Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [65]
My dead Uncle Pavel had a larger, broader hand than I—the hilt of his saber felt too wide and too heavy, but its curve fitted into my palm snugly enough.
The English, all moving at once, as if their movements were mutually articulated by invisible strings, put their hands in the pockets of their coats. I assumed their attire concealed weapons, pistols or knives.
The rotmistr moved to my left, his shoulder almost brushing mine, and advanced half a step in front of me, as if to shield me from the English. Thankfully, his broad back obscured the sight of Dame Nightingale’s snakelike stare, freeing me from her hypnotic influence.
“Stand down, rotmistr,” I whispered in Russian. “They won’t dare do anything here, in the middle of the street, with all these people around them.”
“Right you are, little hussar,” the rotmistr said. He turned to glance at me, his grin flashing a full foot over my head. “They’ll wait till you’re all by your lonesome somewhere secluded. You better run along and find your friend. We’ll keep them entertained here, if that is acceptable?”
“Thank you,” I whispered, and stepped back until his large frame concealed me from the English view entirely. I had left the sidewalk, and struggled through the bushes fringing the side of the tavern. I turned and ran, Nightingale’s voice echoing faintly behind me, my boots sloshing through the snow.
I dashed across the street and ducked between two buildings. The yards behind them connected and I ran through them until I was well clear of the crowded scene on Balchug Street. The yards, surrounded by tall townhouses with dark windows, had accumulated veritable mountains of snow. The din of the street was extinguished by its softness, and—stumbling through knee-deep drifts—it felt as if I were miles away.
The rotmistr and the cornets had done a wonderful thing for us, even though they had met us only the night before. I was lucky, I supposed, that the rotmistr was so kind, and didn’t take my behavior as an affront—he seemed rather amused by it, truth be told. I smiled when I remembered the way he grinned and winked, like a conspiratorial child.
I found an exit back onto the street, and stumbled out of the snow, stomping my feet on the pavement. The crowd thronged far behind me, and I could just make out the rotmistr’s head above the crush. I could discern some shuffling and pushing where he and the cornets were, and could hear a shrill rising female voice, but could not understand what she was saying, or even who it was with any certainty. However, there didn’t seem to be any Englishmen emerging from the crowd, so I sheathed my saber, changed the satchel from my left hand to my right, and ran toward the bridge. As I crossed it, the icy air pricked my chest from the inside with a million stinging needles.
I stopped to rest only when I reached the embankment on the opposite side. It seemed quieter there in the deep blue shadow of the Kremlin, and I walked slowly, looking for Jack. He wouldn’t have gone far.
I found him sitting on the frozen, snow-covered steps leading from the foot of the bridge down to the water, black and sluicing over the fringe of ice that was forming on the embankment’s stone walls. “Are you well?” he called to me.
“Yes,” I said. “But they are after us—they’ll get here soon if the rotmistr fails to hold them off.”
“The rotmistr?”
“Come on—we have to hurry.”
Jack leapt up the steps and I had trouble keeping up with his pace. We decided to walk to the next bridge and cross back into Zamoskvorechye, and head for the train station. We would meet the St. Petersburg train and intercept the courier returning with a message from my aunt. We planned to then hire a coach to take us north, to the Eastern Station where we could catch the train heading to Nizhniy Novgorod and further east, all the way to Turkestan and China. I hoped we would confound our pursuers enough to lose them—there were five train stations in Moscow, and they had no way of knowing which one