The rain pounded on the worn rooftop of the watchtower as the storm grew, filling the air with a relentless pattering that made sleep difficult to find.
Yesugei sat on a small weathered stone, gaze fixed on the small flame dancing in the tower’s firepit as he dried his hunting bow. The warmth slowly seeped into his bones as he worked, chasing away the chill of the rain-soaked air, and he let out a weary sigh of relief. Tuyaara settled into the corner opposite him, her attention focused on tending to the falcon perched on her gloved hand. For a long while neither of them spoke, each lost in their own thoughts.
Finally, Yesugei broke the stretched silence, his voice sounding muffled by the din of the pouring rain outside.
“Why were you following me, Tuyaara?” he asked carefully. “Is your trust truly so little?”
“Trust is to be earned, not given at will,” muttered Tuyaara in reply. She fixed him with a dark look. “Especially when it is to be trust in one tainted by dark magic.”
“Your father certainly had enough trust to send me out. Would you doubt his judgment?”
“His judgment did not come fully from a place of trust,” said the girl-shaman. “It is as you said - he is my father…and fathers fear for their daughters, especially sending them out alone on the open road in such times.”
Tuyaara’s hard gaze wavered from Yesugei’s face, and she cast her eyes back onto her injured falcon. “My father is old, and afraid. Afraid of the coming harvest, afraid of the coming doom. But more than that, he is afraid of losing me - and that fear clouds all other judgment.”
Somehow, though it rang a different tune, the story was familiar. Tuyaara did not seem so much younger than him - their difference was only by a few years, if even that, but her spirit reminded him of his own just a few short weeks ago. Yesugei felt a wry smile come to his face. “So the daughter defies the father, and now you are here. What was your plan, then? How long would you have tracked me, hiding in the shadows?”
“As far as needed,” said Tuyaara with a confident edge to her voice. “If you stayed the course, I would have followed you to the White City and sought my own answers. If you did not…then I would have killed you, and made a good lot of people in the ulus happier for it.”
Yesugei stirred life anew into the fire with a damp branch as the girl-shaman studied him carefully. “Perhaps I still might.”
Suddenly, he felt very tired. Tired of suspicions, tired of insults, tired of cries of oathbreaker and scum. His hand clasped around the ivory hilt of his dagger, and his tongue came sharp as a blade, “If you still plan to kill me…perhaps you should speak to me more softly. I swore an oath to carry out your father’s mission, but I swore nothing of keeping his daughter alive - and you are no warrior.”
Tuyaara’s own knife lay off to the side, and her eyes flashed to the blade for a moment before falling upon him once more. He saw fear in her eyes then - a swift judgment that she might not move quickly enough to defend herself. He let the girl-shaman sit in her quiet fear for a moment, and then he loosened his grip on his own knife and tossed another branch into the fire. “But if you will listen, perhaps I can ease your mind before we kill one another and die for nothing. If you will not trust my honor, then trust my self-interest - I have my own reasons to reach the White City.”
Tuyaara thought for a moment. “The princess…you speak of her.”
“Her name is Vasilisa,” Yesugei replied. He remembered the final flash of her pale Solarian garment before she disappeared into the woods. Might she have come along this very trail he now roamed? “It is her city that is the reason all of this madness started. When your noyan attacked Stribor’s company, she and I made to flee to her home, or perhaps to a lord friendly to her father.”
He fixed Tuyaara with a determined stare, and he saw her own expression had softened somewhat. “I swore an oath to her as well - we are blood-bound, she and I. She saved my life, and I her honor.
"I know she is still alive, and I know she will be making her way to Belnopyl by some road or path. So if you will not trust me to uphold your father’s charge…then trust that I will seek her, at the least.”
Silence fell between them once more. Tuyaara studied him for a long while, her gaze searching for what truth she could find in his eyes. He could not have said for how long they sat, but eventually the girl-shaman sighed, and shrugged her shoulders. “Very well, Qarakesek-”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“My name is Yesugei.”
“Yesugei,” she continued. “I will trust in your blood-bond - not even the sons of Tsaagandai would dare to breach such sacredness a second time...I think. But know this, I will still accompany you to Belnopyl, lest another bandit split your skull in half.”
A small smile tugged at the corners of Yesugei's lips. “I would expect nothing less,” he replied, and he felt the tension in the air slowly melt into the damp floorboards.
Eventually, sleep found him first, drawing his eyes shut with its heavy weight once he found a comfortable nook in which to tuck himself. The darkness came fast upon him, but blessedly, he remembered no dreams - only the crackling of the fire, the preening of the falcon, and Tuyaara's face, half shrouded in darkness, half lit by the orange flames.
The flames…
The flames…
But then he remembered no more.
***
When morning arose the next day a thin mist hung over the entire forest, shrouding the path ahead doubly along with the shadows of the trees overhead. Yesugei awoke to a chill in the air, and he saw the firepit was snuffed out.
Outside, Tuyaara was already at work loading her horse with saddlebags and pack - whether she had even slept the night before, he did not know. When he approached the girl-shaman and loosened his own mare’s reins, she said with her back turned, “I do not like the silence of these woods, nor this cold - it is unnatural. The road here will take us from the woods with good speed, but once we are further, we will need to make a choice.”
Yesugei searched his memory for the time spent in Stribor’s company, and he recalled whispered bits and pieces from the other peasants the band kept as slaves. Briefly, he wondered where they had fled - the man with the thin blond hair, the weaver’s wife Galya, the crooked old woman, and all the others. Wherever they went, he somehow felt that as long as the old woman remained alive, no fate too terrible could have befallen then.
He recalled the old woman’s words about the path Stribor was taking, and repeated them aloud, “The Rovetshi Marshes - that is where the boyar was taking us, and where Vasilisa had fled. From there, if the lord of the marsh were friendly, he could have offered her a boat and an escort to send her up the Cherech to her lands.”
“Perhaps he did,” replied Tuyaara. “But the Gravemarshes are not for our folk.”
“How so?”
Tuyaara’s look grew distant for a moment, recalling some distant memory, or fable. “Did your brothers or father’s noyans ever tell you of their invasion through this land?”
They had, many times over. After the crushing victory at Ongainur Field where the princes were scattered, his father, Nariman, and Talgat had swept west and then north, sacking town after town in their wake. The only treachery that had forced them to slow their rampage then, he recalled, was not any army or keep…but swamps and marshes.
“They did not speak much of the Marshes,” he said slowly. “Only that they judged the mountains the better path, and took their armies there.”
“The noyans were correct in their judgment,” Tuyaara spoke. “It is known the marshes are a dangerous path for all travelers unless they go about with a guide or some local folk, but for us, it would be even more perilous.
“It is said that many centuries ago, before the names of either Qarakesek or Baskord were known, the lands of Rovetshi were once lush and green, and grown with forest. Back then, the Klyazmite holy men of the north were close with the spirits of the land much like the Modkhai, and the wisest among them knew ancient words and chants to move the ground and waters to the will of their gods.
“It was this power they brought against some tribe whose name is now lost, when its khan dared to strike beyond the Devil Woods with fire and sword - the shamans of the west made their stand alongside the chieftains of old, and sundered the wooded realm of Rovetshi with water from the mountains, drowning our kin in their thousands.” Tuyaara shuddered, as if she herself were there to see the warriors of old crushed beneath the surging waves. “It is Khormchak bones which lie deepest now in the marshes, and the magic that remains there today still remembers and hungers for steppe-folk.”
Tuyaara tightened her horse’s saddle, and looked to Yesugei. “If it is your friend and the White City you seek, we should take the path your father's noyans once did - along the God-Spine. Along that path we may ride for a week, and then descend through the Titans’ Pass into the open plains west of the city.”
“The mountains will give us no easy passage either,” Yesugei reminded the shaman. “Our tribe lost one in every ten men to the chill, and there are mountain-folk besides with little love for Khormchaks.”
“Chill winds and unkindly folk will be found wherever we go,” insisted Tuyaara. “But trust me when I say the marshes will be our doom. How will you hope to reach the White City if our horses become stuck in muck up to their bridles, or if you should get bitten by some creature in the waters, and the wound festers and rots beyond my healing? Your bow will break from the humid air, your blade will rust even in its sheath, and the ghosts of men drowned will beseech you to join them.”
There was a stark fear in the shaman’s eyes - to her, this was more than a tale, it was something as real as the earth upon which they stood and the trees which towered about them.
Yesugei thought on her caution for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “What good is a Modkhai shaman if I do not heed her counsel? Very well, we’ll ride for those gods-forsaken mountains.”