“If you could to be stopping, you would have said no already.” He nodded sagely. “When next someone is to be asking you, you will fight again. I am seeing it in your eyes. A champion.”
While he may have liked what he saw in my eyes, he was not as impressed with the rest of the examination.
He asked to see my weapon, and I produced my katana, which seemed satisfactory. He asked to see my armor. I didn’t have any. That got a deep furrow of his white brows. He asked to see my magic and I laughed in his face.
“I don’t have any magic.”
The big man looked perplexed. “Apologies, I am not to being so good at the language. The spells on your door…?”
“That wasn’t me. That was my wife. She’s tried to show me how, but it just doesn’t click. No juice.” It took me a few more minutes of translation difficulties to get the man to understand that I just wasn’t a magic-user. “What’s the big deal? It can’t be that common or everyone would do it. Don’t you have any of these champions without any magic?”
The answer was a resounding no. Not only was it unheard of, it was also unacceptable, and somehow I found myself on a plane to Ukraine, where Ivan believed I would learn something that would correct all I’d done wrong up to this point.
I was still alive. Personally, I thought I’d done pretty damn good so far.
Though we’d started on the outskirts of a small town, our little walk was rapidly leading us across a sparsely wooded area, mostly really old-growth trees. No brush, no saplings, oddly barren compared to the woods I was used to back in Missouri. It had to be almost midnight, local time, but my internal clock was so fried from crossing time zones, I didn’t know if it was Tuesday or raining out. Without the slight dusting of snow on the ground to reflect the distant moonlight, I’d have been walking into trees left and right.
Ivan’s long strides were outdistancing me, given my still-weakened state.
“Mr. Zelenko? Excuse me?” On he marched, and my chest burned as my newly healed ribs struggled to flex with my breath. “Hey!” Then he stopped, turning to look at me. “You’re gonna have to slow down. I’m not fully functional back here, remember?”
That earned me a soft snort, and he set off again, not slowing one damn bit. Well…screw him. I’d take my sweet time. I ducked my head down into my coat, and concentrated on keeping Ivan’s tracks in my view, listening for the soft crunch of his footsteps on the light snow.
I obviously wasn’t listening well enough, because I nearly walked into his broad back when he came to an abrupt stop. I leaned on a tree—oak maybe?—and tried to catch my breath.
“Here. You will to be needing these.” He passed me a pair of binoculars so heavy I almost dropped them. He pointed with one gloved hand. “There.”
Before us, the tree line ended abruptly, the stumps of recently hewn trees dotting a hillside. Under the snow, I could even see the drag marks where the logs had been moved, loaded into some waiting vehicle, I assumed. A logging site. “Really nice stumps you got here.” What the hell was I supposed to be looking for, exactly?
“To be looking farther up the hill. To be watching.” He raised his own binoculars to his eyes, illustrating.
With a sigh, I did the same.
My view of the night suddenly flared in bright greens, outlining everything on that empty hillside in sharp detail. “Oh, cool…night vision!” The teenage boy inside me was thrilled to bits with my new toy.
“Near the top of the ridge. What are you to be seeing?”
Obediently, I looked. “There…Is that a woman up there?” Dialing in a bit on the binoculars, I could see that it was indeed a woman, standing alone near the top of the naked hill.
“Her name is Svetlana.”
Young. That was my first thought. If she was my age, I’d eat one of my gloves. Y’know, when I got somewhere warmer. Her hair color was impossible to determine, with the greenish night vision, but I could settle on “dark.” It was pulled back into a severe tail. She was dressed in what looked to be white ski gear: a parka, boots, her hood hanging down her back. Her gloves were slim, not bulky like most snow garb, but still white. And was that…“A sword?”
“A shashka. A saber once used by the Cossacks.”
It was impossible to see details on the weapon at this distance, but I could tell it had a slight curve, like my katana. It lacked a guard, though, and it was hard to tell where the hilt ended and the scabbard began. If it hadn’t been belted on like it was, I might have assumed it was simply a walking stick.
If the woman knew we were there, watching her, she never once looked down the hill at us. Instead, she stood on one of the wider tree stumps, doing what looked like warm-up stretches. Still being as stiff and sore as I was after my injuries, I kind of envied her flexibility. Her stretching done, she bounced on her toes a little, rolling her head on her shoulders. Obviously, she was waiting for something, and it wasn’t us.
“What exactly are we looking for, here?”
“Quiet. It is to be starting now.”
Okay, I don’t like being shushed like a hyper kid, but before I could object, something stirred on that hillside. I squinted through the binoculars, trying to make out just what was going on.
For a moment, I thought that some small animals had come scampering out of the decimated tree stumps, capering across the ground around the woman’s feet. But it must not have been cute little bunny rabbits and squirrels, because she stepped back up on the tree stump, keeping her boots clear of the darting shadows. They weren’t very big, maybe the size of a football at the most, but she definitely didn’t want them touching her.
In no time at all, there were dozens of them, probably more, just little balls of shadow flitting and flickering over the ground. I lost sight for just a moment when a full body shudder caught me out of nowhere, and I realized how really freakin’ cold I’d become. Beneath the warmest clothes I had, my skin was crawling with goose bumps, and my stomach cramped painfully.
