1

Three grim-faced men glanced up from their fire. They were shabbily dressed horse nomads. Long leather
tunics with fur sleeves and collars, strung with warding herbs and tokens. Baggy trousers. Rawhide belts.
Cone-shaped bashlyk with woolly flaps obscuring their faces. Two of the three wore short szabla, light cavalry
blades with a single curved edge and plain S-shaped hilts. The third sat with a large berdish axe across his
lap, running a whetstone around the curve of the blade. Three unstrung bow staves stood against three
nearby trees. The fire had been prepared using pine cones, twigs, and bricks of dried animal dung. Its smoke
was almost a fourth man around the fire, brusque and pungent, thinking itself unnoticed amongst the bowing,
snow-coated spruces and pines.

The three, or the four, looked taken aback by Radyg Bregny’s sudden, pine-thrashed appearance at the edge
of their clearing. The axeman glanced at Radyg’s pony before shrugging and looking away.

‘Blessings of Dhaz, stranger.’

Lowering his whetstone, Axe offered up a wooden bowl piled with moist strips of venison, carved from the
small buck roasting over the fire on a spit. Radyg felt his mouth fill with saliva and his empty stomach churn.
How long had it been since he’d last eaten? Days, was it? It felt like weeks.

His mad flight through the wood was a blur now.

Overcome by the scent of venison, he urged his mount out from the trees and into the clearing, but she refused.

Kazia was a shaggy oblast pony of some thirteen hands, with a low barrel, stocky legs, and a large, restless
head. Her black mane had been plaited and woven with yellow string. Her hooves were untrimmed and unshod.
Almost like claws. She ground the cold iron bit between her teeth and snorted, her breath clotting in the cold
night air. Like all the best horses, Kazia was more than half wild, left to roam the sea of grass east of Korochev,
burrowing for forage in snow, shivering through the dark winter months, called back and pampered only when
the druzhina had need of horses. Although small compared to the gigantic warhorses favoured in the southern
realms, she would run for days without complaint, covering more ground and faster than any horse of the
Empire. She was crafty, and stubborn, and knew her mind better than any man who might ride her.

She knew when something felt right. And when it felt wrong.

She blew restlessly. Her sides were lathered with sweat and melted snow. She had been galloping hard.
Radyg could feel her heart pounding against his knees where they sat against her ribs. His own cheek stung
where a branch had clawed him.

Something had been chasing them through the woods, but in his panic… he must have failed to see it, because
he could not remember what it had been. Or why it had been pursuing him.

He shook his head to clear it of the confusion.

‘Who are you?’ Radyg asked the three men. He was not minded to trust three strangers in the wood, however
fine their supper smelled. For all he knew they were woodland fey, and he was to be next on their spit.
‘What are you doing in the woods?’

Axe shrugged. ‘We live in these woods.’

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‘Have done since we were children,’ said the second man, the smallest of the three, his voice barely more than
a whisper. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I…’ Radyg hesitated. A memory assailed him. Teeth and claws. Screaming faces. Red droplets sprayed across
the scaly white bark of a spruce. Kazia whinnying as the trees around them opened red-slit eyes and sprouted
horns. He shuddered and the memory passed. ‘I’m looking for the way out of the forest. To Korochev.’ Yes, that
was it. He had been trying to find his way home. He had entered the wood and lost his way and… The same
memory threatened to resurface. He stared into the stranger’s fire until it retreated. ‘The stream. Yes. Yes, I…’

He trailed off.

Axe gave him an encouraging grin, again proffering the bowl of venison.

Kazia pawed the ground and gave a warning snort, but this time it was Radyg’s turn to refuse her. He was
exhausted, starving, soaked through and shivering; the smell of roasting deer was just too appetising to resist
any longer.

‘I have nothing to give in return,’ he said. ‘I shot a rabbit and gathered a bushel of sticks for firewood, but
I…’ Another memory threatened to show itself, but this one only teased, whiskering past the ankle of his
consciousness before scurrying off into his mind’s shadows. ‘But I left them for Mother Ostankya.’

The three men signed themselves to ward off the evil eye. The fire guttered, pulled at by a breeze that Radyg,
in spite of his sodden clothes, did not feel.

‘It is a good man who remembers the Mother,’ said Whisper.

‘A wise one who shows it,’ said Axe.

The third man, as hairy and sullen as a drowsing bear under his mound of wool, felt, and fur, stared into the
fire and did not speak.

‘It is of no matter,’ Axe declared suddenly, shaking off the disquiet. ‘No Kislevite should turn a horse archer
from his camp.’

Whisper merely grunted.

Kazia whickered and again tried to pull away.

Crunching the snow packed into the frozen creases of his coat, Radyg dismounted. He was obviously wearier
than he had realised, because the drop to the ground was longer than he had expected. Stumbling like a man
who had just fallen out of bed, Radyg tossed the pony’s reins over a branch, then walked to the fire in the
middle of the little clearing. Sleet mizzled through the gaps between the trees. The twin moons fumed down
on them all, the wind tearing at their silver haloes. The men did not seem troubled by the rain.

Radyg sat down between Axe and Whisper and took the offered bowl, stuffing a fistful of venison into his
mouth and swallowing without chewing. Still gagging on it, tears in his eyes, he scooped out the remaining
contents of the bowl and forced it into his mouth. He closed his eyes in bliss.

The meat was every bit as delicious as it smelled.

 3
Right then, Radyg could not have cared who these men were, or what they were doing in these woods.
He would have betrayed his druzhina and given them his horse if they had asked him for it.

‘A new friend at our campfire calls for a song, I think,’ said Axe.

‘Or a story,’ said Whisper. ‘Yes. A story for your meal, stranger.’ He lifted a pot of kvass that had been warming
over the fire and poured a stiff measure into a misshapen wooden cup.

Radyg took the offered cup and gulped it down. He coughed as the fiery spirit chased the meat down
his throat.

‘What would you like to hear?’

‘A story we have not heard before.’ Axe smiled, his teeth appearing yellow and crooked in the firelight,
and offered to top up Radyg’s bowl. Radyg accepted the freshly carved meat gladly.

‘Tell us a story of Mother Ostankya,’ said Whisper.

‘Yes,’ said Axe, and slapped a brawny palm across his thigh. ‘A tale of the Witch of Kislev. Dark nights should
have dark tales for their companions.’

The silent man, as appeared to be his custom, said nothing.

‘Very well,’ said Radyg, relaxing back onto the neatly folded horse blanket and looking into the fire.
‘I know a story of the Hag Mother, and it is all the more horrifying for being true…’

***
4
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I was told this tale by an old kossar from Zhidyrna, a stanitsa far to the east where the great Dukhlys Forest
folds before the Worlds Edge Mountains. I have never been there, nor he to Korochev, for all that the same river
that gallops past my village as a stallion begins its life as a stumbling foal in Zhidyrna. We were in Volksgrad to
face the kyazak, the northman raids, that came through the High Pass that year with the spring floods.

His name was Yuliy. He had a long coat of silver mail, an axe with golden lettering that he claimed to have
been written by dwarfs, and a white cloak that had once belonged to a king amongst bears. Or so I believed.
I wonder sometimes what became of him after we rode from Volksgrad, for I never saw him again, but he is
surely dead now. He was white-haired even then, hard as a piece of wood, and with three lifetimes of stories.

I had not known, until then, that the Hag Mother is revered beyond the woods of Korochev, and not only
in forests, but in wetlands and mountains, in rivers and on the open steppe. The stories change from place
to place.

In Korochev, she lives in a hut woven from witchwood and blackthorn. A man can find it, we are told, by
following the foul scent of the smoke rising from her chimney, for it never stands in the same place twice.

In Chernozavtra, beyond the High Pass, she lives on the underside of a black lily pad that appears on the
Zapadreyka River only when the Chaos moon is full. Should the black lily pass Chernozavtra west to east
then the stanitsa can sleep soundly. But if it should pass it east to west, against the river’s normal flow, then
the Chernozavtra pulk had best steel itself, for doom rides south from the Chaos Wastes. At such times, the
ataman makes sacrifices to the river, in the hopes of flattering the Hag Mother into lending Cherozavtra her
magic and her armies.

In Zhidovsk, she is known as the Black Witch of the Crags. Her house is carried in the claws of a frost wyrm
that she bound to her service through her infamous trickery, and to whom, once every ten years, she feeds
the prettiest girl in Zhidovsk.

Wherever a man can sit upon his horse and see neither church spires nor city walls – that is the land of the
Hag Mother, the Witch of Kislev, the power the Motherland turns to when its need is great and all others fail.

Anyway, Yuliy claimed to have once belonged to the pulk of the renowned Golden Knight. Not the champion
living in the Bokhar Palace now, of course, but the one who wore the golden armour before her. Yuliy was
an old man when I met him, and this was some time ago. They say that Naryaska Leysa is already a greater
warrior than her father in his prime. I do not know if this is true, only that any knight entrusted by the Tzar, or
the Tzarina, to be their sword must be great indeed.

Yuliy’s service to the Golden Knight brought him to the Ropsals, a region of densely wooded highlands in the
eastern oblast, and a small village called Strusiv. It was a twenty-day ride, through tangled woodland and
over jagged hills, to find the pulk of the March Boyar in Volksgrad. Half that, perhaps, for a lone rider on a
determined horse to make the nearest stanitsa of note in Chagev. Provided Ursun kept his claws sheathed the
valleys clear of snow.

The Golden Knight arrived in Strusiv to much fanfare to deal with a brayherd that had been raiding from the
Ropsals. The hetman wished to flee, for villages like Strusiv are not built to be defended. They are quick to
burn, and quick to rebuild. The villagers could live in the wind for a season or two, and let Tzar Winter deal
with the dark ones. But the Golden Knight forbade him.
 6
He vowed to hold Strusiv, come what may, and to make the beastmen suffer for their encroachment into the
blessed Motherland.

And so the pulk fought.

Each day at nightfall, the brayherds surged from the hills. Men, furred like dogs and with the heads of goats
and rams, bearing primitive spears, and with human skins stretched across their wooden shields. Chariots
drawn by foul, horn-headed swine. Minotaurs with the strength of a dozen men. Twisted harpies from the high
places, descending on the village in such screeching flocks they outnumbered all the arrows in Strusiv twice
over. They all met the Golden Knight’s sword, and each day when the sun rose it was over fields littered with
the dark ones’ misshapen corpses. But each battle became harder than the last. Their strength dwindled, even
as that of the dark ones seemed to swell. The Golden Knight sought to inspire the defenders of Strusiv with
his own example, but even his own kossars began to doubt they could prevail. Many fled.

Yuliy confessed that he would have been one of them, had his rotamaster not anticipated his intention and
confiscated his horse.

On the eve of what was to be the final battle, the Golden Knight gave a thundering speech, reminding them of
the tenacity and courage they had already shown and promising all who stood by him that Kislev would come
if they only held their faith. It was a good speech, but few were heartened by it. They were resigned to death,
and meant to face it with Kislevite disdain.

But that night, against all expectation, Kislev did come.

Not from the south, where the Golden Knight had commanded his pulk to look for it, but from the north.
From the same wild hills that had harboured their foes.

The wind turned bitter, then died away altogether. A fog rose to fill that stillness. The long valley, crammed with
braying gors working themselves up for their next assault, became an eerie lake, cracked horns and rusted
spear tips bobbing over the grey mist like dead leaves. The defenders of Strusiv fell silent. Even hardened
warriors like Yuliy felt their blood running cold. The laughter of crows descended on the village. A handful at
first, then hundreds. Then thousands, the sky turning black with them, scuffling like Empire soldiers for the
last seats in a karczmaz. Men and woman looked in horror as, over a matter of minutes, every roof, fence and
wagon in Strusiv became crowded by an army of ragged birds, all of them speaking at once, the way that birds
sometimes will, when they know something that earthbound creatures like us do not.

There was not a man in Strusiv who doubted they had come to watch a slaughter. And that was when
Ostankya came.

She stood alone on the far hillside, so old and ugly that not even the beasts dared approach her. Hunch-
backed. Wrinkled like a poisonous nut. Small tusks, like those of a pig, protruded from her lower lip. Tatty
homespun clothes draped her crooked shoulders. She carried a staff stung with charms and topped with
animal skulls. A crown of filthy antlers sat atop her head, like a wart on an old woman’s lip. In her other hand
she held a wooden ladle. With it, she stirred an iron cauldron, bringing forth more of the same fog that had
already filled the entire valley and a tattered, witching light.

‘Run naughty children and hide from your Mother,’ she cackled over her cauldron. Her lisping voice rang from
the hills in both Gospodarin and the Dark Tongue of the beasts, so that Yuliy never knew for certain which of
 7
them she condemned. ‘She’s boiling up vengeance that’s hotter than coal, and sending her spirits to tear out
your soul.’

The light from the cauldron guttered and dimmed. The fog thickened, obscuring all but the tallest of the
beastmen’s battle standards. It rolled on up the valley, all the way towards Strusiv and the defenders cried out
as they fell back from it, much to the mirth of the watching crows. A spear’s throw from the village boundary,
it halted and recoiled, like a flooded river hitting a stone wall. Muffled cries, like the bleating of lost sheep,
reached the men where they reformed their lines inside the village.

Things moved within the fog. Dark, terrible things. The sorts of things that, I am told, could almost make a man
feel pity for the dark ones.

The Golden Knight, more afraid of that mist than he had ever been of the beastmen, plunged his sword into
the hard ground and prayed.

To Ursun, the Father Bear, for protection. To Tyr, for victory.

To Dazh, for the sunrise.

When, at last, the Sun God granted that plea, the fog withdrew from the battlefield to leave no evidence that
a battle had ever been fought. Not a single body was left behind, be it of man or of beast, and the terrible fate
that awaited them in Mother Ostankya’s cauldron was something that Yuliy would not dare dwell on.

The Hag, too, vanished with the dawn. Only a single crow remained, stubbornly perched on the crossbar of
the Golden Knight’s banner and refusing to let go of it, however roughly it was shaken. ‘Run naughty children,’
the bannerman would swear he heard it say, but when there was no one but him to hear it. The Golden Knight
broke up his pulk and left Strusiv soon after. The rotas went their own way, to their own homes, while he and
his retinue galloped for the Bokhar Palace to declare their victory.

But those who had been there, men like Yuliy, knew that the real victory was Ostankya’s…

***
 8
Radyg felt his eyelids droop. He was unsure how long he had spent in the saddle before finding this place, and
between the hot food in his belly and the thickly smoking fire against his body, he was starting to feel warm.
He had pulled off his gloves, his sheepskin hat, and loosened the fastenings of his coat. His boots steamed by
the fire. The occasional spat of drizzle wet the back of his head, but it was a pleasant feeling, soothing, like
the fingers of a parent through a drowsy child’s hair.

The three woodsmen had fallen silent while Radyg told his story. Axe had taken up his axe and resumed his
work with the whetstone. The rhythmic scrape of stone over iron murmured through the smoke, charming
spruce and pine to deeper slumber.

‘Do you call that horrifying?’ said Whisper, after a time. He sounded offended. His wet skin glistened from
beneath the flaps of his hat as he turned towards Radyg and caught the firelight. A few blonde wisps, like a
boy’s first beard, crisped in the earthy smoke from the fire. ‘The Hag in your tale saved the entire village.’

‘Is that how you think of her?’ said Axe, more mildly, still working his blade. ‘A kindly spirit? A guardian of
the wood?’

‘Kindly? No. But a guardian? Yes, I would say she is that. She is cruel as a mother must be cruel, because this
is no world for softness. Children must be hard enough, inside and out, to endure a cold winter, and to hold
a spear when the kyazak come through the mountains. This is how she cares for the Motherland. You don’t
believe me? Well, no matter. I have ridden all over Kislev. I have fought the Northmen, and heard my tale from
the mouth of one who saw her magic turned to the defence of the land. Do you know another?’

The three men shared a look.

‘I know another,’ said Whisper…

***
 9
The story I know is similar. There was indeed a battle fought at Strusiv. And the Golden Knight was there,
though only by chance, stopping in the Ropsals to eat the villagers’ borscht and drink their vodka on his way
south from some other campaign. It was a skirmish, nothing more. The north fights a hundred ‘battles’ just like
it every summer, and Strusiv would have gone unremembered had Tzar Boris’ Golden Knight not been there.
Put it down to an old kossar’s exaggerations.

Your friend spoke briefly of the village hetman. He did not even mention his name, which would grieve him if
he were alive. It was Mieszko. Druzhina Mieszko of Strusiv. And he is central to this tale.

Mieszko had three boys: Grigor, Evegny, and Radimir, and it was for them that Mieszko had counselled retreat.
Not out of fear for their safety, you understand. The boys needed ‘toughening up’ and, in Mieszko’s opinion,
a season in the wind would accomplish that nicely. None doubted that they would be great warriors one day,
but this battle had come too soon.

The druzhina raged at having his counsel ignored by some southern champion, but in private he relished the
prospect of meeting certain doom alongside the legendary Golden Knight.

For all his faults as a father and as a man, Mieszko was Kislevite.

As it was, Miezko’s sons lived, though many sons and daughters of Strusiv did not. Pyres were lit for them
and many libations poured. Sacrifices were made to Dhaz, that his flames might carry their spirits to the great
blue steppe, to ride forever past the horizon. Out of respect for their mourning, the Golden Knight and his rota
consented to remain, but within the week they were gone.

Back to the Bokhar Palace. Back to civilization.

Your friend Yuliy was right about one thing – this is Ostankya’s land.

And some weeks later, the Hag Mother returned to Strusiv.

She appeared as you described her, an old woman, shuffling into the village square with the aid of a stick, her
back bent almost to the ground under the weight of the wicker panier on her back. The basket was filled with
oddments from the valleys and grisly trophies picked from the battlefield: polished stones, bits of stick, pretty
feathers, horned skulls boiled in water, the stump of a cloven-hoofed leg, a spear sticking out blade up. The
ordinary jostling with the macabre. Her tattered rags reeked of stewed nettles and stale cabbage. The skulls
on the top of her staff rattled with her step, as though the gods were rolling dice, settling the fates of men.

As appalling as the Hag must have looked to your kossar friend, imagine the horror of finding her uninvited
on your doorstep.

Mother Ostankya rapped the butt of her stick on Mieszko’s door.

‘Come out, come out,’ she said aloud. ‘You come when Mother calls.’

Now, Mieszko was a prideful man, as we know. He did not want to look as though he was afraid to face an
old woman, but nor would he have his villagers think him the sort of man who came when his babushka
called. He appeared at the balcony above her, with an arrow nocked to his bow, and demanded to know the
Witch’s business.
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Ostankya gave the druzhina an ugly smile. ‘A life given for a life spared,’ she said. ‘I spared five hundred in
saving Strusiv from the beastmen, but ask for only three in return. Your sons. Send them out, and you need
never again see me.’

‘What do you want with my sons?’

The old witch laughed. As one might over a fool’s grave. ‘All say they will be great warriors one day, and Mother
knows best how to care for her children.’

Mieszko, of course, refused.

He ordered his men to seize the unarmed Hag, but the kossars feared Mother Ostankya more than their
druzhina’s temper. Cursing their cowardice, Mieszko loosed his arrow. It struck straight through Ostankya’s
heart. The villagers gasped in horror, but the old woman merely looked at the shaft quivering in her breast and
cackled. It is said that Ostankya is not a creature of flesh and blood, but shaped by the old spirits from mud
and grass and the ground up bones of dark things to be their queen – the true queen of Kislev. Others may say
different, but I tell you it is true, and all who saw her that day believed it. Dismissing the druzhina, she turned
then to the gaping villagers. They fell to their knees and wept for Mother’s mercy.

‘I’ll have what’s mine from Miezsko or I’ll have what’s mine from you,’ she told them. ‘Deliver me my children
and be spared your master’s doom.’

With that, she folded her arms about herself and exploded into a flock of crowing black birds. The druzhina
called for archers to shoot the cursed birds down, but none dared move.

Ostankya left Strusiv in peace for a second time.

None doubted she would be back.

The next day, the baker’s daughter went missing while collecting berries in the forest. She was a sweet girl
and well liked. The villagers grieved, but none suspected this was Ostankya’s curse at work. The forest was
dangerous and she should not have been there alone. Winter is long, and come spring the wolves often need
to be reminded to fear human iron. Really, the fault was with the parents. But then it was the tavernkeeper’s
son, sent to the storeroom for a wheel of cheese, never to return. As the days went by, Strusiv’s children
vanished, one by one. Desperate parents took to hiding them in attics and cellars, standing watch at all hours,
but always, come morning, one more from amongst the village’s dwindling population of children would be
gone, stolen away from behind locked doors like mist with the sunrise. The villagers appealed to their wise
woman to avert the curse. In some places, they call these women hags or witches, but for all their herblore
and medicine, they have no real magic.

There is only one Hag in the Woods and her name is Ostankya.

When the woman’s charms and potions failed, the villages lynched her from a tree and burned her.

No family was spared Ostankya’s curse.

Except, it seemed, that of Druzhina Mieszko.

Remembering Ostankya’s promise, that whoever brought her children would be spared her curse, the villagers
 11
who had fought so stoically against the brayherds now turned on each other. Had the Golden Knight stayed
one month longer, he would have been appalled at what he saw. He might even have wondered if the beasts
had not been the victors after all, if the victory Ostankya had given him was not an illusion of the notoriously
tricksome Hag.

The druzhina’s izba was a stout half-timber dwelling of three stories, the bottom floor all in stone. Mieszko
and the few kossars still loyal to him held out for days, fighting like rats to hold their own villagers at bay.
Until Miezsko’s own maid cracked his skull open with an axe and tipped his body off the balcony.

The villagers cheered as they hacked their former lord to pieces and set fire to his izba. The boys were dragged
out into the snow, barefoot and puffy-eyed from crying. Grigor, the eldest, fought until his knuckles were raw
and he was so exhausted that he could no longer walk and had to be carried the rest of the way into the hills.
Evegny and Radimir went quietly. They were too young to understand what was happening, only that the
immense, often-times frightening, force of nature they called father was now dead. The villagers blindfolded
them so they could not find their way back, and then led as deep into the wooded hills of the Ropsals as the
villagers dared go. There, calling out to Mother Ostankya that they had done as she had asked of them, they
cut the children loose and fled to the smoking ruins of Strusiv.

And Ostankya was true to her word. After a fashion.

No more children were taken from Strusiv, though neither were any ever returned. And the following year,
when Norscya from the west ventured into what had been brayherd territory, they found a village that had
almost conquered itself. After the battle to depose Miezsko, the villagers no longer had the resources to
rebuild the walls they had destroyed, or to bring in the meagre harvest they had sown. The marauders burned
it to the ground in a single night of savagery and mounted the villagers’ severed heads on spikes.

It is said that Ostankya saw all from her house on the hill and was pleased.

The most important lessons are often the hardest to learn…

***
12
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Radyg fidgeted as the softly spoken woodsman finished his tale. He wanted to dismiss the lump in his stomach
as his just dessert for eating and drinking too greedily, but it was not that. His hands itched and his innards
squirmed, as though he had forgotten something profoundly important, but the unconscious part of him, the
flesh and the bone, remembered, and now sought by its own means to remind him.

This talk of lost children brought a fuzzy, but deeply unpleasant sensation. It conjured an image of a small,
dark-haired child running through tall grass, flapping her arms to frighten away birds from the recently sewn
fields. A girl who liked the colour yellow, and who had woven it into the mane and tail of her father’s horse
so she could be with him when he rode. He saw himself in that image then. A rough man, a callous man, a
weathered man, kneeling before the simple shrine above his hearth and begging Dhaz for a boy. A strong,
healthy boy who could inherit Radyg’s sword and ride in the rota when he was gone. He saw a dark-haired
woman with exhaustion in her eyes. Her swollen belly showed through the homespun woollen smock she wore
as she raised a limp hand in farewell. And in the memory, he waved back, pretending it saddened him even
half as much as it saddened her, clicking his tongue and shouting ‘Yhah!’ as he wheeled away and galloped
after his rota.

He pressed his hand flat to his chest, but the ache was too deep for him to find.

The memories shrank.

By all the gods, how did I get here?

What did I do?

‘I think you scared him,’ said Axe, a smile creeping in his voice. He continued to work his blade with the
whetstone. It was surely as sharp now as it would ever be, but still he worked at it. Over, and over, and over.

‘I think you are right,’ said Whisper.

‘What… what happened to the three boys?’ said Radyg, unable to shake the suspicion that he already knew.
Three pairs of eyes, so similar to one another, as green as the forest was dark, glittered around their campfire.
‘And the other children who disappeared into the Ropsals?’

Axe shrugged. ‘Some say they serve the Witch of Kislev still. That they and others like them fight alongside
the spirits of the wild when she rouses the Motherland to war.’

‘Or maybe it is just a story,’ said Whisper.

‘Is it?’ Radyg asked.

Axe gave another shrug, another deeply buried smile pushing its way up through the heavy flaps of his bashlyk,
like a mole clearing away soil.

‘I do not believe there is such evil in my land.’ Radyg shook his head as though that alone would be enough to
keep such a belief from perching itself there. ‘The Tzarina would not allow it.’ Whisper visibly sneered at that,
but Radyg went on. ‘No. I won’t believe it.’ He took a grip on his knees, as though meaning to unfold his legs
and get up, to jump onto Kazia’s back and find his own way out of this cursed wood. But some fear he could
not yet name held him in place. The skin on the back of his neck crawled, but he did not even dare to turn
around and look back at where Kazia stood, watching him.
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Here, with the three woodsmen and their fire, he was safe.

Out there…

‘I knew a man at Strusiv,’ he reminded them, his voice almost as low as Whisper’s. ‘Can any of you say the
same? Can you?’ The three looked amused by the question. ‘How could you have?’ Radyg shouted at them,
because when fear ignores all of a man’s arrows, anger is always the last one in his quiver. ‘You would have
been little more than children.’

‘Would you rather hear a story from closer to home?’

Radyg turned suddenly as though struck.

To the third man. The silent man.

He smiled at Radyg, but there was no goodwill in his dark, green eyes.

‘But steal yourself, friend. For this one took place in this very wood…’

***
 15
Druzhina Witek was a pious man. He commissioned the building of a stone church, larger even than that in
Bolgasgrad, and sponsored many priests to preach in his village. The Bear of Staslav, they called him, and not
only for his huge stature and grizzly temper when woken before noon. He ate meat and fish at least once a
week, as the strictures command, but never both on the same day. He bathed only out of doors.

When rumours spread through the surrounding villages that a great black bear had moved in the Staslav
Forest, Witek took it as a sign of Ursun’s blessing. His priests demanded offerings of fish and berries to take
deep into the woods, to the log cairn that stands as the Bear Father’s shrine in the Staslav, and for a time it
appeared that Ursun truly had favoured Witek.

Pilgrims travelled from Bolgasgrad, from Erengrad and Praag, and even from the northern cities of the Empire
where Ursun is worshipped, to spend their gold ducats in Witek’s church and see the famous bear. But never
once did it show itself, nor claim the offerings left for it at Ursun’s shrine, and it was not long before the ‘Bear
of Staslav’ became a joke to describe anything that was not as advertised. If your new stirrup broke or your
milk was sour it was common, and guaranteed to find a sympathetic laugh, to blame it on the Bear of Stavslav.

Stung by such mockery, Witek resolved to hunt the bear and kill it.

No one would doubt his esteem with the Father Bear once it was stuffed and properly installed under the apse
of his church, and then the pilgrims and their gold would soon return.

Now, Ursun allows such hunts so long as the proper respect is given. Dogs must never be used, nor bows or
slings, though javelins are permitted. The bear must be slain in single combat, and by hand, and prayers must
be spoken afterwards.

With a great entourage of priests and riders, marshalled by a hawkish patriarch of the Orthodxy named
Zawizsa, Witek set off on his expedition into the woods.

The hunt was to be led by a local man. Let us call him Kozel.

He is the doomed hero of this tale, for while Witek was misguided and Zawizsa blinded by zealotry, Kozel
should have known better.

He was a horse archer and had ridden from High Pass in the east to the Sea of Claws in the west in the service
of his druzhina. He had fought goblins in the Worlds Edge Mountains, and harried the kyazak that raided from
the north. Kozel knew his land and its legends, and knew that the black bears of the Staslav, though descended
from Ursun as all bears are, are marked by the Hag Mother. They are her servants, and the guardians of the
secret trails. And when Ostankya leads the men of Kislev to war, it is the bears they ride. Ursun may allow for
their killing, but the Witch in the Wood does not, and the murmurings of priests have no sway over her.

On the morning of the hunt’s departure, she came to Kozel with a warning.

His pregnant wife jerked in her sleep and sat suddenly upright. Her eyes snapped open, but she was not
awake. Her eyes were the glassy whites of the Hag, and when she smiled at him, she showed the dimples of
tiny tusks inside her mouth. ‘Come into the forest and Ostankya will get you,’ she said, her voice was the rasp
of wind through dried grass, and Kozel leapt out of bed and ran at once for Witek’s izba. In his terror, he ran
headlong into Patriarch Zawisza, and repeated for him the Hag’s warning. The Patriarch struck him a stinging
blow across the jaw that put Kozel on his knees, warning the horse archer against repeating such heresies
 16
in the presence of the druzhina, lest Kozel’s wife and daughter be the next offerings for the Bear of Staslav.

So he left an offering of rabbit and brushwood, in the hope this would appease the Hag Mother, and led
Witek’s expedition as he had agreed.

He should have known better.

Misfortune and woe followed the hunt thereafter. The weather turned against them. Rain made the going hard
and miserable, as well as obscuring what spoor the Bear of Staslav might have left behind. Trees conspired to
fall only across the hunters’ favoured trails, driving them inexorably into darker and more dangerous reaches
of the wood. A hunter broke his neck when the howl of a wolf spooked his horse into throwing him. A priest,
unable to see where he was going through the lashing rains, slipped over the edge of a ravine and fell to his
death. Witek and Zawizsa said prayers for them, but pressed on. The horses became difficult to manage,
obliging the hunt to dismount and lead them, for they refused to bear their masters any further into folly.
And the laughter of the Hag rustled through every bush, whispered like a secret from tree to tree.

At last, the eager Kozel finally struck upon a likely trail. Splayed footprints in the wet mud, so broad they could
only have belonged to the Bear of Staslav. But, like all the pilgrims before him, Kozel would find no bear.

A scream from the lead horse was the first warning of danger. The stallion kicked its hind legs at nothing,
tipping sideways and losing its rider, but somehow did not fall. Horse and man hung in mid-air, wriggling
helplessly in a glistening net of sticky, silken webs. Two more riders walked into the same trap before they
could stop themselves. Spiders the size of dogs swarmed down from the treetops to bind them in silk and
ensure they never walked out again.

Witek drew his sword and spurred his horse to attack, for his faith was genuine and Zawizsa and his priests
were not for show. Their battle prayers sent fire coursing through the hunters’ swords and filled their hearts
with bloodlust, even as the stench of burning spiders made their stomachs turn. The light of Dazh seared
away the rain and the darkness, exposing the stealthily moving things that had been creeping through the
woods in ambush.

There was something of the wolf about them, something of the bear, something of old and wicked tree. Even
revealed as they were, it was difficult for the hunters to distinguish them from the spruces and pines, for
their skin was rough like tree bark and their mangy fur was tangled with clumps of moss and dead leaves.
They were as huge as trolls, but disturbed not a single pine needle with their steps. Balewolves. Things in the
Wood. Something about them drove men mad, some enchantment that had hardened warriors forgetting their
weapons or gawking in horror when good sense would have had them fleeing for their lives.

When they struck, it was with a fury that no natural beast could equal.

Witek bravely stood his ground and was the first to fall, torn to shreds by the balewolf’s monstrous claws.
Urged on by the example of their priests, the huntsmen fought on with axe and bow, ripped apart one by one
and devoured, or stung by spiderlings and dragged off into the trees.

And what of Kozel, you wonder? What of our poor, doomed hero?

A balewolf lunged across him to snatch up a chanting priest in its jaws. His pony reared in panic, but Kozel
was a master horseman and a veteran of many battles. Controlling the animal with his knees, just barely
 17
holding onto his own wits in the face of such horror, he struck at the beast.

His szabla chopped into the monster’s shoulder, but its hide was tougher than leather, and the blow only
angered the beast. His pony clattered back onto its front hooves, wrenching the szabla from his hand for it
was embedded in the monster’s back and would not come free.

Swinging its jaws towards Kozel, the balewolf bit the struggling priest in half. Drenched in gore and half-
mad with terror, the pony bucked, and with Kozel reaching for his szabla, threw her rider from the saddle.
His forehead hit the monster’s hard shoulder, shattering the thoughts that had been swirling around in there,
but his hand was already outstretched and somehow it found the protruding handle of his sword. He caught
hold of it as the monster set off after his frightened pony, and –

His face hit the monster’s hard shoulder, breaking the thoughts inside his head. Somehow, his hand found the
protruding handle of his sword, catching onto it as he fell, and –

***
18
 19
‘No!’

Radyg pushed himself from the fire. He fell over in his panic, driving himself further on his back. He remembered
it all now: the dying men, the screaming, mutilated horses, the blood sprayed across the impassive trees as a
mutated horror hoisted Witek’s horse off the ground and wrenched the struggling creature in half, the frantic
chase through the woods.

‘He sees now, Grigor.’

‘I think he does, Radimir.’

The three sons of Druzhina Mieszko smiled at him from behind their fire.

Still on his back, Radyg went for his sword. His hand closed over the emptiness beside his hip. The scabbard
was empty. He remembered striking the szabla into the balewolf’s back, just as the silent man, or Grigor as
Radyg now knew him to be called, had described it. No, no, no. He shook his head firmly. This was a nightmare;
a terrible, terrible nightmare. His sword was not in his scabbard because it was in his saddle holster with his
bow. Yes. That was it.

He scrambled over onto all fours, knocking over pots and bowls and his own drying boots, kicking dirt over the
fire as his wool socks skidded on the mulchy ground. Half-running and half-crawling, he scrabbled to where
Kazia waited with her lead rein looped around a hanging pine branch.

The pony’s lips drew back, revealing large, sharp teeth.

Radyg’s hand recoiled from her snarl.

His heart lurched.

It was not Kazia.

The monster was three times as large as his pony, with a sloped back and all its mass loaded onto its muscular
front limbs, like a charging bear. Its head was brutally encased in bone, a pair of grubby white tusks the size of
sword blades erupting from its lower jaw. A wintry mane of reddish-brown fur and rotting leaves ran down its
neck. There was no saddle. No holster for sword or bow. What he had taken for melted snow and lather was,
in fact the sticky wet blood of a butchered priest. The sword he had thought safely sheathed was sticking out
of the monster’s back. Harsh, inhuman laughter huffed through the brute’s hard, bony nostrils. Its eyes were
white and blind-seeming, but it saw him. He knew it, felt it in the knotting of his bowels, heard it in the horror
screaming up at him from deep, deep inside his mind.

Radyg dropped to his knees, all his limbs failing him at once.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Boys are always sorry,’ said the voice in the smoke, the fourth figure around the fire that Radyg had so very
nearly seen. Even then, he dared not look at her. ‘When they are caught.’

‘Please…’ He thought of Sofia, playing in the grass. Karystyn, waving him farewell. A tear welled up in his eye.
It was the first time he had wept since he was a boy, when his pony had broken a leg on the frozen river, and
 20
his father had given him an axe and shown him what a man must do. He was Kislevite, and Kislevites did not
weep. He blinked the tear away.

‘You were warned against hunting bear in my wood,’ Ostankya hissed. ‘Many times and in many ways were
your warned.’

‘What are you going to do with me?’

‘Now,’ said Evegny, right behind him now, ‘Mother Ostankya is going to get you.’

His axe, as Radyg Bregny had suspected, was very sharp.

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