanced back. Syra slogged after him with one hand over her abdomen – right over where the Bone Doll lay. As though it were a child in her belly and not an old piece of carved bone. The mud oozed over his boots, sucking him downward as he paused.

He saw it happen.

The path beneath Syra’s feet collapsed in a rush of slush and water.

Syra buckled and tumbled into the quicksand below.

His heart in his throat, he clambered in and reached for her.

The quicksand snatched his legs; and Viktor floundered.

Fetid gas bubbled up around them, busting with sickening fumes.

Gagging, Viktor grabbed Syra’s arms and pulled. But it only made him sink deeper in.

She shoved him away. Wrenching her belt knife from the mud, she hacked at her pack’s straps until the pack snapped free and sunk beneath the quicksand. Then, half-crawling, half-swimming, she dragged herself back to the narrow strip of road.

“Get on your belly.” Her voice was hoarse, her face flushed. “Make yourself flat, wide. You have to float.”

Lowering himself into the mud and spreading his limbs, Viktor did as she instructed. Then, carefully, he wriggled forward on the fetid surface. When he was close enough, Syra grabbed his pack and hauled him onto higher ground.

On his hands and knees, covered in mud, Viktor gasped for air.

Syra stared down at him as though he were nothing more than a snake she had encountered on the road.

He lowered his head. He wanted to hide. One wrong turn and he had nearly gotten them killed.

And jumping in after her had done absolutely nothing.

She had saved him. So much for being a capable traveling companion.

He dropped his gaze. “Thank you.”

Though he knew that Syra dealt in silence, he still expected her to yell, to scold, to mock. His father, his mother, his tutors, and even the few people he considered friends used their words to cut him when he made a fool of himself like this.

But Syra said nothing, simply turning back to the path and walking on.

Trying futilely to shake the mud off his clothes, Viktor stood and then followed her.

And if he couldn’t be more miserable, a breeze descended from the north, making his damp clothes heavy and cold.

He let her lead for now so she couldn’t see him.

This was always what happened when he tried to be heroic.

His boots sloshing along the waterlogged path, Viktor remembered being the age of six or seven and watching the older boys training with an obstacle course, under the armsmaster’s dictatorial eye.

Viktor had wanted to be a great warrior like the knights in his fairytales; and so he brashly entered the obstacle course one night after training.

He ended up falling from a rolling log and broke both legs.

He was only discovered by the armsmaster the next morning.

The arms master had ridiculed him for thinking he – a “little boy” – could finish an obstacle course that challenged battle-hardened soldiers.

And Viktor’s father had beaten him raw, broken bones and all, for being such an embarrassment.

He never had walked quite right since, though he did his best to hide it.

Viktor scrubbed at his face, the dried mud turning to grit beneath his palm.

He wished Syra would say something. The worst insult couldn’t be as bad as this disappointed silence.

But she wasn’t like anyone else he had ever known.

Faced with his utter insufficiency, she simply ignored him.

Which only reminded Viktor more clearly how he had tried to impress her, but instead she had to drag him out of a mess of his own making.

Turning towards Syra, Viktor opened his mouth to speak and then stopped. What use were words when he could have gotten her killed?