Page 1 of A War Apart

Chapter one

Barbezht

Han

One more minute. If I could survive one more minute, I’d be able to go home. My heart pounded, muscles aching with the exertion of the battle. Just one more minute.

I’d been telling myself the same thing for what felt like hours.

“Watch out, Han!” My friend and commander, Benedikt, shouted a warning, and I turned just in time to block an ax aimed for my head. I cut the man down with a blow to his stomach and dodged past him, stumbling in the blood-soaked mud.

“Thanks,” I shouted.

Benedikt jerked his head in acknowledgment, pushing sweaty strands of hair from his dark brow. Then his brown eyes widened, fixed on something behind me. Sharp pain shot through my head, and the world went black.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, hearing the clash of metal on metal and the screams of dying men. Unable to move, I lay in the mud, waiting to die. The face of my betrothed appeared in my mind, her soft, brown skin, the twinkle in her brown eyes when she laughed.Mila…I hoped I would see her in the next life.

Eventually, the sounds of battle faded, and I regained control over my limbs. They were stiff, weighted down by something that lay atop me. I opened my mouth to call for help, and a foul-tasting substance dripped on my tongue. I moaned.

A muffled voice came through the darkness. “Got a live one back here!”

The weight on me shifted, and I blinked in the sudden brilliance of sunset. Sunset. I’d been out for hours. Long enough for the battle to be decided. I looked up into the faces of my rescuers.

On the peak of their pointed iron helmets, they each wore a black-and-red flag. Miroslav’s men. My stomach turned to iron as they dragged me to my feet and pushed me toward a row of wooden cages, cursing when I stumbled.

“Enjoy your stay.” One of the men laughed as he pushed me into the first cage.

Several people sat inside the makeshift prison. As I fell to the ground, I heard a familiar voice.

“Han?”

“Benedikt!”

He helped me to my feet and embraced me. “I thought you were dead.”

I pulled back and took stock of my body. Aside from a few scrapes and a bone-deep ache, the only injury I seemed to have was a gash across the back of my head, deep and tender but no longer bleeding. The blood was matted; it would be next to impossible to wash it all from my tightly coiled curls. I’d have toshave it all off. I wondered, briefly, if Mila would still find me attractive without my hair.

Time enough to think about that later, after I’d survived this. After I made it home to her.

I licked my lips, wetting them to speak. “I’ll survive. What happened?”

“We lost.” Benedikt’s voice was flat, as though he didn’t quite believe it yet.

“The tsar?” I didn’t want to know the answer, but I had to ask. Had to know if Borislav was alive.

Benedikt’s face grew grim. “Gone.”

My throat closed. Impossible. Borislav was supposed to save the tsardom. He couldn’t be dead. Couldn’t leave us to his brother Miroslav, whose paranoia and reckless ambition would drive the country into the ground.

“Sit down.” Benedikt gestured to a bare patch of ground between a grizzled, black-skinned soldier and a pale beardless boy not older than thirteen. Another man sat in the corner of the cage, sandy hair swept over his brow and a haunted look in his eyes.

“How did we lose?” I asked. “I missed the end of the battle, but I thought we were winning.”

He shrugged, taking a seat across from me, between the young boy and the man in the corner. “Reinforcements. Miroslav’s allies from Vasland arrived just in time to prevent his men from retreating. The tsar… Tsar Borislav must have been killed in the confusion.”

Silence hung thick in the pen, broken only by the sounds of revelry coming from Miroslav’s nearby camp. After a moment, Benedikt cleared his throat. “We fought like hell, but after Vasland showed up, we were hopelessly outnumbered. They slaughtered us. There’s about three dozen of us in these pens,” he said, gesturing to the row of wooden cages, “but I’d say that’sall of us that survived. They hadn’t brought anyone else for a couple hours before you came.”

I blew out a long breath. Of all those hundreds of men that had taken the field for Tsar Borislav, less than forty had survived. It was a massacre.

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