The Girl in the Tower

Prologue

A girl rode a bay horse through a forest late at night. This forest had no name. It lay far from Moscow—far from anything—and the only sound was the snow’s silence and the rattle of frozen trees.

Almost midnight—that wicked, magic hour—on a night menaced by ice and storm and the abyss of the featureless sky. And yet this girl and her horse went on through the wood, dogged.

Ice coated the fine hairs about the horse’s jaw; the snow mounded on his flanks. But his eye was kind beneath his snow-covered forelock, and his ears moved cheerfully, forward and back.

Their tracks stretched far into the forest, half-swallowed by new snow.

Suddenly the horse halted and raised his head. Among the rattling trees in front of them lay a fir-grove. The firs’ feathery boughs twined together, their trunks bent like old men.

The snow fell faster, catching in the girl’s eyelashes and in the gray fur of her hood. There was no sound but the wind.

Then—“I can’t see it,” she said to the horse.

The horse slanted an ear and shook off snow.

“Perhaps he is not at home,” the girl added, doubtfully. Whispers on the edge of speech seemed to fill the darkness beneath the fir-trees.

But as though her words were a summoning, a door among the firs—a door she hadn’t seen—opened with the crack of breaking ice. A swath of firelight bloodied the virgin snow. Now, quite plainly, a house stood in this fir-grove. Long, curling eaves capped its wooden walls, and in the snow-torn firelight, the house seemed to lie breathing, crouched in the thicket.

The figure of a man appeared in the gap. The horse’s ears shot forward; the girl stiffened.

“Come in, Vasya,” the man said. “It is cold.”