I was here.
It could have been any village among the ever-moving, war-torn borders. The Polish-Lithuanian Prince had fallen to Heaven. Mortals couldn’t hear the thousand boots and their distant tremor. They hadn’t even received the news that the people beyond the safety of their mountain had been trampled. But I heard the earth’s dull roar as foreign royalty marched on territories too far from the Tsar and his army to hold with a closed fist.
Love was here. In nearly two thousand years since the conclave, this was my first reason to plant my feet fully on Slavic soil.
The army would be here by nightfall.
A mutinous god of war carved a rugged path through terrain as he led the colonizers to Love’s soil. But he wasn’t the only one I was here to see.
A god and a bitch rumbled into an ambush.
Someone would die today.
If I fell on the battlefield to my adversaries, at least my story ended over someone worth dying for.
I soaked in the mortal world as if I might see it for the last time. Eastern peaks shimmered as they glowed in the west. A dozen perpendicular logs in the Baltic highlands smoked with life. I eyed the snow-covered, hay-thatched roof, steep enough for a small avalanche to bury three men in a chilly grave. Oak trees, dense, toxic berries of the rowan tree, and a fragrant perimeter of spruce pressed in from all sides.
Villagers milled about their day. Some jolly, some bored, some grumbling about one thing or the other, all ignorant as to the horrors awaiting them. Three thousand people, some with fair hair, some with a constellation of freckles, some fur-chested and black of hair, eye, and spirit.
I couldn’t warn them.
Not this time.
I’d bided my time to deal with Jarovid’s bloodthirsty display at the conclave. Perun, Dzbog, Veles, Lada, and the retinue in attendance had watched their sneering brother and pressed their fingerprints to Hell’s treaty.
An optimized agreement would have held out for reciprocation in wartime. Hell was offered no such promises. We were bound to their aid in battle. They were bound to ours through inaction.
This was my fight.
Snow hit my cheek but didn’t melt against my icy skin.
Ten fingers, and I was nearly approaching both fists when it came to the number of times tears had lined my eyes. Today was such a day as I stood, and I waited.
Thunder rumbled overhead—rare enough for wintry days that it startled the villagers to dash into their homes—as the first deity stepped through the veil to see who had disturbed his people. I savored the last glimpses of sunset before clouds rolled in from over the mountains. This was not the gray of a late-afternoon and its snowfall.
The village vibrated as the sky darkened to a shade of iron.
Axe in hand, beard to his chest, clad in armor, the divine being of war, storms, and the chief of the mountain cults,appeared on the far side of the village. Perun watched as his people scattered, unable to see his shape, but obedient to the sound of his presence. His eyes blackened, a reflection of what could have been a night-dark sky.
I extended my still-dripping hand, dropped my blood upon the snow, and lifted my chin.
His knuckles flexed against his weapon. In a low rumble, he warned, “You offered us protection, Prince. Your legions have arrived throughout the mountains to fight with us, and yet the foreign god spreads. The oracle says this village will fall. She says the bloodshed will end only when we relent our faith.”
I tracked his line of sight as he spied the wobbling shadows in the trees surrounding the village. My legion was here in full force, but not for him.
I spied the shades of other legions mingling with my own. I had not asked for backup. In fact, I’d told none of my plans. Yet, I’d consulted the citizens of Hell who peered into the glasses of time and returned with an answer. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that word of my intent would spread.
“They’ll call it the Truce of Deulino,” I replied. “Heaven will win. Your Tsar will concede. This will be their final battle.”
The thick bushes of two gray brows clouded amidst his troubled forehead. Another crack of thunder, closer, louder, joined the snow “You believe in an ever-changing future, too, Prince. You speak of this one as if it’s in stone. This is only our destiny if?—"
The tightening of my eyes, the flex of my jaws, the subtle quiver as my throat bobbed was its own interruption. I couldn’t cry in front of their highest god, but he was on the verge of understanding what I planned to do.
A sealed fate awaited this village, their people, and my human within it. I was to blame.
Perun tried again. “Are you saying…”
I did my best to create a few moments of levity, however brief, between myself and the high god. I needed him to remember me fondly.
