Page 14 of The Captive

He was rested. Home.

“Where did you ride today?” I asked.

“East. A village called Talniki.” Dmitri tore bread, unhurried. “In the spring, the administrator’s men took their cattle…arrears of taxes.” The word arrears spat out of his soft lips with a contempt that spoke of experience. “Today we brought them sheep, and silver for the winter.”

A white grin, sudden, sidelong. “Some of it yours, duchess. Your silver is feeding widows as we speak. You are very charitable.”

I stared at him in surprise. “You gave it away?” A very strange sort of bandit.

“We keep what we eat and what we ride. The rest goes where the Tsar’s men have already been.” He shrugged, as though this were simple rather than the stuff legends are made of. “It is not so noble as you are about to decide. The villages feed us all winter. A man pays his debts.”

“We have ballads about a man like you,” I said slowly. “In England. He robbed the rich on the king’s roads and gave the takings to the poor, and lived merrily in the greenwood with his men.”

“Did he hang?”

“The ballads disagree.”

“Ballads always do.” My captor drank, his eyes laughing at me over the rim.

The horilka was warm in my chest, and his hand had come to rest against my back—idle, moving, his thumb drawing slow lines through the silk along my spine as though he were thinking with it. I made no move at all to stop him.

“Your French,” I said. “You never told me where.”

“Paris.” His mouth curled. “I helped occupy it.”

“You—” I gasped, counting back the years. “You rode against Napoleon!”

“From eighteen-twelve to ‘fifteen. My father has standing in our stanitsa; his son went to the war looking respectable, with two horses and a new saber.” The firelight moved on Dmitri’s face, doing nothing to hide his bitterness.

He fed me another piece of soft bread. “In the year fourteen I rode into Paris with the army, and stayed most of a year. I learned the wine, the language, and the arguments of a widow on the Rue Jacob who threw a boot at my head whenever I was stupid.” His lips twisted wryly. “A good education, nyet?”

“And then you came back,” I said. “You saw Paris, and you came back here.”

To this barren steppe, where he and his men kept only what they ate.

“Here is mine.” Dmitri shrugged when he said it, as if it were the most natural sentiment in the world.

Then he was quiet for a moment, and the fire cracked, and the singing on the far side of it slid into one of those mournful turns that I couldn’t understand, but I still knew.

Unbidden, my fingertips rose to trace the pale line of his scar, where it left his beard. Only Dmitri’s eyes moved, tracing the lines of my face.

“This came from the war?”

“This came after the war,” he corrected without rancor. “I came home and found a new administrator sent from Petersburg—a man who could not sit a horse, carving up our grazing lands with a pen. Common land, held by Cossack right longer than the Romanovs have held anything.”

Now there was heat and anger and bitterness in Dmitri’s words, and his eyes grew hard. “He gave it to his friends. My father petitioned—the proper way, stamps and clerks. He was ignored. He petitioned again and was fined.”

Finally, he dropped his gaze to the cup in his hands, his voice softening. “The third time he petitioned, my father was threatened.” He turned the cup idly, as if not seeing it. “Then in the autumn they came to seize his horses. Tax in arrears.”

“His horses,” I said. My whole chest hurt at the thought. I’d learned that horses were life here on the steppe, and the way Dmitri’s band cared for Juno and Hector proved that.

His father had his animals confiscated for refusing to give up his land?

My wolf took a deep breath, his expression strangely blank, when I was used to his grins. “I had watched men die four years for the Tsar,” he said. “I found I could not watch that atrocity—a good man losing what was his. There were words, and then there was steel, and at the end of it one of the administrator’s lieutenants was dead on my father’s ground, and I had this”—a finger along the scar, jaw to collar—”from his saber. He was faster than I expected. Once.” Another shrug. “My father took shelter in a nearby stanitsa, and I found peace here, among other men who have been pushed out.”

The fire popped.

I am sorry. There are laws. You protected your father. But there were no right words to say.