Free Twelve by Jasper Kent Page B

was once again terse and uninterested.
    'I'm from Petersburg, so I know the sea pretty well.' This was something of an overstatement. I'd swum in it, but I'd never sailed.
    'You have family there?'
    'Yes.' I smiled, thinking of young Dmitry, and perhaps even a little of Marfa. The image of her retroussé nose and dark eyes looking up into mine filled my mind. I might have indulged myself in talking about her, but little as I had wanted to do so with Domnikiia I desired to even less with Iuda. I stuck to my line of questioning. 'But you would have come from the south, of course. Where did you sail from? Constanta?'
    'Varna. We sailed over the Black Sea to Rostov.'
    I felt suddenly cold. Rostov was near the mouth of the Don. Domnikiia's stories of death travelling upriver towards Moscow fitted neatly with the journey of the Oprichniki. 'And then carried on sailing up the Don?' I asked, hoping to confirm their route.
    'I should get going.' He had realized I was trying to gather information. 'I have to meet up with the others.'
    'Still doing all your work at night?' I said with a sarcasm that was born of regret. I had been trying, however obliquely, to interrogate him, and as a result I had lost him as a companion. In the dark Russian night, in woods crawling with wolves and Frenchmen, friendship might be of more value than intelligence.
    'It's effective,' he replied.
    There was nothing I could do to keep him there. It was too late, on that occasion at least, for an olive branch. 'I'm heading for Goryachkino,' I told him. 'I should be there the day after tomorrow. The others will be there.'
    'We'll try to be there too,' he said as he stood to go. Then he put his hand to his belt. 'My knife!'
    I remembered catching a glimpse of his strange knife as we fought. It had a serrated top edge with backward-pointing teeth, like a huntsman's knife, but there had been something else – something odd about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
    'It won't be hard to find,' I said, picking a branch of pinewood from the fire to give us some light to search by.
    'No, I'll go,' he insisted, setting out into the darkness without me. His concern to keep me out of it naturally made me all the keener to see this knife. I ran after him, holding up the burning branch to see the way. It wasn't far to the spot where we had fought. I had the advantage of having seen where the knife fell as I struck it from his hand, but I caught sight of it only moments before he snatched it up. I had just time to notice what made it so strange.
    It had two blades; not one from each end of the handle, like with some oriental weapons I have seen, but two parallel blades, as though two identical knives had had their handles strapped together. He slipped it into his belt before I could get a better look. Then he stood and offered me his hand.
    'Well, goodbye then, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said as we shook hands. 'I'll see you again in two days, I hope. But when we do meet, don't attack me. You may not be so lucky a second time.' His final words started as a joke, but ended as a threat.
    I went back to the fire, but didn't much feel like sleep. When I did doze off, it was with my sword drawn and in my hand. It was, though, I thought, unfair to worry about Iuda returning to attack me as I slept. As he had said, he'd had plenty of opportunity to kill me earlier had he wanted to. And why should he want to? The Oprichniki were on our side in this war. It seemed a long way to come just to turn on your allies. Thinking that reminded me of the route by which they had come, up the Don – the same route along which Domnikiia had described first a plague and then changed into attacks by wild animals. The Oprichniki had brought no dogs or wolves with them that we had seen, but remembering the way Iuda and the others had fought, had they needed to?
     
    After two more days of walking and one more night's cautious sleep, I made it to Goryachkino. Our prearranged meeting place was a