The Grave-Turner

  The next day of the crossing of the Gravemarsh was much the same as the first: a dreadful, tiring slog through knee-high muds and the grasping tangle of reeds and shrubs. And yet, it was also so very different - the air among the column of refugees felt lighter, and their movements more purposeful, even if still sluggish.

  They were following her lead now, Vasilisa realized. They looked to her in a different light - one of worship, of a sort of rapture that was both enticing and terrifying at once. There were no more complaints or grumbling. Men and women who bemoaned their thinning rations now accepted even less with greater appreciation, looking to their Grand Princess who went without altogether.

  This is how it begins, she thought. She was witnessing the beginning of a legend - here, in the dead heart of a drowned forest, a new sort of faith was taking root. And yet it was something to be feared as much as loved. Now you cannot fail them, truly. To fail is to kill all hope, for they have placed it all on you. Worship - a blessing, and a curse.

  Still, the peasants’ worship served to keep them all well in line. Their ragged column made good time through the marshes, especially as the half-drowned causeway grew more solid. Rovetshi, the house of the Marsh Lords, the gateway into the Belnopyl plains, grew closer with each step.

  And all too soon, the quiet of their march was soon broken by idle talk. The marsh, for all its bleakness, stirred conversation among the peasants, filling the hush with murmurs of old stories and half-forgotten warnings.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Valishin, his voice half-muffled by the scarf wrapped around his lower face. “We’ve been walking this causeway for near two days, and not a single swamp-dweller in sight...”

  “Because the Vorodzhi aren’t real,” scoffed Marmun. “Tales for frightening children, that’s all. A thing for old women to whisper while sitting by the hearth.”

  “They exist,” an older man countered. “There’s stories of ‘em—half-men, half-beasts, troglodytes lurking in the reeds. Robbers, they are, thieves and cutthroats, preying on travelers like us.”

  Vasilisa listened as they spoke, the debate shifting from cautious curiosity to more heated speculation. Finally, she cut through their conversation, her voice calm but firm.

  “The Vorodzhi do exist,” she said. The group fell silent at her words, heads turning toward her as if expecting some great revelation. “They were here long before us, before Belnopyl, before princes and boyars warred over these lands.”

  She glanced past the causeway, where the twisted branches of drowned trees grasped out to the darkening sky. “The hill where my family’s keep now stands once belonged to them. Mariana - my nyanya - said that King Raegnald himself felled the first of the immortal oaks that stood there.”

  Lady Nesha, walking beside her horse, frowned at that. “That sounds sad,” she said after a moment. “To fell an immortal tree.”

  She looked out into the distance, listening to the chittering of the marsh’s unseen critters, the caw of unseen crows. The maps she had seen in her father’s study never betrayed the land’s harshness…nor its strange beauty; the life that brimmed underfoot, underwater, and in the air itself. Raegnald felled the oaks. Am I to fell this land? Fell the land to save the people?

  “Yes,” she murmured. “It is sad.”

  As dusk drew near and the marshes began to grow dark once more, the clangor of a bell sounded over the chittering of insects and the distant caws of birds. As a breeze blew across the open flooded plain, Rovetshi’s towers and curtain walls revealed themselves.

  A low stone wall encircled the Marsh Lords’ domain from north, south, and east - supporting a high wooden palisade. Behind the walls there stood the belltower and the wooden keep. To the west, the river dock jutted into the murky Cherech, where strange dark shapes bobbed on the water. As the mist thinned, Vasilisa realized they were the broken remains of cogs and skiffs, their sails tangled like spiders’ webs.

  A breeze stirred the reeds. She stepped carefully over the mud, but Marmun’s sharp cry stopped her.

  “There, look!”

  A man, caked in filth, lay half-sunken in the marsh at her feet. At first, she thought his bald head was a rock—until she saw the blood-crusted beard and the crossbow bolt buried in his chest. As the mist retreated, more shapes emerged from what seemed to be rocks and muddy slopes around the town.

  “They're everywhere…”

  Corpses littered the outskirts of Rovetshi. Most were peasants, butchered where they stood, their emaciated forms cut down by blades, lances, and bolts. But among the slain lay warriors of the Marsh Lords—one with the green tree of Rovetshi stained red, his jaw torn away. Another clutched at his own spilled entrails. A druzhinnik slumped beside his horse, his face a mess of hanging, graying flesh.

  Gastya retched, followed by others, as the stench of blood, piss, and death rose on the wind. Valishin, accustomed to slaughter, knelt to inspect a body. He turned pale as he looked up at Nesha.

  “Look here… Vadym the Toothless, Balai’s chief money-changer…”

  A spear had been driven through Vadym’s toothless mouth, its tip crusted with blood.

  More death. Everywhere. Vasilisa thought of the Dreamers falling from the sky, dead stars swallowing the land. A lingering cold imprinted itself deep into the earth. One of them was here - seeped in death.

  Valishin pointed to more bodies: a fisherman’s wife, her skull split by an axe, then another, and another. Too many to count—farmers, merchants, shiphands. In death, they all looked the same, sinking into mud and brackish water.

  Marmun covered his nose. “This is them. All of them. Everyone from Balai. Butchered like sheep.”

  The men and women of the empty town - one which had been sealed with an Apostle’s glyph. Suddenly the emptiness and the dread she and Yesugei had felt in Balai all fell together. The Dreamers, this was their work. They brought them here like cattle.

  Suddenly the town bell tolled, sending ripples through the water. Then from the walls ahead, torches flickered to life, iron helmets lined the battlements. A moment later, a splash of fiery red hair poked out from behind the walls.

  “Hold there, and come no closer!” a hoarse voice called. “You come with your wits still about you?”

  The man rose above the battlements, wearing a stained leather tunic and a green cloak fastened with a polished bronze clasp. Even at a distance, Vasilisa recognized the symbol.

  The clasp marked him a vechnik— the elected stewards of Klyazma’s ancient tribes, long before Raegnald’s conquest. Though her ancestor and his followers, the boyars, had replaced them in name, the Vechniki did not disappear entirely. It was still the old tribal heads’ duty to raise the local militia, and to tend to the burdens of rule that noble hands would not dirty themselves with.

  She called out to the headsman. “I would have your name. Who are you, vechnik? And where is Boyar Hrabr?”

  The Vechnik of Rovetshi bristled. “I would have your name first! These are dark times. Men turn to beasts and kill as they please. Give me your name, your business, and only then may we speak as equals.”

  Vasilisa lowered her hood and raised her chin, poised proud as her father before his subjects. “I am Vasilisa, daughter of Igor—princess of Belnopyl. Hrabr would know me well.”

  She gestured to the weary crowd behind her. “I bring with me sick and wounded from Gatchisk. The boyars pillage the lands they swore to protect, and war consumes the south. I seek my father’s hold and protection for these folk, vechnik.”

  The red-haired man studied her warily, but waved to his men to lower their crossbows. “I am Serhij, my lady. It has been years since I last saw you—you were still a child.”

  “Time drags us all by the hair,” she said with a wry grin. “Was it the summer tournament, five years ago?”

  “Nearly six,” Serhij replied. He shouted an order down below, and the iron-banded gates groaned open.

  Vasilisa hurried through, fearing fate would slam the doors in her face. Only when they clanged shut behind her did she finally breathe again. The air within felt lighter, untouched by the stench of the dead marshes.

  Serhij barked orders as the militia settled the refugees. Up close, the vechnik’s men did not look so frightening or proud. Most looked little better than the refugees they herded - sick and wounded, hobbling and lame, too young or too old for war. Lady Nesha, the boyar’s widow, fell into troubled sleep as soon as a bench was offered.

  Vasilisa scanned Rovetshi as Serhij descended to join her. The town was small by design - little could be built on such ground as the Gravemarsh, which swallowed heavy stone keeps as readily as armies. And from the gates, Vasilisa saw the western quarter—once bustling with shops, inns, and alehouses—lay plundered or burned. More of Serhij’s men were dragging blackened corpses from the ruins, loading them into carts. And in the small hours, only a few common folk remained on the streets, making the town feel even smaller.

  “Lady Vasilisa…” said Serhij as he approached, his face red with embarrassment. “A thousand apologies, my lady. I’ll have the crossbowman found and flogged. Unforgivable—shameful!”

  She turned to him, setting the Shargaz aside. “It’s already done, vechnik. What I want to know is what happened outside your walls - and here. Was it battle, or massacre? Hundreds of innocents are dead—some of yours among them. Has war come to Belnopyl as well?”

  “You wouldn’t call them innocents if you saw it.” Serhij’s voice was grim. “An army of freeholders and serfs staggered toward us like they were drunk. When I sent a man to treat with them, they grabbed him off his horse and tore him apart. Then they tried to storm the walls with their fists and tools—hundreds of them!

  “Others came by river on big trading cogs, hacking apart anyone they caught.” He gestured to the ruined western quarter. “Fifty hearths lie cold without families to tend them—and maybe more; for we’re still not done counting the dead. They fought like wild dogs, as if they couldn’t feel pain. My men swear they saw them fight on after losing limbs, after their guts spilled out, even with their throats cut.”

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  “What about Boyar Hrabr?” she asked. “I saw one of his druzhinniks among the dead.”

  “He thought his cavalry would break them,” Serhij admitted. “His men carved through, but those bastards had no fear. They got stuck, and his lordship barely escaped with his life from the mob…”

  Serhij hesitated, then whispered, “He’s bedridden. But he told me a queer thing—he said a spirit was leading the mob. When it retreated into the marsh, they followed like dogs. Even those forced into the river tried to swim after it. They drowned by the dozens.”

  A face drifted through her mind—gray, empty-eyed. The Apostle. Its voice like cracking glass. Its terrible laughter over the corpses beneath its feet.

  “Have you sent anyone to track the spirit, or the mob? We saw no trace of them in the marshes.”

  “I've scarcely enough men to keep the walls manned,” Serhij said. “Those I have left aren't fit to navigate the marsh.”

  “They will return, I’m sure of it,” she sighed. Tosont had been transformed into a festival of flesh and torment - the Apostle would not be denied its sacrifice. And yet…a boyar and his druzhina had forced it to flee. Perhaps not all is lost.

  “Take me to the boyar.”

  ***

  The halls of the Gravemarsh Keep were dark and still as Serhij’s militia led Vasilisa to the boyar’s chambers. Even without the ash-choked skies of the last weeks, moonlight found little purchase in the fortress. Small, sparse windows let in no light, leaving the air thick with the scent of wax from flickering lamps to keep the darkness at bay.

  Few servants crossed her path, bowing their heads - though they gawked at the Shargaz slung across her back as she passed. The bell tolled midnight as she neared the boyar’s door, where a physician in bloodstained robes loitered. His grave expression told her all she needed to know.

  “My lady, it is an honor,” the old man said with a bow. “Though I wish it were under better circumstances.”

  A great fire blazed in the boyar’s hearth, casting the whole room in a red glow. The heat smothered Vasilisa as she entered, mingling with the stench of smoke and death. On the floor crusted mud and damp stains marked where Hrabr’s men dragged him into bed. A leather arming jacket lay in tatters, a hauberk beside it - split down the middle by a cruel slash.

  “My lady,” whispered the shrunken figure lying in bed. A hollow face drained of life peeked out. “Is that you? Gods be good…”

  Vasilisa lowered herself beside him. “Boyar, it’s been too long.”

  The boyars of her father’s court had been men of pride and boisterous laughter. All of that was gone in Hrabr - his thin white hair, sunken cheeks, and hollow eyes. He was only forty by her count, yet he looked a hundred, and the stench rolling from him stung her eyes.

  “I reek, don’t I?” he muttered through clenched teeth. “I stink of death. You hide it well, my lady - better than that green lot outside.” He waved a weak hand toward the guards.

  By the physician’s nod, she grasped the bedsheet’s edge and lifted it.

  The healer’s hand had done fine work - dozens of small wounds were sewn expertly shut and smeared with balm. But it was for little gain. A gash from navel to collarbone marred Hrabr’s torso, and his bandages were already thick with old blood.

  “A wound worth a thousand stories,” Hrabr coughed, grinning - a terrible, bloody thing. “That cursed beast…but I-I made it run. Gods above, that I did.”

  “The spirit?” she asked gently.

  “No!” Hrabr’s sunken eyes burned with sudden fear, urgency. “Not a spirit. No - spirits don’t make a man soil himself with a glance, nor do they cut through steel and leather like water.”

  He shuddered, sucking in a ragged breath before locking eyes with her. “I saw a demon. A real one. The kind that hide in shadows of shadows…the kind our ancestors never dared to speak of.”

  “My lord is feverish, my lady,” the physician said calmly. “When his men pulled him from the mob-”

  “I know what I saw!” Hrabr bellowed, the veins in his neck bulging. “If all you’ll do is hem and haw at your lord, then get out, damn you!”

  The healer shot Vasilisa a stricken look before hurrying out of the room.

  Vasilisa waited until the door shut behind them. No shadows lingered by the threshold.

  “I believe you, boyar,” she said quietly, sitting by him. “I’ve seen one myself…and claimed its sword, at a terrible cost.”

  She gestured to the Shargaz, the whispering blade that spoke with the voice of many. Hrabr beamed. “Of course…a warrior-woman, like the stories of old…”

  “My lord,” she murmured, bring him to focus. “How did you survive? These demons have claimed so many.”

  He gestured weakly to a shelf. “There…my lady, there.”

  Vasilisa saw a golden pendant with a black crystal at its center, swirling with purple and gold. Her breath caught as she placed it in Hrabr’s hands. The golden bands around it were misshapen, as if crushed inward.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “A gift,” Hrabr croaked. “Your mother…gave it to me years ago. I didn’t believe her. But it saved me. My sword did nothing, but when its claws touched this…gods, it howled. It fled before finishing me.”

  He laughed weakly, then winced. His eyes unfocused, lost in the crystal’s swirling dark. Then, suddenly, he gripped her hands tightly.

  “Yes…my lady…” he hissed, his eyes bulging. “Cirina…me and the others…you must know.”

  The stench of his wounds burned her eyes, but she leaned in as his voice faded.

  “What? What did my mother tell you?”

  “The comet…” Hrabr rasped. His eyes became unfocused as he began to ramble. “That damn thing started it all. When it burned through the sky, your mother commanded me to go to the Vorodzhi. She told me to find their chieftain…and to bring his heir in as a ward. Slogged through the mud for days…”

  “Why did she tell you this?” she pressed.

  “She wanted me to…to bring her to Belnopyl,” Hrabr whispered. “Two royal bloodlines, she said, to open the gate. To unseal that thing.”

  “What was it?”

  “A dagger. A foul, terrible knife - made from the same black stone as that gift.”

  Hrabr swallowed, shame clouding his gaze. “She made me swear to never tell your father about all this. Never to tell you either, until the time was right.”

  Realization and questions boiled within her. Black stone - like the crystals in her chest, no doubt. A knife to kill an immortal. But why hide it? Her mother had told her of things that were to follow after their meeting with the posol - was it to speak of the knife, or of the Apostles?

  I need you to be strong, Vasilisa. A voice from a past ripped away, from a nightmare she could never wake from.

  "The time is right, my lord," she whispered. "The world burns. Men starve. Demons descend from the stars. What was I to know?"

  "A special thing... a terrible thing," Hrabr murmured. "It was hers. Meant to be yours." His eyes flicked to the window, breath quickening.

  "No… no… no…" His frail body curled in on itself. "He's coming... he's coming back..."

  A hiss rose between them. Pain shot through Vasilisa’s fingers as her pendant burned. She recoiled, the black crystal within smoking as golden bands screeched and twisted tighter, crushing it.

  "Back... it's coming back..." Hrabr whimpered, hiding beneath his covers.

  The crystal shrank, heat blackening the carpet. Outside, a high, unearthly wail knifed through the night.

  She ran to the window. Below, torches swirled and Serhij barked orders, sending men to the walls. The refugees were fleeing, and the belltower tolled doooom- doooom- doooom.

  "He's coming…" Hrabr's voice faded beneath the crystal's hiss. "Lady Cirina…forgive me…could not protect her…"

  A sharp pop echoed through the room. The crystal shattered, the pendant crushed.

  Hrabr’s whispers ceased. His hand slipped lifelessly from the bed, skin pale, veins blackened.

  Outside, footsteps pounded down the hall, and a shadow darkened the doorstep.

  “They’re coming back! They’re coming back!” The boyar’s door slammed open, revealing a short warrior clad in green-tinged iron scales. An open-faced helmet framed a boyish face, dripping with sweat.

  The warrior froze at the threshold, mouth agape as Vasilisa cradled the dead boyar’s hand. Then another cry echoed outside, and they stammered. “T-they’re coming back, my lady. Hundreds-no, thousands. M-my lord needs his armor-”

  “Your lord is dead.”

  The druzhinnik stiffened, gripping the pommel of their sword. “No…he can’t be.”

  Vasilisa watched as the warrior unfastened their helmet and pulled it off - letting long, brown braids fall loose around their shoulders. A woman. Her face twisted with grief as she whispered, “He was the only one who could lead them. The only one with answers, damn it.”

  “You’re the Vorodzhi chieftain’s daughter, aren’t you?” Vasilisa asked. The woman’s eyes shone green as emeralds, and her short stature was unusual even for a woman.

  She nodded slowly. “Austeja, daughter of Merunas.”

  “Your father swore his oaths to the House of Belnopyl. Will you keep yours?”

  Austeja hesitated - then set her jaw. “I will. The She-Bear of Belnopyl commands, and I will follow.”

  “Good.” Vasilisa seized the Shargaz, its blade shrieking against the stone. No more running. No more fleeing. Not anymore.

  Outside, there was the clamor of the rushing militia rising to stand for their town. No - not just their town…it was hers as well. From Denev to Rovetshi, it was her domain, and her people that would die.

  In the courtyard of the keep, Hrabr’s druzhina gathered in a confused herd, waiting for orders that would never come. They whispered and glanced anxiously as Vasilisa appeared over the balcony, then turned to Austeja.

  “Who holds command here? The magister?”

  “No,” Austeja said. “Lord Hrabr, he led the men. The magister…”

  He’s afraid to fight, she knew. But so are they. The guards that sallied out to die with their boyars were the seniors, the veterans. The ones that remained now were the youths, dressed in ill-fitting armor, unbloodied, untested.

  “Men!” she called down to the druzhina. “Form up at the gate and follow me!”

  Pale, confused faces looked up at her in disbelief. “Your boyar is injured - you are under my command, your liege lady!”

  Her words echoed to no reply. Some druzhinniks chuckled nervously, but most remained glum and silent. They are still young, still afraid. But so was I.

  She turned to Austeja. “Get me a coat of maille, and a helm.” The Vorodzhi lady hurried off, disappearing down the stairs into the armory.

  Vasilisa faced the men again. “Don’t fight for me - and don’t fight for Belnopyl! This is your home, your town, and you’ve seen what these savages can do. So will you lot stand with me, fly with me - or die cowering like dogs when they butcher your people, and break these gates?”

  A silence, heavy and suffocating. Then a lone voice rang out - then another, and another. Spears lifted. Axes and swords flashed in the torchlight.

  Austeja returned, hauberk slung over her arm, helm tucked under her armpit. “I reckon they’re ready, my lady.”

  Vasilisa raised the Shargaz high, letting the cleaver’s shadow darken the courtyard. “Follow me!” she roared. “Follow me, and protect your town!”

  A thunderous war cry erupted. The keep stood - and then they flew.