Evdokia didn’t know. All she really know was that she was scared to death and at the same time thrilled to be alive and flying over the countryside in a dirigible named in her honor. She looked over at her friend and confidant, Natasha, and wondered what the future would bring.
* * *
Natasha didn’t notice. She was holding Bernie’s arm and wasn’t quite sure how it had happened. Some time, while she was watching the battle of Bor probably. But she had no desire at all to let the arm go.
Nor the man it belonged to. So many other customs and attitudes were being cast aside, why should she worry about this one any longer?
And so many things would be changing for them, anyway. She thought about what Filip had said to the czar, when he compared him to a Cossack. He’d been joking, but the more Natasha pondered the matter the more profound that jest became.
Everyone knew there were noblemen out there in the Cossack bands, not just runaway serfs. One of them, the Polish-Lithuanian nobleman Aleksander Józef Lisowski, had even invaded Muscovy twenty years earlier at the head of an outlaw army. He’d besieged Bryansk, defeated two Russian armies sent against him, burned Belyov and Likhvin and taken Peremyshl, and then defeated another Russian army at Rzhev. He’d finally left at that point, but not before burning Torzhok also.
Lisowski himself had died not long afterward. But his men still remained and still considered themselves an army. The Lisowczycy, they called themselves; “Lisowski’s men.”
There were possibilities out there in the frontier lands of eastern Europe; eastward as well as to the south. People came to such lands for many reasons; usually running from something but also looking for adventure and fortune. Former serfs, former free men, former noblemen—the distinctions became blurry in the borderlands; sometimes, to the point of vanishing altogether.
What could happen in such lands, if there were a true czar to serve as a rallying point?
She didn’t know, but she planned to find out.