The Winds of Khalakovo - Bradley P. Beaulieu [208]
Rehada was being held closely, her circlet gone. Of Nikandr’s men less than twenty remained. They stood there, haggard, and it was then that Nikandr realized that Ashan was missing. He scanned the bodies of the fallen, becoming frantic when he didn’t see Ashan among them, but when the wind began to blow across the battlefield, he knew that the arqesh had managed to slip away.
The wind gained in intensity, lifting new waves of snow from the ground and pushing men back who were unprepared. It ebbed for one moment, giving everyone a chance to regain their footing, but then, as if the brief pause had been an inhalation, the wind howled with the force of a gale. It sounded like a great, ravenous beast ready to devour them all.
Nikandr fell to the ground as men were swept from their feet. Their kolpak hats flew off their heads as wet snow and dirt pelted them. One man even fired his musket in the direction of the wind, perhaps seeing something he thought was the enemy. The next moment, he toppled backwards and was lost in a rain of white.
The wind cut fiercely against the Vostroman soldiers, pushing them from the lip of the knoll, and Nikandr understood what Ashan was trying to do.
“This way!” he shouted from hands and knees. He dare not stand up lest he be blown about like the men standing only a few paces away. In fact, the intensity increased even more, forcing him to drop to the ground and lay prone.
He didn’t know if his men had heard his order, but when he was able to rise, the sotnik was at his elbow, pulling him up and helping him stumble toward the opposite side of the hill.
Rehada and Ashan caught up with the group just as they reached the place where Grigory’s men had huddled. There was a wide swath of matted snow and a fair amount of blood, but it was otherwise empty.
They quickly chased after using the trail they had left behind. They found a skiff, its sails cut to shreds, and an imprint in the snow of another that had recently left.
“What do we do, My Lord?” the sotnik asked.
“I don’t know,” Nikandr said listlessly. “I have no idea where they would go.”
“I know,” Rehada said. “They go to Duzol.”
CHAPTER 63
Atiana realized she was in the air again. She felt light, not only because she was flying through the stormy weather in the bottom of a skiff but because she felt wholly unencumbered by her mortal frame. She felt, in fact, like a havahezhan must: free and ethereal.
She fell unconscious. When she woke again, it was to a jostling of the skiff. They had landed, and someone was standing over her, asking her where they needed to go. He looked familiar, but for the life of her she couldn’t place him.
“The spire on the fort,” she said weakly.
“You are sure?” he asked.
It was a man she didn’t care for—she knew this much—but she saw no reason to withhold the information.
“I am.” It felt like each word weighed ten stone.
He looked down on her, ungracious.
“We go,” he said, though she understood it was not to her.
“And the Lady Princess?”
A pause.
“Leave her.”
Flakes of snow fell upon her face, soft touches of ice upon deadened skin.
The sound of footsteps through snow were all around her, but then they faded, leaving only the nearby waves and the wind as it whistled through the trees. She could see neither of these things, but she realized with a growing certainty that she could feel them. The snow beneath her fingers, the grass beneath the snow, the earth through which the grass extended its roots, and the bedrock of the island beneath the soft, pliable earth. She felt all of this and more.
And soon... Soon...
She hears the call of a lonely heron, hears its mate over a mile away. She feels the weight of a nearby copse of trees upon the earth, small in comparison to its larger sister to the south. She feels the wind as it brushes against the evergreen branches, the pine cones as they are tugged free to fall against the snow, the rabbits