In the end, Ivan was surrounded by a wide circle of furious immortals, all dressed in bloody and singed wedding attire.
All baring their fangs at the vampire who had tried to kill the king.
Pavel stepped forward from the line of his warriors, reached down, and though the ground was covered in snow and ice, his power was greater. Pavel’s elemental energy pulsed through the field, and the earth beneath Ivan and his horse rumbled and quaked.
The animal screamed and reared up, throwing Ivan from his back before he galloped away.
Then Oleg’s brother was alone on the bloody field of his own making.
Oleg dismounted and walked toward him.
“You think I will surrender?” Ivan turned and lifted his hand, pushing a massive wall of earth toward Oleg. “Though you kill the true line of Truvor the Red, we will never give in!”
The ground beneath Oleg rolled violently. He nearly fell over, but as he steadied himself, an unseen wall of energy came from his right.
An icy whirlwind formed around Ivan, spinning and whipping the snow into violent flurries until Ivan himself waslifted off the ground, twisting in the air, trapped by a vortex of snow and cutting ice.
“Brothers!” Ivan cried out. “You let a foreigner violate our clan?”
Pavel crossed his arms over his chest.
Rudov curled his lip.
Lev was frozen, watching all of them.
And Lazlo stepped forward, blood staining his icy blue coat. “Brothers of Oleg of Gardariki, elders of the Kievan Rus… Do we claim this betrayer?”
Second by second, the column of frozen water crawled up Ivan’s body, wrapping his arms and freezing them as he screamed.
Pavel was the one who spoke first. “I do not know him.”
“I do not know him,” Rudov repeated.
“I do not know him.”
“I do not know him.”
Tatyana Vorona, terrin of the Poshani and Oleg’s new bride, stepped forward with the Hazar at her back and Oleg’s druzhina at her side. Her braids had come loose in the battle, and her hair whipped around her face. Her embroidered riding coat was stained with blood and ashes, and a line of red dripped down her cheek. She held a gore-covered axe in her right hand and lifted it in the air.
The world around her went silent.
She looked at Oleg, and her icy blue gaze burned into his. He felt their blood bond light up like a river of fire flowing from his heart to hers.
Isolated and lifted from the earth, Ivan had nothing to fight with. Tatyana had locked him in chains of snow and was stalking toward him with her people behind her and the blood of Ivan’s children spattered across her clothes.
“So she will fight your battles?” Ivan laughed desperately. “O great Knyaz! The humiliation of it. To let a woman not a decade immortal fight your battles so that not even?—”
Ice spread over Ivan’s lips, choking out the last words his brother would ever utter from his lying mouth.
Oleg looked at Tatyana, who met his eyes for barely a second before she ran up the snowy ramp, drew back her axe, and cut the betrayer’s head from his body with one bloody stroke.
Ivan’s frost-covered head rolled down the hill, coming to rest at Oleg’s feet, but he kicked it to the side, walked over to Tatyana, and lifted her hand, which still gripped the axe.
Oleg roared, “Knyaginya!”
The vampires of his clan howled their approval with hoarse cries. “Knyaginya!”
The Poshani chanted something that sounded like a war song.
