I jumped to my feet—I wouldn't have two people towering over me.
"How did Ondrey betray us?" I asked Phedoxia.
The sickly sweet smell filled the tent despite Pheodoxia's curling smoke's innocuous appearance. She was burning Ashanti herb. Ashanti, that killed more women than the blazes of war set by conquerors. Before I scolded her for unauthorized use, she said, "The Princess Granda of Tverizh has abandoned her war with the Haida. She marches on Ratne."
"We'll meet her in the spring then." I shrugged. "You do have spring here, right?"
"We do," Ondrey murmured. His face pinched, attentive. He said nothing to contradict Phedoxia's accusations yet.
Phedoxia swung her Ashanti-trailing lamp. The handle made a squeak.
"The Bhuta's magic moves Tverizh's longboats down the frozen river. She is flying towards us, her sails full of wind, with six to eight thousand troops. She will crush us, Your Grandissima, then she'll turn around after the spring melt to meet the Haida."
I took my black steel dagger out of its sheath to trim a nail. A badass move compared to biting them, yet dangerous. The dagger belonged to an assassin. The black steel was magical. The smaller nick would bleed a woman to death without magical healing. I was wounded by it once, and it left its mark on me. Yet, I kept trimming my nails. Playing with my fear.
"Crush us, really...we'll see about that!"
My brazen attitude didn't blunt the edge of hysteria in Phedoxia's voice. "Our allies were the only ones that knew about Her Majesty's sending the Deadhead Company to attack Ratne. This man served Grand Princess Snehora."
Devious subtlety is a talent that the High Scribes hold in high regard. They also inhale Ashanti despite the risks, hoping to glean useful secrets in the past, present or future. If Phedoxia was hot and bothered by what she had seen, I couldn't dismiss the possibility that Ondrey was a double-agent and warned Snehora of our arrival. That was too bad. I liked him.
I tipped one ear at Ondrey, my eyes watching the dagger's tip carefully to avoid cutting myself. "Answer her."
He crossed the tent in three strides, bumping his knee into his makeshift war table. His fingers clasped around my sword hand, the one that held the dagger. His glance arrested mine—or I would have embedded the blade in his eye. He guided my hand.
Together, we cut a line with the black steel tip across his wrist. It immediately perspired red dew. First tentatively, since the cut was shallow, then faster. The lifeblood ran down to his elbow, dripped to the right boot, to the furs he stood on.
He coated the blade with his blood until it glistened red.
"I urged Snehora to take notice of our movements. That much is true. Put this on Her Luminance's Ashanti lantern to see why. I'll wait for your judgment."
Then he sat down cross-legged where he stood and lowered his head. His arm laid across his knees. Red trickled down from it. It couldn't be stopped.
I took the lantern from Pheodoxia and put it on the table.
"Bring the paste that closes black steel wounds," I ordered.
She didn't move a muscle.
"Commander!" Her hands flew to her reddening cheeks, shaking with fury. "This is an obvious assassination plot. Women not used to Ashanti could go mad or die without the proper guidance and preparation. If you wish to be oblivious for the sake of this scoundrel, at the very least, I should stay here to protect you."
"Whatever it is, it's not a ploy to kill me, Phedoxia. I sense it in my bones."
I imagined scorpias assassins everywhere lately, except for here at this very moment. Ondrey had just done what I would have done, had I been desperate for someone to listen to me.
Hence, I intended to listen.
Alas, I couldn't explain to Phedoxia that I recognized the same nature, the same ambition in him that also drove me all my life. It didn't take long for a woman to recognize her reflection in the mirror. Alas, I couldn't explain it all well enough before Ondrey had bleed out.
"I appreciate the offer, Phedoxia. But go. Bring the medicine. Also, bring Miccola and the Haida's elder, whoever she is today."
I seized the lantern from her and lifted the dagger blade over it. Three red drops clung to the steel of my dagger for a long moment before falling onto the flames.
A drop...a pause...a drop.
Each blood drop sizzled on the smoldering sticks coated with Ashanti, giving out a puff. I expected the smoke to turn scarlet—and it didn't. Ashanti overpowered everything with its purple haze, even the blood.
I leaned over the contraption, my hair—a curtain around the lantern, and inhaled as deeply as I dared.
With the last effort of consciousness, I slurred to Phedoxia, "If he is guilty, he'll die. It's not a merciful death, trust me on that! But if he's innocent and I want him to live, and you're not here when I need you--"
She turned and left into the night with shuffling steps and bent back. It was like all the years of her long life had caught up with her at once.
I could no longer worry about Phedoxia. Ondrey's tent blurred around me. My heartbeat became the cymbals' banging.
***
The windows admitted plenty of light into the giant echoing room I saw in Ashati's fumes. A tapestry covered up a whitestone wall... A palace of some sort, despite the sparse ornaments. I had no interest in studying the decor. My eyes went straight to Ondrey. He stood to the side, next to a circle of crones.
...Three women and iron manacles restrained him. In the vision, he was much younger, on the cusp of his twentieth spring or thereabout, judging by a rose-petal texture and color of his undamaged cheek. And my heart! He was achingly beautiful back then. Or must have been, before the bruises closed one eye and blood from the broken nose crusted everything it had splattered upon, skin or clothes. Despite the appalling evidence of the beating he had received, the brunt of hatred wasn't directed against Ondrey. The pain inflicted upon him was an afterthought.
Inside the circle of crones knelt a young woman. She was about my present age back then, but softer. Heavily pregnant.
In my dream, Ondrey started to scream and it nudged the pieces together for me. This was his wife carrying their unborn child.
My gut tightened.
Ashanti was showing me the past, but I didn't need to be a seer to guess what was coming. He was single now. He'd made a vow to sacrifice everything to get something important to him. It could only have been vengeance. I knew what was going to happen to the woman and the child. Just not how. Or how bad it was going to be.
The statuesque woman who incited the gathering could have only been the Princess Granda. If someone told me she had to devour babies to preserve her youth and beauty, I would have believed it. She had a perfect cast to her oval face, yet unnatural pallor, relieved only by the angry splotches of red on the cheekbones. The blue of her eyes belonged in a flowerbed. The glossy braid tossed over one shoulder had the faintest hint of gold over silver, shot through with the threads of those noble metals to put them to shame.
The beauty was spoiled by the marks of the unchecked cruelty. She folded coral lips into a broken line, worried them by perfect pearl-white teeth. Her nostrils flared.
"Treacherous dog," she told Ondrey's wife. "You had conspired to usurp me the moment your womb quickened! How dare you!"
The woman didn't answer, clutching the ripped dress over her bosom—there was no disarming the cold rage emanating from Princesse Granda with reasonable words, tears or pledges of fealty. Her fate was sealed. Her silence when the blows fell was admirable in its own way.
Ondrey screamed for both of them, his broken mouth no longer even forming words. Just an endless howl of fury and impotency.
For a mad moment, I believed that with an inhuman effort he'd break free from the guards. But this wasn't a ballade. The women and chains that held him were rather competent.
"You're a viper who crept from under a gravestone," the Princess raged, kicking her prone rival. Then it wasn't enough. She hit her with a long bejeweled staff. Saliva foamed and dripped out of the corner of her mouth. Her blue eyes bulged. "I shall stomp out your vile plans and your Bhuta's spawn. Like the weeds are pulled by the root, so would you be uprooted! Like the rats are smoked out of their holes, so you would be exterminated! Like—"
I averted my eyes, rested them on Ondrey. He was a terrible sight in his futile struggles and grief. But it was a relief next to witnessing an unborn babe stomped out of a living womb. How brave could one be to look upon such without flinching? How cowardly to not interfere?
He tossed his head back and keened, my sign that the dark deed had been done.
Princess Granda surveyed the two bloody bodies, a woman's and a babe's. Hot color left her cheeks. Her eyes returned to a dead stare. A sigh of satisfaction first lifted, then released her chest. The twisted mouth relaxed into a pretty smile. She wiped off drool from her chin with a gold-embroidered, sable-trimmed sleeve.
The crones exhaled after her.
She walked to Ondey. "Enough tears, my beautiful. I don't hold you responsible for the crimes of your Mistress and wife.
"Denounce Marezhka for consorting with a Bhuta in the night, swear that the child was a Bhuta's get, a monster covered with fur, tusks and a tongue of a serpent—and I'll find a loyal woman for you to wed.
"No need to waste what Marezhka enjoyed so much!"
I didn't hear Ondrey's response—it wasn't for anyone but the Princess to hear, but everyone had heard her afterward. The scarlet flushed her anew, coming up her porcelain throat to her cheeks. The eyes flashed with menace.
"I'll pull your tongue out first. Then I'll open you up, and pull your every other organ, one by one, and lay it out for you to see as you die slowly. No! Maybe I'll save your tongue for the last, so you could tell me how you're enjoying the show. You have a pleasant voice."
"No need, Your Great-Highness."
The crowd parted, the crones darting surprised glances at the newcomer who dared to interrupt their Princess.
If Ondrey had aged ten or more years since that tragic day—or on that day—Yadwiga looked exactly the same as she had back then.
"Who let you in, vile hag?" the Princess hissed.
Yadwiga ignored her question. "Why rip out his tongue, when you could make it into the tongue of a despicable liar, a whore, and a maggot?"
Yadwiga stood over the two corpses without expression on her old face. Had she seen worse? I wanted to heave in my dream.
With cringes, joints' creaks and moans of a decrepit person, the old witch bent to pick up the raw body of the infant. This time I looked. The dead child was a girl, nearly ready to enter the world before she was murdered so cruelly.
Yadwiga poured an ugly liquid over the tiny corpse from a vial secreted in the shawls wrapping her wrinkly bosom. How many magic ingredients did she carry wherever she went? Or did she know that the martyrdom was in store for Ondrey's family?
I couldn't decide which one was worse, knowing in advance or packing a potion just in case you happen upon a brutally murdered babe.
With whispered, scary words, she upended a birch-bark box on the floorboards...
I expected scorpions and earwigs, but all I could see was dirt, just clumps of wet dirt, thumping on the floor.
She threw the infant, who didn't get to live, onto this patch of dirt. The moment the dead girl touched the dirt, her little body transformed to become a monster with tusks and hooves. Exactly the way the Princess had wanted Ondrey to describe his poor daughter!
"Show Marezhka's child to the crowd at the gates," Yadwiga ordered drily. "Hang her for the world to see. Then Ondrey is a liar, abandoned by his wife to consort with Bhutas. He'll live forever with his shame. Or--"
She lifted her hands, fingers rounded, prepared to snap them. It would destroy the convenient enchantment.
The Princess Granda licked her lips.
There was silence.
Ondrey slumped against the guards, glassy-eyed, mouth slack, barely lucid. It would have been a mercy if he had fainted, but the Divines weren't doling out mercy in that palatial room. He moaned, "No..."
Nobody but me paid any attention to him. The retinue of crones watched their Princess' every move. Yadwiga watched her too.
She licked her lips again. For a second, I thought her tongue flickered like a viper's... just an illusion. It was a human pink tongue. Humans can be worse than snakes. Worse than Bhutas.
The glitter returned into her eyes. "Done! But he must serve me for ten years to atone for his insolence just now. Compel him!"
Yadwiga bowed with the stiffness of ages. "Done, Your Great-Highness!"