Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Breathe in. Breathe out. Clench your fists. Be still as the drumming stomp of soldiers approached. Don’t look away. Don’t back down. This is it.
The treaty was mine, and as such, they were my words to regret.
Love was mine to protect.
Every pantheon who had pressed its finger to the scroll had vowed to honor the terms.
I continued to play my part in the prophecy to the letter, evidenced by my faithfulness to her no matter where, no matter when, no matter who. Gods knew better than to make assumptions, and the treaty hadn’t specified that I fill my human with the liquid, demonic potential.
True to my oath: never again would I avoid her. From one life to the next, I’d seek her out, woo her, protect her, and know her carnally whenever the cycle allowed. In return, they offered me an unconditional pardon for whatever I had to do for Love upon their soil.
Centuries of baffling impotence was the fault of those who’d assumed I’d take the next logical step in the gray area.
Love and I had a few beautiful lifetimes.
We had a few cut tragically short.
We were thwarted by Heaven more times than I care to admit.
And at last…it was my turn for the stars to align.
Orange sunlight peeked through clouds, illuminating snowflakes as they swirled. I preferred when the sun shined on rainy days, but a sunset amidst the twinkle of frost was its own kind of magic.
The snow, the pine, the harsh rock had changed names over the years.
Reclusive royals tucked themselves into the stony valleys years before the blood flowed through Wallachia.
Vlad III Dracul—a surname destined for legends—impaled, disemboweled, beheaded, torn, thrashed, violated, burned, plucked, nailed, and otherwise scribbled verbs into the long list of accomplishments of Hell and its Marquis of Torture.
My people were as varied as the humans, wise and respectable, kind and generous, homicidal sadists. Variety was not a mortal quality.
Five hundred years after Vlad’s butcherous delights whispered through the kingdoms, I found myself on the mortal soil belonging to a pantheon I’d been waiting a long, long time to visit.
Heaven had spent centuries flooding the region.
Reddish-orange light washed the home sheltering a perfect, mortal soul. Love was somewhere indoors drinking stew from a ladle with her parents. I knew from the legion that found her that Love was only a few years old. I also knew I would not see her face in this life.
I approached her house to leave my mark. A single cut across my palm. A symbol she and I had crafted together in a former life. A formal announcement.
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.
“Heaven and its false peace has been championed by a god of war for two thousand years. This future was foretold.” In my dullest attempt at idle chatter, I added, “At least your people believe in art. Among the colonizers and his places of worship…Your mosaics, the glasswork, the buildings they’ve erected… beauty is a small consolation.”
Perun was not one for small talk. “We attended Hell’s summit as this war god was seen among our oracles. The doom you casted warranted attention, and yet, I was reluctant to believe. Futures change all the time.”
“And this one?” I asked. I knew the king of their pantheon didn’t have a gift for premonition. But I wasn’t asking about the fate of our people. This question belonged not to the years, but to the moments stretched before us.
He looked into the eyes of a man ready to die for the one he loved.
Perun dipped his chin. “Your scroll states that we will not retaliate, should you seek revenge. It does not say that we will come to your aid when Hell spills blood upon our soil.”
The final wooden shutter slammed shut.
“I understand.”
“Jarovid has not yet violated your treaty,” he warned. The caution was unnecessary, and he knew it from the water lining my eyes. He lowered his axe. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I could have chuckled. “So do I.”
I appreciated the ominous vibrations that shook the world. The sounds, the terror, the tremble of the earth itself, paid a solemn respect to the moment and its gravity. A warm, sunny day would have been downright disrespectful.
Perun was long gone, but he’d left behind the rumbling thunder of a storm that refused to arrive. Those who dared a glimpse through the shutters wouldn’t see lightning amidst the gathering blizzard.
He masked the distant cadence of a thousand heels.
His people wouldn’t hear the first murmur of war.
I expected I would never again receive a gift from the Slavic pantheon, as he granted me something as kind as it was cruel.
This depended on my predictability, and as such, I dug in to do the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I tore myself from Love’s perimeter, perching just beyond the village, certain that the evergreens would mask my earthy scent as the army approached.
The plated crusade, its prince, the metallic clang of his religious army, believed they sought territory. The humans had no idea who pulled the strings, orchestrating their every movement.