The Tetrachromat (On HOLD)

Chapter 10. May Fifteenth

Dmitrii whined that the sun was into his eyes, since he always complained about something. Snot trembled on the pointy end of his nose when his complaints went ignored by his companions, a sure sign of trouble.

Besson wanted to warn the others, but it felt too damn nice to huddle with Osip, Bitiagovskii and Simeon. The annoying kid would keep.

"Cross my heart, I saw her!" Osip, who normally stumbled through his duty with his eyes hooded from boredom, talked fast, gesticulating in front of his face.

"The heathen witch? You're fibbing," Bitiagovskii said.

"Am not! A heathen witch, aye, dressed in breeches like a man. Her eyes... just whoa!" He rounded his thumbs and forefingers on both hands and bright them to the bridge of his nose to make spectacles, then fluttered his remaining fingers like eyelashes.

"If she wore breeches and looked like a man, then you saw a stable boy and conjured the rest," Bitiagovskii said.

Bitiagovskii's personal name was Mikhail, but nobody dared to call him Mishka. He was a lumbering oaf, never hurt a fly, except on his bad days. The bouts of black anger hit him out of the blue, replacing placid indifference. On his bad days, he charged in like a bull.

"I know a wench when I see one, Bitiagovskii. She smiled at me, and stroked her tit—" Osip's hand traced a sinuous curve in the air, which looked more like Himalayan peaks, than any woman's breasts. "Her braid was thicker than two fists!"

"Your fists or mine?" Bitiagovskii shoved one of his fists under Osip's nose. With all the fingers curled tightly, it was larger than another man's open palm.

Osip pushed the enormous fist away. Gently. "Laugh if you wish, but we have a witch at large, casting spells to seduce good Christian men."

"Good Christian men? That makes you safe from her wiles, Osip," said Besson's third comrade, Simeon. He had more freckles than the sky has stars, and whenever he grinned, he flashed a chipped incisor on the right. Thanks to that, he could whistle better than anyone in Uglich.

The trio stared at Besson, who hadn't spoken yet. His vote on Osip's story's authenticity was the tie-breaker.

"Ah..." Besson groped for something decisive to say, but Dmitrii's sniveling reached a disturbingly high pitch.

Bitiagovskii went to crouch by the young prince, breaking up the grown-ups' conference. "Mosquitoes are out early this year, eh? You want to play, right?"

"Aye!" Despite his short fuse, Bitiagovskii never lost his temper with Dmitrii. He looked up at the trio still standing together. "Enough with the stupid wench already. Probably, Osip saw some doxie visiting the guards. Let her be."

"But," Osip started.

"His Highness desires to play, so we play." Bitiagovskii took the knife from the prince's hands to scratch the target circle in the spot of dirt not overtaken by grass. He divided it in half, then divided the second half into more sectors... the smaller the sector, the more points for impaling the knife into it from a distance. That was all there was to the game of knife-toss.

Besson, Osip and Simeon moved out of Bitiagovskii's way, ending up by the wall, near the ladder that went missing since.

Bitiagovskii measured the distance out, then crouched again, his huge knees sticking out. He roughed in the starting line into the soggy turf and passed the knife to Dmitrii. "Here we go. You start."

Besson winced when the toes of Dmitrii's red boots poked a good two inches past Bitiagovskii's line. The royals seemed to suckle entitlement with their mothers' milk, and only another royal could call them out on it. This was a game of knife toss, however, with nothing riding on it.