Page 13 of The Captive

Nobody guarded me. That was the thing I kept turning over as I walked out into the camp—no escort, no watcher at my shoulder, nothing but Marfa waving me off toward the fire like a landlady recommending the garden.

The message required no translation. Where, precisely, would I go, out here on the steppes?

So I explored my prison, and my prison was a village that happened to have wheels.

The wagons stood behind the tents in neat rows, but nothing else about the place felt temporary. Women worked hide and wool in the shade with their sleeves rolled. Men mended tack, argued over a cauldron of pitch, sharpened things. An ancient man with one eye sat carving a spoon and singing to himself in a cracked whisper, and children ran everywhere in loose howling packs with the dogs, cheerful as sin and not much cleaner.

Smoke, crushed grass, horses, mutton fat: the whole camp smelled of industry.

And everyone worked beside everyone. A woman in a red kerchief shoed a horse while a man held its head. I stood watching that for a long while.

My French was useless. My English was a party trick—the children followed me chanting “gud moaning” in a teasing chorus until their mothers swatted them.

But by afternoon I had gathered words the way a gown gathers burrs: kon’— horse. Voda—water. Khleb—bread. Spasibo—thank you. This last earned me such beaming approval from Marfa that I resolved to deploy it recklessly.

My horses, when I finally allowed myself the visit, were an insult.

Juno gleamed. Someone had bathed her, picked out her feet, and combed her mane into better order than her own groom managed at home, and she stood drowsing at the picket line among the shaggy little steppe horses like a countess fallen asleep at a farmhouse table.

Hector had acquired an entourage of boys who fed him grass one blade at a time in exchange for the privilege of touching him. The wiry young rider from the raid—Grishka, the boys called him—walked me around both animals, pointing at legs and feet and rattling off commentary I understood perfectly despite knowing none of the words. Sound. Fit. Feeding well.

They did not need me. I checked everything twice and could improve on nothing.

I stood at Juno’s shoulder with my fingers in her mane, and I considered—honestly considered, for the length of ten heartbeats—swinging up bareback and running.

Until I took a deep breath and looked to the horizon.

Flat land to every horizon. No map, no water, no Russian, and behind me forty riders who could track a hawk across the grass, led by a man who had promised, with a wink, to hunt me down.

And beyond all that, beneath all that, the truer thing: I had struck a bargain, and I had not yet gotten the better end of it.

You want to see what happens tonight.

I fed Juno a crust of stolen bread and stayed.

The riders returned at dusk, and I heard the cheering before I saw the dust.

The camp poured out to meet them the same as before—dogs first, then children, then everyone—and the great fire was already roaring by then, a whole sheep on the spit and a cauldron of that dark red stew breathing paprika over half the steppe. Someone had a fiddle going before the first man dismounted. The bandura—a string instrument I’d only learned the word for today—joined it, then the voices, and the evening cracked open into celebration as though the camp had merely been holding its breath all day.

Dmitri came through the crowd flushed with wind and grinning, and when he found me by the fire in my red silk, he stopped dead.

Then he laughed—a great free bark of it—closed the distance, caught me by the waist, and swept me off my feet and around in a full circle while the silk flared and the camp whooped.

My hands landed on his shoulders. My head spun with more than the turning.

He set me down and kissed me, brief and thorough, in front of everyone. As though I belonged here. As though I were the thing he’d ridden home to.

“Krasivaya,” he said, by way of explanation, and towed me toward the fire by the hand.

Beautiful, Dmitri called me. He called me that when I was dressed as one of his people, or when I was in my nightrail. Or when I was half-naked.

We ate seated on felts before the fire, close enough that his thigh lay warm along mine. He fed me without asking—lamb pulled off the bone with his fingers, bread dragged through the stew, a honeyed thing that stuck my fingers together—and kept my cup filled with the clear spirit from the night before.

“Horilka,” he said, when I choked on it, and tapped my cup with his. “Say it.”

“Horilka,” I managed, in flames.

“There. Now you drink like a Cossack.” My wolf was relaxed in a manner I hadn’t yet seen—loose-shouldered, easy, laughing across the fire at his men.