The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3)(121)

My fairy-tale version of this battle ignores the incredible amount of political and military maneuvering that led up to the event itself: the threats, the skirmishes, the deaths, the marriages, the delays.

    But the great events of my version of Kulikovo are drawn from history:

A warrior-monk named Aleksandr Peresvet really fought in single combat with a Tatar warrior named Chelubey, and died victorious. Dmitrii really did trade places with one of his minor boyars, so that he could fight with his men, unmarked by the enemy. Oleg of Ryazan really did play an ambiguous role in the battle: perhaps he betrayed the Russians, perhaps he betrayed the Tatars, perhaps he merely strove to chart a path between the two.

All that is true.

And perhaps, beneath the battle recorded by history, there was fought another, between holy men and chyerti, over how they were to coexist in this land of theirs. Who knows? But the concept of dvoeveriye, dual faith, persisted in Russia up until the Revolution. Orthodoxy coexisted with paganism in peace. Who is to say that wasn’t the work of a girl with strange gifts and green eyes?

Who is to say, in the end, that the three guardians of Russia are not a witch, a frost-demon, and a chaos-spirit?

I find it fitting.


Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I started this series in a tent on a beach in Hawaii when I was twenty-three years old, and now you are holding the final piece of that work in your hands.


I am still astonished by the journey, and more grateful than I can say that it happened.