Volya couldn't even moan his protest when the effing fog thickened around him, because his body was asleep. He had so much to do in the waking world! A few hours of dreamless slumber would do him good, but the ancient past had no consideration for his present. Well, maybe not. Maybe the visions connected to what he did in life, told him what he needed to know—
Yes, the mist-wolf whispered.
Volya lifted his eyes in resignation. His inflamed gaze snapped to the holes in the clouds that were his wolf's eyes. The creature grinned a canine smile.
Who are you? Volya had asked this before. He had never received a straight answer.
I am the Memories.
Memories, plural? Volya didn't break eye contact, stubbornly holding on to the shifting, ephemeral circles with no pupils or irises. The genetic memories of the Walkwe? Or just men?
I am the Memories, the mist-wolf repeated, as if saying it twice made it any clearer. The effect was the opposite. Volya had no clue. Maybe Nadezhda could werewolf-splain it to him later. Though, if he ran to his sister with every puzzle, wouldn't she tire of him?
Could you let me dream about kissing Liam? Not much hope of that, but if you don't ask...
If you wanted to, you'd be kissing him for real.
The sigh Volya expelled in response was so deep, that it rippled the mist-wolf's outline in the sky. That's what I love most about you. Your amazing compassion.
I try, the wolf said modestly.
Naturally, the Memories living rent-free in his head would be sly. Volya let the naughty essence have the last word and looked around.
After Akrum's death, his viewpoint became unstable, like a wobbling camera in a DIY horror video. However, he had more control over where he could look. This upgrade worked even when the visions with Akrum in them repeated, layering the details till the past was distilled in Volya's memory crisper than, say, the events of Grade 1. Memory was a weird thing.
Today, his surroundings in the dream were unfamiliar. The grassland was interrupted by stony, salt-crusted patches. What grass there was, grew in tufts, rather than in an ocean of the feathery seed heads streaming in the wind. The centaurs crushed its brittle stems underfoot without regret, but paid reverent heed to the bleached stones and bones heaped on the mounds, maybe a foot in height and three or so in diameter. Skulls crowned the boulders, the empty sockets of horses' or goats' heads peeking next to the maroon eyes of flint in the stone. These mounds spiraled outward from the central cairn.
Yasuwa lowered the woman he had bargained for to the ground. She was dressed no differently from her captors and wasn't tied up. Her eyes blazed in the lean face, but no more so than those of the centaurs. The privations stripped everyone to the very essence of a human animal. The predator this deconstruction had revealed was more frightening than Volya had seen in his life, and he had thought himself hard-bitten.
"Here we are, Karzhift," Yasuwa said hoarsely. Karzhift, the Winged Shadow.
True to her name, she walked the spiral in small soundless steps. Her shadow silenced the gofers' whistles. The patched up skins hang down her shoulders like folded wings. At the center, Karzhift stopped abruptly and whirled to face the centaurs' troupe.
"I've told you already that I can't undo Akrum's curse."
Volya doubted it. If he could do it after barely a week of study, Karzhift should do it in a snap of her fingers. She had real power, the kind that reverberated even after centuries upon centuries had passed.
The same sentiment showed up in Yasuwa's frown. "I didn't ask for the spell to be undone, Shaman."
Bird's talons tied together by a cord hang down Karzhift's neck. She clutched this talisman. "Then why did you bring me to this ill-fated place?"
Yasuwa's woman, Ushpi, wedged forward between two other riders. "Take care how you speak of it. Here lie the bones of our children."
"Children?" Karzhift turned around slowly, both of her hands tagging the necklace, as if it was strangling her. "It couldn't be. The curse was meant to come undone by the course of life. Washed away in one generation, like each winter's offal by the following spring's meltwater."
"You are wrong," Yasuwa replied with deceptive softness. His features, already hard as flint, hardened beyond comprehension. "What happened to me and mine wasn't a curse."
The centaurs murmured their assent, reminding Volya of the surf whenever Liam took him to the ocean. There, they walked on the sand. He swam until his lips turned blue because Liam would tell him the water was too cold to swim and Volya would argue he was a werewolf. Then Liam would warm Volya with kisses... he loved that memory, but not now.
"Not a curse?" Karzhift smiled thinly. "Have you the Sight?"
"I see what I see," Yasuwa said, pointing at the horizon.
Apart from the murky sky, Volya couldn't immediately pick out what was there, in the distance, but then he half-seen, half-guessed it: the sun was rising in the East.
"That's what Akrum had made of us. Our own people. The new breed, born into the world like the sunrise of the new day. A man is powerful. A horse is powerful. But the centaurs are more, much more than either. The day is ours."
Karzhift swallowed, her eyes saying what her tongue did not. Steppes had driven you mad, Yasuwa.
Her glare stopped Volya from nodding to Yasuwa's words. Must the darn centaur be so logical? Agreeing with him felt downright unpatriotic for a Walkwe.
"We don't want to be undone," Ushpi added in a softer tone than her mate. "We want to continue."
Yasuwa turned his shaggy head toward her. What was braids once, turned to dreadlocks. The two shared a kind of smile that is only bought by mutual torment. The kind that could never be faked, nor emulated. How many cairins were their children? As in, fathered by him, grown in her womb?
"Continue?" Karzhift echoed the other woman's words.
"Living children are not being born to the she-centaurs, nor to the breeders. Those who've been born are all buried here." Yasuwa's hand circled over the patch of hard earth, bone and stones. The gesture was protective, gentle even.
If Volya was in Yasuwa's shoes, he'd have been wary of the expression that flickered in Karzhift's eyes at the mentions of breeders. But Yasuwa was too wrapped up in his own dreams to watch his captive closely. He knew no other word for the enslaved women.
"Akrum wanted the same thing," he went on, his torso leaning forward to loom over the stick-straight Karzhift. Once again, the resemblance between this ancient marauder and Volya's childhood nemesis, the Bruiser, struck him.
"Everyone wants to see their children's children born, in their likeness," Karzhift replied bitterly. Even someone so cloaked in arrogance as Yasuwa was, couldn't miss how her right hand slipped from the necklace. It stopped at her belly, still clutched, as if ready to rip it open and claw the internal organs out. "But Yamnaya wants only theirs to walk the grass. New breed you want to be, but with the same wickedness."
Silence fell over the cairns. Sky lowered, clouds and mist crowding the group from all sides, turning the centaurs to ghosts prematurely at the edges of Volya's vision.
"You can refuse to help us," Yasuwa said, "but you'll share our fate. You'll ride with us until we ride into the sky and disappear. If you help us, though, I'll let you go where the Walkwe women went."
"I am not of Walkwe." Pride fueled Karzhift's voice. "I am a Sjena."
Goosebumps ran up Volya's arms. This identity was the only thing Yamnaya didn't take from her. To keep it, she killed an infant that was also hers, because he could only grow into a Yamnaya.
Volya prepared for Yasuwa to say that Walkwe or Sjena was all the same to him, because that was what the Bruiser would have said. He was inwardly ready to hate his guts for it.
"Akrum's women took many who were kin to you, not just the Walkwe," Yasuwa said to Volya's surprise. And relief... a surprising sense of relief. What did he care for how woke Yasuwa was millenia ago?
Even if Karzhift didn't know about the fertility rites, this deal should have tempted her. Freedom instead of the cruel masters, no rapine, no children implanted into her by the hated horse-lords, no lonely death on the boundless steppe, unburied and unmourned.
Yes, Volya would have understood if she was tempted. But her face remained set. "No. Akrum's abominations must die without issue."
Ushpi pushed even further forward, to stand next to Yasuwa. She whispered something into his ear. Frowning, Yasuwa motioned to his troupe to move beyond the burial grounds border. That left the two women tête-à-tête amidst the stones and skulls.
"What do you have to say that wasn't said?" Karzhift asked without a preamble, folding her arms under her breast. The welts on her wrists had faded—or maybe it only seemed so in the diffused light.
Ushpi lowered herself to the ground and put her hand on the stones of the central cairn. She cupped the dead rock with unexpected gentleness.
"He was conceived and born," she said quietly, "my son. Only he wasn't a man or a beast, but a red, twisted creature of limbs, teeth and fur. I cried when he was pulled out of my womb. I cried because I thought I was cursed to birth a monster. Other children followed. They were the same."
Karzhift watched pale sun to crest the horizon, giving Volya's vision a likeness to faded photographs, the black-and-white ones, later coloured by hand.
"But they were conceived and born."
Ushpi's voice gained strength, but she didn't look away from the cairn. "So I reckon the story told to us by our shamans, how the Yamnaya had been driven away by the other tribes for our lack of magic is false. They said it to keep us going. To give us a reason to come back and take our rightful place.
"I think we had had magic once, long ago and had lost or rejected it. I know this. If I had no magic at all, I would have been barren as a centaur. I would be an abomination like you've called me.
"And I am not. My womb had quickened in this form, just like the Walkwe women's wombs quicken and bring forth wolf-men."
"Your form is an abomination," Karzhift repeated stubbornly. "Theirs is not."
She didn't add that all Walkwe were conceived and born human. The shifting came later, to a wolf or a werewolf. Maybe it came earlier to the women than it came to Volya, but it would never have been from birth. Volya's memories told him so. His instinct told him so. Why didn't Karzhift use this argument on Ushpi?
"If Akrum offended the spirits with his curse, then why am I not barren?" Ushpi exclaimed. Clearly, unlike Volya's, her instincts were either silent or confused.
"I don't know," Karzhift replied.
If Volya had known, she should have known too. She should have mocked the other woman's pretensions to magic. Why didn't she tell Upshi the truth?
The women sat in silence, both chewing their lips, then Ushpi spoke up again, reaching out for another cairn. "My second child was nearly perfect. I could see four tiny hooves and an arm."
Karzhift whispered something under her breath, reaching for her necklace again.
"My body—this body—is hale." Ushpi looked all of herself up and down, as if double checking her statement. "Me and mine, we are fated to be the Mothers. The womb is ready for magic, but something is lacking. A very small thing, a needle piercing the hide, where a fist would fail."
Karzhift looked ready to roll her eyes, like, whatever you say, girl.
"I ask you to give me this needle to stitch the patches of magic that Akrum revealed in us... so our children are born whole."
Now Karzhift should laugh in her face, tell her that she is out to lunch, or whatever they said in Yamnaya's time! Now that Ushpi revealed the depth of her ignorance, Karzhift would have her revenge—
"If Akrum did the spirits' bidding," Karzhift said gravely, "there is a place you could go. A powerful place for my people..."
Volya's jaw hung. What?
Tears glistened in Karzhift's eyes. Was it pity? Or shame for betraying the sacred secrets of the Sjena? Humiliation after realizing that Akrum wasn't a heretic? Was it something else, something Volya couldn't guess at yet?
"A powerful place," Ushpi repeated, as if in a trance, her arms stretched to hug two cairns, her two children struck by Akrum's wrath.
"Yes, yes," Karzhift confirmed, the gleam between her eyelids brightening. "We can find your answers there."
Oh, crap! Those weren't tears. There were never any tears, only this glow... the glowering?
"Where is it?" Ushpi whispered, stretching out her neck so much that for a second Volya almost believed that Yamnaya were related to snakes, not horses. Though the horses had long, flexible necks too.
Karzhift pointed at the horizon. "We must go to the Giant Who Reaches the Sky."
Volya's head nearly exploded. She had lied, and Volya didn't know if he wanted her to fool the Yamnaya. It wasn't a stupid prank or an innocent white lie, like if Ushpi had asked if she looked fat in those furs. She had asked an existential question and received an answer pregnant with doom. Yasuwa's troupe had been probably doomed anyway, but if she believed Karzhift, their doom was 100% assured. Not that Volya had any clue who this Giant was, and what punishment he was going to dispense, but it was impossible to miss that Karzhift hoped for retribution.
Volya thrashed, trying to catch more of the conversation, to understand what was happening, but all it netted him was a violent shake from Damir.
Damir?
"Damir?" Volya blinked, but the scarred face didn't go away. He was in his tent, back in the present. "Damir..."
The flashlight blazed like a meteor in his hand.
"Your sister thinks it's time." Damir's voice was maybe point zero-zero one decibel louder than usual, his equivalent of raving. "You can dip your head into the river to wake up."
Volya huffed at the suggestion. He was totally awake already.
The moment he stuck his mussed up head out of the tent with a croak of, "Nadezhda, I've just had—" two things had happened.
First, he came totally awake. Actually awake. Like he-would-never-sleep-again awake.
Second, the rest of his intended sentence stuck deep in his throat. His knees might have wobbled a little too.
Damir should have warned him that a giant black pile by the campfire was Nadezhda. She stirred and lifted on all fours, a pitch-black wolf with familiar wine-red eyes.
In Volya's visions, Akrum-as-a-wolf loomed large, but it was one thing to see it in a dream, and quite another to stare at a hound of Baskervilles on steroids on a starry night in a deserted steppe.
Every childhood terror came realized in this she-wolf. The size of her, the long legs lifting up the massive eight foot torso to a height that placed her massive jaws right at Volya's chest level, the blazing red eyes....
She swished her tail to create a minor tornado. Aside from changing local weather, it seemed that this tail flick was an invitation for Volya to follow. So he could spar with this giant wolf.
No wonder sleep had fled him!
No wonder!