Read Chapter 15: The Cossack's Revenge

The snow had stopped falling, but the wind still sang through the pines like a woman weeping. Marchetti had his back to a birch trunk, chewing a strip of frozen fish Gerhard had hacked from the lake catch, when the horse came.

Not their horse. Not a horse at all anymore—they had eaten the last of that animal three days ago, boiled down to gristle and bones. This was a new beast, a shaggy steppe pony with ice crusted in its mane, and on its back sat the Cossack chief.

Marchetti saw the man's scarred face and felt the world narrow to a point. The chief wore the same shaggy sheepskin coat, the same fur hat clamped over wild black hair. In his hand, a saber caught the weak gray light.

"French," the Cossack said, sliding from the saddle. His accent crushed the word flat. He walked toward the camp with the unhurried confidence of a man who had already killed everything that mattered to him. "You ate my horse."

Marchetti rose slowly. Behind him, he could hear the others moving in the den's mouth—Petit's sharp intake of breath, Lefebvre's boots scraping over frozen ground. Aubert lay inside, too weak to rise, but Marchetti felt the captain's fevered gaze on his back.

"Your horse was dead," Marchetti said. "You left it."

The Cossack stopped ten paces away. His eyes moved over the camp—the low fire, the scattered packs, the wounded men propped against rock—and his lip curled. "You killed it. You ate it. Now you owe me."

"We owe you nothing. You were going to kill us."

The Cossack shrugged. It was a surprisingly Gallic gesture. "That was yesterday. Today I am a businessman. The horse was worth twenty rubles. I will take your weapons and your cart and call it even."

"We have no cart."

"Then I take the girl."

From inside the den, Marchetti heard the peasant girl's sharp intake of breath. Lefebvre shifted, placing his body between the Cossack and the cave entrance.

"No," Marchetti said.

The Cossack's grin was slow and ugly. He raised his saber, testing the edge with a callused thumb. "Then I take everything else."

He came fast—faster than a man his size should have moved. The saber whistled in a horizontal arc meant to open Marchetti from hip to shoulder. Marchetti threw himself backward, feeling the blade kiss the air where his chest had been, and his boots slid on the packed snow.

"Holy Mother," Petit breathed somewhere behind him.

The Cossack pressed the attack, a second cut chopping down from overhead. Marchetti rolled left, came up with snow on his face, and found himself reaching for a bayonet he no longer had. His rifle was still propped beside the den mouth, its powder ruined, as useless as a stick.

He grabbed the stick instead—a length of birch Lefebvre had cut for firewood—and swung it two-handed like a quarterstaff. The wood caught the Cossack's saber mid-swing with a crack that jarred Marchetti's teeth. The blade held. The stick split down its length.

"Run out of tricks, Frenchman?" The Cossack circled, breathing hard. His grin had an edge of real pleasure now. "I've killed ten of your kind this winter. You'll make eleven."

"Then you've wasted a lot of time on dead men."

Marchetti saw it before the Cossack did—Lefebvre, moving low along the treeline with a knife in his fist. But there was something in the Cossack's posture, a slight shift of weight in his stirrup-less stance, a warning honed over years of surviving these frozen plains.

"Lefebvre, no!" Marchetti shouted.

The Cossack turned at the sound of boots crunching snow and met Lefebvre's rush with a backhanded slash. Lefebvre twisted, the blade opening his coat from collar to ribs, and crashed into the snowbank with a grunt.

The Cossack laughed and turned back to Marchetti. "Your friend is dead. Your men are wounded. Your captain is dying. And you stand there with a stick." He advanced, savoring it. "Why are you still fighting, Frenchman?"

Marchetti looked past the Cossack, at the open ground between them and the treeline, at the thin light of a sun that would be gone in two hours, and felt something settle in his chest. Not courage. Not resignation. Something older, colder.

"Because I'm not dead yet," he said.

He feinted left and threw the broken stick like a javelin. The Cossack batted it aside contemptuously—but that was the moment he wanted. The moment cost Marchetti everything: the Cossack's blade came around and down in a savage riposte that he could not have avoided if he'd been ten years younger.

He avoided it by two inches.

The saber split his sleeve from shoulder to wrist and carved a furrow across his forearm deep enough to show white before it filled with red. The pain was a spike driven through his nerves, bright and immediate. But the Cossack's blade was overextended, his weight committed to a cut that had missed its target.

Marchetti stepped into him.

He did not have a knife. He had not had a knife since the gendarmes' ambush stripped them of their weapons. But he had fists, and he had feet, and he had grown up in the printing quarter of Paris where a man learned to fight with whatever God gave him.

His fist caught the Cossack under the jaw. The man's head snapped back, and Marchetti followed with his forehead, butting him full in the bridge of the nose. Something gave way with a wet crunch. The Cossack staggered, saber swinging blindly, and Marchetti caught his wrist with both hands—one of them streaming blood, numbing fast—and twisted.

The saber fell. It stuck upright in the snow like a grave marker.

The Cossack tried to rise, tried to reach for the blade, his split lips forming a curse. Marchetti kicked him in the chest. The man went over backward, and his head struck a rock outcropping with a sound like a frozen melon splitting.

The Cossack lay still.

Marchetti stood over him, chest heaving, blood dripping from his wrist to stain the snow a violent crimson. He watched the man's chest rise. Fall. Rise.

Then stop.

"He was going to kill us all," Marchetti heard himself say. He turned to the others. Lefebvre was climbing to his feet, coat gaping open, a red line across his chest but no blood beneath it. Petit pressed a trembling hand to his wounded shoulder. Gerhard stood frozen in the cave mouth, holding the peasant girl back by the arm.

And behind him, weak but unmistakable, Aubert's voice: "Good."

Marchetti looked back at the Cossack's body. His horse stood a few paces off, head hanging, nostrils steaming in the cold. The animal hadn't bolted during the fight. It just watched, patient and resigned, as if it had seen enough death this winter to know there was no point running.

He walked to the horse and put a hand on its neck. It did not flinch.

"Lefebvre." Marchetti's voice came out hoarse. "We have a horse now. We can carry the captain."

"Your arm—" Petit began.

Marchetti looked down at the gash. The blood still flowed freely, painting his hand the color of rust. In the cold, it would take longer to clot. If he didn't bind it soon, he'd bleed out slow and stupid, a fate too ordinary for this winter.

"Gerhard," he said, "find me something to wrap this. Then we move. The gendarmes will have heard nothing—no shots fired—but the Cossack might have had friends. We need to be gone before they come looking."

He did not say what he was thinking: that the Cossack had found them in a hollow they'd believed invisible, which meant their tracks were still readable, which meant the gendarmes could read them too if they were half as skilled. The snow would cover tracks eventually. But snow did not come when summoned, and death moved faster than weather.

Gerhard came with a strip of cloth torn from a dead man's pack and began winding it around Marchetti's forearm. The bandage went on crimson, then dark red, then stopped spreading so fast.

"That's deep," Gerhard said. "You won't be able to fight for a week, maybe more."

Marchetti looked at the dead Cossack, at the horse, at the wounded men who depended on him to think, to plan, to survive. Then he looked down at his ruined arm and felt the weight of every mile still between them and Vyazma.

"Then we'd better get where we're going," he said.

He did not mention that the saber's cut had come three inches from his elbow joint, that his fingers were already numb, that he couldn't feel his little finger at all. There was no point. The dead did not need comforting.

The living did.

He turned toward the cave entrance where Aubert lay, and caught the peasant girl watching him with dark, unreadable eyes. She held something in her hand—a locket on a broken chain, the one she'd carried since the burned village. She looked at him a moment longer, then tucked it back inside her coat.

They were not through with this winter. And this winter was not through with them.