Finding the train tracks was more important than finding the ponies. Which way was north? She searched the ground for shadows but couldn’t find a single one. She looked at the sky again. At this time of year, it would be brighter to the south, so she headed toward clouds that were a darker shade of gray.
One foot in front of the other. Were it summer, she’d tell herself to conserve her energy until she could figure out a more accurate direction, but in the winter, she had to keep moving.
Light was fading, and her head ached. She studied the sky. The clouds were thick. They would block the stars in the same way her circumstances were blocking her hope.
She trudged forward, then tripped and fell. She was so dizzy. She didn’t get up for a few moments, but eventually, she forced herself to her feet. The rail line might be on the other side of the next snowdrift. She had to keep going.
The next time she fell, it took longer to rise. In the distance, she saw a bit of gray darker than the rest of the horizon. Smoke? A storm? Or a feverish delusion? Regardless, she headed that way. Maybe a train was coming. She couldn’t hear a train, but maybe, just maybe . . .
Her head spun, and she fell into the snow again. Her body shook with exhaustion, but she prayed and found her feet. Another few steps. Another fall. She crawled. Then she collapsed. Could she get up again? Would it matter? She wasn’t going to find the ponies. She wasn’t going to find the rail line. Even if she did, finding the tracks was just the first step. She’d have to follow them to a station, and her body wouldn’t carry her that far.
She closed her eyes. General Winter was going to carry her off. The wind blew, but she didn’t feel the cold any longer. She felt nothing, but a sound met her ears. The cry of the wind and . . . voices? Didn’t General Winter know anything about stealth? Why was he so loud?
Chapter Thirty-Two
Filip felt lost without his wife. Which was ridiculous. He’d managed the twenty-seven years of his life before meeting her just fine. She’d only been his real wife for four months. But she’d left his heart—and the rest of him—in pieces.
“Did you hear about what happened there?” Dalek walked with him along the streets of Yekaterinburg. Filip couldn’t lead patrols until his shoulder was healed, so he had come east to meet up with the rest of the Sixth Regiment. Dalek had come too. He wouldn’t say why, but Filip suspected it had something to do with making sure Filip didn’t do anything stupid in his grief.
The house Dalek pointed to was two stories high, surrounded with a fence of wood that looked like a medieval palisade. It had once belonged to an engineer, but when the Bolsheviks had held the city last summer, they’d commandeered it, calling it The House of Special Purpose.
“I’ve heard a few different versions,” Filip said. “But they all agree on one thing: that’s where they killed them.” Local rumor was more interested in a good story than in accuracy, but the tsar, his wife, his son, and his four daughters had all disappeared. Most people assumed they were dead.
“I heard they bungled the execution. Some of the family had jewels sewn into their underthings. Bullets couldn’t get through, so they had to try other methods.” Dalek shook his head. “Poor things. One would think the Bolsheviks could have managed a proper execution for a tsarevich and four grand duchesses.”
He’d almost gone east, searching for them. That was what husbands did when their wives ran off. They found the man in question and challenged him to a duel. That was the honorable course, but Nadia and Petrov had a week’s head start, and Siberia was a very large place. He might never find them. And Dalek had insisted that the Sixth Regiment needed him. That seemed to be all Filip had left now—his duty to his brothers.
They were moving off the line, the entire legion. They weren’t going to fight someone else’s war any longer. They’d be out of the thick of it, but they couldn’t go home yet. They would guard fifteen hundred miles of rail line from Omsk to Irkutsk. To the east, Japanese and American troops would keep the rest of the railway open. To the west, the White Russians would continue their fight against the Bolsheviks. He wished them luck, but it was time for the legion to worry about Czechoslovakia. They’d been in Russia long enough.