When the winds sing, p.1
When the Winds Sing, page 1
The
Perilous Gods
Book Two
When the
Winds
Sing
L. D. Colter
Also by L.D. Colter
A Borrowed Hell
The Halfblood War
While the Gods Sleep
Where the Shadows Dwell
When the Winds Sing
First published 2025 by Solaris Nova
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-83786-648-9
Copyright © 2025 L. D. Colter
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
eBook production
by Oxford eBooks Ltd.
www.oxford-ebooks.com
To my brother, Jeremy – non-fiction writer by day, fiction writer at heart
Foreword
I rejoice any time a writer—let alone an excellent wordsmith like L. D. Colter—chooses to incorporate Slavic folklore into their fiction. These characters are seldom seen in Western literature, and when we do encounter them, they’re often depicted with all the accuracy and authenticity of Ivan Drago in Rocky, a Russian boxer portrayed by a Swedish chemical engineer.
There is good reason for this, however. There are heaps of material on Greek and Roman and Egyptian pantheons, but few reliable records about the Slavic deities. Any writer who undertakes the task of telling their stories must labor without a safety net.
Just how scarce are the records? We know that Perun was the equivalent of Zeus or Jupiter, a mighty thunder god at the top of the food chain. By comparison, we don’t know much about Stribog at all. It’s not even certain that the two were parts of the same pantheon.
These gods were worshipped by the Slavic tribes before the Varangians—Vikings—conquered the region and established city-states that eventually consolidated into Kievan Rus. No significant written records have survived, and much of what we know about the history of Kievan Rus comes from the Primary Chronicle, the manuscript written several centuries later. It was authored by a monk named Nestor, whose principal goal appeared to be lionizing Christianity and its early adopters rather than accuracy.
Thus, our glimpse into Slavic religions and mythology comes from oral storytelling, where old tales and rituals survived and changed over the centuries in an uneasy balance with Christianity. Many of the spirits the Slavs used to worship became known as devils, others were relegated to fairy tale characters. As for the pagan gods? Those were not tolerated by the Church and therefore sent to the dustbin of history.
Like all verbal stories, Slavic folk tales shifted and changed with every telling. The versions of Koschei the Deathless and other mythological staples as we know them today are largely from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Consider Baba Yaga. She is an old character, likely as old as Perun. But would a seventh century Slav recognize her modern depiction? Baba Yaga is often—but not always—described as a hideous old woman with features such as a bony leg or iron teeth. She’s simultaneously an evil witch to be defeated, and a guardian of the forest and of the old ways to be placated. At times she serves as a guide to the underworld. That’s a lot of jobs for one senior citizen! Colter chose to base her on a possible pre-Christian portrayal as someone who acted as a guide or teacher of young children, though not a particularly benevolent one.
Today, the most recognized attribute of Baba Yaga is her home: She lives in a hut on chicken legs. Or does she?
The idea of this hut is almost certainly more recent than Baba Yaga herself. Most experts agree that the “legs” are wooden stilts. The structures raised on one or more stilts in swampland were common among people in Finland, Karelia, and Siberia. They were built that way to reduce dampness and avoid rot. But when did the Slavs come into contact with this technology? Was it brought by the Vikings too?
The hut legs may have nothing to do with chickens, either. The Russian term “курьи ножки” sure does sound like “chicken legs,” but the word “куръ” means both “rooster” and “hut rafters” or “hut stilts.” (Dal’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, 2nd edition, 1881.) Don’t worry—everyone gets it wrong. There’s a “no harm, no fowl” joke in there, somewhere.
So, you see, depicting these characters well is difficult work, and may require an entire wall of cute kitten motivational posters that say, Hang in there! (Well, the cute kitten posters can’t hurt, anyway.)
But, as common wisdom goes, every challenge is an opportunity. Such ambiguity is license for a writer to add to the canon, to fill in the blank spots in the most interesting way possible. In this book, Colter resurrects the old gods in her own unique manner that still feels respectful of the lore. Let her be your guide into the deep dark forest of Slavic folk tales. You are certain to enjoy the tour!
Alex Shvartsman
Award-winning writer and Russian-to-English literary translator
Part One
Chapter One
A sharp and tangy scent of ozone seeped under Alex’s motorcycle helmet, a single breath of warning before the heavy drizzle ripened to a cold, drenching deluge. Gray streaked the air. The landscape muted around him, blurring into a background of clouds and mist as rain bled down over the coastal redwoods and red barns and faded green pastures along the rural road.
He reduced his speed to adjust for the slick asphalt and gusty winds. Winter rain was a familiar companion in this northwestern corner of California, but he’d always viewed weather as an integral part of a whole rather than an annoyance to rail against. Even his parents passing away on wet winter days hadn’t bound his grief from those times to gray skies and chilly rainfall. Nature, in all its forms, brought him a measure of peace that little else in his life had ever equaled.
Negotiating a curve in the road, a bearded, grandfatherly figure came into sight in the field on his left. The man was standing maybe a hundred feet from the road, flying a kite. The cheap drugstore model with its paper skin, light wooden skeleton, and tail of rag cloth shouldn’t have been able to fly in this weather any more than if he’d tied a wet wool sweater to his string. Yet, it not only stayed aloft in the storm but sailed strongly, fifty feet or more above the road.
The entire scene defied both logic and physics. Alex searched for a rational explanation for the man, the activity, or the aerodynamics of the kite and came up blank. Raindrops as large as teardrops splashed his visor and dotted his vision as he lifted his head to follow the kite’s implausible acrobatics.
A solitary car passed, traveling in the opposite direction. With no other traffic in sight, he eased off the throttle for a better look. The garbage bag rain jacket over his secondhand leathers flapped with decreasing violence as he decelerated. The cold had penetrated his layers and his fingers felt numb inside his gloves, so the old guy must have been freezing. The gray wool suit hung dripping from his torso, and the woolly black hat perched on his head offered no protection for his face or neck. Alex saw no structures in the field and no car parked along the road. He couldn’t guess where he’d come from as none of the widely scattered farmhouses nearby were within comfortable walking distance for the weather.
The man held the spindle of twine with both hands, locked in battle with the kite that strained to break free and soar east. Alex drew level and saw a flash of white teeth and the man’s shoulders shaking with laughter while the kite bucked high above the road, directly overhead.
Lightning streaked the sky, rare and unexpected at the coast. It filled Alex’s vision. The white kite vanished against the bright flash, as if morphing into pure energy. And where the old guy held one string, the afterglow of the flash and the moisture on Alex’s visor created the image of hundreds of strings, thousands, shimmering between the man’s hands and the sky. Thunder boomed, loud as a bomb detonating.
He lifted one gloved hand to wipe his visor just as a brutal blast of wind hammered into his side, unbalancing him. Grabbing at his bike’s handlebar again, he overcorrected, swerving left then right. The gust reversed direction, like some ocean monster inhaling to hurl another blast. Above him, the kite plummeted on a sudden wind shear and the vertical wooden strut shot toward him like a crossbow bolt. He braked and veered to evade it. His back wheel lost traction on the wet road.
The motorcycle toppled to the right as the kite hurtled toward him. A second before the strut would have speared him, the kite jerked horizontal, scooping the air and flying parallel to the ground. The sound of vibrating paper momentarily eclipsed the noise of his motorcycle peg scraping the pavement as the kite arrowed toward the old man, who must have yanked the line.
Alex tried to kick free of the bike, but it skidded out from under him before he had a chance. He slid less than a yard, tearing the garbage bag from his shoulders and scuffing his pride worse than his jacket. Lying in a puddle, half on his right side, his brain took a moment to assess the impact. Drizzle pa ttered on his helmet—the heavy rain having stopped as suddenly as it had started—while he confirmed he’d sustained nothing worse than a bruised hip and shoulder.
Shaky and amped on adrenaline, he pushed to his feet and cursed himself for an idiot for falling over at low speed in the middle of an empty road. He felt more like a high school kid who’d tripped on the stairs than a thirty-two-year-old ex-con who’d dumped his motorcycle. Flipping his visor up, he glanced reflexively at the field to see if the old man had witnessed his fall. He hadn’t. He was preoccupied with a younger man who stood face-to-face with him, gesturing angrily.
The new person’s sudden appearance was as startling as his clothing: a round fur cap and a gold-embroidered tunic of white cloth over white leggings with tall brown boots. Ignoring his bike lying on the centerline, Alex stared at the pair, struggling to make sense of the bizarre elements playing out on this peaceful stretch of road.
He bent to the kill switch on his bike and turned the engine off, only half paying attention to what he did. It seemed impossible he could have missed seeing another person out there, especially someone who looked like he was dressed for cosplay. Ripping the remains of the garbage bag from his waist, he tucked the torn plastic into a saddlebag to throw away later. A distant grunt came from the field, and he looked up to see a fight in progress. He watched, stunned, as the younger man hit the older man in the face.
The unexpected violence fired electricity along Alex’s already heightened nerves. His fingertips and lips tingled. He straightened slowly, feeling lightheaded.
It was out of the question for him to wade in and break up the fight. He couldn’t. Not after the way things had gone to hell in Missoula. Those few moments on a quiet street outside a bar were all it had taken to set the events in motion that had ruined his life. He was on parole for felony assault and alarms were ringing in his skull, telling him to leave now before anyone saw him here.
He ignored the warning bells and continued to watch the two men, transfixed. The old guy looked a bit like his grandfather, who had developed dementia in his late seventies. If this man suffered from something similar, it might explain why he’d been out in the middle of nowhere in the rain.
Alex scanned both directions along the road, hoping for someone else to come by and stop the fight. There were no cars in sight. Calling 911 should have been the obvious solution, but things weren’t that simple for someone like him. Reporting a crime had the potential to go sideways for an ex-con, and GIS and digital ID technology meant that calling anonymously was a thing of the past. He might be questioned. His parole officer might be notified. And if one of the men got badly hurt—or worse—he could end up a suspect.
Nothing. Nothing would ever be worth the risk of ending up behind bars again.
The old man not only managed to stay upright but fought back. The one in the tunic punched him in the gut. Alex stared hopefully at the empty road a second time. Making sure his motorcycle was in neutral, he hauled it upright, rolled it to the side of the road, and booted the kickstand down. Suppressing his concerns about the altercation, he squatted to block both men from sight and quickly checked the gas tank for leaks or damage.
He told himself the grunts were the wind, though the wind had died to a breeze. The ocean surf beyond the trees at the end of the field, then. He stood to see the two men still grappling but not as unmatched as he would’ve guessed. Neither appeared to have a weapon. Neither looked badly hurt. Three years ago, he would have intervened anyway. Not anymore. Prison had changed everything. Worst of all, it had changed him.
He flipped his visor down and straddled the bike. Any minute now, someone would drive by; someone who could call the police without repercussions. He turned the key in the ignition. The engine ground without turning over. A smell of gasoline wafted to him. He swore again.
His phone vibrated. It was bound to be Fen texting him to see why he hadn’t called yet. If his ex-best friend’s message yesterday meant what Alex hoped, he might soon be on the path to getting his conviction overturned. After practically begging Fen for help the past few months, the last thing he wanted was to undermine the tenuous reconnection it’d taken him so long to build. Looking unreliable—not calling this morning when he said he would—wasn’t helping.
The flooded carburetor on the ancient Honda would take at least five minutes to clear. More time for the situation in the field to fall apart. More chance someone would see him sitting there, assume his involvement. More chance he’d miss Fen, because calling him from here while the two strangers fought a hundred feet away would be entirely too weird. His chilled hands sweated inside his gloves. He checked the road in both directions again. Other than the distant surf and a light breeze, all was silent. Against his will, he looked back at the field.
The old man was climbing the short embankment up to the road, smiling. He held his kite frame with his left hand and rolled the last of the string onto the spindle. He showed no sign of pain or injury, and the other man was nowhere to be seen. Alex’s stomach lurched as he pictured the guy in the tunic and leggings lying stabbed or strangled somewhere in the tall grass. He needed to get off his bike, be ready to fight or run, but doubt and confusion pinned him in place.
“You are all right?” the man asked him. His sodden suit—the same color as the dark-gray clouds above, the same color as his eyes—had a thick weave and a dated look. His voice was deep, and he rolled his r’s in a familiar accent that carried on it memories of Alex’s parents and grandparents. The fuzzy, black ushanka hat, ear flaps folded up and tied at the crown, was identical to the one his grandfather had brought with him from Russia.
Alex lifted his visor again. “Where’s the other man?”
“What other man?”
“The one you were fighting out there.”
The man pursed his lips. “You are not all right. You hit your head?”
“Are you trying to tell me you weren’t just in a fight with another man?”
“You need to look?” The man jerked his head back toward the field. “See for yourself?”
The likelihood that this old guy was lying and that a costumed man had suddenly appeared in the field, fought him without leaving any mark or injury, and disappeared again was looking very slim. Alex’s call to Fen took a back seat to his need to know if he was losing his mind.
“Yeah. I think I do.”
He could settle the question in a couple of minutes and still have time to at least text a quick explanation before driving the last mile or so to work. He removed his helmet and hung it on the handlebar. The soft rain drummed on his hair.
“I’m Stribog. Orel Stribog,” the man said as Alex followed him back down the embankment. He moved confidently and with an unexpected spryness. Alex adjusted his guess at the man’s age down by a decade.
“Alex Orlov.”
“Orlov. Good name.”
Alex hadn’t spoken much Russian since his grandfather died three years ago, but he knew that Orel and Orlov were both derived from the word for “eagle.” His last name had tumbled out because of that connection, and he wondered now if he’d introduced himself to a killer leading him to the spot where he’d left one person dead already.
His gut told him no. He’d known killers; this Stribog didn’t trip the same warning flags those men had. And if he was wrong, he was at least thirty years younger, he’d stayed fit in prison, and doing time had taught him to hold his own against worse than this man. All the evidence seemed to point to Stribog being right, though: Alex had been in a wreck, hit his head harder than he thought, and had imagined the second man.
Stribog led him to a culvert where a stream flowed under the road and out into the pasture, meandering its way to the nearby ocean. Two strands of wire sagged low over the culvert. They climbed easily over the old fencing just as a car finally passed them. Alex glanced up, still jumpy, then wished he’d kept his face turned away. Even if there’d been no altercation here, at the least he guessed they were trespassing.
The wet grass swished at their calves as they negotiated the embankment down to the pasture. The boggy smell of saturated soil and crushed alfalfa rose from the field and mingled with salt air off the ocean. They traced Stribog’s muddy footprints back to the flattened patch where Alex had first seen the old man.
