Citadels of Fire

  ***

  An hour later, the camp was set. The men were right: after they'd lit the fires, the wolves did not attack again. The company ate a cold meal, then milled around, not talking but needing one another’s companionship.

  As the night wore on, men began turning in. Taras had no desire to sleep. He did not feel tired. The images he’d seen since entering Siberia ran unceasingly through his head. He’d never be able to sleep with that going on.

  Instead, he pulled out his parchment and found a suitable stick from the fire, picking one that had burned down to black charcoal. Taras started drawing pictures after his mother died. It calmed him. He’d brought a good supply of parchment for his journey, but most had been used now. He’d often given it as payment for supplies along the way. He only retained two small, unused pieces. With careful strokes, he sketched the wolf that nearly claimed his life.

  Around midnight, a man he did not know handed him a white fur skin. He took it cautiously. The man spoke a language he could not understand, and Taras was unsure what he wanted.

  Another man Taras didn’t know sat across the fire from him. He spoke, and his Russian was better than Almas’s.

  “It is the skin of the demon you slew,” he said.

  Taras looked up in surprise, then back down at the skin. He appreciated its beauty and gleam. Frozen blood crusted the edges. It was, indeed, the skin of the wolf he'd killed. No blood stained any part of the fur, however, and the pelt was large enough that not an inch could be missing. The skinning must have been done by a master.

  “Why is he giving it to me?”

  “You killed it. It is yours by right. The meat has been divided up already and stored. We will eat it tomorrow.”

  Taras didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know why he should feel upset, so he decided to be polite. “Will you give him my thanks?”

  The man across the fire said something in the other language, and the man who had given Taras the fur bowed his head before walking away. Taras sat, looking at the fur and running his hand over the soft pelt for several minutes.

  “She was a magnificent creature,” the man across the fire said.

  “She was,” Taras agreed. “Fierce and beautiful.”

  “And dead.” The man stared at him levelly. Taras glanced up at the man, taken aback.

  “You say that as though it’s a crime.”

  The man shrugged. “No crime. Simply life. That’s what ferocity gets you—death.” When Taras didn’t answer, the man went on. “Well, what would you rather be: common and alive, or magnificent and dead?”

  Taras had no answer. He stared down at the fur covering his legs. The man shrugged and rolled up in his blankets to rest.

  Taras did not sleep that night.