But, as Souma had said, first they sailed.

This ship was nothing at all like the [i]Empress of Japan,[/i] the famed luxury ocean liner Galina had boarded the last time she'd made a trans-Pacific journey. There was of course, no elegant state room, no magnificent dining area or a slew of chefs to ensure their meal was a sampling of one earthly delight after the next. There was no grand deck to promenade at their leisure, or string quartets to while away the evenings in the ball room with all the glittering personages.

And there was also no Klara with her now, the only mother she had ever known, the gracious woman who had cared for at least two generations of Demidov children. There was no silver-tongued Goemon to keep her amused, engaged, always just one step ahead as he maneuvered an unwary woman just where he would, at his master's behest. 

But the ghosts of these two singular people, the shades of two fathers and so many lost loved ones traveled with steam cutter's passengers to America, haunting the two master spies bent on a vengeance to shake the very gates of Hell. Old bonds broken, old worlds shattered - but in their place, new things grew, raised their tender heads to the sun. New relationships and alliances, unexpected and, in a sane world, utterly impossible.

Yet Galina Demidova was below the deck this very moment, dressed in some borrowed men's clothing: a white linen shirt and men's linen pants tucked into high, hard leather boots. Her dark hair pulled back into a no-nonsense bun tied tightly at the nape of her neck, the elegant noblewoman had only just finished mucking out her Cossack horse's stall. She set the shovel into the small wheelbarrow, and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve with a wry smile and a loving pat of the stallion's thick, muscular neck.

No, Galina was not above caring for her own horse, and never had been. But the stallion Anatoly was being decidedly ill-pleased about this second, longer cross-water trip, and taking out his ill-tempered irritation on anyone and everyone but Galina, who dared come near his stall. None of the crew would come anywhere within biting distance of the horse's stall anymore, and while Galina did feel the occasional twinge of guilt? She quickly discovered that however smelly and supposedly beneath her dignity the work might be, this was also one of the few places she could be alone to think, to wonder at the enormity of the strangeness of how in the world she should find herself mucking a stable in the bowels of a steam cutter with a man who should have been, by all rights, her mortal enemy.

But he wasn't. Not even a little. Galina smiled, even as she pushed a small wheelbarrow of horse manure to the hawse hole. She could not exactly say what Souma was to her now, much less what would happen on the other side of their vengeance - a moment that Galina, not even once - not for a single second - doubted would happen. Sacrilege or not, she was fully convinced that all the circumstances that had led a Russian noblewoman to shovel horse shit out beneath the decks of a Japanese steam cutter, had been the will of God from beginning to end.

Yet what was to become of her at the end of it all, nor the nature of what stood between her and the Japanese spymaster now, she simply could not say. 

Galina pushed the wheelbarrow back toward Anatoly's stall, lashed it down with the shovel and then pulled her leather work gloves off. [i]"You don't bite anyone, bad horse, and I'll be sure to bring you a carrot tonight... "[/i] she said in Russian, her voice tender and loving as she lay her head against the stallion's thickly muscled neck, one hand running down his withers to his wide, warm back.