Fire, Wind & Yesterday: A Tale of Ukraine and Khazaria

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Set in a treacherous ninth-century land that is now Ukraine and southern Russia, Fire, Wind & Yesterday is a novel for those who love serious historical fiction. Laïsha sees the chance and claims her freedom, fleeing alone down a cold Russian river. Her escape is thwarted but perhaps she can manipulate Kolyek, a bumbling Slavic healer deep in the woods, to shield her until she finds another way home. But the forest rings with the howls of wolves. Wait… no, not wolves. Holy men from Greece. They are headed in the right direction. Will they take a young woman along or does the healer have to come too? So many deadly mistakes and the lies to cover them! So where is the danger if faith be bold and the truth be told?

That’s her perspective, anyway. What about his? Kolyek sees himself as a humble peasant aspiring to become a physician of modern ways. When an unconscious, injured woman lands literally at his doorstep he discovers that he is left no option but to take up the cause of two Greek holy men who also darken his door and cross the steppe with them and with the fugitive woman in pursuit of an elusive rendezvous. While Kolyek awakens to the Greeks’ advanced culture, becomes an unwitting hero in his near-fatal defiance of a nomadic chieftain, and decides whether he is a man to whom things happen or a man who makes things happen, the holy men discover in the humble peasant’s cottage the rudiments of what is now the Cyrillic alphabet.