Just to ask my Harry Potter fans who enjoyed this fiction to have a look at Ironfist and the Falcon if you enjoyed reading about Jurko. I think it should be possible to follow it without knowing With Fire and the Sword at all.
this started out as a little ficlet in which a lonely, unloved, unwanted Helena overheard Jurko Bohun say that he loved her, in a time before he had frightened her by killing a man in front of her. This Helena has not been as completely crushed and cowed as she was a few years later when Sienkiewicz's story begins, and she is still fascinated by tales of derring-do. She seizes an opportunity to escape.
And what happens led me into writing an alternate history in which the Chmielnicki uprising is headed off... and life becomes very interesting. This is the unedited version.
Kurylo looked at his kinsman and ataman and laughed. The handsome young Cossack had his arms full of jewels and gold, and carried some woman's headdress stiff with jewels by the expedient of putting it on his own dark, unruly locks.
"The harem princess look doesn't go with the bloodstains, ataman," he said.
Jurij Bohun grinned at him, his even teeth very white in his regular tawny face.
"How else am I to carry it?" he asked. His sea-coloured eyes danced with fun knowing that he looked ridiculous. He had not looked ridiculous to the Janissaries he had recently been slaying with his quick sabre.
"Don't you have enough?"
"You can never have enough loot. Besides, I am depriving the Turks of it, and every złoty's worth taken from them is one they cannot spend on war. Also, I need to impress the old princess."
Kurylo made a face.
The princess was the mother of the Kurcewiczowie often accompanied Bohun and his Cossacks on their raids on the Tatars and the Sultanate, and Kurylo was not certain it was healthy. The five –or four since the oldest had been captured and blinded – might be technical princes but in fact fulfilled the Polish proverbial description of dirt-poor szlachciura as 'bare foot but with spurs.'
1 Somewhat derogatory word for a Pole