Shade of Honor: From the Federal Witch Series (Standard of Honor Series Book 1) Read online

  “Sorry, Zhanna! I didn’t know if you were sleeping and I thought it better to knock a little more loudly.”

  “Stefan Alexandrovich, what are you doing knocking on our door this late at night?”

  “I need to talk to you and your Baba. Zhanna, may I please come in.”

  “Of course,” Zhanna responded, “Would you like a cup of tea, Baba and I were just having some.”

  Looking terribly uncomfortable, Stefan did not answer. Uncharacteristically he hung back and let Zhanna lead the way.

  Escorting him back into the kitchen, Zhanna was totally surprised to see her familiar sitting in the lap of her grandmother. The cat was purring loudly, rubbing its jawline against the old woman’s hands and occasionally against her chin. If anything, the older woman went even paler and grayer when she saw who it was that had come to the door. Zhanna was amazed to see her grandmother’s mouth form what look like the word ‘no’ and tears start pouring down her face. Stefan came to an abrupt halt just inside the door. He looked at the old woman and said, “Bolormaa, seer, you have seen?”

  Zhanna stared in uncomprehending confusion as her grandmother jerkily nodded her head and then placed her face against the cat’s soft fur. Glancing between Stefan, who was terribly uncomfortable and shifting foot to foot, to the shaking form of her grandmother, Zhanna was quick to lay a soft hand on her grandmother’s back. Feeling the strength of the sobs that were shaking the old woman’s body, Zhanna looked at Stephan and demanded angrily, “What on earth has happened? Can’t you see you are upsetting her terribly?”

  Both of the others ignored Zhanna. About to again angrily demand the source of her grandmother’s discomfort, Zhanna was totally flabbergasted to hear her grandmother ask, “How did he die?”

  The feeling of impending doom’s settled down in a crash around Zhanna’s shoulders. For a split second, she couldn’t breathe. Her throat was tight, her lungs are frozen, everything was hot then everything was cold. There was only one he, only one he that they didn’t see all the time in her world and her Baba’s world. It was her brother. But how could Igor be dead?

  Yes, he was a mercenary, but far gentler than most. Not for him the major battles and the convoluted agreements. For Igor was the only man in the village that all the animals flocked to, the only one that all the children climbed over. Her gentle brother had always taken assignments that were protective in nature. Ones that kept him out of immediate danger. What could’ve happened?

  Opening her mouth to demand more information, Zhanna stood up to give her demand more authority. The sudden movement sent her head into a spin. It was as if she was caught in the twisters of a few days ago. Spinning around and around where nothing made sense, where the light was gone, and her brother was dead! This wasn’t real, this wasn’t legitimate! Her head pounding in her chest, her eyes losing focus, for the first time in her entire life, Zhanna fainted.

  <<<>>>

  Zhanna’s escape from the harsh realities of her suddenly broken world was only momentary. It could not have been very long that she was out because the bruises from her fall to the floor were still smarting. Stefan and her grandmother had hold of her and were trying to lift her up. She could feel their hands on her, she could hear their voices, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was like her brain had frozen, reality and wishful thinking colliding in her forebrain, sending echoes along her skin and exploding out through her fingers and toes. This was not possible, he could not be dead.

  In her numb state, Zhanna was easy to chivvy into a chair. Her grandmother kept patting the younger woman’s hands, and Stefan stumbled around in their small kitchen to get her a glass of water. Everything that she saw was filtered through thick glass. It was not real, they look like actors on a stage, like performers in the television. They weren’t real, because that horrible thought, the horrible, horrible possibility, could not be true. Her brother could not be dead.

  Zhanna heard her grandmother asking again, “How did he die?”

  The crash of fracturing glass, the tinkle of chiming broken bits seem to hang in the air. All the denial, the separation that Zhanna had hastily created to protect herself was gone. Her brother was dead. Drawing a painfully deep breath, Zhanna asked around the fire of unshed tears in her eyes and throat, “How did my brother die?”

  Quietly, gently, the shaking hands of the two women touched and clung to each other tightly, as if the pure physical contact would somehow get them through the wave of crushing pain that was about to descend. It was no cushion from the sharpness of grief as Stefan explained.

  Igor, the brother of Zhanna and grandson of Bolormaa, had been killed while on assignment. His main assignment was to protect a teenage young woman when she went on a field trip with her schoolmates. He was not the only mage bodyguard in that group. The schoolchildren came from a private academy. There were many privileged youths in that school, and five of those bodyguards were on the same trip. In fact, the mercenaries on bodyguard duty took turns covering some of the off shifts.

  The field trip had been to one of the national parks in the United States. It was seen as a good place for this type of trip since it had lots of opportunities for activities. Lessons could be taught on the history and the features of the park itself, which made it a good educational opportunity. The trip was in its fourth day when disaster struck. All of the students were in bed, and two of the bodyguards were on duty when the building began to shake, and horrible rumblings could be heard. The contract for protection was quite explicit. The bodyguards were required to ensure the health and safety of their client above all else. Igor was on the shift when the earthquake hit. He had immediately created a protection zone around his client and demanded that she get dressed. The young woman threw on her clothes, but then grabbed two of her friends close to her so that he could protect them also. Igor never would have dreamed of objecting. Zhanna knew he was a kind man, a good man, and abandoning people to danger was not in his nature.

  There were several rounds of earthquake tremors. Almost nothing happened to any of the buildings or to specifically endanger the students. However, all of the bodyguards felt uneasy. In their opinion, the field trip needed to be ended and the students removed from the area. If it had been one person, one opinion, the trip’s organizers might have overruled the bodyguard. But with five of them all in agreement, steps were taken to cut the trip short and get the children out of the area as soon as it was full light.

  Igor had insisted that his client and her two friends change rooms. He was uneasy with the situation of the rooms and did not like some undefinable aspect of it. Overstressed, the hotel did not have any other rooms to accommodate the request. As much as Igor pushed on the manager, the hotel was simply unable to rearrange rooms enough to move the three students. Finally, his client told him that was only for a few more hours, and it wasn’t worth getting fussy about. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  It turned out to be a bad mistake. Only an hour later, the earthquake returned in higher intensity. The rumbling heard before increased, and the sound and shaking of the ground continued on and on. The other bodyguards grabbed their clients and ran. After all, their contract was to save the client and not worry about anybody else. All of the mercenary contracts are written that way. What was in the contract was exactly what was done. No more, no less. This was seen as the right way, the only way.

  Igor was trying to protect his client and her two friends. He got them moving out of the hotel and was close to the vehicle waiting to take them away. They were making good progress and in the lobby, the girls toting their own suitcases so that Igor’s arms were free. The rest of the bodyguards and their clients were about 40 feet ahead of them. It seemed like they were all going to make it out alive. And then disaster struck.

  The rumbling had been that of the mountainside above them cracking. The earthquake had loosened up an entire face of the cliff, and the last shaking had broken it free. The only thing holding it there was the soil, an
d in this case, dirt wasn’t strong enough to hold the rock up.

  With a grinding crashing roar that sounded like a huge freight train, the entire cliff face started to accelerate down in an avalanche of huge boulders and sharp shale. It gathered additional components as it moved forward, sweeping in trees, dirt, and other rocks. The thunder of its approach was loud enough that it was impossible to talk over it. Grabbing their client’s arms, each of the other bodyguards teleported out. Abandoning all the rest of the people to their fate.

  Igor was different. First of all, he couldn’t abandon the two girls that were friends with his client to their fate, and none of the mages were strong enough to teleport more than one person with themselves. Yelling at the girls to drop their suitcases and to crawl under a table, Igor turned toward the approaching weight of a mountain and threw up a shield wall.

  Zhanna heard her grandmother take a deep, sharp breath when Stefan explained this. Glancing at her grandmother and holding her hands tightly Zhanna was inundated with the vision of a building she had never seen, and the resolved face of her brother. She could hear the roar of the approaching stone. She could feel the crashing of the avalanches as they neared. Screams of frightened people assaulted her ears, and her heart was torn asunder by the desperation of her brother’s last moments. She felt him burn out and die. But not before he had stopped the avalanche.

  <<<>>>

  Stefan had done what he could to comfort the two women, which was not very much. There was no facility in their town for helping people, no Red Cross, no comforting factors. The village priest had been killed in the twister attack, so there wasn’t even a representative of organized religion to help them. Once Stefan had taken his sad and distressed face out of their home, the two women surrendered to their joint grief. Clinging to each other, the sister and the grandmother of an unacknowledged hero drew what solace that they could from each other and from their pride in the young man’s actions.

  It wasn’t enough, but it was all they had. Dascha crawled between them, purring her message of caring as loudly as she could. The time of tears and sadness seemed to draw on forever. But like all feelings of high intensity, the body and psyche limit the ability to continue to experience even heartrending sorrow. Eventually, Zhanna’s rent heart stopped throbbing just enough for her to realize how pale and drawn her grandmother looked.

  Galvanized by the thought of her grandmother’s comfort and health, Zhanna got up and poured her Baba a glass of water. Then she stood over her, bullying her Baba into drinking it. It was about all she could manage at that moment.

  Holding the empty glass in her hand, Bolormaa appeared to be studying the glass itself. Startling both Dascha and Zhanna, Bolormaa started to speak.

  “You might not know that I was born and raised in Mongolia, of the Mokshas. We live closely with our horses and with our hearts. I never thought to leave the steppes, never thought to leave my family. But your grandfather happened. He was on some sort of diplomatic mission, one that he never fully explained even after we got married. He appeared like a hero out of the dark one night in company with a woman vampire and two other witches. The two were volkhvy, those that ruled. They had been looking for my teacher, the visionary of our tribe. She was the one with the strong skills and the wide vision. Everyone that was concerned with major plans or activities in our part of the world sooner or later would come to her. I was simply there as her apprentice.

  My people have always been smaller, with darker skin, and darker spirits. We are fierce in battle but do not seek to conquer others. We frequently hosted meetings for those that wish to talk rather than fight and my mistress, the seer Dochin, would be in the midst of it. It was an exciting time, a great time and I loved every second of what I was learning. But then he came.

  He was like the sun God to me. Deep golden hair and blue, almost purple eyes. I was stricken, I was obsessed, I was lost. And miracles on miracles he seemed to be just as lost.

  He had such a strong will, so much determination. In many ways, Zhanna, you remind me of him. I think that just like your grandpa, you will not let go of the things that you think are right. No matter what the cost, no matter what else has to happen. He had honor, a bright and shiny honor. No taint to him, no clouding of what was right and what was wrong. He would know intuitively what the pathway of that honor meant, and he would not be deterred from it. And this is what ultimately got him killed.

  At the time that we met, none of us had any foreshadowing of that future. My mistress knew that we had an important meeting to host and that her skills would be needed. She knew that I would have a future different from hers but still important. None of us were aware of what shape that would take, so all of us were surprised when the man in charge of the mission approached my father and my mistress about my hand in marriage.

  In my culture, that’s not how it’s done. Your grandfather was trying to do me honor, and barely avoided a challenge for insult. The idea that a woman wouldn’t be in control of her own fate has never occurred to my people. Our Seers, our wise women, are equal in importance with any of the chiefs, even with the world leaders. Without the seer visions, my people would not have survived.

  “Baba, you did marry him.”

  “Yes, I did, but it was not right away. I needed to finish my training, and I was not yet sure of my own mind. My body was singing for him, but my brain had to be in agreement. There was also the issue of my talent. Seers are not easy to assimilate into new family groups. We see too much, and we frighten most people. Almost no one in this village still remembers that I scry or that I have visions. It’s far more comfortable for them to pretend that I don’t.

  He came back for me three times before I agreed to go with him. I had seen my life here by then, seen that I would be giving up some things and gaining others. I traded the exhilaration of riding and the openness of the plains, the comfort of my kin, and the exercise of my craft, all away for the life I foresaw with your grandfather. His future, I knew would be cut short. The thought of him going away without my having shared part of my life with him was ultimately what made me say yes. My mistress told me to follow my head and my heart, and I did. She agreed that it was right for me but mourned what I was giving up.”

  “Baba, did you resent us, did you regret it?”

  “I have never regretted it although I have mourned the passing of your grandfather and your parents, just like I will mourn the passing of our golden boy.”

  Zhanna bowed her head over their joined hands and let her tears wash away some portion of the pain.

  <<<>>>

  Chapter 3

  Crying and grief always takes a toll on the body. Zhanna’s eyes hurt, her nose ached from being stuffed up. Every time she turned around, she would see something small that reminded her of Igor. Her brother’s spirit was throughout their entire house, his presence everywhere. She tripped over his shoes, smelled his cologne in the small bathroom, saw his toothbrush on the tiny shelf. Each reminder of him drew an echo of fresh grief.

  It was as if her nerves were all abraded. Hypersensitive and reactive, everything led to more tears. Her brother had been there for as long as she could remember. He was only a year older, but he had defended her, protected her, and mentored her, like all good brothers do. It was as if a part of her was missing. At some level, she expected him to come through the front door, calling out his usual greeting, “Where are my lovely ladies? The man of the house is home!”

  Bolormaa had not slept well the night before. Zhanna had awakened multiple times during the evening, each time to hear her grandmother moving about the small house. Sometimes crying, sometimes just moving, there had not been a lot of sleeping going on last night. Zhanna decided that she would cook her grandmother a breakfast, hoping that the comfort of food would provide some relief, however temporary.

  Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Zhanna was reminded of another worry, another problem that had to be dealt with. There was almost no food in the ki
tchen. The tiny, old refrigerator, wheezing in lonely splendor in the corner, held only a partially empty bottle of milk and a couple wedges of cheese.

  Warmth and caring flooded her mind, as Dascha comforted her witch, <>

  Resolving to worry about it at another time, Zhanna proceeded to make her grandmother a warm breakfast. She would provide what support she could, and let her tired and grieving brain rest for just a little while longer.

  <<<>>>

  There was another knock on the door. The sudden clench of fright that tightened her throat and set her heart pounding rapidly was the clearest indication of exactly how rattled and how disoriented she was. Zhanna sought to calm her breathing as she walked purposely toward the front door. She had not gotten more than four or five steps when the door was pounded again. Such impatience meant that it was not one of the villagers. The young witch stifled her irritation and open the door.

  Standing in front of her was the last person in the world that she really wanted to see today. It was Krava, once a fearsome classmate, now one of the top billing mercenaries from their village. He was an imposing man. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of almost white gold hair. Still dressed in his normal mercenary garb, a cross between mages robes and tailored suits, he looked like a recruiting poster for the successful mercenary.