The Girl in the Tower

10. Family

Snow fell lightly, fracturing the winter morning. Dmitrii was shouting up at the sentry on the ladder behind the wall. “Do you see them? Anything?” The Grand Prince’s men hastily smothered their fires and began mustering arms. A crowd gathered around the newcomers: a few women hurried forward, crying questions. Their men followed, staring.

Sasha was only half-aware. The pale, smudged creature before him could not be his younger sister.

Absolutely not. His sister Vasilisa must by now be married to one of her father’s sober, earnest neighbors. She was a matron, with a babe in arms. She was certainly not riding the roads of Rus’ with bandits at her back. No. This was some boy who resembled her, and not Vasya at all. His young sister could never have grown tall and gaunt as a wolfhound, nor learned to carry herself with such disturbing grace. And how could her face bear such a stamp of grief and steady courage?

Sasha met the newcomer’s stare, and he knew—Mother of God, he knew that he was not mistaken. He could never—not in a thousand years—forget his sister’s eyes.

Horror replaced shock. Had she run away with a man? What in God’s name had happened at Lesnaya Zemlya, that she would come here?

Interested villagers crept nearer, wondering why the famous monk gaped at a ragged slip of a boy and called him Vasya.

“Vasya—” Sasha began again, forgetful of their surroundings.

Dmitrii’s bellow cut him off. The Grand Prince had come down from the wall in time to intercept Sergei, hurrying toward the commotion. “Back off, all of you, in the name of Christ. Here is your holy hegumen.”

The people made way. Dmitrii was still snarled from sleep, half-armored and loud, but he supported the old monk tenderly on one arm.

“Cousin, who is this?” the Grand Prince demanded, when he had parted the crowd. “The sentry sees nothing from the wall-top, are you sure—?” He broke off, looked more slowly from Sasha to Vasilisa and back again. “God have mercy,” said the Grand Prince. “Take off your beard, Brother Aleksandr, and this boy would be the image of you.”

Sasha, not usually at a loss for words, could not think what to say. Sergei was looking, frowning, from Sasha to his sister.

Vasya spoke up first. “These girls have been riding all night,” she said. “They are very cold. They must have baths at once, and soup.”

Dmitrii blinked; he had not noticed the three pallid scarecrows clinging to the intriguing boy’s cloak.

“Indeed they must,” said holy Sergei. He gave Sasha a lingering look, then said, “God be with you, my daughters. Come with me at once. This way.”

The girls clung to their rescuer tighter than ever, until Vasya said, “Here, Katya, you must be first. Lead them away; you cannot stay outdoors.”

The eldest girl nodded, slowly. The little girls were weeping with pure exhaustion, but at length they allowed themselves to be led away, to food and baths and beds.

Dmitrii folded his arms. “Well, cousin?” he said to Sasha. “Who is this?”

Some of the dispossessed villagers had gone about their business, but a few still listened unabashedly. Half a dozen idle monks had also drifted closer. “Well?” Dmitrii said again.

What can I say? Sasha wondered. Dmitrii Ivanovich, let me present my mad sister Vasilisa, who has come where no woman should be, is dressed like a man in defiance of all decency, has flouted her father and very likely run off with a lover. Here is the brave little frog, the sister that I loved.

Before he could speak, it was she, once more, who spoke first.

“I am called Vasilii Petrovich,” Vasya said clearly. “I am Sasha’s younger brother—or was, before he gave himself to God. I have not seen him in many years.” She shot Sasha a hard look, as though daring him to contradict. Her voice was low for a woman. A long dagger hung sheathed at her hip, and she wore her boy’s clothes without embarrassment. How long had she been wearing them?

Sasha shut his lips. Vasya as a boy solved the immediate problem of instant, appalling scandal, and the real danger for his sister among Dmitrii’s men. But it is wrong—indecent. And Olga will be furious.

“Forgive my silence,” Sasha said to Dmitrii Ivanovich, matching his sister glare for glare. “I was surprised to see my brother here.”

Vasya’s shoulders relaxed. As a child, Sasha had always known her to be clever. Now this woman said calmly, “No more than I, brother.” She turned brilliant, curious eyes upon Dmitrii. “Gosudar,” she said, “you call my brother ‘cousin.’ Are you then Dmitrii Ivanovich, the Grand Prince of Moscow?”

Dmitrii looked pleased, if a little puzzled. “I am,” he said. “How came your youngest brother to be here, Sasha?”

“By great good fortune,” said Sasha in no very pleasant tones, glaring at his sister. “Have you nothing better to do?” he added to the monks and villagers who stood about, staring.

The crowd began to break up, with many backward glances.

Dmitrii took no notice; he clapped Vasya on the back hard enough to make her stagger. “I don’t believe it!” he cried to Sasha. “And outside you said—you were pursued? But the men on the wall have seen no sign.”

Vasya replied, after only a slight hesitation, “I have not seen the bandits since last night. But at dawn, I heard hoofbeats and sought out shelter. Gosudar, yesterday I came to a town, burned—”

“We too have seen burned towns,” said Dmitrii. “Though of the marauders, not a trace. You said—those girls?”

“Yes.” To her brother’s mounting horror, Vasya continued, “I found a burnt village yesterday morning, and tracked the bandits back to their camp, because they had captured those three girls that you saw. I stole the children back.”

Dmitrii’s gray eyes lit. “How did you find the camp? How did you get out alive?”

“I saw the raiders’ fire between the trees.” Vasya was avoiding her brother’s eye. Sasha, to his chagrin, thought he could trace a likeness between his cousin and his sister. Charisma they both had: a thoughtless ferocity, not without charm. “I pulled their horses’ picket and scared their beasts into flight,” she continued. “When the men went into the forest after them, I killed the sentry and took the girls back. But we barely got away.”

Sasha had ridden away from Lesnaya Zemlya ten years ago. Ten years since his little sister watched him go, big-eyed and furious, not crying, but valiant and desolate, standing at the gate of their father’s village. Ten years, Sasha thought grimly. It was ten minutes, no more, since he first saw her again, and already he wanted to shake her.

Dmitrii was pleased. “Well, then!” he cried. “Well met, my young cousin! Found them! Tricked them! So easily! By God, it is more than we could do. I will hear your tale properly. But not now. You said the bandits were following you? They must have turned back when they saw the monastery—we must track them to their camp. Do you remember the way you came?”

“A little,” said Vasya, uncertainly. “But the trail will look different by day.”

“Never mind,” said Dmitrii. “Hurry, hurry.” He was already turning away, calling his orders—let the men assemble, let the horses be saddled, oil the blades—

“My brother ought to rest,” Sasha put in through gritted teeth. “He has been riding all night.” Indeed, Vasya’s face was thin—painfully thin—with shadows beneath her eyes. Also, he was not about to be responsible for allowing his younger sister to go bandit-hunting.

Vasya spoke up again, with a gathered ferocity that startled her brother. “No,” she said. “I do not need to rest. Only—I would like some porridge, please, if there is any to be had. My horse needs hay—and barley. And water that is not too cold.”

The horse had been standing still, ears pricked, his nose on his rider’s shoulder. Sasha had not really marked him, appalled as he was by his sister’s sudden appearance. Now he looked—and stared. Their father bred good horses, but Pyotr would have had to sell nearly all he owned to buy a horse like this bay stallion. Some disaster has driven her from home, for Father would never—“Vasya,” Sasha began.

But Dmitrii had thrown an arm around his sister’s thin shoulders. “Such a horse you have, cousin!” he said. “I did not think they bred such good horses so far north. We will find you your porridge—and some soup besides—and grain for the beast. And then we ride.”

A third time, Vasya spoke before her astonished brother could. Her eyes had gone cold and distant, as though reliving bitter memory. She spoke through bared teeth. “Yes, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” she said. “I will hurry. We must find these bandits.”

VASYA’S NERVES STILL TINGLED with the aftermath of danger, of urgent flight, the ugly shock of killing, and the joyous shock of seeing her brother. Her nerves, she decided, had undergone altogether too much.

She thought a moment, with black humor, of melting into shrieks the way her stepmother used to. It would be easier to go mad. Then Vasya remembered how she had last seen her stepmother, crumpled up small on the bloody earth, and she swallowed back nausea. Then she remembered the moment her knife had slipped like rain into the bandit’s neck, and Vasya decided that she really was going to be sick.

Her head swam. It was a day since she had eaten. She stumbled, reached instinctively for Solovey, and found her brother there instead, gripping her arm with a sword-hardened hand. “Don’t you dare faint,” he said into her ear.

Solovey squealed; his hooves crunched in the snow, and a voice called, alarmed. Vasya pulled herself together. A monk had approached the stallion with a rope halter and a kindly expression, but Solovey wasn’t having it.

“You’d better let him follow us,” Vasya croaked to the monk. “He is used to me. He can have his hay at the kitchen door, can’t he?”

But the monk wasn’t looking at the horse anymore. He was gaping at Vasya, with a look of almost comical shock on his face. Vasya went very still.

“Rodion,” said Sasha at once, quickly and clearly. “This boy was my brother, before I gave myself to God. Vasilii Petrovich. You must have met him at Lesnaya Zemlya.”

“I did,” croaked Rodion. “Then—yes, I did indeed.” When Vasya was a girl. Rodion was looking at Sasha very hard.

Sasha shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“I—I will get hay for the beast,” Rodion managed. “Brother Aleksandr—”

“Later,” said Sasha.

Rodion went off, but not without many backward glances.

“He did meet me at Lesnaya Zemlya,” said Vasya urgently, when Rodion had gone. She was breathing quickly. “He—”

“He will keep quiet until he talks to me,” replied her brother. Sasha had something of Dmitrii’s dazzling air of authority, though more contained.

Vasya looked her gratitude at him. I did not know I was lonely, she thought, until I was no longer alone.

“Come on, Vasya,” Sasha said. “Sleep you cannot have, but soup will mend things a little. Dmitrii Ivanovich is serious when he says he means to ride off immediately. You do not know what you have let yourself in for.”

“It would not be the first time,” returned Vasya, with feeling.

The monastery’s winter-kitchen was all hazed with oven-smoke, the heat almost shocking. Vasya crossed the threshold, took a sharp breath of the roiling air, and pulled up. It was too hot, too small, too full of people.

“May I eat outside?” she asked hastily. “I do not want to leave Solovey.”

There was also the fact that if she surrendered to the warmth, and ate hot food on a comfortable bench, there would be no getting herself onto her feet again.

“Yes, of course,” put in Dmitrii, unexpectedly, popping out of the kitchen doorway like a house-spirit. “Drink your soup standing, boy, and then we will go. You there! Bowls for my cousins; we must hurry.”

VASYA PULLED OFF HER HORSE’S SADDLEBAGS while they waited, glancing around her all the while with a wondering expression. Sasha had to admit to himself that his sister made a convincing boy, all angles, her movements fluid and bold, with none of a woman’s diffidence. A leather hood tied beneath her hat concealed her hair, and she did not give herself away, save perhaps (in Sasha’s nervous imagination) in her long-lashed eyes. Sasha wanted to tell her to keep them downcast, but that would only make her appear more like a girl.

She broke the ice from her horse’s whiskers, checked his feet, and opened her mouth to speak half a dozen times, before each time falling silent. Then a novice appeared with soup and hot loaves and pie, and the chance for talk had passed.

Vasya took the food in both hands and tore into it with nothing like maidenly decorum. Her horse finished his hay and made a winsome play for her bread, blowing warm air on her ear until she laughed and yielded. She fed it to him and finished her soup, while her gaze darted like a finch’s about the walls and clusters of buildings, the chapel with its bell-tower.

“I had never heard bells, before leaving home,” she said to Sasha, finally settling on a safe topic. Unsaid things swam in her eyes.

“You will have all the chances in the world, when we have killed our bandits,” remarked Dmitrii, overhearing. He leaned against the kitchen wall, ostensibly admiring the stallion but really, Sasha thought, taking Vasya’s measure. It made the monk nervous. Whatever Dmitrii thought, though, he hid it behind a ferocious smile and a skin of honey-wine. The wine dripped when he drank, the color of his beard.

Dmitrii Ivanovich was not a patient man. And yet the Grand Prince could be surprisingly steady now and again; he waited, without comment, for Vasya to finish eating. But as soon as she put her bowl aside, the Grand Prince’s grin grew downright savage. “Enough gawping, country boy,” he said. “It is time to ride. The hunter becomes the hunted; won’t you like that?”

Vasya nodded, a little pale, and handed her bowl to the waiting novice. “The saddlebags—?”

“To my own cell,” replied Sasha. “The novice will take them.”

Dmitrii strode off, shouting orders; already the men were mustering in the space before the monastery gate. Sasha walked beside his sister. Her breathing quickened when she saw the men arming. Grimly he said, quick and low, into her ear, “Tell me truly—you found these bandits? You can find them again?”

She nodded.

“Then you must come with us,” said Sasha. “God knows we have had no other luck. But you will stay close to me. You will not speak more than you can help. If you have any more idea of heroics, forget it. You are going to tell me the whole story as soon as we get back. You are also not to be killed.” He paused. “Or wounded. Or captured.” The absurdity struck him again, and he added, almost pleading, “In God’s name, Vasya, how came you here?”

“You sound like Father,” Vasya said ruefully. But she could not say more. Dmitrii was already on his horse. The stallion, overexcited, cavorted in the snow and squealed at Solovey. The prince shouted, “Come, cousin! Come, Vasilii Petrovich! Let us ride!”

Vasya laughed at that, a little wildly. “Let us ride,” she echoed. She turned a mad grin on Sasha, said, “We will have no more burnt villages,” and leaped to her horse’s back with perfect grace and a complete lack of modesty. Solovey still wore no bridle. He reared. The men around them raised a cheer. Vasya sat his back like a hero, fey-eyed and pale.

Sasha, torn between outrage and grudging admiration, went to find his own mare.

The hinges of the monastery-gate, rigid with cold, gave a dying wail and then the way was open. Dmitrii spurred his horse. Vasya leaned forward and followed him.

IT IS NOT EASY TO FOLLOW the track of a cantering horse through the snow, not when a few hours of flurrying have half-filled the marks. But Vasya led them on steadily, brow furrowed in concentration. “I remember that old rock—it looked like a dog by night,” she would say. Or, “There—that stand of pines. This way.”

Dmitrii followed at Vasya’s heel with the look of a wolf on a hunt. Sasha rode behind him, keeping a brooding eye on his sister.

The fine, dry powder came to the horses’ bellies, and fell sparkling from the treetops. It had stopped snowing; the sun broke through the clouds, and all about them was golden light and virgin snow. Still they saw no tracks of bandits, only the marks of Solovey’s hooves, faint but definite, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Vasya led them steadily on. At midday they drank mead without slackening their pace.

An hour passed, then another. The trail grew fainter, and Vasya’s memory less certain. This was the part she had ridden in deep darkness, and the hoofprints had had more time to fade. But still they went, foot by foot.

Toward midafternoon, the forest thinned, and Vasya paused, casting here and there. “We are close now,” she said, “I think. This way.”

The tracks were wholly gone by then, even to Sasha’s eye; his sister was keeping the trail by the memory of trees that she had seen in the dark. Sasha was unwillingly impressed.

“That is a clever boy, your brother,” Dmitrii said to Sasha thoughtfully, watching Vasya. “He rides well. And has a good horse. The beast went all night, and yet he bears the boy easily today. Even though Vasilii is only a slip of a thing—too thin, your brother. We will feed him handsomely. I have a mind to bring him to Moscow myself.” Dmitrii broke off and raised his voice. “Vasilii Petrovich—”

Vasya cut him off. “Someone is here,” she said. Her face was taut with listening. From nowhere, and everywhere, a bitter wind began to blow. “Someone—”

Next moment the wind rose to a shriek, but not loud enough to mask the howl and thump of an arrow, or the cry from a man behind them. Suddenly strong men on stocky horses were riding down on them from every side, blades flashing in the low winter sun.

“AMBUSH!” SHOUTED SASHA, just as Dmitrii roared, “Attack!” The horses reared, startled by the first rush, and more arrows fell. The wind was blowing furiously now—tricky conditions for archery—and Sasha blessed their good fortune. Steppe-archers are deadly.

The men drew together at once, surrounding the Grand Prince. No one panicked. All the men were veterans who had ridden with Dmitrii in his wars.

The dense trees limited lines of sight. The wind was shrieking now. The bandits, howling, galloped down onto the Grand Prince’s men. The two groups met body to body, and then the swords rang out—swords? Expensive things for bandits to carry—

But Sasha had no time to think. In a moment, the melee had broken into a cluster of individual contests, stirrup to stirrup, and Dmitrii’s band was hard-pressed. Sasha blocked a spear-thrust, splintered the shaft with a downstroke, and cut down viciously, felling the first man who tried him. Tuman reared, lashing out with her forefeet, and three more attackers, riding smaller horses, drew back. “Vasya!” Sasha snapped. “Get out! Don’t—” But his unarmed sister bared her teeth, not quite laughing, and hung doggedly at the prince’s flank. Her eyes had grown very cold at the sight of the bandits. She had no sword or spear, which she surely did not know how to use, nor did she draw the knife at her side, which was too short for fighting on horseback.

No, she had her stallion: a weapon worth five men. Vasya had only to cling to his back and direct the beast to each new victim. Solovey’s kicks sent bandits flying; his hooves caved in their skulls. Girl and horse clung determinedly close to Dmitrii’s side, keeping the raiders off with the stallion’s weight. Vasya’s face was dead-white now, her mouth set stiff and unflinching. Sasha guarded his sister’s other side and prayed she wouldn’t fall off the horse. Once in the chaos, he could have sworn he saw a tall white horse beside the bay stallion, whose rider kept the bandits’ blades from finding the girl. But then Sasha realized it was only a cloud of flying snow.

Dmitrii laid about him with an ax, roaring his joy.

After the first frenzy of charge, it was all close work, in deadly earnest. Sasha took a sword-stroke to the forearm that he did not feel, and beheaded the man who gave it to him. “How many bandits can there be?” Vasya shouted, her eyes aglitter with fearful battle-lust. The stallion kicked out, breaking a man’s leg and sending his horse crashing to the snow. Sasha gutted another and booted him out of the saddle, as Tuman shifted to stay beneath him.

One of Dmitrii’s men fell, and a second, and then the battle grew desperate.

“Vasya!” snapped Sasha. “If I fall, or if the Grand Prince does, you must flee. You must go back to the monastery; do not—”

Vasya wasn’t listening. Uncanny how the big bay stallion protected his rider, and none of the Tatars now would bring his horse in range of the beast’s hooves. And yet a single spear-stroke could take him down. They had not managed it yet, but—

Suddenly Dmitrii shouted. A group of men broke out of the wood, churning up bloody snow beneath the strong hooves of their horses. These men were no bandits, but bright-helmed warriors, many warriors, armed with boar-spears. A tall, red-haired man was leading them.

The bandits looked palely on this new arrival, flung their weapons down, and fled.

11. We Are Not All Born Lords’ Sons

“Well met, Kasyan Lutovich!” called Dmitrii. “We looked for you sooner.” A careless scarlet splatter covered one cheek and crusted in his yellow beard; there was blood on his ax and on the neck of his horse. His eyes were very bright.

Kasyan smiled back and sheathed his sword. “I beg you will forgive me, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

“This time,” retorted the Grand Prince, and they laughed. Of the bandits, only the dead and the badly wounded lay huddled in the snow; the rest had fled. Kasyan’s men were already cutting the wounded men’s throats. Vasya, shaken, did not watch; she concentrated on her hands, binding up her brother’s forearm. The cold breeze still whispered through the clearing. Right before the bandits appeared, she could have sworn she heard Morozko’s voice. Vasya, he had said. Vasya. And then the wind had come screaming, the wind that turned the bandits’ arrows. Vasya even thought she had seen the white mare, with the frost-demon on her back, turning the blades that came nearest to touching her.

But perhaps she was mistaken.

The breeze died. The tree-shadows seemed to thicken. Vasya turned her head, and he was there.

Barely. A faint, black-and-bone presence stepped softly into the clearing, its eyes disconcertingly familiar.

Morozko stilled beneath her glance. This was not the frost-demon, this was his other, older self, black-cloaked, pale, long-fingered. He was here for the dead. Suddenly the sunlight seemed muted. She felt his presence in the blood on the earth, in the touch of the cold air on his face, old and still and strong.

She drew a deep breath.

He inclined his head slowly.

“Thank you,” she whispered into the cold morning, too low for anyone to hear.

But he heard. His eyes found hers, and for an instant he looked—almost—real. Then he turned away, and there was no man there at all, but only the cold shadow.

Biting her lip, Vasya finished binding her brother’s arm. When she looked back, Morozko had gone. The dead men lay in their blood, and the sun shone gaily down.

A clear voice was speaking. “Who is that boy,” asked Kasyan, “who looks so much like Brother Aleksandr?”

“Why, this is our young hero,” returned Dmitrii, raising his voice. “Vasya!”

Vasya touched Sasha’s arm, said, “This must be cleaned later, with hot water, and bound with honey,” and then turned.

“Vasilii Petrovich,” said Dmitrii, when she had crossed the clearing and bowed to the two men. Solovey followed her anxiously. “My cousin—my father’s sister-son. This is Kasyan Lutovich. Between you, you have won my victory.”

“But we have met,” said Kasyan to Vasya. “You did not tell me you were the Grand Prince’s cousin.” At Dmitrii’s startled glance, he added, “I met this boy by chance in a town market a sennight ago. I knew he looked familiar—he is the image of his brother. I wish you had told me who you were, Vasilii Petrovich. I could have brought you with honor to the Lavra.”

Kasyan’s dark scrutiny had not softened since that day in Chudovo, but Vasya, cocooned in the tranquillity of extreme weariness and shock, returned equably, “I had run away from home, and did not want word getting back too soon. I did not know you, Gospodin. Besides”—she found herself grinning impishly, almost drunkenly, and wondered at the feeling rising in her throat: laughter or sob, she could not have said—“I came in good time. Did I not, Dmitrii Ivanovich?”

Dmitrii laughed. “You did indeed. A wise boy. A wise boy, indeed; for only fools trust, when they are alone on the road. Come, I wish you to be friends.”

“As do I,” said Kasyan, his eyes on hers.

Vasya nodded, wishing he would not stare, and wondering why he did. A girl might well pray to the Blessed Virgin to have hair of that deep russet color. She looked hastily away.

“Sasha, are you fit?” called Dmitrii.

Sasha was looking Tuman over for scratches. “Yes,” he returned shortly. “Although I will have to hold my sword in my shield-hand.”

“Well enough,” said Dmitrii. His own gelding had a great gash in his flank; the Grand Prince mounted one of his men’s horses. “We have another hunt before us now, Kasyan Lutovich. The stragglers must be tracked to their lair.” Dmitrii bent from the saddle to give instructions to those who would bring the wounded men back to the Lavra.

Kasyan mounted up and paused, looking Vasya over. “Have a care for this boy, Brother Aleksandr,” he said lightly. “He is the color of the snow.”

Sasha frowned at Vasya’s face. “You should go back with the wounded.”

“But I am not wounded,” Vasya pointed out, with a floating, detached logic that did not appear to reassure her brother. “I want to see this done.”

“Of course you do,” put in Dmitrii. “Come, Brother Aleksandr, do not shame the boy. Drink this, Vasya, and let us go now; I want my supper.”

He handed her his skin of mead, and Vasya gulped it down, welcoming the warmth that washed away feeling. The wind had dropped now and the dead men lay huddled alone in the snow. She looked at them, and looked away.

Solovey had taken no hurt in the melee, but his head was high, his eye wild with the smell of blood.

“Come,” Vasya said, stroking the stallion’s neck. “We are not finished.”

I do not like this, said Solovey, stamping. Let us run into the woods.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

DMITRII AND KASYAN RODE FIRST: now one ahead, now the other, now talking in low tones, now silent, in the manner of men exploring a fragile trust. Sasha rode at Solovey’s flank and did not speak at all. He held his torn arm stiffly.

The snow had been trampled in the survivors’ flight, all dappled and spotted with blood. Solovey had quieted but he was nothing like calm; he would not walk, but went sideways instead, almost cantering in place, with swiveling ears.

Their pace was not the swiftest, to spare the weary horses, and the day dragged on. They trotted from clearing to shadow and back again, and they all grew colder and colder.

At last Dmitrii’s warriors rode down a single wounded bandit. “Where are the others?” the Grand Prince demanded, while Kasyan held the man jerking in the snow.

The man said something in his own tongue, eyes wide.

“Sasha,” said Dmitrii.

Sasha slid down Tuman’s shoulder and spoke, to Vasya’s surprise, in the same language.

The man shook his head frantically and poured out a stream of syllables.

“He says they have a camp just to the north. A verst, no more,” said Sasha in his measured voice.

“For that,” said Dmitrii to the bandit, stepping back, “I will kill you quickly. Here, Vasya, you have earned it.”

“No, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya choked, when Dmitrii offered her his own weapon, and gestured, grandly, to where Kasyan held the bandit. She feared she would be sick; Solovey was on the edge of bolting. “I cannot.”

The bandit must have caught the sense of the words, for he bent his head, lips moving in prayer. He was no monster now, no child-thief, but a man afraid, taking his last breaths.

Sasha, though he stood steadily, had gone gray with his wound. He drew breath to speak, but Kasyan spoke first. “Vasilii is only a reedy boy, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” he said, still gripping his captive. “Perhaps he would miss his stroke, and the men have had enough to do today without hearing a man scream and die, gutted.”

Vasya swallowed hard, and the look on her face seemed to convince the prince, for he thrust the blade through the man’s throat, petulantly. He stood an instant with heaving shoulders, recovered his good humor, wiped off the splatter, and said, “All well and good. But we will feed you properly in Moscow, Vasilii Petrovich, and you will be spearing boars at a stroke before long.”

THE BANDITS’ CAMP WAS A SMALL, crude thing. Huts to keep out the cold, and pens for the beasts, but little more. No wall or ditch or palisade; the bandits had not feared attack.

There was no sound and no movement. No smoke from cook-fires, and the whole effect was of chill stillness, grim and sad.

Kasyan spat. “They are gone, I think, Dmitrii Ivanovich. Those that survived.”

“Search everywhere,” said Dmitrii.

In and out of each hut Dmitrii’s men went, searching through the grime and darkness and reek of those men’s lives. Vasya’s hatred began to flake away, leaving only a faint sickness behind.

“Nothing,” said Dmitrii, when the last place was searched. “They are dead or fled.”

“It was well fought, Gosudar,” said Kasyan. He took off his hat and ran a hand through his matted hair. “I do not think they will trouble us again.” Unexpectedly he turned to Vasya. “Why so troubled, Vasilii Petrovich?”

“We never found their leader,” Vasya said. She cast her gaze once more about the squalid encampment. “The man who commanded them in the forest, when I stole the children back.”

Kasyan looked taken aback. “What sort of man is this leader?”

Vasya described him. “I looked for him in the battle, and among the dead,” she concluded. “I could not easily forget his face. But where is he?”

“Fled,” said Kasyan promptly. “Lost in the forest, and hungry already, if he is not dead. Do not worry, boy. We will set fire to this place. Even if this captain lives, he will not easily find more men to go adventuring in the wild. It is over.”

Vasya nodded slowly, not quite agreeing, and then she said, “What of their captives? Where have they taken them?”

Dmitrii was giving orders that fires be built and meat be shared out for the comfort of them all. “What of them?” the Grand Prince asked. “We have killed the bandits; there will be no more burnt villages.”

“But all those stolen children!”

“What of them? Be reasonable,” said Dmitrii. “If the girls are not here, then they are dead, or far away. I cannot go galloping through the thickets with weary horses to look for peasants.”

Vasya had her mouth open on an angry retort, when Kasyan’s hand fell heavily on her shoulder. She bit her tongue and whirled on him.

Dmitrii had already walked away, calling more orders.

“Do not touch me,” Vasya snapped.

“I meant no harm, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan said. Evening shadows blackened his fiery hair. “It is best not to antagonize princes. There are better means to get your way. In this case, though, he is right.”

“No, he isn’t,” she said. “A good lord cares for his people.”

The men were gathering up whatever would burn. The smell of wood-smoke began drifting out into the forest.

Kasyan snorted. His amused look made her feel, resentfully, like the country girl Vasilisa Petrovna, and not at all like Dmitrii’s young hero Vasilii. “But which people, that is the question, boy. I suppose your father was the lord of some country estate.”

She said nothing.

“Dmitrii Ivanovich is responsible for a thousand times as many souls,” Kasyan continued. “He must not waste his men’s strength on futility. Those girls are gone. Do not think of heroics tonight. You are dead on your feet; you look like a mad child’s ghost.” He glanced at Solovey: a looming presence at her shoulder. “Your horse is not in much better case.”

“I do well enough,” said Vasya coldly, drawing herself straight, though she could not keep from glancing worriedly at Solovey. “Better than those stolen children.”

Kasyan shrugged and glanced out into the darkness. “They might count life among slavers a mercy,” he said. “At least those girls are worth coin to a slaver, which is more than they are to their families. Do you think anyone wants a half-grown girl, another frail mouth to feed, in February? No. They lie atop the oven until they starve. Some might die going south to the slave-markets, but at least the slaver will give them the mercy-stroke when they can no longer walk. And the strong—the strong will live. If one is pretty or clever, she might be bought by a prince and live richly in some sun-drenched hall. Better than a dirt floor in Rus’, Vasilii Petrovich. We are not all born lords’ sons.”

The voice of the Grand Prince broke the silence that fell between them.

“Rest while you can,” Dmitrii told his men. “We will ride at moonrise.”

DMITRII’S PEOPLE FIRED THE BANDIT-CAMP and returned to the Lavra in the silvered dark. Despite the hour, many of the villagers gathered in the shadow of the monastery gate. They shouted savage approbation at the returning riders. “God bless you, Gosudar!” they cried. “Aleksandr Peresvet! Vasilii Petrovich!”

Vasya heard her name called with the others, even in her haze of exhaustion, and she found the strength to at least ride in straight-backed.

“Leave the horses,” said Rodion to them all. “They will be well looked after.” The young monk did not look at Vasya. “The bathhouse is hot,” he added, a little uneasily.

Dmitrii and Kasyan slid at once from their horses, jostling each other, victorious and carefree. Their men followed suit.

Vasya busied herself at once with Solovey, so no one would wonder why she didn’t go and bathe with the others.

Father Sergei was nowhere to be found. As Vasya curried her horse, she saw Sasha set off to find him.

THE LAVRA HAD TWO BATHHOUSES. They had heated one for the living. In the other, the Muscovite dead from that day’s battle were already washed and wrapped, by Sergei’s steady hand, and that was where Sasha found his hegumen.

“Father bless,” said Sasha, coming into the darkness of the bathhouse: that orderly world of water and warmth, where folk in Rus’ were born, and where they lay after dying.

“May the Lord bless you,” said Sergei, and then embraced him. For a moment, Sasha was a boy again, and he pressed his face against the frail strength of the old monk’s shoulder.

“We succeeded,” said Sasha, collecting himself. “By the grace of God.”

“You succeeded,” echoed Sergei, looking down at the dead men’s faces. He made a slow sign of the cross. “Thanks to this brother of yours.”

The rheumy old eyes met those of his disciple.

“Yes,” Sasha said, answering the silent question. “She is my sister, Vasilisa. But she bore herself bravely today.”

Sergei snorted. “Naturally. Only boys and fools think men are first in courage. We do not bear children. But this is a dangerous course you are taking, you and she both.”

“I cannot see a safer,” said Sasha. “Especially now that there will be no more fighting. There will be an appalling scandal if she is discovered, and some of Dmitrii’s men would happily force her, on some dark night, if they knew her secret.”

“Perhaps,” said Sergei heavily. “But Dmitrii has much faith in you; he will not take kindly to deception.”

Sasha was silent.

Sergei sighed. “Do what you must, I will pray for you.” The hegumen kissed Sasha on both cheeks. “Rodion knows, doesn’t he? I will speak to him. Now go. The living need you more than the dead. And they are harder to comfort.”

DARKNESS TURNED THE HOLY GROUNDS of the Lavra into a pagan place, full of shadow and strange voices. The bell tolled for povecheriye, and even the bell’s cry could not contain the dark and chaotic aftermath of battle, or Sasha’s own troubled thoughts.

Outside the bathhouse, people dotted the snow: villagers left destitute, hurled on the mercy of God. A woman near the bathhouse was weeping, mouth open. “I had only one,” she whispered. “Only one, my firstborn, my treasure. And you could not find her? No trace, Gospodin?”

Vasya, astonishingly, was there and still upright. She stood wraithlike and insubstantial before the woman’s grief. “Your daughter is safe now,” Vasya replied. “She is with God.”

The woman put her hands over her face. Vasya turned a stricken look on her brother.

Sasha’s torn arm ached. “Come,” he said to the woman. “We will go to the chapel. We will pray for your daughter. We will ask the Mother of God, who takes all into her heart, to treat your child as her own.”

The woman looked up, eyes starry with tears in the blotched and swollen ruin of her timeworn face. “Aleksandr Peresvet,” she whispered, voice smeared with weeping.

Slowly, he made the sign of the cross.

He prayed with her a long time, prayed with the many who had gone to the chapel for comfort, prayed until all were quieted. For that was his duty, as he counted it, to fight for Christians and tend to the aftermath.

Vasya stayed in the chapel until the last person left. She was praying too, though not aloud. When they left at last, dawn was not far off. The moon had set long since, and the Lavra was bathed in starlight.

“Can you sleep?” Sasha asked her.

She shook her head once. He had seen that look in warriors before, driven past exhaustion to a state of sick wakefulness. It had been the same when he killed his first man. “There is a cot for you in my own cell,” he said. “If you cannot sleep, we will give thanks to God instead, and you will tell me how you came here.”

She only nodded. Their feet groaned in the snow as they crossed the monastery side by side. Vasya seemed to be gathering her strength. “I have never been so glad in my life as when I recognized you, brother,” she managed, low, as they walked. “I am sorry I could not show it before.”

“I was glad to see you too, little frog,” he returned.

She halted as though stricken. Suddenly she threw herself at him, and he found himself holding an armful of sobbing sister. “Sasha,” she said. “Sasha, I missed you so.”

“Hush,” he said, stroking her back awkwardly. “Hush.”

After a moment, she pulled herself together.

“Not quite the behavior of your bold brother Vasilii, is it?” she said, scrubbing at her running nose. They started walking again. “Why did you never come back?”

“Never mind that,” Sasha returned. “What were you doing on the road? Where did you get that horse? Did you run away from home? From a husband? The truth now, sister.”

They had come to his own cell, squat and unlovely in the moonlight, one of a cluster of little huts. He dragged the door open and lit a candle.

Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Father is dead.”

Sasha went still, the lit candle in his hand. He had promised to go home after he became a monk, but he never had. He never had.

“You are no son of mine,” Pyotr had said in his anger, when he rode away.

Father.

“When?” Sasha demanded. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “How?”

“A bear killed him.”

He could not read her face in the darkness.

“Come inside,” Sasha told her. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”

IT WAS NOT THE truth, of course. It could not be. Much as Vasya had loved her brother, and had missed him, she did not know this broad-shouldered monk, with his tonsure and his black beard. So she told—part of the story.

She told him of the fair-haired priest who had frightened the people at Lesnaya Zemlya. She told him of the bitter winters, the fires. She told him, laughing a little, of a suitor that had come to claim her and ridden away unwed, and that their father had then wished to send her to a convent. She told him of her nurse’s death (but not of what came after), and she told him of a bear. She said that Solovey was a horse of their father’s, although she could tell he didn’t quite believe her. She did not tell him that her stepmother had sent her in search of snowdrops at midwinter, or of a house in a fir-grove, and she certainly did not tell him of a frost-demon, cold and capricious and sometimes tender.

She finished and fell silent. Sasha was frowning. She answered his look, not his words. “No, Father would not have been out looking in the forest, had I not been there,” she whispered. “I did it; it was I, brother.”

“Is that why you ran away?” Sasha asked. His voice (beloved, half-remembered) was uninflected, his face composed, so that she had no idea what he was thinking. “Because you killed Father?”

She flinched, then bowed her head. “Yes. That. And the people—the people feared I was a witch. The priest had told them to fear witches, and they listened. Father was no longer there to protect me, so I ran.”

Sasha was silent. She could not see his face, and at last she burst out, “For God’s sake, say something!”

He sighed. “Are you a witch, Vasya?”

Her tongue felt thick; the vibration of men’s deaths still rang through her body. There were no more lies left in her, and no more half-truths.

“I do not know, little brother,” she said. “I do not know what a witch is, not really. But I have never meant anyone ill.”

At length he said, “I do not think you did right, Vasya. It is sin for a woman to dress so, and it was wrong of you to defy Father.”

Then he fell silent again. Vasya wondered if he was thinking of how he, too, had defied their father.

“But,” he added slowly, “you have been brave, to get this far. I do not blame you, child. I do not.”

The tears came to her throat again, but she swallowed them back.

“Come on, then,” Sasha said, stiffly. “Try to go to sleep now, Vasya. You will come with us to Moscow. Olya will know what to do with you.”

Olya, Vasya thought, her heart lifting. She was going to see Olya again. Her earliest memories—of kind hands and of laughter—were of her sister.

Vasya was sitting opposite her brother, on a cot beside the clay stove. Sasha had built a fire, and the room was slowly warming. Suddenly all Vasya wanted was to pull the furs over her head and sleep.

But she had one last question. “Father loved you. He wished you would come home. You promised me you’d come back. Why didn’t you?”

No answer. He had busied himself with the fire; perhaps he had not heard. But to Vasya, the silence seemed to thicken suddenly with regrets that her brother would not utter.

SLEEP SHE DID: a sleep like winter, a sleep like sickness. In her sleep the men all died again, stoic or screaming, their guts like dark jewels in the snow. The black-cloaked figure stood by, calm and knowing, to mark each death.

But this time a terrible, familiar voice spoke also in her ear. “See him, poor winter-king, trying to keep order. But the battlefield is my realm, and he only comes to pick over my leavings.”

Vasya whirled to find the Bear at her shoulder, one-eyed, lazily smiling. “Hello,” he said. “Does my work please you?”

“No,” she gasped, “no—”

Then she fled, slipping frantic over the snow, tripping on nothing, falling into a pit of endless white. She did not know if she was screaming or not. “Vasya,” said a voice.

An arm caught her, stopped her fall. She knew the shape and turn of the long-fingered hand, the deft and grasping fingers. She thought, He has come for me now; it is my turn, and began to thrash in earnest.

“Vasya,” said his voice in her ear. “Vasya.” Cruelty in that voice—and winter wind and old moonlight. Even a rough note of tenderness.

No, she thought. No, you greedy thing, do not be kind to me.

But even as she thought it, all the fight went out of her. Not knowing if she were awake or still dreaming, she pressed her face into his shoulder, and broke into a storm of violent weeping.

In her dream, the arm went hesitantly round her and his hand cradled her head. Her tears lanced some of the poisoned wound of memory; at last she fell silent and looked up.

They stood together in a little moonlit space, while trees slept all around. No Bear—the Bear was bound, far away. Frost fretted the air like silver-gilt. Was she dreaming? Morozko was a part of the night, his feet incongruously bare, his pale eyes troubled. The living world of bells and icons and changing seasons seemed the dream then, and the frost-demon the only thing real.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you really here?”

He said nothing.

“Today—today I saw—” she stammered. “And you—”

When he sighed, the trees stirred. “I know what you saw,” he said.

Her hands clenched and unclenched. “You were there? Were you only there for the dead?”

Again he did not speak. She stepped back.

“They mean for me to come to Moscow,” she said.

“Do you wish to go to Moscow?”

She nodded. “I want to see my sister. I want to see more of my brother. But I cannot stay a boy forever, and I do not want to be a girl in Moscow. They will try to find me a husband.”

He was silent a moment, but his eyes had darkened. “Moscow is full of churches. Many churches. I cannot—chyerti are not strong in Moscow, not anymore.”

She drew back, crossing her arms over her breast. “Does that matter? I will not stay forever. I am not asking for your help.”

“No,” he agreed. “You are not.”

“The night under the spruce-tree—” she began. All around them the snow floated like mist.

Morozko seemed to gather himself, and then he smiled. It was the smile of the winter-king, old and fair and unknowable. Any hint of deeper feeling vanished from his face. “Well, mad thing?” he asked. “What do you mean to ask me? Or are you afraid?”

“I am not afraid,” said Vasya, bristling.

That was true, and it was also a lie. The sapphire was warm beneath her clothes; it was glowing, too, though she could not see it. “I am not afraid,” she repeated.

His breath slipped cool past her cheek. Goaded, she dared to do dreaming what she would not awake. She twisted her hand in his cloak and pulled him nearer.

She had surprised him again. The breath hitched in his throat. His hand caught hers, but he did not untangle her fingers.

“Why are you here?” she asked him.

For a moment she thought he would not answer, then he said, as though reluctant, “I heard you cry.”

“I—you—you cannot come to me thus and go away again,” she said. “Save my life? Leave me stumbling alone with three children in the dark? Save my life again? What do you want? Do not—kiss me and leave—I don’t—” She could not find the words for what she meant, but her fingers spoke for her, digging into the sparkling fur of his robe. “You are immortal, and perhaps I seem small to you,” she said at last fiercely. “But my life is not your game.”

His grip crushed her hand in turn, right on the edge of pain. Then he untangled her fingers, one by one. But he did not let go. For an instant his eyes found hers and burned them, so full were they of light.

Again the wind stirred the ancient trees. “You are right. Never again,” he said simply, and again it sounded like a promise. “Farewell.”

No, she thought. Not like that—

But he was gone.

12. Vasilii the Brave

The bells rang for outrenya and Vasya jerked awake, dazed with dreams. The heavy coverlets seemed to smother her. Like a creature in a trap, Vasya was on her feet before she knew, and the morning chill jolted her back to awareness.

When she emerged from Sasha’s hut, she was hatted and hooded and longing for a bath. All around was a swirl of activity. Men and women ran back and forth, shouting, quarreling—packing, she realized. The danger had ended; the peasants were going home. Chickens were being boxed, cows goaded, children slapped, fires smothered.

Well, of course they were going home. All was well. The bandits had been tracked to their lair. They had been slain—hadn’t they? Vasya shook off thought of the missing captain.

She was trying to choose whether she needed her breakfast or a place to relieve herself worse, when Katya came running up, very pale, her kerchief askew.

“Easy,” Vasya said, catching her just before the girl sent them both into the snow. “It is too early in the morning for running about, Katyusha. Have you seen a giant?”

Katya was blotched red with passion, her nose running freely. “Forgive me; I came to find you,” she gasped. “Please—Gospodin—Vasilii Petrovich.”

“What is it?” Vasya returned in quick alarm. “What has happened?”

Katya shook her head, throat working. “A man—Igor—Igor Mikhailovich—asked me to marry him.”

Vasya looked Katya up and down. The girl looked more bewildered than frightened.

“Has he?” Vasya asked cautiously, “Who is Igor Mikhailovich?”

“He is a blacksmith—he has a forge,” Katya stammered. “He and his mother—they have been kind to me and to the little girls—and today he said that he loves me and—oh!” She covered her face with her hands.

“Well,” Vasya returned. “Do you want to marry him?”

Whatever Katya had been expecting from the boyar’s son Vasilii Petrovich, it apparently wasn’t a mild, sensible question. The girl gaped like a landed fish. Then she said in a small voice, “I like him. Or I did. But this morning he asked—and I didn’t know what to say…” She seemed on the verge of tears.

Vasya scowled. Katya saw, swallowed the tears back, and finished, creaking, “I—I would betroth myself to him. I think. Later. In the spring. But I want to go home to my mother, and have her consent, and finish my wedding-things in the proper way. I promised Anyushka and Lenochka that I would take them home. But I cannot take them home alone, so I don’t know what to do—”

Vasya found to her chagrin that she could no more bear Katya’s tears than she could her own small sister’s. What would Vasilii Petrovich do? “I will speak to this boy for you, as is right,” said Vasya gently. “And then I will see you home.” She thought a moment. “I and my brother, the holy monk.” Vasya hoped devoutly that Sasha’s chaste presence would be enough for Katya’s mother.

Katya paused again. “You will? Just— You will?”

“My word on it,” Vasya said, with finality. “Now I want my breakfast.”

VASYA DISCOVERED A SECLUDED latrine that she used with the speed of outright terror, and afterward made her way to the refectory. She strode in with more confidence than she felt. The long, low room was full of seemly hush, and Dmitrii and Kasyan were eating bread dipped in something that steamed. Vasya smelled it and swallowed.

“Vasya!” Dmitrii roared affectionately when he saw her. “Come, sit, eat. We must hear service, give thanks to God for our victory, and then—Moscow!”

“Have you heard the talk of the peasants this morning?” Kasyan asked her as she accepted a bowl. “They are calling you Vasilii the Brave now, and saying that you delivered them all from devils.”

Vasya almost choked on her soup.

Dmitrii, laughing, pounded her between the shoulder-blades. “You earned it!” he cried. “Raiding the bandit-camp, fighting on that stallion—although you must learn to wield a spear, Vasya—you will soon be as great a legend as your brother.”

“God be with you,” said Sasha, overhearing. He walked in with both his hands thrust through his sleeves: a very monk. He had gone early to prayer with his brothers. Now he said austerely, “I hope not. Vasilii the Brave. That is a heavy name for one so young.” But his gray eyes gleamed. It occurred to Vasya that he might be enjoying, despite himself, the risks of their deception. She certainly was, she realized with some surprise. The danger in every word she spoke, among these great people, was like wine in her veins, like water in a hot country. Perhaps, she thought, that was why Sasha left home. Not for God, not to wound Father, but because he wanted surprises around each road’s turning, and he would never get that at Lesnaya Zemlya. She eyed her brother in wonder.

Then she took another swallow of soup and said, “I must return the three peasant girls to their village before I go to Moscow. I promised.”

Dmitrii snorted and quaffed his beer. “Why? There will be folk going out today; the girls can go with them. You needn’t trouble yourself.”

Vasya said nothing.

Dmitrii grinned suddenly, reading her face. “No? You look just like your brother when he has made up his mind and is being polite. Is it that you want the elder girl—what is her name? Don’t look prudish, Sasha; how old were you when you started tumbling peasant girls? Well, I owe you a debt, Vasya. Letting you play the hero to a pretty child is little enough. It is not too far out of our way. Eat. We ride tomorrow.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY left the Lavra, Brother Aleksandr knocked on his master’s door. “Come in,” said Sergei.

Sasha entered to find the old hegumen sitting beside a stove, looking into the flames. An untouched cup sat beside him, and a heel of bread, a little gnawed by rats.

“Father bless,” said Sasha, stepping on a rat-tail just poking out beneath the cot. He heaved the beast up, broke its neck, and dropped it outside in the snow.

“May the Lord bless you,” said Sergei, smiling.

Sasha crossed the room and knelt at the hegumen’s feet.

“My father is dead,” he said, without ceremony.

Sergei sighed. “God grant him peace,” he said, and made the sign of the cross. “I wondered what had happened, to send your sister out into the wild.”

Sasha said nothing.

“Tell me, my son,” said Sergei.

Sasha slowly repeated the story Vasya had told him, staring all the while into the fire.

When he had finished, Sergei was frowning. “I am old,” he said. “Perhaps my wits are failing. But—”

“It is all very unlikely,” finished Sasha shortly. “I can get no more out of her. But Pyotr Vladimirovich would never—”

Sergei sat back in his chair. “Call him your father, my son. God will not begrudge it, and nor do I. Pyotr was a good man. I have rarely seen one so grieved to part with his son, yet he gave me no angry word, after the first. And no, he did not strike me as a fool. What do you mean to do with this sister of yours?”

Sasha was sitting at his master’s feet like a boy, with his arms around his knees. The firelight erased some of the marks of war and travel and long lonely prayer. Sasha sighed. “Take her to Moscow. What else? My sister Olga can take her quietly back into the terem, and Vasilii Petrovich may disappear. Perhaps on the journey, Vasya will tell me the truth.”

“Dmitrii will not like it, if he finds out,” Sergei said. “What if your—if Vasya refuses to be hidden away?”

Sasha looked up quickly, a line between his brows. Outside a hush lay on the monastery, save for a monk’s single voice, raised in plainchant. The villagers had all gone, save for the three girl-children, who would depart on the morrow with Dmitrii’s cavalcade.

“She is as like you as brother and sister can be,” continued Sergei. “I saw that from the first. Would you go quiet into the terem? After all the galloping about, the saving girls, the slaying bandits?”

Sasha laughed at the image. “She is a girl,” he said. “It is different.”

Sergei lifted a brow. “We are all children of God,” he said, mildly.

Sasha, frowning, made no answer. Then he said, changing the subject, “What think you of Vasya’s tale—of seeing a bandit-captain that we can now find no trace of?”

“Well, either this captain is dead or he is not,” said Sergei practically. “If he is dead, God grant him peace. If he is not, I think we will discover it.” The monk spoke placidly, but his eyes gleamed in the firelight. In his remote monastery, Sergei contrived to hear a good deal. Before he died, the holy Aleksei himself had wanted Sergei to be his successor as Metropolitan of all Moscow.

“I beg you will send Rodion to Moscow, if you have word of the bandit-captain after we are gone,” said Sasha, reluctantly. “And…”

Sergei grinned. He had only four teeth. “And now are you wondering who is this red-haired lord that young Dmitrii Ivanovich has befriended?”

“As you say, Batyushka,” said Sasha. He sat back against his hands, then recalled his wounded forearm and snatched it up with a grunt of pain. “I had never heard of Kasyan Lutovich. I who have traveled the length and breadth of Rus’. And then suddenly he comes riding out of the woods, bigger than life, with his marvelous clothes, and his marvelous horses.”

“Nor I,” said Sergei, very thoughtfully. “And I ought to have.”

Their eyes met in understanding.

“I will ask questions,” said Sergei. “And I will send Rodion with news. But in the meantime, be wary. Wherever he comes from, that Kasyan is a man who thinks.”

“A man may think and do no evil,” said Sasha.

“He may,” said Sergei only. “In any case, I am weary. God be with you, my son. Take care of your sister, and of your hotheaded cousin.”

Sasha gave Sergei a wry look. “I will try. They are damnably similar in some ways. Perhaps I should renounce the world and stay here, a holy man in the wilderness.”

“Certainly you should. It would be most pleasing to God,” said Sergei tartly. “I would beg you to do so, if ever I thought I could persuade you. Now get out. I am weary.”

Sasha kissed his master’s hand, and they parted.

13. The Girl Who Kept a Promise

It took two days to cover the distance to the girls’ village. Vasya put all three children together on Solovey. Sometimes she rode with them; more often she walked beside the stallion, or rode one of Dmitrii’s horses. When they were in camp, Vasya told the girls, “Don’t get out of my sight. Stay near me or my brother.” She paused. “Or Solovey.” The stallion had grown fiercer since the battle, like a boy blooded.

As they ate around the fire on the first night, Vasya looked up to see Katya on a log opposite, weeping passionately.

Vasya was taken aback. “What is it?” she asked. “Do you miss your mother? Only a few more days, Katyusha.”

At the greater fire, not far off, the men were elbowing each other, and her brother looked austere, which meant he was annoyed.

“No—I heard the men’s jokes,” said Katya in a small voice. “They said that you mean to share my bed—” she choked, rallied. “That that was the price for saving us, and taking us home. I—I understand, but I am sorry, Gosudar, I am frightened.”

Vasya gaped, realized she was gaping, swallowed her stew, and said, “Mother of God.” The men were laughing.

Katya looked down, knees pressed together.

Vasya went around the fire and sat down beside the other girl, putting her back to the men around the fire. “Come,” she said low. “You have been brave; are you going to give in to nerves now? Didn’t I promise to see you safe?” She paused, and was not sure what imp prompted her to add, “We are not prizes, after all.”

Katya looked up. “We?” she breathed. Her eyes slid down Vasya’s body, shapeless in fur, and came at last to rest questioningly on her face.

Vasya smiled a little, put a finger to her lips, and said, “Come, let us sleep; the children are tired.”

They slept at last, contentedly, all four together, huddled in Vasya’s cloak and bedroll, with the two younger girls squashed and squirming in between the elder.

THE THIRD DAY—THE LAST DAY—the girls rode Solovey all four together, as they had when they first fled the downstroke of the bandit-captain’s sword. Vasya held Anyushka and Lenochka in front of her, while Katya sat behind, arms about Vasya’s waist.

As they neared the village, Katya whispered, “What is your real name?”

Vasya stiffened, so that Solovey threw his head up, and the little girls squeaked.

“Please,” added Katya doggedly, when the horse had settled. “I mean no harm, but I wish to pray for you rightly.”

Vasya sighed. “It really is Vasya,” she said. “Vasilisa Petrovna. But that is a great secret.”

Katya said nothing. The other riders had drawn a little ahead. When they were screened a moment by a stand of trees, Vasya put a hand into her saddlebag, withdrew a handful of silver, and slipped it into the girl’s sleeve.

Katya hissed. “Are you—bribing me to keep your secret? I owe you my life.”

“I—no,” said Vasya, startled. “No. Don’t look at me like that. This is your dowry, and the two little ones’, too. Keep it against need. Buy fine cloth—buy a cow.”

Katya said nothing, for a long moment. It was only when Vasya had turned back around and nudged Solovey to catch up with the others that Katya spoke, low in her ear. “I will keep it—Vasilisa Petrovna,” said Katya. “I will keep your secret, too. And I will love you forever.”

Vasya took the girl’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

They broke from the last trees, and the girls’ village lay spread before them, roofs sparkling in the late-winter sun. Its people had begun to clear away the worst of the ruin. Smoke rose from the undamaged chimneys, and the black look of utter desolation had gone.

One kerchiefed head jerked up at the sound of oncoming hoofbeats. Then another, then another. Screams split the morning, and Katya’s arms tightened. Then someone called, “Nay—hush—look at the horses. Those are no raiders.”

Folk rushed out of their houses, clustering and staring. “Vasya!” called Dmitrii. “Come, ride beside me, boy.”

Vasya had kept Solovey near the back of the cavalcade, but now she found herself smiling. “Hold on,” she told Katya. Taking a firmer grip on the children, she nudged Solovey. The horse, delighted, broke into a gallop.

So the last distance to Katya’s village was covered with Vasilisa Petrovna and the Grand Prince of Moscow galloping side by side. The cries grew louder and louder as the riders approached, and then a single woman, standing upright and alone, cried, “Anyushka!” The horses leaped the half-cleared remains of the palisade, and then they were surrounded.

Solovey stood still while the two little ones were handed down into the arms of weeping women.

Blessings rained down on the riders; screams and prayers and cries of “Dmitrii Ivanovich!” and “Aleksandr Peresvet!”

“Vasilii the Brave,” Katya told the villagers. “He saved us all.”

The villagers took up the cry. Vasya glared, and Katya smiled. Then the girl froze. A single woman had not come out to join the crowd. She stood apart from the rest, barely visible in the shadow of her izba.

“Mother,” Katya breathed, in a voice that sent a jolt of unlooked-for pain through Vasya. Then Katya slid down Solovey’s flank and was running.

The woman opened her arms and caught her daughter to her. Vasya did not see. It hurt to look. She looked instead at the door of the izba. Just in the doorway stood the small, sturdy domovoi, with ember eyes and twig-fingers and grinning face all covered with soot.

It was just a glimpse. Then the crowd surged and the domovoi disappeared. But Vasya thought she saw one small hand, raised in salute.

14. The City Between Rivers

“Well,” said Dmitrii, with relish, when the forest had swallowed Katya’s village and they rode again on unmarked snow. “You have played the hero, Vasya; all well and good. But enough of coddling children; we must hurry on now.” A pause. “I think your horse agrees with me.”

Solovey was bucking amiably, pleased with the sun after a week of snow, and pleased to have the weight of three people off his back.

“He certainly does,” Vasya panted. “Mad thing,” she added to the horse in exasperation. “Will you attempt to walk now?”

Solovey deigned to come to earth, but instead of bucking, he pranced and kicked until Vasya leaned forward to glare into one unrepentant eye. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, while Dmitrii laughed.

They rode until dark that day, and their pace only increased as the week wore on. The men ate their bread in the dark and rode from first light until shadows swallowed the trees. They followed woodcutters’ paths and broke trail when they had to. The snow was crusted on top, a deep powder beneath, and it was heavy going. After a week, only Solovey, of all the horses, was bright-eyed and light of foot.

On the last night before Moscow, darkness caught them in the shelter of trees, just on the bank of the Moskva. Dmitrii called the halt, peering down at the expanse of river. The moon was waning by then, and troubled clouds smothered the stars. “Better camp here,” said the prince. “Easy riding tomorrow and home by midmorning.” He slid off his horse, buoyant still, though he had lost weight in the long days. “A good measure of mead tonight,” he added, raising his voice. “And perhaps our warrior-monk will have caught rabbits for us.”

Vasya dismounted with the others and broke the ice from Solovey’s whiskers. “Moscow tomorrow,” she whispered to him, with jumping heart and cold hands. “Tomorrow!”

Solovey arched his neck, untroubled, and shoved her with his nose. Have you any bread, Vasya?

She sighed, unsaddled him, rubbed him down, fed him a crust, and left him to nose about for grass under the snow. There was wood to chop, and snow to scrape away, a fire to build, a sleeping-trench to dig. The men all called her Vasya now; they teased her as they worked. She had found, to her surprise, that she could give as good as she got, in the coin of their rough humor.

They were all laughing when Sasha returned. Three dead rabbits swung from his hand and an unstrung bow lay over his shoulder. The men raised a cheer, blessed him, and set the meat to stewing. The flames of their campfires leaped bravely now, and the men passed skins of mead and waited for their supper.

Sasha went to where Vasya was digging her sleeping-trench. “Is all well with you?” he asked her, a little stiffly. He had never quite settled on a tone to use with his brother-who-was-really-his-sister.

Vasya grinned roguishly at him. His bemused but determined effort to keep her safe on the road had eased her gnawing loneliness. “I’d like to sleep on an oven, and eat stew that someone else made,” she said. “But I am well, brother.”

“Good,” said Sasha. His gravity jarred after the men’s jokes. He handed her a little stained bundle. She unwrapped the raw livers of the three rabbits, dark with blood.

“God bless you,” Vasya managed before she bit into the first. The sweet-salt-metal life taste exploded across her tongue. Behind her Solovey squealed; he disliked the smell of blood. Vasya ignored him.

Her brother slipped away before she finished. Vasya watched him go, licking her fingers, wondering how she might ease the growing worry in his face.

She finished digging, and sank down onto a log drawn near the fire. Chin on fist, she watched Sasha as he blessed the men, blessed their meat, and drank his mead, inscrutable, on the other side of the flames. Sasha spoke no word when the blessings were done; even Dmitrii had begun to remark how silent Brother Aleksandr had been since the Lavra.

He is troubled, of course, Vasya thought, because I am dressed as a boy, and I fought bandits, and he has lied to the Grand Prince. But we had no choice, Brother—

“Quite the hero, your brother,” said Kasyan, breaking into her thoughts. He sat down beside her and offered her his skin of mead.

“Yes,” replied Vasya, with some sharpness. “Yes, he is.” There was something almost—not quite—mocking, in Kasyan’s voice. She did not take the honey-wine.

Kasyan seized her mittened hand and slapped the vessel into it. “Drink,” he said. “I meant no insult.”

Vasya hesitated, then drank. She still had not gotten used to this man: to his secret eyes and sudden laughter. His face had perhaps paled a little, with the week of travel, but that only made the colors of him more vivid. She would meet his glance at odd moments, and fight down a blush, though she had never been a girl for simpering. How would he react, she sometimes found herself wondering, if he knew I was a girl?

Don’t think of it. He will never know.

The silence between them stretched out, but he made no move to go. To break it, Vasya asked, “Have you been to Moscow before, Kasyan Lutovich?”

His lips quirked. “I came to Moscow not long after the year turned, to rally the Grand Prince to my cause. But before that? Once. Long ago.” An arid suggestion of feeling just tinged his voice. “Perhaps every young fool goes seeking his heart’s desire in cities. I never went back, until this winter.”

“What was your heart’s desire, Kasyan Lutovich?” Vasya asked.

He gave her a look of good-natured scorn. “Are you my grandmother now? You are showing your small years, Vasilii Petrovich. What do you think? I loved a woman.”

Across the fire, Sasha’s head turned.

Dmitrii had been making jokes and watching the stew like a cat at a mouse-hole (their rations did not suit his appetite), but he overheard and spoke first. “Did you, Kasyan Lutovich?” he asked interestedly. “A Muscovite woman?”

“No,” said Kasyan, speaking now to the listening company. His voice was soft. “She came from far away. She was very beautiful.”

Vasya bit her lower lip. Kasyan usually kept to himself. He was silent more often than speaking, except that he and Dmitrii sometimes rode side by side, passing a companionable wineskin. But now everyone was listening.

“What happened to her?” asked Dmitrii. “Come, let us have the story.”

“I loved her,” said Kasyan carefully. “She loved me. But she disappeared, on the day I was to have taken her away to Bashnya Kostei, to be my own. I never saw her again.” A pause. “She is dead now,” he added, sharply. “That is all. Get me some stew, Vasilii Petrovich, before these gluttons eat it all.”

Vasya got up to do so. But she wondered very much at Kasyan’s expression. Nostalgic tenderness, when he talked of his dead lover. But—just for an instant, and right at the end—there had been such an expression of baffled rage that her blood crept. She went to eat her soup with Solovey, resolving to think no more of Kasyan Lutovich.

WINTER WAS STILL DIAMOND-HARD, full of black frosts and dead beggars, but the old, rigid snow had begun to show its age on the day Dmitrii Ivanovich rode back into Moscow beside his cousins: the monk Aleksandr Peresvet and the boy Vasilii Petrovich. With him also were Kasyan and his followers, who, at Dmitrii’s urging, had not gone home.

“Come, man—come to Moscow and be my guest for Maslenitsa,” said Dmitrii. “The girls are prettier in Moscow than in your old tower of bones.”

“I do not doubt it,” Kasyan said wryly. “Though I think you wish to secure my taxes, Gosudar.”

Dmitrii bared his teeth. “That, too,” he said. “Am I wrong?”

Kasyan only laughed.

They rose that morning in a fine spitting haze of snowflakes and rode down to Moscow along the vast sweep of the Moskva. The city was a white crown on the dark hilltop, blurred by curtains of blown snow. Her pale walls smelled of lime; her towers seemed to split the sky. Sasha could never still a leap of his heart at the sight.

Vasya was riding beside him, snow in her eyebrows. Her smile was infectious. “Today, Sashka,” she said, when the first towers came into sight, thrusting above the gray-white world. “We will see Olga today.” Solovey had caught his rider’s mood; he was almost dancing as they walked.

The role of Vasilii Petrovich had grown on Vasya like skin. If she did tricks on Solovey, they cheered her; if she picked up a spear, Dmitrii laughed at her clumsiness and promised her teaching. If she asked questions, they were answered. A hesitant happiness had begun to show in her expressive face. Sasha felt his lie the more keenly for it, and did not know what to do.

Dmitrii had taken to her. He had promised her a sword, a bow, a fine coat. “A place at court,” Dmitrii said. “You will attend my councils, and command men, when you are older.”

Vasya had nodded, flushed with pleasure, while Sasha looked on, gritting his teeth. God grant Olya knows what to do, he thought. Because I do not.

WHEN THE SHADOW OF THE GATE fell on her face, Vasya drew a wondering breath. The gates of Moscow were made of iron-bound oak, soaring to five times her height and guarded above and below. More wondrous still were the walls themselves. In that land of forests, Dmitrii had poured out his father’s gold, his people’s blood, to build Moscow’s walls of stone. Scorch marks about the base gave credit to his foresight.

“See there?” said Dmitrii, pointing at one of these places. “That is when Algirdas came with the Litovskii, three years ago, and laid siege to the city. It was a near-fought thing.”

“Will they come again?” Vasya asked, staring at the burned places.

The Grand Prince laughed. “Not if they are wise. I married the firstborn daughter of the prince of Nizhny Novgorod, barren bitch that she is. Algirdas would be a fool to try her father and me together.”

The gates groaned open; the walled city blotted out the sky. Bigger than anything Vasya had ever heard of. For a moment she wanted to flee.

“Courage, country boy,” said Kasyan.

Vasya shot him a grateful look and urged Solovey forward.

The horse went when she asked, though with an unhappy ear. They passed through the gate: a pale arch that echoed the sound of people shouting.

“The prince!”

The call was picked up and carried about the narrow ways of Moscow. “The Grand Prince of Moscow! God bless you, Dmitrii Ivanovich!” And even, “Bless us! The warrior-monk! The warrior of the light! Brother Aleksandr! Aleksandr Peresvet!”

Out and out the cry rippled, borne away and back, torn up and re-formed, whirling like leaves in a tempest. People ran through the streets, and a crowd gathered about the gates of the kremlin. Dmitrii rode in travel-stained dignity. Sasha reached down for the people’s hands and made the sign of the cross over them. Tears sparked in an old lady’s eyes; a maiden raised trembling fingers.

Beneath the shouts, Vasya caught snatches of ordinary conversation. “Look at the bay stallion there. Have you ever seen his like?”

“No bridle.”

“And that—that is a mere boy on his back. A feather, to ride such a horse.”

“Who is he?”

“Who indeed?”

“Vasilii the Brave,” Kasyan put in, half-laughing.

The people took it up. “Vasilii the Brave!”

Vasya narrowed her eyes at Kasyan. He shrugged, hiding a smile in his beard. She was grateful for the sharp breeze, which gave her an excuse to pull hood and cap closer about her face.

“You are a hero, I find, Sasha,” she said, when her brother came riding up beside her.

“I am a monk,” he replied. His eyes were bright. Tuman stepped easily beneath him, neck arched.

“Do all monks get such names? Aleksandr Lightbringer?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I would stop them if I could. It is unchristian.”

“How did you get this name?”

“Superstition,” he said, tersely.

Vasya opened her mouth to pry the tale out, but just then a troop of muffled children came capering almost under Solovey’s hooves. The stallion skidded to a halt and half-reared, trying not to maim anyone.

“Be careful!” she told them. “It’s all right,” she added to the horse, soothingly. “We’ll be through in a minute. Listen to me, listen, listen—”

The horse calmed, barely. At least he put all four feet on the ground. I do not like it here, he told her.

“You will,” she said. “Soon. Olga’s husband will have good oats in his stable, and I will bring you honeycakes.”

Solovey twitched his ears, unconvinced. I cannot smell the sky.

Vasya had no answer to that. They had just passed the huts, the smithies, the warehouses and shops that made up the outer rings of Moscow, and now they had come to the heart of the city: the cathedral of the Ascension, the monastery of the Archangel, and the palaces of princes.

Vasya stared up, and her eyes shone in the towers’ reflected light. All the bells in Moscow had burst into pealing. The sound rattled her teeth. Solovey stamped and shivered.

She put a calming hand on the stallion’s neck, but she had no words for him, no words for her delighted astonishment, as she learned all at once the beauty and the scale of things made by men.

“The prince is come! The prince!” the cries rose louder and louder. “Aleksandr Peresvet!”

All was movement and bright color. Here stood scaffolding hung with cloth; there, great ovens smoking amid piles of slushy snow; and everywhere new smells: spice and sweetness, and the tang of forge-fires. Ten men were building a snow-slide, heaving blocks and dropping them, to hilarity. Tall horses and painted sledges and warmly bundled people gave way before the prince’s cavalcade. The riders passed the wooden gates of noble houses; behind them lay sprawling palaces: towers and walkways, haphazardly painted, and dark with old rain.

The riders halted at the largest of these gates, and it was flung open. They rode into a vast dooryard. The crush grew thicker still: servants and grooms and shouting hangers-on. Some boyars, too: broad men with colored kaftans, and broad smiles that did not always reach their eyes. Dmitrii was calling greetings.

The crowd pressed closer, and closer still.

Solovey rolled a wild eye and struck out with his forefeet.

“Solovey!” cried Vasya to the horse. “Easy now. Easy. You are going to kill someone.”

“Get back!” That was Kasyan, hard-handed on his gelding. “Get back, or are you all fools? That one is a stallion, and young; do you think he won’t take your heads off?”

Vasya looked her gratitude, still grappling with Solovey. Sasha appeared on her other side, pushing people away with Tuman’s brute strength.

Cursing, the crowd gave them space. Vasya found herself at the center of a ring of curious eyes, but at least Solovey began to settle.

“Thank you,” she said to both men.

“I only spoke for the grooms, Vasya,” Kasyan said lightly. “Unless you’d like to see your horse split more skulls?”

“I’d rather not,” she said. But the instant warmth was gone.

He must have seen her face change. “No,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

She had already dismounted, dropping down into a little pool of wary faces. Solovey had settled, but his ears still darted forward and back.

Vasya scratched the soft place beneath his jaw and murmured, “I must stay—I want to see my sister, but you—I could let you go. Take you back into the forest. You needn’t—”

I will stay here if you do, interrupted Solovey, though he was trembling, lashing his flanks with his tail.

Dmitrii flung his reins to a groom and dropped to the ground, his horse as unmoved by the crowd as he. Someone thrust a cup into his hand; he drank it off and pushed his way to Vasya. “Better than I expected,” he said. “I was sure you’d lose him the second we passed the gates.”

“You thought Solovey would bolt?” Vasya demanded indignantly.

“Of course I did,” said Dmitrii. “A stallion, bridleless and no more used to crowds than you? Take that outraged look off your face, Vasilii Petrovich; you look just like a maiden on her wedding night.”

A flush crept up her neck.

Dmitrii slapped the stallion’s flank. Solovey looked affronted. “We will put this one to my mares,” said the Grand Prince. “In three years my stable will be the envy of the Khan at Sarai. That is the best horse I have ever seen. Such a temperament—fire, but obedience.”

Solovey turned a mollified ear; he was fond of compliments. “Better a paddock for him now, though,” Dmitrii added practically. “He’ll kick my stable down otherwise.” The prince gave his orders, and then added aloud, “Come, Vasya. You will bestow the beast yourself, unless you think a groom might be able to halter him. Then you will bathe in my own palace, and wash off the grime of the road.”

Vasya felt herself turn pale. She groped for words. A groom sidled near with a rope in one hand.

The horse snapped his teeth, and the groom dropped hurriedly back.

“He doesn’t need a halter,” said Vasya, a trifle unnecessarily. “Dmitrii Ivanovich, I would like to see my sister at once. It has been so long; I was only a child when she went away to marry.”

Dmitrii frowned. Vasya wondered what she would do about bathing, if he insisted. Say she was concealing a deformity? What sort of deformity would make a boy—?

Sasha came to her rescue. “The Princess of Serpukhov will be eager to see her brother,” he said. “She will want to give thanks for his safe arrival. The horse can stay in her husband’s stable, if you permit, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

Dmitrii frowned.

“Perhaps we should leave them to their reunion,” said Kasyan. He had handed over his reins and stood sleek as a cat in the middle of the tumult. “There will be time enough for putting the beast to mares, when he is rested.”

The Grand Prince shrugged. “Very well,” he said in some irritation. “But come to me, both of you, when you have seen your sister. No, don’t look like that, Brother Aleksandr. You are not going to ride with us all the way to Moscow and then cry up monkish solitude as soon as you have passed the gates. Go to the monastery first if you wish; flog yourself, and cry prayers to heaven, but come to the palace after. We must give thanks, and then there are plans afoot. I have been too long away.”

Sasha said nothing.

“We will be there, Gosudar,” Vasya interjected hastily.

The Grand Prince and Kasyan disappeared together into the palace, talking, followed by servants and by jostling boyars. Just at the doorway, Kasyan glanced back at her before disappearing into the shadows.

“THIS WAY, VASYA,” SAID SASHA, shaking her from contemplation.

Vasya remounted Solovey. The horse walked when she asked, though his tail still swished back and forth.

They turned right out of the Grand Prince’s gates and were instantly caught in the swirl of the moving city. The two riders rode abreast beneath palaces taller than trees, across earth turned to muck, the dirty snow pushed aside. Vasya thought her head would twist off from staring.

“Damn you, Vasya,” said Sasha as they rode. “I begin to have sympathy for your stepmother. You might have pleaded sickness instead of agreeing to sup with Dmitrii Ivanovich. Do you think Moscow is like Lesnaya Zemlya? The Grand Prince is surrounded by men all vying for his favor, and they will resent you for being his cousin, for leaping over them to land so high in his good graces. They will challenge you and set you drunk; can you never hold your tongue?”

“I couldn’t tell the Grand Prince no,” replied Vasya. “Vasilii Petrovich wouldn’t have told him no.” She was only half-listening. The palaces seemed to have tumbled from heaven, in all their sprawling glory; the bright colors of their square towers showed through caps of snow.

A procession of highborn ladies passed them, walking together, heavily veiled, with men before and behind. Here blue-lipped slaves ran panting about their business; there a Tatar rode a fierce and stocky mare.

They came to another wooden gate, less fine than Dmitrii’s. The door-ward must have recognized Sasha, for the gate swung open immediately, and they were in the dooryard of a quiet, well-ordered little kingdom.

Somehow, despite all the noise at the gates, it reminded her of Lesnaya Zemlya. “Olya,” Vasya whispered.

A steward came to meet them, soberly garbed. He did not turn a hair when confronted with a grubby boy, a monk, and two weary horses. “Brother Aleksandr,” he said, bowing.

“This is Vasilii Petrovich,” said Sasha. A hint of distaste rippled his voice; he must be deathly weary of the lie. “My brother before I became a brother in Christ. We will need a paddock for his horse, then he wishes to see his sister.”

“This way,” said the steward after an instant’s startled hesitation.

They followed him. The prince of Serpukhov’s palace was an estate in and of itself, like their father’s, but finer and richer. Vasya saw a bakery, a brewery, a bathhouse, a kitchen, and a smoking shed, tiny beside the sprawl of the main house. The palace’s lower rooms were half-dug into the earth, and the upper rooms could be accessed only by outside staircases.

The steward took them past a low, neat stable that breathed out sweet animal-smells and gusts of warm air. Behind it lay an empty stallion-paddock with a high fence. It held a little, square shelter, meant to keep off the snow, and also a horse-trough.

Solovey halted just outside the paddock and eyed the arrangement with distaste.

“You needn’t stay here,” Vasya murmured to him again, “if you do not wish to.”

Come often, the horse said only. And let us not stay here long.

“We won’t,” Vasya said. “Of course we won’t.”

They wouldn’t, either. She meant to see the world. But Vasya did not want to be anywhere else just then, not for gold or jewels. Moscow lay at her feet, all its wonders ready for her eyes. And her sister was near.

A groom had come up behind them, and at the steward’s impatient gesture, he let down the bars of the paddock-fence. Solovey deigned to be led inside. Vasya undid the stallion’s girth and slung the saddlebags over her own shoulder.

“I will carry them myself,” she said to the steward. On the road, her saddlebags were life itself, and she found now that she could not relinquish them to a stranger in this beautiful, frightening city.

A little mournfully, Solovey said, Be careful, Vasya.

Vasya stroked the horse’s neck. “Don’t jump out,” she whispered.

I won’t, said the horse. A pause. If they bring me oats.

She turned to say as much to the steward. “I’ll come back to see you,” she said to Solovey. “Soon.”

He blew his warm breath into her face.

Then they left the paddock, Vasya trotting in her brother’s wake. She looked back once, before the curve of the stable quite obscured her view. The horse watched her go, stark against the white snow. All wrong, that Solovey would stand there behind a fence, like an ordinary horse…

Then he disappeared, behind the curve of a wooden wall. Vasya shook away her misgivings and followed her brother.

15. Liar

Olga had heard Dmitrii’s cavalcade return. She could hardly help hearing it; the bells rang until her floor shook, and in the wake of the pealing came the cries of “Dmitrii Ivanovich! Aleksandr Peresvet!”

A tight, reluctant ache once again eased about Olga’s heart when she heard her brother’s name. But of her relief she gave no sign. Her pride wouldn’t allow it, and there was no time. Maslenitsa was upon them now, and preparations for the festival took all her attention.

Maslenitsa was the three-day sun-feast, one of the oldest holidays in Muscovy. Older by far than the bells and crosses that marked its passing, though it had been given the trappings of religion to mask its pagan soul. This—the last day before the festival began—was the last day they could eat meat until Easter. Vladimir, Olga’s husband, was still in Serpukhov, but Olga had arranged a feast for his household—wild boar and stewed rabbit and cock-pheasants, and fish.

For a few more days, the people could still eat butter and lard and cheese and other rich things, and so in the kitchen they were making butter-cakes by the score, by the hundred, cakes enough for days of gluttony.

Women filled Olga’s workroom, talking and eating. They had all come with their veils and their over-robes to do their mending in the pleasant crowd of warm bodies and chatter. The excitement in the streets seemed to have risen and invaded the very air of the sedate tower.

Marya sprang about, shouting. Busy or no, Olga still worried about her daughter. Since the night of the ghost-story, Marya had often woken her nurse with screaming.

Olga paused in her hurrying to sit a moment beside the oven, exchange pleasantries with her neighbors, call Marya and look her over. On the other side of the stove, Darinka simply would not stop talking. Olga wished her head ached less.

“I went to Father Konstantin for confession,” Darinka was saying loudly. Her voice made a shrill counterpoint to the murmur of the crowded room. “Before he went into seclusion in the monastery. Father Konstantin—the fair-haired priest. Because he seemed such a holy man. And indeed he instructed me in righteousness. He told me all about witches.”

No one looked up. The women’s sewing had a new urgency. In the mad revel of festival-week, Moscow would glitter like a bride, and the women must all go to church—not once, but many times—bundled magnificently, and be seen to peer out from around their veils. Besides, this was not the first time Darinka had regaled them with tales of this holy man.

Marya, who had heard Darinka’s tale before and was weary of her mother’s fussing, pulled herself loose and scampered out.

“He said they walk among us, these witches born,” Darinka continued, not much troubled by her lack of audience. “You never know who they are until it is too late. He said they curse good Christian men—curse them—so that they see things that are not there, or hear strange voices—the voices of demons—”

Olga had heard rumors of this priest’s hatred for witches. They made her uneasy. He alone knew that Vasya…

Enough, Olga told herself. Vasya is dead, and Father Konstantin has gone to the monastery; let it pass. But Olga was glad of the tumult of festival-week, which would turn the women’s attention away from the ravings of a handsome priest.

Varvara slipped into the workroom, with Marya returned, panting, at her heels. Before the slave could speak, the girl burst out, “Uncle Sasha is here! Brother Aleksandr,” she corrected, seeing her mother frown. Then she added, irrepressibly, “He has a boy with him. They both want to see you.”

Olga frowned. The child’s silk cap lay askew, and she had torn her sarafan. It was high time to replace her nurse. “Very well,” Olga said. “Send them up at once. Sit down, Masha.”

Marya’s nurse came wheezing belatedly into the room. Marya gave her a wicked look, and the nurse shrank back. “I want to see my uncle,” the girl said to her mother.

“There is a boy with him, Masha,” said Olga wearily. “You are a great girl now; better not.”

Marya scowled.

Olga’s jaded glance took in the crowd about her oven. “Varvara, bring our visitors to my chamber. See that there is hot wine. No, Masha; listen to your nurse. You will see your uncle later.”

DURING THE DAY, OLGA’S OWN ROOM was not so warm as the crowded workroom, but it had the advantage of peace. The bed was curtained off, and visiting there was quite usual. Olga seated herself just in time to hear the footsteps, and then her brother, fresh from the road, stood in the doorway.

Olga got heavily to her feet. “Sasha,” she said. “Have you killed your bandits?”

“Yes,” he said. “There will be no more burning villages.”

“By God’s grace,” Olga said. She crossed herself and they embraced.

Then Sasha said, with unaccountable grimness, “Olya,” and stepped aside.

Behind him, in the doorway, lurked a slender, green-eyed boy, hooded and cloaked, wearing supple leather and wolfskin, two saddlebags slung over his shoulder. The boy at once paled. The saddlebags thumped to the floor.

“Who is this?” Olga asked reflexively. Then a shocked breath hissed out between her teeth.

The boy’s mouth worked; his great eyes were bright. “Olya,” she whispered. “It is Vasya.”

Vasya? No, Vasya is dead. This is not Vasya. This is a boy. In any case, Vasya was only a snub-nosed child. And yet, and yet…Olga looked again. Those green eyes…“Vasya?” Olga gasped. Her knees went weak.

Her brother helped her to her chair, and Olga leaned forward, hands on knees. The boy hovered uncertainly at the doorway. “Come here,” Olga said, recovering. “Vasya. I can’t believe it.”

The erstwhile boy shut the door, and with her back to them, raised trembling fingers and fumbled with the ties of her hood.

A heavy plait of shining black slithered out, and she turned once more to face the oven. With the cap gone, now Olga could see her little sister grown: that strange, impossible child become a strange, impossible woman. Not dead—alive—here…Olga struggled for breath.

“Olya,” Vasya said. “Olya, I’m sorry. You are so pale. Olya, are you well? Oh!” The green eyes lit; the hands clasped. “You are going to have a baby. When—?”

“Vasya!” Olga broke in, finding her voice. “Vasya, you’re alive. How came you here? And dressed so…Brother, sit down. You, too, Vasya. Come into the light. I want to look at you.”

Sasha, meek for once, did as he was told.

“Sit down, too,” Olga said to Vasya. “No, there.”

The girl, looking eager and frightened, sank onto the indicated stool with a loose-limbed grace.

Olga took the girl by the chin and turned her face into the light. Could this really be Vasya? Her sister had been an ugly child. This woman was not ugly—though she had features too stark for beauty: wide mouth, vast eyes, long fingers. She looked far too like the witch-girl Konstantin described.

Her green eyes spilled over with sorrow and courage and terrible fragility. Olga had never forgotten her little sister’s eyes.

Vasya said, tentatively, “Olya?”

Olga Vladimirova found herself smiling. “It is good to see you, Vasya.”

Vasya fell to her knees, crying like a child into Olga’s lap. “I m-missed you,” she stammered. “I missed you so.”

“Hush,” Olga said. “Hush. I missed you, too, little sister.” She stroked her sister’s hair, and realized she was crying as well.

At last Vasya raised her head. Her mouth quivered; she wiped her streaming eyes, drew breath, and took her sister’s hands. “Olya,” she said. “Olya, Father is dead.”

Olya felt a little cold place form and grow inside her: anger at this rash girl, mixed with her love. She did not say anything.

“Olya,” Vasya said. “Didn’t you hear? Father is dead.”

“I know,” Olga said. She crossed herself, and could not keep that coldness from her voice. Sasha glanced at her, frowning. “God give him peace. Father Konstantin told me all. He said you had run away. He thought you had died. I thought you had died. I wept for you. How came you here? And dressed—so?” She eyed her sister in some despair, taking in anew the disheveled shining plait, the boots and leggings and jacket, the disturbing grace of a wild thing.

“Tell her, Vasya,” said her brother.

Vasya ignored both question and order. She had shot stiff-legged to her feet. “He is here? Where? What is he doing? What did Father Konstantin tell you?”

Olga measured out the words. “That our father died saving your life. From a bear. That you— Oh, Vasya, better not to speak of it. Answer the question: How came you here?”

A pause, and all the ferocity seemed to rush out of her. Vasya dropped back onto her stool. “It should have been me,” she said low. “But it was him. Olya, I didn’t mean…” She swallowed. “Don’t listen to the priest; he is—”

“Enough, Vasya,” said her sister firmly. Then she added, with an edge, “Child, what possessed you to run away from home?”

“CAN THAT BE ALL THE TRUTH?” Olga demanded of her brother sometime later. They had gone to her little chapel, where whispered conversations were not so strange and there was less chance of being overheard. Vasya had been sent off, in Varvara’s care, and in great secrecy, to bathe. “The priest told nearly the same story—but not exactly—and I hardly believed him then. What would drive a girl to act so? Is she mad?”

“No,” said Sasha, wearily. Above him, Christ and the saints reared in glorious panoply: Olga’s iconostasis was very fine. “Something happened to her—and I think there is more to this tale than either of us knows. She will not tell me. But I cannot believe her mad. Reckless she is, and immodest, and sometimes I fear for her soul. But she is only herself; she is not mad.”

Olga nodded, biting her lips. “If it weren’t for her, Father would not have died,” she said, before she could stop herself. “And Mother, too—”

“Now that,” Sasha said sharply, “is cruel. We must wait to judge, sister. I will ask this priest. Perhaps he can say what she will not.”

Olga looked up at the icons. “What are we to do with her now? Am I to dress her in a sarafan and find her a husband?” A new thought struck her. “Did our sister ride all the way here dressed as a boy? How did you explain that to Dmitrii Ivanovich?”

Awkward silence.

Olga narrowed her eyes.

“I—well—” Olga’s brother said sheepishly, “Dmitrii Ivanovich thinks she’s my brother, Vasilii.”

“He what?” Olga hissed, in tones completely unsuited for prayer.

Sasha said, determinedly calm, “She told him that her name was Vasilii. I judged it better to agree.”

“Why, in God’s name?” Olga retorted, controlling her voice. “You should have told Dmitrii that she was a poor mad child—a holy fool, her wits deranged—and brought her instantly and in secret to me.”

“A holy fool who came galloping into the Lavra with three rescued children on her horse,” returned Sasha. “She ferreted out bandits that we’d not found in two weeks’ searching. After all that, was I supposed to apologize for her and huddle her out of sight?”

These were Sergei’s questions, Sasha realized with some discomfiture, coming out of his own mouth.

“Yes,” Olga told him wearily. “You are not enough in Moscow; you don’t understand— Never mind. It is done. Your brother Vasilii must be sent away at once. I will keep Vasya quiet in the terem long enough for folk to forget. Then I will arrange a wedding for her. No great match—she must not catch the Grand Prince’s eye—but that can hardly be helped.”

Sasha found he could not stay still: another thing strange for him. He paced through the pools of light and darkness thrown by the many candles, and the light fretted his black hair—like Olga’s and Vasya’s—a gift from their dead mother. “You can’t confine her to the terem yet,” he said, coming to a halt with an effort.

Olga crossed her arms over her belly. “Why not?”

“Dmitrii Ivanovich took a liking to her, on the road,” Sasha said carefully. “She did him a great service, finding those raiders. He has promised her honors, horses, a place in his household. Vasya cannot disappear before Maslenitsa, not without insulting the Grand Prince.”

“Insulting?” hissed Olga. The measured tone suitable for the chapel had deserted her once more. She leaned forward. “How do you think he will take it when he finds out that this brave boy is a girl?”

“Badly,” said Sasha, drily. “We will not tell him.”

“And I am supposed to—to perpetuate this, to watch my maiden sister race about Moscow in the company of Dmitrii’s carousing boyars?”

“Don’t watch,” advised Sasha.

Olga said nothing. She had been playing games of politics every day since her marriage at fifteen, longer even than Sasha. She had to: her children’s lives depended on the whims of princes. Neither she nor her brother could afford to anger Dmitrii Ivanovich. But if Vasya were discovered—

More gently, Sasha added, “There is no choice now. You and I must both do what we can to keep Vasya’s secret through the festival.”

“I should have sent for Vasya when she was a child,” Olga said, with feeling. “I should have sent for her long ago. Our stepmother did not raise her properly.”

Sasha said wryly, “I am beginning to think that no one could have done any better. Now, I have tarried too long; I must go to the monastery and get news. I will speak to this priest. Let Vasya rest; it will not be strange if young Vasilii Petrovich spends the day with his sister. But in the evenings he must go to the Grand Prince’s palace.”

“Dressed as a boy?” Olga demanded.

Her brother set his jaw. “Dressed as a boy,” he said.

“And what,” Olga demanded, “am I to tell my husband?”

“Now that,” said Sasha, turning for the door, “is entirely up to you. If he returns, I would strongly advise that you tell him as little as possible.”

16. The Lord from Sarai

When he left his sister, Brother Aleksandr went at once to the monastery of the Archangel, tucked in a compound by itself, apart from the palaces of princes. Father Andrei welcomed Sasha heartily. “We will give thanks,” decreed the hegumen. “Then you will come to my rooms and tell me all.”

Andrei was no believer in the mortification of the flesh, and his monastery had grown rich as Moscow itself had, with the tax of silver from the south, and with the trade in wax and furs and potash. The hegumen’s rooms were comfortably furnished. His icons stared down in massed and disapproving ranks from their sacred corner, clad in silver and seed pearls. A little chilly daylight filtered in from above, and faded the oven’s flames to wavering ghosts.

Prayers said, Sasha dropped gratefully onto a stool, pushed his hood back, and warmed his hands.

“Not yet time to sup,” said Andrei, who had gone south to Sarai in his youth and still remembered, wistfully, the saffron and pepper of the Khan’s court. “But,” he added, considering Sasha, “exception can be made for a man fresh from the wild.”

The monks had cooked a great haunch of beef that day, to thicken their blood before the great fast; there was also new bread and a dense, tasteless cheese. The food came and Sasha fell on it single-mindedly.

“Did your journey go so ill?” asked Andrei, watching him eat.

Sasha shook his head, chewing. He swallowed and said, “No. We found the bandits, and slew them. Dmitrii Ivanovich was delighted. He has gone to his own palace now, keen as a boy.”

“Then why are you so—” Andrei paused, and his face changed. “Ah,” he said slowly. “You had the news of your father.”

“I had the news of my father,” Sasha agreed, setting his wooden bowl on the hearth and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His brows drew together. “So have you, it would seem. The priest told you?”

“He told us all,” said Andrei, frowning. He had a bowl of goodly broth for himself, swimming with the last of the summer’s fat, but he set that reluctantly aside and leaned forward. “He told a tale of some wickedness—said that your sister was a witch, who drew Pyotr Vladimirovich out into the winter forest against all reason—and that your sister, too, is dead.”

Sasha’s face changed, and the hegumen misread it entirely. “You didn’t know, my son? I am sorry to cause you grief.” When Sasha did not speak, Andrei hurried on, “Perhaps it is better she is dead. Good people and wicked may come from the same tree, and at least your sister died before she could do greater harm.”

Sasha thought of his vivid Vasya riding her horse in the gray morning and said nothing. Andrei was on his feet. “I will summon the priest—Father Konstantin—he keeps much to himself. He prays without cease, but I am sure he will take time to tell you all. A very holy man…” Andrei was still flustered; he spoke as though caught between admiration and doubt.

“No need,” said Sasha abruptly, rising in turn. “Show me where this priest is, and I will go to him.”

They had given Konstantin a cell, small but clean, one of several kept for monks who wished to pray in solitude. Sasha knocked at the door.

Silence.

Then halting footsteps sounded within, and the door swung open. When the priest saw Sasha, the blood left his face and washed back again.

“God be with you,” said Sasha, wondering at the other man’s expression. “I am Brother Aleksandr, who brought you out of the wilderness.”

Konstantin mastered himself. “May the Lord bless you, Brother Aleksandr,” he said. His sculpted face was quite expressionless, after that one involuntary spasm of frightened shock.

“Before I renounced the world, my father was Pyotr Vladimirovich,” said Sasha, coldly because doubt had wormed in: Perhaps this priest has spoken true. Why would he lie?

Konstantin nodded once, looking unsurprised.

“I hear from my sister Olga that you have come from Lesnaya Zemlya,” Sasha said. “That you saw my father die.”

“Not saw,” replied the priest, drawing himself up. “I saw him ride out, in pursuit of his mad daughter, and I saw his torn body, when they brought him home.”

A muscle twitched in Sasha’s jaw, hidden by his beard. “I would like to hear the whole story, as much as you can remember, Batyushka,” he said.

Konstantin hesitated. “As you wish.”

“In the cloister,” said Sasha hastily. A sour stench—the smell of fear—drifted out from the priest’s narrow room, and he found himself wondering what it was that this Father Konstantin was praying for.

PLAUSIBLE. THE TALE WAS so plausible—yet it was not—quite—the same story Vasya had told him. One of these two is lying, Sasha thought again. Or both.

Vasya had said nothing of her stepmother, save that she was dead. Sasha had not questioned that; people died easily. Certainly Vasya had not said that Anna Ivanovna died with their father…

“So Vasilisa Petrovna is dead,” Konstantin finished with subtle malice. “God rest her soul, and her father’s and stepmother’s, too.” Monk and priest paced the round of the cloister, looking out onto a garden all gray with snow.

He hated my sister, Sasha thought, startled. Hates her still. He and she must not come face-to-face; I do not think boy’s clothes will deceive this man.

“Tell me,” Sasha asked abruptly. “Did my father have a great stallion in his stable, bay in color, with a long mane and a star on his face?”

Whatever question Konstantin had been expecting, it was not that. His eyes narrowed. But—“No,” he said, after a moment. “No—Pyotr Vladimirovich had many horses, but not one like that.”

And yet, Sasha thought. You fair snake, you remembered something. You are telling me lies, mixed with truth.

As Vasya did?

Damn them both. I want only to know how my father died!

Looking into the priest’s gray-hollowed face, Sasha knew he would get no more from him. “Thank you, Batyushka,” he said abruptly. “Pray for me; I must go.”

Konstantin bowed and made the sign of the cross. Sasha strode down the gallery, feeling as though he had touched a slimy thing and wondering why he should feel afraid of a poor pious priest, who had answered all his questions with that air of sorrowful honesty, in a deep and glorious voice.

VASYA WAS SCRUBBED TO her pores by the efficient Varvara, who was perfectly in her mistress’s confidence and perfectly unflappable. Even Vasya’s sapphire pendant only elicited a scornful snort. There was something naggingly familiar about the woman’s face. Or maybe it was only her briskness that reminded Vasya of Dunya. Varvara washed Vasya’s filthy hair and dried it beside the roaring stove in the bathhouse. “You ought to cut this off—boy,” she said drily, as she braided it up.

Vasya frowned. Her stepmother’s voice would always live in some knotted-up place inside her, shrilling “Skinny, gawky, ugly girl,” but even Anna Ivanovna had never criticized the red-lit black of Vasya’s hair. Yet Varvara’s voice had held a faint note of disdain.

“Midnight, when the fire is dying,” Vasya’s childhood nurse Dunya had said of it, when she had gotten old and inclined to fondness. Vasya also remembered how she had combed her hair by the fire while a frost-demon watched, though he seemed not to.

“No one will see my hair,” Vasya said to Varvara. “I wear hoods all the time, and hats, too. It is winter.”

“Foolishness,” said the slave.

Vasya shrugged, stubborn, and Varvara said no more.

Olga appeared after Vasya’s bath, thin-lipped and pale, to help her sister dress. Dmitrii himself had sent the kaftan: worked in green and gold, fit for a princeling. Olga carried it on one arm. “Do not drink the wine,” the Princess of Serpukhov said, slipping unceremoniously into the hot bathhouse. “Only pretend. Do not speak. Stay with Sasha. Come back as soon as you can.” She laid out the kaftan, and Varvara produced a fresh shirt and leggings and Vasya’s own boots, hastily cleaned.

Vasya nodded, breathless, wishing she might have come to Olga a different way, so that they could laugh together as they used to, and her sister would not be angry.

“Olya—” she said, tentatively.

“Not now, Vasya,” Olga said. She and Varvara were already arranging Vasya’s clothes with brisk and impersonal skill.

Vasya fell silent. She had a child’s memories of her sister feeding chickens, hair straggling out of its plait. But this woman had a queenly beauty, regal and remote, enhanced by fine clothes, a headdress, and the weight of her unborn child.

“I haven’t the time,” Olga went on more gently, with a glance at Vasya’s face. “Forgive me, sister, but I can do no more. Maslenitsa will begin at sundown, and I must see to my own household. You are Sasha’s concern for the week. There is a room waiting for you in the men’s part of this palace. Do not sleep anywhere else. Bolt your door. Hide your hair. Be wary. Do not meet any women’s eyes; I do not want the cleverer ones to recognize you when I eventually take you into the terem as my sister. I will speak to you again when the festival has ended. We will send Vasilii Petrovich home as soon as we may. Now go.”

The last tie was fastened; Vasya was dressed as a Muscovite princeling. A fur-lined hat was pulled low over her brows, over a leather hood that concealed her hair.

Vasya felt the justice of Olga’s planning but also the coldness. Hurt, she opened her mouth, met her sister’s unyielding stare, closed it again, and went.

Behind her Olga and Varvara exchanged a long look.

“Send word to Lesnaya Zemlya,” said Olga. “Secretly. Tell my brothers that our sister is alive and that I have her.”

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Sasha met Vasya at the prince of Serpukhov’s gate. They turned together and began steadily to climb. The kremlin was built on the crest of a hill, with the cathedral and the Grand Prince’s palace sharing the apex.

The street was rutted and winding, choked with snow. Vasya watched her feet, to keep her boots out of all manner of filth, and had to scramble to keep up with Sasha. Solovey was right, she thought, dodging people, a little frightened of their impersonal hurry. That other town, that was nothing to this.

Then she thought, sadly, I will not live in the terem. I am going to run away before they try to make me a girl again. Have I seen my sister for the first time in years, and the last time forever? And she is angry with me.

The guards saluted them at the gate of Dmitrii’s palace. Brother and sister passed within, crossed the dooryard—bigger, finer, noisier, and filthier than Olya’s—climbed a staircase, and then began a trek through room after room: fair as a fairy tale, though Vasya had not expected the stink or the dust.

They were climbing a second staircase, open to the hum and smoke of the city, when Vasya said, tentatively, “Have I caused great trouble for you and Olya, Sasha?”

“Yes,” said her brother.

Vasya stopped walking. “I can go away now. Solovey and I can disappear tonight, and we will not trouble you again.” She tried to speak proudly, but she knew he heard the hitch in her voice.

“Don’t be a fool,” retorted her brother. He did not slow his stride; he barely turned his head. Secret anger seemed to bite at him. “Where would you go? You will see this through Maslenitsa and then put Vasilii Petrovich behind you. Now, we are nearly there. Speak as little as you can.” They were at the top of the stairs. A gloss of wax brightened the carved panels of a great door, and two guards stood before it. The guards made the sign of the cross and bowed their heads in quick respect. “Brother Aleksandr,” they said.

“God be with you,” said Sasha.

The doors swung open. Vasya found herself in a low, smoky, magnificent chamber packed wall to wall with men.

The heads near the door turned first. Vasya froze in the doorway, like a hart in a dog-pack. She felt naked, sure that at least one among all the throng must guffaw and say to his fellow, “Look! A woman there, dressed as a boy!” But no one spoke. The smell of their sweat, their oils, and their suppers clotted the already close air. She had never imagined a crowd so thick.

Then Kasyan came forward, spruce and calm. “Well met, Brother Aleksandr, Vasilii Petrovich.” Even in that jeweled gathering, Kasyan stood out, with his firebird coloring, and the pearls sewn into his clothes. Vasya was grateful to him. “We meet again. The Grand Prince has honored me with a place in his household for the festival.”

Vasya saw then that the crowd was looking at her famous brother more than at her. She breathed again.

Dmitrii roared from a seat at a small dais, “Cousins! Come here, both of you.”

Kasyan bowed a fraction and indicated the way. The scrum of boyars pressed back against the walls, allowing them to pass.

Following her brother, Vasya crossed the room. A wave of talk rose in her wake. Vasya’s head swam with the shifting colors of jewels and kaftans and bright-painted walls. She made herself stalk stately after Sasha. A mad jumble of carpets and skins covered the floor. Attendants stood blank-faced in corners. Minute windows, mere slits, let in a little breathable air.

Dmitrii sat in the midst of the throng, in a carved and inlaid chair. He was newly bathed, pink and cheerful, at ease in the center of the boyars’ talk. But Vasya thought she saw turmoil in his eyes, something hard and flat in his expression.

Sasha stirred beside her; he’d seen it, too.

“I present my brother, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” said Sasha in clipped, formal tones that cut through the hall’s murmuring. His hands were thrust into his sleeves; Vasya could almost feel him vibrate with tension. “Vasilii Petrovich.”

Vasya bowed deeply, hoping not to lose her hat.

“You are welcome here,” said Dmitrii with equal formality. He proceeded to name her to a dazzling variety of first and second cousins. When her head was swimming from the march of names, the Grand Prince said abruptly, “Enough of introductions. Are you hungry, Vasya? Well—” He glanced at the scrum and said, “We will have a bite to ourselves, and a little talk among friends. This way.”

So saying, the Grand Prince rose, while all the staring folk bowed, and led the way into another room, blessedly empty of people. Vasya drew a relieved breath.

A table stood between stove and window, and at Dmitrii’s wave, a serving-man began to pile it with cakes and soup and platters. Vasya watched with unabashed longing. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to not be hungry. No matter what she had eaten the past fortnight, the cold always sapped the nourishment away. She had counted each of her ribs, in the bathhouse.

“Sit down,” Dmitrii said. His coat was shot with silver and stiff with gems and red gold; his hair and beard had been washed and oiled. In his fine clothes, he had acquired a new air of authority, sharp and precise and a little frightening, though he still concealed it beneath his round-cheeked smile. Vasya and Sasha took places at the narrow table. Cups of hot and sweet-smelling wine lay to hand. The center of the table was crowned with a great pie, studded with cabbage and egg and smoked fish.

“The boyars are coming tonight,” said the Grand Prince. “I must feast them all, piggish things, and send them home dazed with the meat. They must get their fill of flesh before the great fast begins.” Dmitrii’s glance took in Vasya, who hadn’t managed yet to peel her eyes from the platters. His face softened a little. “But I did not think our Vasya could wait for supper.”

Vasya nodded, swallowed, and managed, “I have been a bottomless pit, since the road, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

“As it should be!” cried Dmitrii. “You haven’t nearly your growth yet. Come, eat and drink, both of you. Wine for my young cousin, and for the warrior-monk—or are you fasting already, brother?” He gave Sasha a look of wry affection and shoved the pie in Vasya’s direction. “A slice for Vasilii Petrovich,” Dmitrii told the servant.

The slice was cut, and Vasya started on it with delight. Sour cabbage, rich eggs, and the salt of the cheese on her tongue…She attacked wholeheartedly and began to relax with the weight of food inside her. Her pie inhaled, she fell like a dog upon stewed meat and baked milk.

But Dmitrii’s good-natured hospitality had not deceived Sasha. “What has happened, cousin?” he asked the Grand Prince, while Vasya ate.

“Good news and bad, as it happens,” said Dmitrii. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his ringed hands, and smiled with slow satisfaction. “I may forgive my foolish wife for weeping and imagining ghosts now. She is with child.”

Vasya’s head jerked up from her supper. “God protect them both,” said Sasha, clasping his cousin’s shoulder. Vasya stammered congratulations.

“God send she throws me an heir,” said Dmitrii, gulping at his cup. His air of buoyant carelessness slowly leached away as he drank, and when he glanced up again, Vasya felt she could see him for the first time: not the lighthearted cousin from the road but a man tempered and burdened beyond his years. A prince who held the lives of thousands in his steady grip.

Dmitrii wiped his mouth and said, “Now for the bad news. A new ambassador has come from Sarai, from the court of the Khan, with horses and archers in his train. He is installed in the emissary’s palace and demanding all taxes owed forthwith, and more. The Khan is finished with delays, he says. He also says, quite openly, that if we do not pay, General Mamai will lead an army up from the lower Volga.”

The words fell like a hammer.

“It might be just bluster,” Sasha said, after a pause.

“I am not sure,” said Dmitrii. He had mauled his food about more than eating it; now he put his knife aside. “Mamai has a rival in the south, I hear, a warlord called Tokhtamysh. This man is also putting forth a claimant for the throne. If Mamai must go to war to put down this rival—”

A pause. They all looked at each other. “Then Mamai must have our taxes first,” finished Vasya suddenly, surprising even herself. She’d been so caught up in the conversation that she had forgotten her shyness. “For money to fight Tokhtamysh.”

Sasha shot her a very hard look. Be silent. Vasya made her face innocent.

“Clever boy,” said Dmitrii, distractedly. He grimaced. “I have not sent tribute for two years, and no one noticed. I did not expect them to. They are too busy poisoning each other, so that they or their fat sons may have the throne. But the generals are not so foolish as the pretenders.” A pause. Dmitrii’s glance met Sasha’s. “And even if I decide to pay, where am I to get the money now? How many villages burned this winter, before Vasya tracked those bastards to their lair? How are the people to feed themselves, much less muster up a tax for another war?”

“The people have done it before,” Sasha pointed out, blackly. The atmosphere around the table made a strange counterpoint to the cheerful shrieks of the city outside.

“Yes, but with the Tatars divided between two warlords, we have a chance to worm free of the yoke—to make a stand—and every wagon that goes south weakens us. Why should our taxes go to enrich the court at Sarai?”

The monk did not speak.

“One smashing victory,” Dmitrii said, “would put an end to all this.”

It sounded to Vasya as though they were continuing an old argument.

“No,” retorted Sasha. “It wouldn’t. The Tatars could not let a defeat stand; there is still too much pride there, even if the Horde is not what it was. A victory would buy us time, but then whoever takes control of the Horde would come back for us. And they would not want to simply subdue us, but to punish.”

“If I am to raise the money,” the Grand Prince said slowly, “we will have to starve some of those peasants you rescued, Vasya. Truly, Sasha,” he added to the monk, “I value your advice. Let all know it. For I am weary of being these pagans’ dog.” The last syllable came out sharp as broken ice, and Vasya flinched. “But”—Dmitrii paused, and added, lower—“I would not leave my son a burnt city.”

“You are wise, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” said Sasha.

Vasya thought of hundreds of Katyas in villages across Muscovy, going hungry because the Grand Prince must pay a tax to the lord of the same people that had burned their homes in the first place.

She made to speak again, but Sasha shot her a vicious glance across the table and this time she bit the words back.

“Well, we must greet this ambassador in any case,” said the Grand Prince. “Let it not be said that I failed in hospitality. Finish your supper, Vasya. You are both coming with me. And our Kasyan Lutovich, with his fine looks and fine clothes. If I must placate a Tatar lord, I may as well do it properly.”

A PALACE SMALL AND FINELY MADE stood a little by itself, near the southeast corner of the kremlin. Its walls were higher than those of the other palaces, and something in its shape or situation breathed out an indefinable sense of distance.

Vasya and Sasha and Kasyan and Dmitrii, with several of the chief members of the latter’s household, all walked there from the Grand Prince’s palace, with guards to deter the curious.

“Humility,” said Dmitrii to Vasya with black humor. “Only a proud man rides. One is not proud to the lords from Sarai, or you will be dead, your city burned, your sons disinherited.”

His eyes filled with bitter memory, older than he. It was nearly two hundred years since the Great Khan’s warriors first came to Rus’, and threw down her churches, and raped and slaughtered her people into acquiescence.

Vasya could not think of a worthy reply, but perhaps her face conveyed sympathy, for the Grand Prince said gruffly, “Never mind, boy. There are worse things one must do to be Grand Prince, and worse still to be Grand Prince of a vassal-state.”

He looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. Vasya remembered his laughter during the long days, when the snow fell in the trackless wood. On sudden impulse, Vasya said, “I will serve you in any way I can, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

Dmitrii paused in his walking; Sasha stiffened. Dmitrii said, “I may call upon it, cousin,” with the unassuming ease of a man who had been crowned at sixteen years old. “God be with you.” He laid a brief hand on Vasya’s hooded head.

Then they were walking again. Dmitrii added, low, to Sasha, “I may grovel all I like, but it won’t grow my coffers a jot. I hear your counsel, but—”

“Humility may postpone the reckoning in any case,” Sasha murmured back. “Tokhtamysh may strike Mamai sooner than we expect; every delay may buy you time.”

Vasya, keen-eared and walking just behind her brother, thought, No wonder Sasha never came home to our father’s house. How could he, when the Grand Prince needs him so? Then she thought, with foreboding, But Sasha lied. For me, he lied. Where will that leave him with his prince when I am gone?

They came to the gates, were admitted, stripped of their guards, and shown to the finest room Vasya had ever seen.

Vasya had no notion of luxury—she barely had a word for it. Mere warmth was luxury to her, and clean skin and dry stockings and not being hungry. But this—this room gave her an inkling of what luxury might mean, and she stared about her, delighted.

The wooden floor had been laid down with care and polished. Spread upon it were figured carpets, free of dust, of a kind she did not know, vivid with snarling cats.

The stove in the corner had been tiled and painted with trees and scarlet birds, and its fire burned hotly. In an instant, Vasya was too warm; a bead of sweat rolled down her spine. Men stood arrayed like statues against the walls, wearing cerise coats and strange hats.

I will see this city, Sarai, Vasya thought, feeling her gorgeous kaftan a gaudy, ill-made thing in all this elegance. I will go far, with Solovey, and he and I will see it.

She breathed a scent (myrrh, though she did not know it) that made her nose itch; frantically she suppressed a sneeze and almost ran into Sasha when the party halted a few paces from a carpeted dais. Dmitrii knelt and bent his head to the floor.

Her eyes watering, Vasya could not see the ambassador clearly. She heard a quiet voice bidding the Grand Prince of Moscow to rise. She listened in silence while Dmitrii conveyed his greetings to the Khan.

She hardly recognized the bold prince in this lord who murmured his apologies, bowing, and handed off his gifts to the attendants. The greetings went on—“on all your sons, your wives, may God protect”—Vasya snapped back to attention only when Dmitrii’s voice shifted. “Village after village,” Dmitrii said in respectful but ringing tones, “robbed, left in flames. My people will have enough to do to survive the winter, and there is no more money. Not until next fall’s harvest. I mean no disrespect, but we are men of the world, and you understand—”

The Tatar replied in his own tongue, voice sharp. Vasya frowned. She had not raised her eyes yet beyond the interpreter at the foot of the platform. But something in the voice drew her glance upward.

And then she stood transfixed, appalled.

For Vasya recognized the ambassador. She had last seen him in the dark, behind the vicious downstroke of a curving sword, while that same voice summoned his men with a war-cry.

He glittered now in silk velvet and sable, but she could not mistake the broad shoulders, the hard jaw and hard eye. He was speaking to the translator with a steady voice. But for an instant the Tatar ambassador—the bandit-captain—turned his eyes to hers, and his lip curled in an expression of half-laughing hatred.

VASYA LEFT THE AUDIENCE-HALL ANGRY, afraid, and doubting her own senses. No. It cannot be he. That man was a brigand. Not a highborn Tatar, not a servant of the Khan. You are mistaken. You saw him once by firelight, and again in the dark. You cannot be sure.

Was she? Could she really forget the face she had seen behind the stroke of a sword, the face of a man who had almost killed her?

That this man would mouth oily things about alliance and Dmitrii’s ingratitude while Russian blood still stained his hands…

No. It wasn’t he. How could it be? And yet…Could a man be a lord and a bandit? Was he an impostor?

Dmitrii’s party was going back the way it had come, crossing the kremlin at a quick pace. All about them dinned the careless noise of a city on the cusp of festival: laughter, shouting, a snatch of song. The people gave way when the Grand Prince passed, and shouted his name.

“I need to speak with you,” Vasya said to Sasha with quick decision. Her urgent hand closed about her brother’s wrist. “Now.”

The gates of Dmitrii’s palace materialized before them; the first torches were lighting. Kasyan shot them a curious glance; brother and sister walked with their heads close together.

“Very well,” said Sasha, after an instant’s hesitation. “Come, back to the palace of Serpukhov. There are too many ears here.”

Chewing her lip, Vasya waited while her brother made a swift excuse to a frowning Dmitrii. Then she followed her brother.

The day was drawing on; golden light made torches of Moscow’s towers, and shadows pooled in the space around the palaces’ feet. A bone-cracking breeze whistled between the buildings. Vasya could barely keep her feet in the tumult of the streets now: so many folk charged to and fro laughing or frowning or merely hunched against the chill. Lamps and hot irons smoothed the snow-slides; hot cakes sizzled in fat. Vasya turned her head once, smiling despite herself, at the splat and howl of flung snowballs, all beneath a sky turning fast to fire as the day waned.

By the time they came to Solovey’s paddock, in a quiet corner of Olga’s dooryard, Vasya was hungry again. Solovey’s white-starred head jerked up when he caught sight of her. Vasya clambered over the fence and went to him. She felt him over, combed his mane with her fingers, let him nuzzle her hands, all the while searching for words to make her brother understand.

Sasha leaned against the fence. “Solovey does well enough. Now what do you mean to say to me?”

The first stars had kindled in a sky gone royally violet, and the moon heaved a faint silver curve over the ragged line of palaces.

Vasya took a deep breath. “You said,” she began, “when we were chasing the bandits—you said it was strange that the bandits had good swords, finely forged, that they had strong horses. Odd, you said, that they had mead and beer and salt in their encampment.”

“I remember.”

“I know why,” said Vasya, speaking faster still. “The bandit captain—the one who stole Katya and Anyushka and Lenochka—he is the one they are calling Chelubey, the emissary from General Mamai. They are one and the same man. I am sure of it. The emissary is a bandit—”

She paused, a little breathless.

Sasha’s brows drew together. “Impossible, Vasya.”

“I am sure of it,” she said again. “When last I saw him, he was swinging a sword at my face. Do you doubt me?”

Slowly Sasha said, “It was dark. You were frightened. You cannot be sure.”

She leaned forward. Her voice came grinding out with her intensity of feeling. “Would I speak if I were not sure? I am sure.”

Her brother tugged his beard.

She burst out, “He is mouthing things about the Grand Prince’s ingratitude while he profits from Russian girls. That means—”

“What does it mean?” Sasha retorted with sudden and cutting sarcasm. “Great lords have others to do their dirty work; why should an emissary be riding about the countryside with a pack of bandits?”

“I know what I saw,” said Vasya. “Perhaps he is not a lord at all. Does anyone in Moscow know him?”

“Do I know you?” retorted Sasha. He dropped like a cat from the fence. Solovey threw his head up when the monk’s booted feet struck the snow. “Do you always tell the truth?”

“I—”

“Tell me,” said her brother. “Whence came this horse, this vaunted bay stallion that you ride? Was it Father’s?”

“Solovey? No—he—”

“Or tell me this,” said Sasha. “How did your stepmother die?”

She drew in a soft breath. “You have been talking to Father Konstantin. But that has nothing to do with this.”

“Doesn’t it? We are talking about truth, Vasya. Father Konstantin told me the whole tale of Father’s death. A death you caused, he says. Unfortunately, he is lying to me. But so are you. The priest will not say why he hates you. You have not said why he thinks you a witch. You have not said whence came your horse. And you have not said why you were mad enough to stray into a bear’s cave in winter, nor why Father was foolish enough to follow you. I would never have believed it of Father, and after a week’s riding, I do not believe it of you, Vasya. It is all a pack of lies. I will have the truth now.”

She said nothing, eyes wide in the newborn dark. Solovey stood tense beside her, and her restless hand wound and unwound in the stallion’s mane.

“Sister, the truth,” said Sasha again.

Vasya swallowed, licked her lips and thought, I was saved from my dead nurse by a frost-demon, who gave me my horse and kissed me in the firelight. Can I say that? To my brother the monk? “I cannot tell you all of it,” she whispered. “I barely understand all of it myself.”

“Then,” said Sasha flatly, “am I to believe Father Konstantin? Are you a witch, Vasya?”

“I—I do not know,” she said, with painful honesty. “I have told you what I can. And I have not lied, I have not. I am not lying now. It is only—”

“You were riding alone in Rus’ dressed as a boy, on the finest horse I have ever seen.”

Vasya swallowed, sought an answer, and found her mouth dust-dry.

“You had a saddlebag full of all you might need for travel, even a little silver—yes, I looked. You have a knife of folded steel. Where did you get it, Vasya?”

“Stop it!” she cried. “Do you think I wanted to leave? Do you think I wanted any of this? I had to, brother, I had to.”

“And so? What are you not telling me?”

She stood mute. She thought of chyerti and the dead walking, she thought of Morozko. The words would not come.

Sasha made a soft sound of disgust. “Enough,” he said. “I will keep your secret—and it costs me to do it, Vasya. I am still my father’s son, though I will never see him again. But I do not have to trust you, or indulge your fancies. The Tatar ambassador is no bandit. You will make no further promises of service to the Grand Prince, tell no more lies than you can help, stop speaking when you should keep silent, and perhaps you will finish this week undiscovered. That is all that should concern you.”

Sasha vaulted the paddock’s bars with lithe grace.

“Where are you going?” Vasya cried, stupidly.

“I am taking you back to Olga’s palace,” he said. “You have said, done, and seen enough for one night.”

Vasya hesitated, protests filling her throat. But one look at his taut back told her that he would not hear them. Her breathing ragged, Vasya touched Solovey’s neck in parting and followed.

17. Marya the Pirate

Vasya’s room in the men’s quarters was small, but warm and far cleaner than anything in Dmitrii’s palace. Some wine had been kept hot on the oven beside a little stack of butter-cakes, only a little gnawed by an adventurous mouse.

Sasha brought her to the threshold, said “God be with you,” and left.

Vasya sank onto the bed. The sounds of Moscow in festival filtered in through her slitted window. She had ridden all day every day for weeks on end, endured both battle and sickness, and was bone-weary. Vasya bolted the door, cast off cloak and boots, ate and drank without tasting, and climbed beneath the mound of fur coverlets.

Though the blankets were heavy and the stove sent out steady warmth, still she shook and could not fall asleep. Again and again she tasted the lies on her own tongue, heard Father Konstantin’s deep, plausible voice telling her brother and sister a tale that was—almost—true. Again she heard the bandit-captain’s war-cry and saw his sword flash in the moonlight. Moscow’s noise and its glitter bewildered her; she did not know what was true.

Eventually Vasya drifted off. She awoke with a jolt, in the still hour after midnight. The air had a thick tang of wet wool and incense, and Vasya stared bewildered into the midnight rafters, longing for a breath of the clean winter wind.

Then her breath stilled in her throat. Somewhere, someone was weeping.

Weeping and walking, the sound was coming nearer. Sobs like needles stabbed through the palace of Serpukhov.

Vasya, frowning, got to her feet. She heard no footsteps, just the gasp and choke of tears.

Nearer.

Who was crying? Vasya heard no sound of feet, no rustle of clothes. A woman crying. What woman would come here? This was the men’s half of the house.

Nearer.

The weeper paused, right outside her door.

Vasya nearly ceased to breathe. Thus the dead had come back to Lesnaya Zemlya, crying, begging to be taken in out of the cold. Nonsense, there are no dead here. The Bear is bound.

Vasya gathered her courage, drew her ice-knife to be cautious, crossed the room, and opened the door a crack.

A face stared back at her, right up against the doorframe: a pale, curious face with a grinning mouth.

You, it gobbled. Get out, go—

Vasya slammed the door and flung herself backward to the bed, heart hammering. Some pride—or some instinct of silence—buried her scream, though her breath snarled in and out.

She had not bolted the door, and slowly it creaked open.

No—now there was nothing there. Only shadows, a trickle of moonlight. What was that? Ghost? Dream? God be with me.

Vasya watched a long time, but nothing moved, no sound marred the darkness. At length, she gathered her courage, got up, crossed the room, and shut the door.

It was a long time before she fell asleep again.

VASILISA PETROVNA AWOKE ON the first day of Maslenitsa, stiff and hungry, remorseful and rebellious, to find a pair of large dark eyes hanging over her.

Vasya blinked and gathered her feet beneath her, wary as a wolf.

“Hello,” the owner of the eyes said archly. “Aunt. I am Marya Vladimirovna.”

Vasya gaped at the child, and then tried for an older brother’s outraged dignity. She still had her hair tied up in a hood. “This is improper,” she said stiffly. “I am your uncle Vasilii.”

“No, you’re not,” said Marya. She stepped back and crossed her arms. Her little boots were embroidered with scarlet foxes, and a band of silk hung with silver rings set off her dark hair. Her face was white as milk, her eyes like holes burned in snow. “I crept in after Varvara yesterday. I heard Mother telling Uncle Sasha everything.” She looked Vasya up and down, a finger in her mouth. “You are my ugly aunt Vasilisa,” she added, with a fair attempt at insouciance. “I am prettier than you.”

Marya might well have been called pretty, in the unformed way of children, were she not so pale, so drawn.

“Indeed you are,” Vasya said, torn between amusement and dismay. “But not as pretty as Yelena the Beautiful, who was stolen by the Gray Wolf. Yes, I am your aunt Vasilisa, but that is a great secret. Can you keep a secret, Masha?”

Marya lifted her chin and sat down on the bench by the stove, taking care with her skirts. “I can keep a secret,” she said. “I want to be a boy, too.”

Vasya decided it was too early in the morning for this conversation. “But what would your mother say,” she asked, a little desperately, “if she lost her little daughter, Masha?”

“She wouldn’t care,” retorted Marya. “She wants sons. Besides,” she went on, with bravado, “I have to leave the palace.”

“Your mother may want sons,” Vasya conceded. “But she wants you, too. Why must you leave the palace?”

Marya swallowed. For the first time, her air of jaunty courage deserted her. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“I probably would.”

Marya looked down at her hands. “The ghost is going to eat me,” she whispered.

Vasya lifted a brow. “The ghost?”

Marya nodded. “Nurse says I mustn’t tell tales and worry my mother. I try not. But I am scared.” Her voice faded away on the last word. “The ghost is always waiting for me, just as I fall asleep. I know she means to eat me. So I have to leave the palace,” said Marya, with an air of renewed determination. “Let me be a boy with you, or I’ll tell everyone that you’re really a girl.” She delivered her threat with ferocity, but shrank back when Vasya rolled out of bed.

Vasya knelt before the little girl. “I believe you,” she said mildly. “I have also seen this ghost. I saw it last night.”

Marya stared. “Were you scared?” she asked at length.

“Yes,” said Vasya. “But I think the ghost was scared, too.”

“I hate her!” Marya burst out. “I hate the ghost. She won’t leave me alone.”

“Perhaps we should ask her what she wants, next time,” said Vasya thoughtfully.

“She doesn’t listen,” said Marya. “I tell her to go away, and she doesn’t listen.”

Vasya considered her niece. “Masha, do you ever see other things that your family doesn’t?”

Marya looked warier than ever. “No,” she said.

Vasya waited.

The child looked down. “There is a man in the bathhouse,” she said. “And a man in the oven. They scare me. Mother told me I must not tell such stories, or no prince will wish to marry me. She—she was angry.”

Vasya remembered, vividly, her own helpless confusion when told the world she saw was a world that did not exist. “The man in the bathhouse is real, Masha,” Vasya said sharply. She took the child by the shoulders. “You must not be afraid of him. He guards your family. He has many kin: one to guard the dooryard, another for the stable, another for the hearth. They keep wicked things at bay. They are as real as you are. You must never doubt your own senses, and you must not fear the things you see.”

Marya’s brow creased. “You see them, too? Aunt?”

“I do,” Vasya returned. “I will show you.” A pause. “If you promise not to tell anyone I am a girl.”

A light had come into the little girl’s face. She thought for a moment. Then, every inch a princess, Marya returned, “I swear it.”

“Very well,” said Vasya. “Let me get dressed.”

THE SUN HAD NOT risen; the world was subtle and flattened and gray. A sweet and waiting hush lay over Moscow. Only the spiraling smoke moved, dancing alone, veiling the city as though with love. The dooryards and staircases of Olga’s palace were quiet; its kitchens and bakeries, breweries and smokehouses just stirring.

Vasya’s eye found the bakery unerringly. The air smelled marvelously of breakfast.

She thought of bread, smeared with cheese, and then she gulped, and had to hasten after Marya, who was running straight down the screened-in walkway to the bathhouse.

Vasya seized the girl by the back of her cloak an instant before she grabbed the latch. “Look to see if there is no one there,” said Vasya, exasperated. “Has no one ever told you to think before you do things?”

Marya squirmed. “No,” she said. “They tell me not to do things. But then I want to and I can’t help it. Sometimes nurse turns purple—that is best.” She shrugged, and the straight shoulders drooped. “But sometimes mother tells me she is afraid for me. I do not like that.” Marya rallied and hauled herself free of her aunt’s grip. She pointed to the chimney. “No smoke—it is empty.”

Vasya squeezed the girl’s hand, lifted the latch, and they stepped into the chill dark. Marya hid behind Vasya, clinging to her cloak.

Her bath the day before had been too rushed for Vasya to take note of her surroundings, but now she gazed appreciatively at the embroidered cushions, the glossy oak benches. The bathhouse at Lesnaya Zemlya had been strictly functional. Then she said into the dimness, “Banchik. Master. Grandfather. Will you speak to us?”

Silence. Marya poked a cautious head around Vasya’s cloak. Their breath steamed in the chill.

Then—“There,” said Vasya.

Even as she said it, she frowned.

She might have been pointing to a wisp of steam, fire-lit. But if you turned your head just so, an old man sat there, cross-legged on a cushion, his head to one side. He was smaller even than Marya, with cloudy threads of hair and strange, faraway eyes.

“That is him!” said Marya, squeaking.

Vasya said nothing. The bannik was even fainter than that other bannik in Chudovo, fainter far than the weeping domovoi in Katya’s village. Little more than steam and ember-light. Vasya’s blood had revived the chyerti of Lesnaya Zemlya, when Konstantin terrified her people into casting them out. But this kind of fading seemed both less violent and harder to halt.

It is going to end, Vasya thought. One day. This world of wonders, where steam in a bathhouse can be a creature that speaks prophecy. One day, there will be only bells and processions. The chyerti will be fog and memory and stirrings in the summer barley.

Her mind went to Morozko, the winter-king, who shaped the frost to his will. No. He could not fade.

Vasya shook away her thoughts, went to the water bucket and poured out a ladleful. She had a crust in her pocket, which she laid, along with a birch-branch from the corner, in front of the living wisp.

The bannik solidified a little more.

Marya gasped.

Vasya tapped her niece’s shoulder and pried the child’s hands off her cloak. “Come, he will not hurt you. You must be respectful. This is the bannik. Call him Grandfather, for that is what he is, or Master, for that is his title. You must give him birch-branches and hot water and bread. Sometimes he tells the future.”

Marya pursed her rosebud mouth, and then she made a most stately reverence, only a little wobbling. “Grandfather,” she whispered.

The bannik did not speak.

Masha took a hesitant step forward and proffered a slightly squashed crumb of cake.

The bannik smiled slowly. Marya quivered but did not move. The bannik took the cake in his foggy hands. “So you do see me,” he whispered, in the hiss of water on coals. “It has been a long time.”

“I see you,” said Marya. She crowded nearer, forgetting fear in the way of children. “Of course I see you. You never talked before though, why not? Mother said you weren’t real. I was scared. Will you tell the future? Who am I going to marry?”

A dour prince, as soon as you have bled, Vasya thought darkly. “Enough, Masha,” she said aloud. “Come away. You do not need prophecies—you aren’t going to marry yet.”

The chyert smiled with a ghost of wickedness. “Why shouldn’t she? Vasilisa Petrovna, you have had your prophecy already.”

Vasya said nothing. The bannik at Lesnaya Zemlya had told her that she would pluck snowdrops at midwinter, die at her own choosing, and weep for a nightingale. “I was grown when I heard it,” she said at last. “Masha is a child.”

The bannik smiled, showing its foggy teeth. “Here is your prophecy, Marya Vladimirovna,” he said. “I am only a wisp now, for your people put their faith in bells and in painted icons. But this little I know: you will grow up far away, and you will love a bird more than your mother, after the season has turned.”

Vasya stiffened. Marya went very red. “A bird…?” she whispered. Then—“Never! You’re wrong!” She clenched her fists. “Take that back.”

The bannik shrugged, still smiling with a little edge of malice.

“Take it back!” Marya shrilled. “Take it—”

But the bannik had turned his glance on Vasya, and something hard gleamed in the backs of his burning eyes. “Before the end of Maslenitsa,” he said. “We will all be watching.”

Vasya, angry on Marya’s behalf, said, “I do not understand you.”

But she was addressing an empty corner. The bannik was gone.

Marya looked stricken. “I don’t like him. Was he telling the truth?”

“It is prophecy,” Vasya said slowly. “It might be true, but not at all in the way you think.”

Then, because the girl’s lower lip quivered, her dark eyes big and lost, Vasya said, “It is early still. Shall we go riding, you and I?”

A sunrise dawned on Masha’s face. “Yes,” she said at once. “Oh, yes, please. Let’s go now.”

A certain furtive giddiness made it clear that galloping about the streets was not something Marya was allowed to do. Vasya wondered if she had made a mistake. But she also remembered how, as a small child, she had loved to ride with her brother, face against the wind.

“Come with me,” said Vasya. “You must stay very close.”

They crept out of the bathhouse. The morning had lightened from smoke to pigeon-gray, and the thick blue shadows had begun to retreat.

Vasya tried to stride along like a bold boy, though it was hard since Marya kept such a tight hold of her hand. For all her ferocity, Marya only ever left her father’s palace to go to church, surrounded by her mother’s women. Even walking about in the dooryard unchaperoned had the flavor of rebellion.

Solovey stood bright-eyed in his paddock, snuffing the morning. Vasya thought for a moment that a long-limbed creature with a tuft of beard sat combing the horse’s mane. But then the monastery bells all rang outrenya together; Vasya blinked and there was no one.

“Oh,” said Marya, skidding to a halt. “Is that your horse? He is very big.”

“Yes,” said Vasya. “Solovey, this is my niece, who wishes to ride you.”

“I don’t much want to, now,” said Marya, looking at the stallion with alarm.

Solovey had a fondness for scraps of humanity—or maybe he was just puzzled by creatures so much smaller than he. He minced over to the fence, snorted a warm breath into her face, then put his head down and lipped Marya’s fingers.

“Oh,” said Marya, in a new voice. “Oh, he is very soft.” She stroked his nose.

Solovey’s ears went back and forth, pleased, and Vasya smiled.

Tell her not to kick me, Solovey said. He nibbled Marya’s hair, which made her giggle. Or pull my mane.

Vasya relayed this message and boosted Marya up onto the top of the fence.

“He needs a saddle,” the child informed Vasya nervously, clutching the fence rail. “I have watched my father’s men ride out; they all have saddles.”

“Solovey doesn’t like them,” Vasya retorted. “Get up. I will not let you fall. Or are you scared?”

Marya put her nose in the air. Clumsy in her skirts, she swung a leg over and sat down, plop, on the horse’s withers. “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

But she squeaked and clutched at the horse when he sighed and shifted his weight. Vasya grinned, climbed the fence, and settled in behind her niece.

“How are we going to get out?” Marya asked practically. “You didn’t open the gate.” Then she gasped. “Oh!”

Behind her, Vasya was laughing. “Hang on to his mane,” she said. “But try not to pull it.”

Marya said nothing, but two small hands took a death grip on the mane. Solovey wheeled. Marya was breathing very quickly. Vasya leaned forward.

The child squealed when the horse took off: one galloping stride, two, three, and then with a tremendous thrust the horse was up and over the fence, light as a leaf.

When they landed, Marya was laughing. “Again!” she cried. “Again!”

“When we return,” Vasya promised. “We have a city to see.”

Leaving was surprisingly simple. Vasya concealed Marya in her cloak, staying a little in the shadows, and the gate-guard leaped to draw the bar. Their business was keeping people out, after all.

Outside the prince of Serpukhov’s gates, the city was just stirring. The sound and smell of frying cakes laced the morning silence. A group of small boys were playing on a snow-slide in the violet dawn, before the bigger boys came to sweep them aside.

Marya watched them as they rode past. “Gleb and Slava were making a snow-slide in our dooryard yesterday,” she said. “Nurse says I am too old for sliding. But Mother says perhaps.” The child sounded wistful. “Can’t we play on this slide here?”

“I don’t think your mother would like it,” Vasya said, with regret.

Above them, the rim of sun, like a ring of copper, showed its edge above the kremlin-wall. It coaxed color from all the brilliant churches, so that the gray light fled and the world glowed green and scarlet and blue.

A glow kindled also in Marya’s face, lit by the new sun. Not the savage exuberance of the child racing around inside her mother’s tower, but a quieter, more joyful thing. The sun set diamonds in her dark eyes, and she drank in all they saw.

Solovey walked and trotted and loped through the waking city. Down they went, past bakers and brewers and inns and sledges. They passed an outdoor oven, where a woman was frying butter-cakes. Obeying hungry impulse, Vasya slid to the ground. Solovey approved of cakes; he followed her hopefully.

The cook, without taking her eyes from the fire, poked her spoon at the stallion’s questing nose. Solovey jerked back indignantly and only just remembered that rearing would unseat his small passenger.

“None of that,” the cook told the stallion. She shook her spoon for emphasis. The top of his withers was well over her head. “I’ll wager you’d eat the whole pile if you could, a great thing like you.”

Vasya hid a smile, said, “Forgive him; your cakes smell so good,” and proceeded to buy an enormous, greasy stack.

Mollified, the cook pressed a few more on them—“You could use fattening, young lord. Don’t let that child eat too many”—and, with an air of great condescension, even fed Solovey a cake out of her own hand.

Solovey held no grudges; he lipped it up gently and nosed over her kerchief until the cook laughed and shoved him away.

Vasya mounted again and the two girls ate as they rode, smearing themselves with grease. Every now and again Solovey would put his head around, hopefully, and Marya would feed him a piece. They went along slowly, watching the city come awake.

When the walls of the kremlin heaved up before them, Marya craned forward, openmouthed, bracing her two buttery hands on Solovey’s neck. “I’ve only seen them from far away,” she said. “I didn’t know how big they are.”

“I didn’t either,” Vasya admitted. “Until yesterday. Let’s go closer.”

The girls passed through the gate, and now it was Vasya’s turn to draw a wondering breath. On the great open square outside the kremlin gates, they were putting up a market. Merchants set up their stalls while men bellowed greetings and blew on their hands. Their brats ran about, calling like starlings.

“Oh,” said Marya, her glance darting here and there. “Oh, look, there are combs there! And cloth! Bone needles, and saddles!”

All that and more. They passed sellers of cakes and wine, of precious wood and vessels of silver, of wax, wool, taffeta, and preserved lemons. Vasya bought one of the lemons, smelled it with delight, bit into it, gasped, and handed the thing hurriedly to Marya.

“You don’t eat it; you put a bit into the soup,” said Marya, smelling the thing cheerfully. “They must travel for a year and a day to get here. Uncle Sasha told me.”

The child was peering about her with a squirrel’s eager interest. “The green cloth!” she would call. Or—“Look, that comb is made like a sleeping cat!”

Vasya, still regretting the lemon, caught sight of a herd of horses penned on the south side of the square. She nudged Solovey over for a look.

A mare bugled at the stallion. Solovey arched his neck and looked pleased. “So now you want a harem, do you?” Vasya asked under her breath.

The horse-drover, staring, said, “Young lord, you cannot bring that stud so close; he will have my beasts in an uproar.”

“My horse is standing quiet,” said Vasya, trying to approximate a rich boyar’s arrogance. “What yours do is not my concern.” But his horses were certainly getting restive, and she backed Solovey off, considering the mares. They were all much alike, save the one who had called to Solovey. She was a chestnut, jauntily stockinged and taller than the others.

“I like that one,” said Marya, pointing at the chestnut.

Vasya did, too. A swift, mad thought had come to her—buy a horse? Until she’d left home, she had never bought anything in her life. But she had a handful of silver in her pocket and a newborn confidence warming her blood. “I wish to see that filly there,” Vasya said.

The horse-drover’s eye rested with doubt on the slender boy.

Vasya sat haughtily, waiting.

“As you say, Gospodin,” muttered the man. “At once.”

The chestnut mare was led forth, fretting at the end of a rope. The horse-drover trotted her back and forth through the snow. “Sound,” he said. “Just rising three year, a war-horse to make a hero of any man.”

The mare lifted first one foot, then the next. Vasya wanted to go to her, touch her, consider her legs, her teeth, but she did not want to leave Marya alone and exposed on Solovey’s back.

Hello, said Vasya to the mare instead.

The mare put her feet down; her ears went forward. Frightened, then, but not without common sense. Hello? she said tentatively. She put out a questing nose.

The sound of new hoofbeats echoed from the arch of the kremlin-gate. The mare jerked back, half-rearing. The horse-drover drew her down with a curse and sent her curvetting back into the pen.

Vasya, said Solovey.

Vasya turned. Three men came thudding into the square, riding broad-chested horses. They moved in a wedge; their leader wore a round hat, and an air of elegant authority. Chelubey, Vasya thought. Leader of bandits, so-called ambassador of the Khan.

Chelubey turned his head; his horse checked a stride. Then all three riders changed direction and made straight for the horse-pen. Chelubey shouted apologies in terrible Russian as they bulled through the crowd. Awed and angry faces turned to follow the Tatar’s progress.

The sun had risen higher. Cool white flames kindled in the ice of the river, and lights darted from the riders’ jewels.

Vasya pulled her cloak forward to conceal the child. “Be quiet,” she whispered. “We have to go.” She nudged Solovey into a casual walk toward the kremlin-gate. Masha sat still, though Vasya could feel her heart beating fast.

They should have moved quicker. The three riders fanned out with perfect skill, and suddenly Solovey was boxed in. The stallion reared, angrily. Vasya brought him down, holding tight to her niece. The riders reined their horses with skill that brought a murmur from the onlookers.

Chelubey rode his stocky mare with elegant composure, smiling. Something in his easy-seeming authority reminded her of Dmitrii; in that moment Chelubey was so unlike the furious swordsman from the darkness that she thought she’d been mistaken.

“In haste?” Chelubey said to Vasya, with a most graceful bow. His glance went to Marya, half hidden and squirming in Vasya’s cloak. He looked amused. “I would not dream of detaining you. But I believe I have seen your horse before.”

“I am Vasilii Petrovich,” Vasya replied, inclining her head stiffly in turn. “I cannot imagine where you could have seen my horse. I must be going.”

Solovey started off. But Chelubey’s two men put hands to blades and blocked his way.

Vasya turned back, trying for nonchalance, but she was beginning to be frightened. “Let me pass,” she said. Movement had all but ceased in the square. The sun was rising quickly; soon the streets would become crowded. She and Masha must get back, and in the meantime she did not care at all for the Tatar’s look of smiling threat.

“I am quite sure,” said Chelubey meditatively, “that I have seen that horse before. One glance and I knew him.” He pretended to think. “Ah,” he said, flicking a speck off his gorgeous sleeve. “It comes to me. A forest, late at night. Curiously, I met a stallion there, that had gotten loose. A stallion twin to yours.”

The wide, dark eyes fastened on hers, and Vasya knew that she was not mistaken.

“You say it was dark,” Vasya returned at length. “It is hard to know a horse again, that you have only seen in the dark. You must have seen some other—this one is mine.”

“I know what I saw,” said Chelubey. He was looking at her very hard. “As do you, I think, boy.”

His men nudged their horses nearer. He knows I know, Vasya thought. This is his warning.

Solovey was bigger than the Tatar horses, and likely quicker; he could bull through. But the men had bows, and there was Masha to think of…

“I will buy your horse,” said Chelubey.

Surprise startled a thoughtless answer from her. “For what purpose?” she demanded. “He wouldn’t carry you. I am the only one who can ride him.”

The Tatar smiled a little. “Oh, he would carry me. Eventually.”

Inside the cloak, Marya made a sound of muffled protest. “No,” Vasya said, loud enough for the square to hear. Anger allowed only one answer. “No, you can’t buy him. Not for anything.”

Her answer rippled out through the merchants, and she saw the faces change, some shocked, some approving.

The Tatar’s grin widened—and she realized with horror that he had counted on her reaction—that she had just given him a perfect excuse to draw his sword on her now and apologize later to Dmitrii. But before Chelubey could move, a loud voice came grumbling up from the direction of the river. “Mother of God,” it said. “Can a man not go for a gallop without having to shove his way through the hordes of Moscow? Stand aside there—”

Chelubey’s smile faded. Vasya’s cheeks burned.

Kasyan came magnificently through the crowd, dressed in green, riding his big-boned gelding. He looked between Vasya and the Tatars. “Is it necessary to bait children, my lord Chelubey?” he asked.

Chelubey shrugged. “What else is there to do in this mud-hole of a city—Kasyan Lutovich, was it?”

Something about the easy rhythm of his reply made Vasya uneasy. Kasyan nudged his gelding up beside Vasya and said coolly, “The boy is coming with me. His cousin will be wanting him.”

Chelubey glanced left and right. The crowd was silent, but obviously on Kasyan’s side. “I do not doubt it,” he said, bowing. “When you wish to sell, boy, I have a purse of gold for you.”

Vasya shook her head, her eyes not leaving his.

“Better you take it,” added the Tatar, low. “If you do, I will not hold debt between us.” Still he smiled, but in his eyes was a clear and uncompromising threat.

Then—“Come on,” said Kasyan impatiently. His horse cut around the other riders and made for the kremlin-gate.

Vasya did not know what possessed her then. Angrily, swiftly, with the morning sunshine in her eyes, she set Solovey straight at the nearest rider’s horse. One stride, and the man realized what she meant to do; he flung himself swearing out of the saddle, and next instant Solovey was soaring straight over his horse’s back. Vasya held Marya tight with both hands. Solovey landed like a bird, and caught up with Kasyan.

Vasya turned back. The man had gotten to his feet, smeared with muddy snow. Chelubey was laughing at him right along with the crowd.

Kasyan said nothing; he did not speak at all until they were well up into the choked and winding streets, and his first words were not to Vasya at all. “Marya Vladimirovna, I believe?” he said to the child without turning his head. “I am pleased to meet you.”

Marya gave him an owl-eyed look. “I am not supposed to talk to men,” she told him. “Mother says.” She shivered a little, and then heroically quelled it. “Oh, Mother is going to be angry with me.”

“With both of you, I imagine,” said Kasyan. “You really are an idiot, Vasilii Petrovich. Chelubey was about to spit you, and beg the Grand Prince’s pardon after. What possessed you to take the prince of Serpukhov’s daughter out riding?”

“I would not have let any harm come to her,” said Vasya.

Kasyan snorted. “You couldn’t have kept yourself from harm if the ambassador had drawn his sword, never mind the child. Besides, she was seen. That is harm enough; just ask her mother. No, forgive me; I have no doubt that her mother will tell you, at length. For the rest— You have baited Chelubey. He will not forget it, despite his smiles. They are all smiles in the court at Sarai—until they set their teeth into your throat and pull.”

Vasya barely heard; she was thinking of the joy and hunger in Marya’s face when she saw the wide world, outside the women’s quarters. “What matter if Masha was seen?” she asked with some heat. “I only took her riding.”

“I wanted to go!” Marya put in unexpectedly. “I wanted to see.”

“Curiosity,” said Kasyan, didactically, “is a dreadful trait in girls.” He grinned with a sort of acid cheer. “Just ask Baba Yaga: the more one knows, the sooner one grows old.”

They were nearly at the prince of Serpukhov’s palace. Kasyan sighed. “Well, well,” he added. “It is a holiday, isn’t it? I have nothing better to do than to protect virtuous maidens from gossip.” His voice sharpened. “Hide her in your cloak. Take her straight to the stallion-paddock and wait.” Kasyan rode forward, calling to the steward. His rings flashed in the sun. “Here am I, Kasyan Lutovich, come to drink wine with young Vasilii Petrovich.”

The gate was already unbarred, in honor of the festival morning; the gate-guard saluted. Kasyan rode in with Vasya on his heel, and the steward hurried forward.

“Take my horse,” ordered Kasyan magnificently. He swung to earth and shoved his gelding’s reins at the steward. “Vasilii Petrovich must manage his brute himself. I will see you after, boy.” With that, Kasyan strode off in the direction of the palace, leaving an irritated steward alone, holding the gelding by the bridle. He hardly looked at Vasya.

Vasya nudged Solovey toward his paddock. She had no idea what Kasyan did, but when they leaped the fence, to Marya’s delight, Vasya found Varvara already hurrying up, with such a look of white, mute fury on her face that both Vasya and Marya quailed. Vasya hurriedly slid to the ground, taking the child with her.

“Come, Marya Vladimirovna,” Varvara said. “You are wanted indoors.”

Marya looked frightened but said to Vasya, “I am brave like you. I do not want to go in.”

“You are braver than me, Masha,” Vasya said to her niece. “You have to go in this time. Remember, next time you see the ghost, ask her what she wants. She cannot hurt you.”

Marya nodded. “I am glad we went riding,” she whispered. “Even if Mother is angry. And I am glad we jumped over the Tatar.”

“So am I,” said Vasya.

Varvara took the child firmly by the hand and began towing her away. “My mistress wishes to see you in the chapel,” said Varvara over her shoulder. “Vasilii Petrovich.”

IT DID NOT OCCUR to Vasya to disobey. The chapel was crowned with a small forest of domes and not hard to find. Vasya stepped into the disapproving gaze of a hundred icons and waited.

Soon enough, Olga joined her there, walking heavily, with her time almost upon her. She crossed herself, bowed her head before the icon-screen, and then turned on her sister.

“Varvara tells me,” said Olga without preamble, “that you went riding at sunup and paraded my daughter through the streets. Is this true, Vasya?”

“Yes,” said Vasya, chilled at Olga’s tone. “We went riding. But I did not—”

“Mother of God, Vasya!” said Olga. What little color she had fled from her face. “Have you no thought for my daughter’s reputation? This is not Lesnaya Zemlya!”

“Her reputation?” asked Vasya. “Of course I care for her reputation. She spoke to no one. She was properly dressed; she covered her hair. I am her uncle, they say. Why can I not take her riding?”

“Because it is not—” Olga paused and dragged in air. “She must stay in the terem. Virgin girls mayn’t leave it. My daughter must learn to be still. As it is, you will have unsettled her for a month, and ruined her reputation forever, if we are unlucky.”

“Stay in these rooms, you mean? This tower?” Vasya’s eyes went involuntarily to the shuttered slit of a window, to the massed ranks of the icons. “Forever? But she is brave and clever. You can’t mean—”

“I do mean,” returned Olga, coldly. “Don’t interfere again, or I swear that I will tell Dmitrii Ivanovich who you are, and you will go to a convent. Enough. Go. Amuse yourself. The day is barely an hour old, and already I am tired of you.” She turned for the door.

Vasya, stricken, spoke before she could think. Olga stilled at the lash of her voice. “Do you have to stay here? Do you ever go anywhere, Olya?”

Olga’s shoulders stiffened. “I do well enough,” she said. “I am a princess.”

“But, Olya,” said Vasya, coming nearer. “Do you want to stay here?”

“Little girl,” said Olga, rounding on her with a flash of real rage, “do you think it matters—for any of us—what we want? Do you think I have any indulgence for any of this—for your mad starts, your reckless immodesty?”

Vasya stared, silenced and stiff.

“I am not our stepmother,” Olga continued. “I will not have it. You are not a child, Vasya. Just think, if you could only have listened for once, then Father would still be alive. Remember that, and be still!”

Vasya’s throat worked, but the words would not come. At last she said, eyes fixed on memory beyond the chapel walls, “I— They meant to send me away. Father wasn’t there. I was afraid. I didn’t mean for him—”

“That is enough!” snapped Olga. “Enough, Vasya. That is a child’s excuse, and you are a woman. What’s done is done. But you might mend your ways in future. Keep quiet, until the festival is over, for the love of God.”

Vasya’s lips felt cold. As a child she had daydreamed of her beautiful sister, living in a palace, like the fairy-tale Olga with her eagle-prince. But now those childish dreams dwindled to this: an aging woman, magnificent and solitary, whose tower door never opened, who would make her daughter a proper maiden but never count the cost.

Olga looked into Vasya’s eyes with a touch of weary understanding. “Come, now,” she said. “Living is both better and worse than fairy tales; you must learn it sometime, and so must my daughter. Do not look so, like a hawk with clipped wings. Marya will be all right. She is too young still for great scandal, fortunately, and hopefully she was not recognized. She will learn her place in time, and be happy.”

“Will she?” Vasya asked.

“Yes,” said Olga firmly. “She will. As will you. I love you, little sister. I will do my best for you, I swear it. You will have children in your turn, and servants to manage, and all this misfortune will be forgot.”

Vasya barely heard. The walls of the chapel were stifling her, as though Olga’s long, airless years had a shape and a flavor that she could breathe. She managed a nod. “Forgive me then, Olga,” she said, and walked past her sister, out the door, and down the steps into the roar of festival gathering below. If Olga tried to call her back, she did not hear.

18. Horse-Tamer

Kasyan met her at the gate.

“I thought you came to drink wine with me,” Vasya said.

Kasyan snorted. “Well, you are here,” he returned easily. “And wine can be got. You look as though you could use it.” The dark glance found hers. “Well, Vasilii Petrovich? Did your sister break a bowl over your head, and bid you marry your niece at once, to redeem her lost virtue?”

Vasya was not entirely sure if Kasyan was joking. “No,” she said shortly. “But she was very angry. I—thank you for helping me return Marya to the house without the steward and the guard seeing.”

“You ought to get drunk,” Kasyan said, shrugging this off. “Thoroughly. It would do you good; you are angry and not sure who to be angry with.”

Vasya merely bared her teeth. She felt her snatched-at freedom keenly. “Lead the way, Kasyan Lutovich,” she said. All around, the city shrieked and bubbled, like a kettle on the boil.

Kasyan’s tight, secret mouth curved a little. They turned down the muddy street from Olga’s palace and were instantly lost in the joyous maw of a city at play. Music sounded from side-streets where girls danced with hoops. A procession was getting up; Vasya saw a straw woman on a stick being hoisted above a laughing crowd, and a bear with an embroidered collar being led like a dog. The bells rang out above them. The snow-slides were crowded now, and folk pushed each other for their turn, fell off the back of the slide or came tumbling headfirst down the front. Kasyan paused. “The ambassador,” he said delicately. “Chelubey.”

“What?” said Vasya.

“It seemed as if he knew you,” said Kasyan.

A clamor rang out in the streets ahead. “What is that?” Vasya asked instead of answering. A wave of people ahead of them were falling back. Next moment a runaway horse came galloping, wild-eyed, up the street.

It was the mare from the market, the filly Vasya had coveted. Her white stockings flashed in the dirty snow. People shouted and ducked out of the way; Vasya opened her arms to arrest the mare’s flight.

The mare tried to dodge around her, but Vasya adroitly seized the broken lead-rope and said, “Hold, lady. What is the matter?”

The mare shied at Kasyan and reared, panicked by the crowd. “Get back!” Vasya told them. The people drew away a trifle, and then came the sound of three sets of steady hoofbeats as Chelubey and his attendants came trotting up the street.

The Tatar gave Vasya a look of languid surprise. “So we meet yet again,” he said.

Vasya, now that Marya was home and safe, felt she had very little to lose. So she raised a brow and said, “Bought the mare and she ran away?”

Chelubey was composed. “A fine horse has spirit. What a good boy, to catch her for me.”

“Spirit is no excuse to terrify her,” retorted Vasya. “And don’t call me boy.” The mare was almost vibrating against her grip, jerking her head in renewed fright.

“Kasyan Lutovich,” Chelubey said, “take this child in hand. Or I will beat him for impudence and take his horse. He may keep the filly.”

“If I had the filly,” Vasya said recklessly, “I would be riding her before the noon bell. I would not have her fleeing panicked through the streets of Moscow.”

The bandit, she saw with anger, was looking amused again. “Big words for a child. Come, give her to me.”

“I will wager my horse,” said Vasya, not moving—she thought of Katya starving because Dmitrii must have taxes to pay for a new war, and her rage at Chelubey fueled a temper already inclined to rashness—“that this mare will bear me on her back before the third hour rings.”

Kasyan began. “Vasya—”

She did not look at him.

Chelubey laughed outright. “Will you, now?” His eye took in the flighty, frightened mare. “As you like. Show us this marvel. But if you fail, I will certainly have your horse.”

Vasya gathered her nerve. “If I do win, I want the mare for myself.”

Kasyan gripped her arm, urgently. “It is a foolish wager.”

“If the boy wants to throw away his property on boasting,” said Chelubey, to Kasyan, “it is his business. Now off you go, boy. Ride the mare.”

Vasya did not reply, but considered the frightened horse. The mare was dancing on the end of her rope, jerking Vasya’s arms with every plunge, and scarcely had a horse ever looked less rideable.

“I will need a paddock, with a fence of decent height,” said Vasya at length.

“An open space and a ring of people is all you get,” said Chelubey. “You should consider the conditions of your wagers before making them.”

The smile had fallen off his face; now he was crisp and serious.

Vasya thought again. “The market-square,” she said after a moment. “There is more room.”

“As you wish,” said Chelubey, with an air of great condescension.

“When your brother finds out, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan muttered, “I am not standing between you.”

Vasya ignored him.

THEIR WAY DOWN TO the square became a procession, with word flying through the streets ahead of them. Vasilii Petrovich has made a wager with the Tatar lord Chelubey. Come down to the square.

But Vasya did not hear. She heard nothing but the mare’s breathing. She walked beside the horse, while the creature thrashed against the rope, and she talked. It was nonsense mostly; compliments, love words, whatever she could think of. And she listened to the horse. Away was all the mare could think, all she could say with head and ears and quivering limbs. Away, I must get away. I want the others and good grass and silence. Away. Run.

Vasya listened to the horse and hoped she had not done something supremely stupid.

PAGAN HE MIGHT BE, but the Russians loved a showman, and Chelubey swiftly proved himself nothing if not that. If someone in the crowd shouted praise, he bowed with a flourish of the rough-cut gems on his fingers. If someone jeered, hidden in the throng, he answered in roaring kind, making his audience laugh.

They made their way down into the great square, and Chelubey’s riders began at once to clear an open space. The merchants swore, but eventually it was done, and the stocky Tatar horses stood still, swishing their tails, fetlock-deep in the snow, holding back the throng.

Chelubey informed one and all of the conditions of the wager, in his execrable Russian. Instantly, and in defiance of any number of prelates present, the betting among the onlookers began to fly thick and fast, and children clambered onto market stalls to watch. Vasya stood with the terrified mare in the middle of the new-made circle.

Kasyan stood just at the inner edge of the crowd. He looked half disgusted, half intrigued, his glance inward, as though he were thinking furiously. The throng grew larger and louder, but all Vasya’s attention was on the mare.

“Come now, lady,” she said in the horse’s speech. “I mean you no harm.”

The mare, stiff through her body, made no answer.

Vasya considered, breathed, and then, ignoring the risk, and with every eye in the square on her, stepped forward and pulled the halter from the horse’s head.

A muted sound of astonishment moved through the crowd.

The mare stood still an instant, as startled as her watchers, and in that moment, Vasya hissed between her teeth. “Go then! Flee!”

The mare needed no encouragement; she bolted toward the first of the steppe-horses, spun, ran for the other, and ran again. If she tried to halt, Vasya drove her on. For of course, to be ridden, the horse must first obey, and the only order the mare would obey at the moment was an order to run away.

Begone. This order had another meaning. When a foal disobeyed, Vasya’s beloved Mysh, the herd-mare at Lesnaya Zemlya, would drive the young one, for a time, out of the herd. She had even done it to Vasya once, to the girl’s chagrin. It was the direst punishment a young horse could sustain, for the herd is life.

With this filly, Vasya acted as a mare would act—a wise old mare. Now the filly was wondering—Vasya could see it in her ears—if this two-legged creature understood her, and if, just possibly, she was no longer alone.

The crowd all around was completely silent.

Suddenly Vasya stood still, and in the same moment the mare halted.

The crowd gave a sigh. The mare’s eyes were fixed on Vasya. Who are you? I don’t want to be alone, the mare told her. I am afraid. I don’t want to be alone.

Then come, said Vasya with the turn of her body. Come to me, and you will never be alone again.

The mare licked her lips, ears pricked. Then, to soft cries of wonder, the mare took one step forward, and then another, and then a third and a fourth, until she could lay her nose against the girl’s shoulder.

Vasya smiled.

She did not heed the shouts from all sides; she scratched the mare’s withers and flanks, as horses will for each other.

You smell like a horse, said the mare nosing her over uncertainly.

“Unfortunately,” said Vasya.

Casually, the girl began to walk. The mare followed her, her nose still at Vasya’s shoulder. Now here. Now there. Turn back.

Stop.

The mare stopped when Vasya did.

Ordinarily Vasya would have left it there, let the horse go and be quiet and remember not being afraid. But there was a wager. How much more time did she have?

The people watched in muttering hush; she glimpsed Kasyan’s eyes inscrutable. “I am going to get on your back,” Vasya said to the horse. “Just for a moment.”

The mare was dubious. Vasya waited.

Then the mare licked her lips and lowered her head, unhappy, the trust there, but fragile.

Vasya leaned her body onto the mare’s withers, letting her take the weight. The mare shivered, but she didn’t move.

With an inward prayer, Vasya jumped as lightly as she could, swung a leg over, and was on the mare’s back.

The mare half-reared, and then stilled, trembling, both ears pitched pleadingly back to Vasya. The wrong move—even a wrong breath—and the mare would be in full flight, all the girl’s work undone.

Vasya did nothing at all. She rubbed the mare’s neck. She murmured to her. When she felt the horse relax a little—a very little—she touched her with a light heel that said walk.

The mare did, still rigid, ears still pitched back. She went a few steps and halted, stiff-legged as a foal.

Enough. Vasya slid to the ground.

She was met with absolute silence.

And then a wall of noise. “Vasilii Petrovich!” they shouted. “Vasilii the Brave!”

Vasya, overcome, a little dizzy, bowed to the crowd. She saw Chelubey’s face, irritated now, but still with that curve of unwilling amusement.

“I will take her now,” Vasya told him. “A horse must consent, after all, to be ridden.”

Chelubey said nothing for a moment. Then he surprised her by laughing. “I did not know I was to be outdone by a little magic boy and his tricks,” he said. “I salute you, magician.” He swept her a bow from horseback.

Vasya did not return the bow. “To small minds,” she told him, spine very straight, “any skill must look like sorcery.”

All around, the people took up the laughter. The Tatar’s smile did not waver, though the half-suppressed laughter in his face vanished. “Come and fight me then, boy,” he returned, low. “I will have my recompense.”

“Not today,” said Kasyan firmly. He came up and stood at Vasya’s shoulder.

“Well, then,” said Chelubey with deceptive mildness. He waved to one of his men. A fine, embroidered halter appeared. “With my compliments,” he said. “She is yours. May your life be long.”

His eyes promised otherwise.

“I do not need a halter,” Vasya said, proudly and carelessly. She turned her back, and when she began to walk away, the mare still followed her, anxious nose at Vasya’s shoulder.

“You have a genius for trouble, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan said, resignedly, falling in beside her. “You have made an enemy. But—you have a genius for horsemanship as well. That was a masterly display. What will you call her?”

“Zima,” said Vasya without thinking. Winter. It suited her delicacy, her white markings. She stroked the mare’s neck.

“Do you mean to set up as a horse-breeder, then?”

The mare breathed like a bellows in Vasya’s ear, and the girl turned, startled, to look at the filly’s white-blazed face. A horse-breeder? Well, she had this horse now, who would bear foals. She had a kaftan worked in gold thread: a gift from a prince. A pale knife, sheathed at her side: a gift from a frost-demon; and the sapphire necklace hung cold between her breasts: a gift from her father. Many gifts, and precious.

She had a name. Vasilii Petrovich, the crowd had roared. Vasilii the Brave. Vasya felt pride, as though the name were really her own.

Vasya felt she could have been anyone at that moment—anyone except who she really was—Vasilisa, Pyotr’s daughter, born in the far forest. Who am I? Vasya wondered, suddenly dizzy.

“Come,” said Kasyan. “It will be all over Moscow before nightfall. They are going to call you Vasilii Horse-Tamer now—you will have more epithets than your brother. Put the filly in the paddock with Solovey, and let him console her. Now you must assuredly get drunk.”

Vasya, with no better notions, followed him back up the way she had come, keeping a hand on the mare’s neck as they passed again through the riotous city.

SOLOVEY, CONFRONTED WITH AN actual mare, was more uncertain than pleased. The mare, eyeing the bay stallion, was in no better case. They watched each other with ears eased back. Solovey ventured a placating rumble, only to be met with a squeal and flying hooves. The two horses finally retreated to either end of the paddock and glared.

Unpromising. Vasya watched them, hand on fist, leaning against the paddock rail. Part of her had dreamed for a moment of having a foal of Solovey’s blood, a herd of horses all her own, an estate to manage how she would.

The other, sensible part was informing her, patiently, that this was quite impossible.

“Drink, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan said, leaning on the rail beside her. He handed her a skin of thick, dark beer he’d bought on the way. She drank deep, and put it down with a gasp. “You never answered,” said Kasyan, taking the skin back. “Why does this man Chelubey seem to know you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Vasya said. “My brother didn’t believe me.”

Kasyan let out a little half-breath. “I suggest,” he said acidly, pulling at the beer in turn, “that you try me, Vasilii Petrovich.”

It was almost a dare. Vasya looked into his face, and told him.

“WHO KNOWS OF THIS?” Kasyan asked her sharply when she had done. “Who else have you told?”

“Besides my brother? No one,” returned Vasya bitterly. “Do you believe me?”

A small silence. Kasyan turned away from her, watched with unseeing eyes the smoke spirals of a hundred ovens, against the pure sky. “Yes,” said Kasyan. “Yes, I believe you.”

“What should I do?” asked Vasya. “What does it mean?”

“That they are a folk of robbers and the sons of robbers,” Kasyan replied. “What else could it mean?”

Vasya did not think that mere robbers could have built the ambassador’s exquisite palace, nor did she think a robber born would have Chelubey’s elegant manner. But she did not argue. “I wanted to tell the Grand Prince,” she said instead. “But my brother said I must not.”

Kasyan tapped his teeth with a forefinger, considering. “There must be proof first, beyond your word, before you go to Dmitrii Ivanovich. I will send out a man to search the burnt villages. We will find a priest, or some villager who has seen the bandits. We must have more witnesses than you.”

Vasya felt a rush of gratitude that he believed her, and that he knew what to do. Above them the bells rang. The two horses nosed for dry grass beneath the snow, determinedly ignoring each other.

“I will wait, then,” Vasya said, with renewed confidence. “But I will not wait too long. Soon I must try my luck with Dmitrii Ivanovich, witnesses or no.”

“Understood,” said Kasyan practically, clapping a hand to her shoulder. “Go and wash yourself, Vasilii Petrovich. We must go to church, and then there will be feasting.”

19. Maslenitsa

The sun sank in a panoply of purple and scarlet beneath the flickering stars, and Vasya went to service in the evening, with her silent brother, with Dmitrii Ivanovich, with a whole throng of boyars and their wives. On great days, the women were allowed, veiled, into the dusky streets, to go and worship with their kin.

Olga did not go; she was too near her time, and Marya stayed in the terem with her mother. But the other highborn women of Moscow paced the rutted road to church, clumsy in their embroidered boots. Walking all together, with their servants and their children, they made a winter meadow of flowers, marvelously and comprehensively veiled. Vasya, half-smothered in the scrum of Dmitrii’s boyars, watched the brightly clad figures with a mix of curiosity and terror until a mocking elbow dug between her ribs. One of the boys in the Grand Prince’s train said, “Better not look too long, stranger, unless you want a wife or a broken head.”

Vasya, not knowing whether to laugh or be vexed, turned her gaze elsewhere.

The towers of the cathedral were a fistful of magic flames in the light of the setting sun. The double cathedral-doors, bronze-studded, stretched to twice the height of a man. When they passed from narthex to vast, echoing nave, Vasya stood still an instant, lips parted.

It was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. The scale alone awed her, the smell of incense…the gold-clad iconostasis, the painted walls, the silver stars in their blue on the vault of the ceiling…the multitude of voices…

Instinct drove Vasya to the left of the nave, where the women worshipped, until she recalled herself. Then she stood, marveling, in the throng behind the Grand Prince.

For the first time in a long while, Vasya pitied Father Konstantin. This is what he lost, she thought, when he came to live at Lesnaya Zemlya. This glimpse of his Heaven, this jewel-setting where he might worship and be beloved. No wonder it all turned to threats and bitterness and damnation.

The service wound on, the longest service that Vasya had ever stood through. Chanting replaced speech, which replaced prayer, and all the while she stood in a half-dream, until the Grand Prince and his party left the cathedral. Vasya, surfeited with beauty, was glad to go. The night released them to violent freedom, after three hours of sober ritual.

The Grand Prince’s procession turned back toward Dmitrii’s palace; as they wound through the streets, the bishops blessed the crowd.

They clashed briefly with another procession, a spontaneous one, marching in the snow with Lady Maslenitsa, the effigy-doll, borne high above. In all the confusion, a throng of young boyars came up and surrounded Vasya.

Fair hair and wide-set eyes, jeweled fingers and sashes askew; this was surely yet another clutch of cousins. Vasya crossed her arms. They jostled like a dog-pack.

“I hear that you are high in the Grand Prince’s favor,” said one. His young beard was a hopeful down on his skinny face.

“Why should I not be?” Vasya returned. “I drink my wine and do not spill it, and I ride better than you.”

One of the young lords shoved her. She gave back gracefully before it, and kept her feet. “Strong breeze tonight, wouldn’t you say?” she said.

“Vasilii Petrovich, are you too good for us?” another boy asked, grinning around a rotted tooth.

“Probably,” said Vasya. A certain recklessness of temper, quelled in childhood, but now nourished by the rough world in which she found herself, had burst giddily to life in her soul. She smiled at the young boyars and she found herself, truly, unafraid.

“Too good for us?” they jeered. “You are only a country lord’s son, a nobody, jumped-up, the grandchild of a morganatic marriage.”

Vasya refuted all this with a few inventive insults of her own, and laughing and snarling at once, they eventually informed her that they meant to run twice about the palace of Dmitrii Ivanovich and a wine-jar to the winner.

“As you like,” said Vasya, fleet-footed from childhood. She had put all thoughts of bandits, mysteries, failures from her mind; she meant to enjoy her evening. “How much of a start would you like?”

CLUTCHING HER WINE, TIPSY ALREADY, Vasya was borne by a wave of new friends into Dmitrii Ivanovich’s hall, a little of her worry drowned in triumph, only to find most of the players in her deceitful drama already present in the cavern of the Grand Prince’s hall.

Dmitrii, of course, sat in the central place. A woman whose robe stuck straight out from her shoulders, beneath a round-faced expression of sour complacency, sat beside him. His wife…

Kasyan—Vasya frowned. Kasyan was calm as ever, magnificently dressed, but he wore an expression of grave thought, a line between his red brows. Vasya was wondering if he’d had bad news, when her brother appeared and caught her by the arm.

“You heard,” said Vasya resignedly.

Sasha pulled her into a corner, displacing a flirtatious conference, to the irritation of both parties. “Olga told me you took Marya into the city.”

“I did,” said Vasya.

“And that you won a horse from Chelubey in a wager.”

Vasya nodded. She could hear him grinding his teeth. “Vasya, you must stop all this,” Sasha said. “Making a spectacle of yourself and drawing that child in? You must—”

“What?” Vasya snapped. She loved too well this clear-eyed, strong-handed son of her father, and was all the angrier for it. “Step quietly off into the night, back into a locked room in Olya’s palace, there to arrange my linen forthwith, say prayers in the morning, and rally my feeble charms for the seduction of boyish lords? All this while Solovey languishes in the dooryard? Do you mean to sell my horse, then, brother, or take him for yourself, when I go into the terem? You are a monk. I don’t see you in a monastery, Brother Aleksandr. Shouldn’t you be growing a garden, chanting, praying without pause? Instead you are here, the nearest adviser of the Grand Prince of Moscow. Why you, brother? Why you and not I?” Her shoulders heaved; she had surprised even herself with the flow of words.

Sasha said nothing. She realized that he had said all this over to himself in the thinking silences of the monastery, argument and counterargument, and had no answers either. He was looking at her with a frank and unhappy bewilderment that smote her heart.

“No,” she said. Her hand found his, thin and strong, there on her fur-clad arm. “You know as well as I do that I cannot go into the terem any more than a real boy could. Here I am and here I remain. Unless you mean to reveal us both as liars before all the company?”

“Vasya,” he said. “It cannot last.”

“I know. And I will end it. I swear it, Sasha.” Her mouth quirked, darkly. “But there is nothing for it; let us feast now, my brother, and tell our lies.”

Sasha flinched, and Vasya stalked away from him before he could reply, high-headed in her fading anger, with sweat pooling at her temples, beneath the hated hat, and tears pooling in her eyes, because her brother had loved the child Vasilisa. But how can one love a woman who is too much like that child, still brash, still unafraid?

I must go, she thought suddenly and clearly. I cannot wait until the end of Maslenitsa. I am wounding him the worst, with this lie on my behalf, and I must go.

Tomorrow, brother, she thought. Tomorrow.

Dmitrii waved her over, smiling as ever, and only his stone-cold sobriety showed that perhaps the prince was not as at ease as he appeared. His city and his boyars seethed with talk; a Tatar lord lounged in his city, demanding tribute, and the Grand Prince’s heart bade him fight while his head bade him wait, and both those things required money that he did not have.

“I hear you won a horse from Chelubey,” Dmitrii said to her, banishing trouble from his face with practiced ease.

“I did,” said Vasya breathlessly, smacked in the back by a passing platter. Already the first dishes were going around, a little touched with snow from their trip across the dooryard. No meat, but every kind of delicacy that flour and honey and butter and eggs and milk could contrive.

“Well done, boy,” said the Grand Prince. “Although I cannot approve. Chelubey is a guest, after all. But boys will be boys; you would think the horse-lord could manage a filly better.” Dmitrii winked at her.

Vasya, until then, had felt the pain of Sasha’s lie to the Grand Prince; she had never felt the guilt of her own. But now she remembered a promise of service and her conscience smote her.

Well, one secret, at least, could be told. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya said suddenly. “There is something I must tell you—about this horse-lord.”

Kasyan was drinking his wine and listening; now he came to his feet, shaking back his red hair.

“Shall we have no entertainment, for the festival-season?” he roared drunkenly at the room at large, quite drowning her out. “Shall we have no amusements?”

He turned, smiling, to Vasya. What was he doing?

“I propose one amusement,” Kasyan went on. “Vasilii Petrovich is a great horseman, we have all seen. Well, let me try his paces. Will you race tomorrow, Vasilii Petrovich? Before all Moscow? I challenge you now, with these men to witness.”

Vasya gaped. A horse-race? What had that to do with—?

A pleased murmur rolled through the crowd. Kasyan was watching her with a strange intensity. “I will race,” she said in confused reflex. “If you permit, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

Dmitrii sat back, looking pleased. “I will say nothing against it, Kasyan Lutovich, but I have seen no creature of yours that is any match for his Solovey.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Kasyan, smiling.

“Heard and witnessed, then!” Dmitrii cried. “Tomorrow morning. Now eat, all of you, and give thanks to God.”

The talk rose, the singing, and the music. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya began again.

But Kasyan stumbled off his bench and sank down beside Vasya, throwing an arm round her shoulders. “I thought you might be about to commit an indiscretion,” he murmured into her ear.

“I am tired of lies,” she whispered to him. “Dmitrii Ivanovich may believe me or not as he chooses; that is why he is Grand Prince.”

On her other side, Dmitrii was shouting toasts to his son-to-be, a hand on the shoulder of his almost-smiling wife, and flinging bits of gristle to the dogs at his feet. The firelight shone redder and redder as midnight approached.

“This is not a lie,” said Kasyan. “Only a pause. Truths are like flowers, better plucked at the right moment.” The hard arm tightened around Vasya’s shoulders. “You have not drunk enough, boy,” he said. “Not nearly enough.” He sloshed wine into a cup and held it toward her. “Here—that is for you. We are going to race, you and I, in the morning.”

She took the cup, sipped. He watched, and grinned slowly. “No. Drink more, so I may win the easier.” He leaned forward, confiding. “If I win, you will tell me everything,” he murmured. His hair almost brushed her face. She sat very still. “Everything, Vasya, about yourself and your horse—and that fine blue dagger that hangs at your side.”

Vasya’s lips parted in surprise. Kasyan was tossing back his own wine. “I was here before,” he said. “Here in this very palace. Long ago. I was looking for something. Something I’d lost. Lost. Lost to me. Almost. Not quite. Do you think I will find it again, Vasya?” His eyes were blurred and shining and faraway. He reached for her, pulled her nearer. Vasya knew her first jolt of unease.

“Listen, Kasyan Lutovich—” Vasya began.

She felt him go rigid, and felt him, indeed, listening, but not to her. Vasya fell silent, and slowly she also grew aware of a silence: an old, small silence, gathering beneath the roar and clatter of the feast, a silence that slowly filled with the soft rushing of a winter wind.

Vasya forgot Kasyan altogether. It was as though a skin had been plucked from her eyes. Into the stinks and smokes and noise of this boyars’ feast in Moscow, another world had come creeping, unnoticed, to feast with its people.

Under the table, a creature dressed in magnificent rags, with a potbelly and a long mustache, was busily sweeping up crumbs. Domovoi, Vasya thought. It was Dmitrii’s domovoi.

A tiny flossy-haired woman stood on Dmitrii’s table, skipping between the dishes and sometimes kicking over an unwary man’s cup. That was the kikimora—for the domovoi sometimes has a wife.

A rustle of wings high above; Vasya looked up for an instant into a woman’s unblinking eyes before she vanished in the smoke of the upper walls. Vasya felt a chill, for the woman-headed bird is the face of fate.

Seen and unseen alike, Vasya felt the weight of their gazes. They are watching, they are waiting—why?

Then Vasya raised her eyes to the doorway, and saw Morozko there.

He stood in a pool of dim torchlight. Behind him, the firelight streamed out into the night. In shape and in coloring, he might have been a man in truth, except for his bare head and beardless face, and the snow on his clothes that did not melt. He was dressed in a blue like winter twilight, rimed and edged with frost. His black hair lifted and stirred with a pine-tasting wind that came dancing and cleared a little of the fumes from the hall.

The music freshened; men sat straighter on their benches. But no one seemed to see him.

Save Vasya. She stared at the frost-demon, as at an apparition.

The chyerti turned. The bird above spread her vast wings. The domovoi had stopped his sweeping. His wife had come to a halt; they all stood deathly still.

Vasya made her way down the center of the hall, between raucous tables, between the watching spirits, to where Morozko stood watching her come, a faint, wry curve to his mouth.

“How came you here?” she whispered. So near him, she smelled snow and years and the pure, wild night.

He lifted a brow at the watching chyerti. “Am I not permitted to join the throng?” he asked.

“But why would you wish to?” she asked him. “There is no snow here, and no wild places. Are you not the winter-king?”

“The sun-feast is older than this city,” Morozko replied. “But it is not older than I. They once strangled maidens in the snow on this night, to summon me and also to bid me go, and leave them the summer.” His eyes measured her. “There are no sacrifices now. But I still come to the feasting sometimes.” His eyes were paler than stars and more remote, but they rested on the red faces all about them with a cold tenderness. “These are still my people.”

Vasya said nothing. She was thinking of the dead girl in the fairy tale, a moralizing story for children on cold nights, to mask a history of blood.

“It marks the waning of my power, this feast,” Morozko added mildly. “Soon it will be spring, and I will stay in my own forest, where the snow does not melt.”

“Have you come for a strangled maiden, then?” asked Vasya, a chill in her voice.

“Why?” he asked. “Will there be one?”

A pause while they looked at each other. Then—“I would believe anything of this mad city,” said Vasya, pushing the strangeness aside. She did not look again at the years in his eyes. “I will not see you, will I?” she asked. “When it is spring?”

He said nothing; he had turned away from her. His frowning glance flicked all around the hall.

Vasya followed his gaze. She thought she glimpsed Kasyan, watching them. But when she tried to see him full, Kasyan was not there.

Morozko sighed and the starry glance withdrew. “Nothing,” he said, almost to himself. “I twitch at shadows.” He turned again to look at her. “No, you will not see me,” he said. “For I am not, in spring.”

It was the old, faint sorrow in his face that prompted her to ask then, formally, “Will you sit at the high table this night, winter-king?” She spoiled the effect by adding in practical tones, “The boyars are all falling off their benches by now; there is room.”

Morozko laughed, but she thought he looked surprised. “I have been a vagabond in the halls of men, but it has been a long time—long and long—since I was invited to the feasting.”

“Then I invite you,” said Vasya. “Though this is not my hall.”

They both turned to look at the high table. Indeed, some of the men had fallen off the bench and lay snoring, but the ones still upright had invited women to sit beside them. Their wives had all gone to bed. The Grand Prince had two girls, one on each arm. He caught one girl’s breast in his broad palm, and Vasya’s face heated. Beside her, Morozko said, voice threaded with suppressed laughter, “Well, I will defer my feast. Will you ride with me instead, Vasya?”

All about them thrummed the churn and the reek, shouts and half-screamed singing. Suddenly Moscow stifled her. She had had enough of the musty palaces, hard eyes, deception, disappointments…

All around, the chyerti watched.

“Yes,” Vasya said.

Morozko gestured, elegantly, toward the doors, then followed her out into the night.

SOLOVEY SAW THEM FIRST and loosed a ringing neigh. Beside him stood Morozko’s white mare, a pale ghost against the snow. Zima cowered against the fence, watching the newcomers.

Vasya ducked between the bars of the fence, murmured reassurance to the filly, and leaped onto Solovey’s familiar back, heedless of her fine clothes.

Morozko mounted the white mare and laid a hand on her neck.

All around were the high bars of the paddock. Vasya set her horse at them. Solovey cleared the fence, the white mare only a stride behind. Overhead the last of the cloud-haze blew away, and the living stars shone down.

They passed the prince of Serpukhov’s gate like wraiths. Below them, the kremlin-gate was open still, in honor of festival-night, and the posad below the kremlin proper was full of red hearth-light and slurred singing.

But Vasya had no care for hearths or songs. The other, older world had hold of her now, with its clean beauty, its mysteries, its savagery. They galloped unremarked through the kremlin-gate, and the horses swung to the right, racing between the feast-filled houses. Then the sound of the horses’ hooves changed, and the river unrolled ribbon-like before them. The smoke of the city fell behind, and all around was snow and clear moonlight.

Vasya was still more than half-drunk, despite the cleansing shock of the night air. She cried aloud, and Solovey’s stride lengthened; then they were galloping down the length of the Moskva. The two horses raced stride for stride across ice and silver snow, and Vasya laughed, teeth bared against the wind.

Morozko rode beside her.

They galloped a long time. When Vasya had ridden enough, she drew Solovey to a walk, and on impulse dived, still laughing, into a snowbank. Sweating under her heavy clothes, she wrenched off both hat and hood and bared her tousled black head to the night.

Morozko pulled up when Solovey halted and dropped lightly onto the river-ice. He had raced with a mad glee to match hers, but now there was something gathered and careful in his expression. “So you are a lord’s son now,” Morozko said.

Some of Vasya’s forgetful ease faded. She got up, brushing herself off. “I like being a lord. Why was I ever born a girl?”

A blue gleam, from beneath veiled lids. “You are none so ill as a girl.”

It was the wine—only the wine—that brought heat to her face. Her mood changed. “Is that all there is for me, then? To be a ghost—someone real and not real? I like being a young lord. I could stay here and help the Grand Prince. I could train horses, and manage men, and wield a sword. But I really cannot, for they will have my secret in time.”

She turned abruptly. The starlight shone in her open eyes. “If I cannot be a lord, I can still be a traveler. I want to ride to the ends of the world, if Solovey will bear me. I would see the green land beyond the sunset, the island—”

“Buyan?” Morozko murmured, from behind her. “Where the waves beat upon a rocky shore, and the wind smells of cold stone and orange blossom? Ruled by a swan-maiden with sea-gray eyes? The land of the fairy tale? Is that what you want?”

The heat of the wine and the wild ride were dimming now, and all around was the deathly hush before the dawn wind rises. Vasya shivered suddenly, cloaked in wolfskin and in the skeins of her black hair. “Is that why you came?” she asked, not turning around. “To tempt me from Moscow? Or are you going to tell me that I am better off here, dressed as a girl, married? Why did the chyerti come to the feasting? Why was the gamayun waiting above—yes, I know what the bird means. What is happening?”

“Are we not permitted to feast with the people?”

She said nothing. She moved again, pacing like a cat in a cage despite the sweep of ice and forest and sky. “I want freedom,” she said at length, almost to herself. “But I also want a place and a purpose. I am not sure I can have either, let alone both. And I do not want to live a lie. I am hurting my brother and sister.” She stopped abruptly and turned. “Can you solve this riddle for me?”

Morozko raised an eyebrow. The dawn wind made eddies of the snow at the horses’ feet. “Am I an oracle?” he asked her coldly. “Can I not come to a feast, ride in the moonlight, without being called on to hear the plaints of Russian maidens? What care I for your little mysteries, or your brother’s conscience? Here is my answer: that you ought not to listen to fairy tales. I spoke truly once: Your world does not care what you want.”

Vasya pressed her lips together. “My sister said the same thing. But what about you? Do you care?”

He fell silent. Clouds were massing overhead. The mare shivered her skin all over.

“You can mock,” Vasya continued, angry now in turn, stepping closer, and closer still. “But you live forever. Perhaps you don’t want anything, or care about anything. And yet—you are here.”

He said nothing.

“Should I live out my life as a false lord, until they find me out and put me in a convent?” she demanded. “Should I run away? Go home? Never see my brothers again? Where do I belong? I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. And I have eaten in your house, and nearly died in your arms, and you rode with me tonight and—I hoped you might know.”

The word sounded foolish even as she said it. She bit her lip. The silence stretched out.

“Vasya,” he said.

“Don’t. You never mean it,” she said, drawing away. “You are immortal, and it is only a game—”

His answer was not in words, but his hands, perhaps, spoke for him when his fingertips found the pulse behind her jaw. She did not move. His eyes were cold and still: pale stars to make her lost. “Vasya,” he said again, low and—almost ragged, into her ear. “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.

“It is all I have,” he said. Then he slid his fingers through her hair and kissed her.

She made a sound like a sob, anger and wanting together. Then her arms went round him.

She had never been kissed before, not thus. Not long and—deliberately. She didn’t know how—but he taught her. Not with words, no: with his mouth, and his fingertips, and a feeling that did not have words. A touch, dark and exquisite, that breathed along her skin.

So she clung and her bones loosened and her whole body lit with cool fire. Even your brothers would call you damned now, she thought, but she utterly did not care. A light wind sent the last of the clouds scudding across the sky, and the stars shone clear on them both.

When he drew away at last, she was wide-eyed, flushed, burning. His eyes were a brilliant, perfect, flame-heart blue, and he could have been human.

He let her go abruptly.

“No,” he said.

“I do not understand.” Her hand was at her mouth, her body trembling, wary as the girl he had once thrown across his saddlebow.

“No,” he said. He dragged a hand through his dark curls. “I did not mean—”

Dawning hurt. She crossed her arms. “Did you not? Why did you come, really?”

He ground his teeth. He had turned away from her, his hands clenched hard. “Because I wanted to tell you—”

He broke off, looked into her face. “There is a shadow over Moscow,” he said. “Yet whenever I try to look deeper, I am turned aside. I do not know what is causing it. Were you not—”

“Were I not what?” Vasya asked, hating her voice as it creaked painfully from her throat.

A pause. The blue flame deepened in his eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” said Morozko. “But, Vasya—”

It seemed for a moment that he really meant to speak, that some secret would come pouring out. But he sighed and closed his lips. “Vasya, be wary,” he said in the end. “Whatever you choose, be wary.”

Vasya did not really hear him. She stood there cold and tense and burning all at once. No? Why no?

If she’d been older, she would have seen the conflict in his eyes. “I will,” she said. “Thank you for your warning.” She turned, with deliberate steps, and swung onto Solovey’s back.

She had already galloped away, and so she did not see that he stood for a long time, watching her go.

Later, much later, in the chill and bitter hour before dawn, a red light like a flash of fire streaked across the sky over Moscow. The few who saw it called it a portent. But most did not see it. They were asleep, dreaming of summer suns.

Kasyan Lutovich saw it. He smiled, and he left his room in Dmitrii’s palace to go down into the dooryard and make his final arrangements.

Morozko would have known the flash for what it was. But he did not see, for he was galloping alone, in the wild places of the world, face set and shut against the lonely night.

20. Fire and Darkness

A fine yellowish sunlight pooled into Vasya’s little room the next day. She awakened at its coy touch and rolled to her feet. Her head throbbed, and she wished heartily that she had shouted less, run less, drunk less, and wept less the night before.

Tonight beat like a drum in her skull. She would tell Dmitrii what she knew, or suspected, of Chelubey. She would whisper her farewells to Olga and Marya, but softly, that they could not hear and call her back. Then she would go. South—south to where the air was warm and no frost-demons could trouble her nights. South. The world was wide, and her family had suffered enough.

But first—this horse-race.

Vasya dressed quickly; cloak and boots went on over her old shirt and jacket and fleece-lined leggings. Then she ran out into the sun. A little warmth breathed down from the sky when she turned her face to the light. Soon the snowdrops would bloom in the hidden places and winter would begin to end.

A flurrying snow, just at dawn, had covered the dooryard. Vasya went at once to Solovey’s paddock, boots crunching.

The stallion’s eye was bright and he breathed like a war-horse before the charge. The filly Zima stood calmly now beside him.

“Try not to win by too much,” Vasya told Solovey, seeing the wildness in him.“I don’t want to be accused of bewitching my horse.”

Solovey only shook his mane and pawed the snow.

Vasya, sighing, said, “And we are leaving tonight, when the revel is at its peak. So you must not exhaust yourself racing—we must be far away before dawn.”

That steadied the horse a bit. She brushed his coat, muttering plans for getting them both, along with her saddlebags, out of the city when darkness fell.

A red edge of sun was just showing over the city walls as Kasyan came into Olga’s dooryard, dressed in silver and gray and fawn, with embroidery on the tilted toes of his boots. He halted at the paddock-fence. Vasya glanced up to find him watching her.

She bore his stare easily. She could bear any gaze after Morozko’s the night before.

“Well met, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan said. A little sweat curled the hair at his temples. Vasya wondered if he was nervous. What man wouldn’t be, who had agreed to pit some ordinary horse against Solovey? The thought almost made her smile.

“A fair morning, lord,” Vasya returned, bowing.

Kasyan spared a glance at Solovey. “A groom could make the horse ready, you know. You needn’t dirty yourself.”

“Solovey would not take a groom’s hand,” Vasya said shortly.

He shook his head. “I meant no offense, Vasya. Surely we know each other better than that.”

Did they? She nodded.

“Fortunate boy,” Kasyan said, with another glance at Solovey. “To be so beloved of a horse. Why is that, do you think?”

“Porridge,” Vasya said. “Solovey cannot resist it. What have you come to say to me, Kasyan Lutovich?”

At that, Kasyan leaned forward. Vasya had an arm hooked over Solovey’s back. The horse’s nostrils flared; he stirred uneasily. Kasyan’s eyes caught hers and held them. “I like you, Vasilii Petrovich,” he said. “I have liked you from the moment I saw you, before I knew who you were. You must come south to Bashnya Kostei in the spring. My horses number as the blades of grass, and you may ride them all.”

“I would like that,” said Vasya, though she knew she would be far away in the spring. “If the Grand Prince gives me leave.” For a moment she wished it were true. Horses like blades of grass…

Kasyan’s eye ran over her as though he could dive into her soul and steal her secrets. “Come home with me,” he said low, a new emotion in his voice. “I will give you all you desire. I must only tell you—”

What did he mean? He never finished. At that moment, several horses came rattling through the gate, and a small cavalcade galloped, shouting, across the dooryard, pursued by the angry steward.

Vasya wondered what Kasyan had meant. Tell her what?

Then the young boyars of Dmitrii’s following were all around; the ones who had called their insults in the hall, and jostled her in challenge. They managed their plunging horses between their fur-clad knees, and their bits and stirrups made a warlike music. “Boy!” they called, and “Wolf-cub! Vasya!” They shouted their ribald jokes. One reached down and elbowed Kasyan, asking how it would feel to be beaten by that stripling boy, whose coat hung off him like laundry and whose horse wore no bridle.

Kasyan laughed. Vasya wondered if she had imagined the raw feeling in his voice.

At length the young boyars were persuaded to depart. Outside that snow-filled paddock, outside Vladimir’s wooden gates, the city shook itself awake. A shriek rang out from the tower above, quelled by a slap and a sharp rejoinder. The air smelled of wood-smoke and hundreds of cakes baking.

Kasyan lingered still, a line between his red brows. “Vasya,” he began again. “Last night—”

“Have you no horse to see to yourself?” Vasya asked sharply. “We are rivals now; are we to share confidences?”

Kasyan, mouth twisted, looked her in the face a moment. “Will you—” he began.

But again he was interrupted by a visitor, this one dressed plainly as a sparrow. His hood was up against the chill, his face stern. Vasya swallowed, turned, and bowed. “Brother,” she said.

“Forgive me, Kasyan Lutovich,” said Sasha. “I wish to speak to Vasya alone.”

Sasha looked as though he had been awake a great while, or had never gone to bed.

“God be with you,” Vasya said to Kasyan in polite farewell.

Kasyan looked for a moment taken aback. Then he said, in a cold, strange voice, “You would have done better to heed me,” and stalked away.

A small silence fell when he had gone. That man smells strange, said Solovey.

“Kasyan?” Vasya asked. “How?”

Solovey shook his mane. Dust, he said. And lightning.

“What did Kasyan mean?” Sasha asked her.

“I have no idea,” Vasya replied honestly. She peered into her brother’s face. “What have you been doing?”

“I?” he said. He leaned wearily on the fence. “I am looking for rumors about this man Chelubey, the ambassador of Mamai. Great lords do not just emerge from the woods. In all this city someone should have heard tell of him, even fourth-hand. But for all his magnificence, I can get no news at all.”

“And so?” Vasya rejoined. Green eyes met gray.

“Chelubey has the letter, the horses, the men,” said Sasha slowly. “But he has not the reputation.”

“So you suspect the ambassador is a bandit now, do you?” Vasya asked childishly. “Do you believe me at last?”

Her brother sighed. “If I can come to no better explanation, then yes, I will believe you. Although I have never heard of such a thing.” He paused and added, almost to himself, “If a bandit—or whoever he is—has duped us all so thoroughly, then he must have had help. Where did he get money and scribes and papers and horses and finery to pass himself off as a Tatar lord? Or would the Khan send us such a man? Surely not.”

“Who would possibly help him?” Vasya asked.

Sasha shook his head slowly. “When the race is done, and Dmitrii Ivanovich can be persuaded to heed, you will tell him everything.”

“Everything?” she asked. “Kasyan said we needed proof.”

“Kasyan,” retorted her brother, “is too clever for his own good.”

Their eyes met a second time.

“Kasyan?” she said, answering her brother’s look. “Impossible. Those bandits burned his own villages. He came to Dmitrii Ivanovich to ask for help.”

“Yes,” said Sasha slowly. His face was still troubled. “That is true.”

“I will tell Dmitrii all I know,” said Vasya in a rush. “But—afterward—I am going to leave Moscow. I will need your help for that. You must look after the filly—my Zima—and be kind to her.”

Her brother stiffened, looked into her face. “Vasya, there is nowhere to go.”

She smiled. “There is the whole world, brother. I have Solovey.”

When he said nothing, she added, with impatience to mask pain, “You know I am right. You cannot send me to a convent; I am not going to marry anyone. I cannot be a lord in Moscow, but I will not be a maiden. I am going away.”

She could not look at him and started instead to comb Solovey’s mane.

“Vasya,” he began.

She still would not look at him.

He made a grinding sound of irritation and stepped between the bars of the fence. “Vasya, you cannot just—”

She turned on him. “I can,” she said. “I will. Lock me up if you want to hinder me.”

She saw him taken aback and then realized that tears had sprung into her eyes.

“It is unnatural,” Sasha said, but in a different voice.

“I know,” she said, resolved, fierce, miserable. “I am sorry.”

Even as she spoke, the great cathedral-bell tolled. It was time. “I will tell you the true story,” Vasya said. “Of Father’s death. Of the Bear. All of it. Before I go.”

“Later,” was all Sasha said, after a pause. “We will talk later. Watch for tricks, little sister. Be as careful as you can. I—I will pray for you.”

Vasya smiled. “Kasyan has no horse, I’ll wager, to match Solovey,” she said. “But I will be glad of your prayers.”

The stallion snorted, tossing his head, and Sasha’s grim expression softened. They embraced with sudden ferocity, and Vasya was enveloped in the childhood-familiar smells of her older brother. She wiped her wet eyes surreptitiously on his shoulder. “Go with God, sister,” murmured Sasha into her ear. Then he stepped back, raising a hand to bless her and the horse. “Do not take the turns too fast. And do not lose.”

A new crowd of watchers had begun to gather at the paddock-fence: the grooms of Olga’s household. Vasya vaulted to Solovey’s back. The wise ones got themselves out of the way. The fools stood gaping, and Vasya set Solovey at the fence. He cleared it, and was obliged as well to leap several heads, when their owners did not move. Sasha swung into Tuman’s saddle. Brother and sister trotted together through the gate.

Vasya looked back, just as she passed through, and she thought she saw a queenly figure, watching from a tower-window while a smaller one clung to her skirts and yearned toward the light. Then she and her brother were out in the street.

Crowds came thronging behind them. Vasya thrilled to the people’s cheers; she lifted a hand to the crowd, and the people roared in answer. Peresvet! she heard, and Vasilii the Brave!

From the direction of his palace, the Grand Prince of Moscow appeared, trailing boyars and attendants, preceded by the roars of the crowd. “Are you ready, Vasya?” demanded Dmitrii, falling in beside them. His train fell back, making room. All the great lords of Moscow jostled for position behind. “I have a great wager riding on you.”

“I am ready,” Vasya returned. “Or Solovey is, at least, and I will cling to his neck and try not to disgrace him.”

Indeed, Solovey was glorious on the bright morning, with his coat like a dark mirror, his fall of mane, his unbridled head. The prince looked the horse over and laughed. “Mad boy,” he said with affection.

The boyars behind looked jealously at the clever-handed siblings that had Dmitrii’s favor.

“If you win,” Dmitrii told Vasya, “I will fill your purse with gold and we will find you a pretty wife to bear your children.”

Vasya gulped and nodded.

THE NOISE DROPPED. VASYA looked back up the snowy street, to where Kasyan came riding, down from the top of the hill, alone.

Dmitrii, Vasya, Sasha, and all the boyars went very still.

Vasya had seen Solovey in his glory, running over the snow, and she had watched Morozko’s white mare rearing in the dawn light. But she had never seen a horse to equal the golden creature Kasyan was riding.

The mare’s coat was a true, brilliant fire-color, dappled on the flank. Her mane poured over her neck and shoulder, only a shade or two lighter. She was long-limbed and tautly muscled, taller even than Solovey.

On the mare’s head was fastened a golden bridle, golden-bitted, attached to golden reins. With these Kasyan held her, nose bowed nearly to her breast. The mare looked as though she would take flight were it not for her rider’s grip. Her every movement was perfection, every turn of her head and toss of her silver-gold mane.

The bit had jagged points that thrust from her mouth. Vasya hated the bridle on sight.

The mare balked at the crowd, and her rider kicked her forward. She went, reluctantly, her tail lashing as she came. She tried to rear, but Kasyan brought her down and sent her bounding ahead with a spur to the flank.

The crowd did not cheer at their approach, but stayed motionless, entranced by the light and lovely footfalls.

Solovey’s ears tilted forward. That one will be fast, he said, and pawed the ground.

Vasya straightened on Solovey’s back. Her face stilled and set. This mare was no more an ordinary horse than Solovey. Where had Kasyan gotten her?

Well, she thought, it will be a race after all.

The golden mare halted. Her rider bowed, smiling. “God be with you, Dmitrii Ivanovich—Brother Aleksandr—Vasilii Petrovich.” In Kasyan’s face was joyful mischief. “Here is my lady. Zolotaya, I call her. It suits her, does it not?”

“It does,” said Vasya. “Why have I never seen her before?”

Kasyan’s smile did not waver, but something darkened in his eyes. “She is—precious to me, and I do not ride her often. But I thought it would be worth it to race her against your Solovey.”

Vasya bowed distractedly and did not reply. She had a glimpse of another domovoi, sitting wispily on a house roof; overhead she seemed to feel the rush of wings, and saw the bird-woman gazing at her from a perch atop a tower. A strange feeling began to creep down her spine.

Beside her, Dmitrii said, after a moment’s speechlessness: “Well.” He clapped Vasya on the back. “We will have a race, by God.”

Vasya nodded, the princes grinned and laughed. Just like that, the tension was broken. It was a blazing winter day, the last day of festival, with all Moscow turned out to cheer them. They clattered toward the kremlin-gate, and Kasyan fell in beside her. The crowd roared, crying encouragement to the horses bright and dark.

Down they went, through the kremlin-gate and out into the posad.

The whole city thronged the wall-top, the riverbank, the glittering fields. Daring boys choked the trees on the far side of the river and sent snow like water down onto the watchers below. “The boy!” Vasya heard. “The boy! He’s a feather, nothing at all—that big bay brute will carry him through.”

“Nay!” cried an answering voice. “Nay! Look at that mare, just look at her!”

The mare shook her head and jogged in place. Foam spattered her lips, and her every movement broke Vasya’s heart.

The procession of riders crossed the empty market-square and came down to the river. “Godspeed, Vasya,” said Dmitrii. “Ride fast, cousin.”

So saying, the prince spurred his horse away to a place by the finish. Sasha, with a lingering glance at Vasya, followed.

Solovey and the golden mare went on more sedately toward the start, their riders knee to knee, their horses nearly of a height. The bay stallion slanted an ear and blew peaceably at the golden mare, but she only pinned her ears and tried to snap, fighting the golden bridle.

The wide stretch of frozen river dazzled in the sun. On the far side, at the start and end of the race, the lords and bishops were gathered, furred and velveted, set like jewels in the river-road’s white, watching the two racers approach.

“Would you like to wager, Vasya?” asked Kasyan suddenly. The eagerness in his face echoed the eagerness in hers.

“A wager?” Vasya asked in surprise. She nudged Solovey out of the golden mare’s range. Up close, the fight in the other horse was palpable, like heat-shimmer.

Kasyan was grinning. In his eyes was a clear and unguarded triumph. “A wager,” he said. “I have already seen your gambler’s soul.”

“If I win,” she said impulsively, “give me your horse.”

Both Solovey’s ears slanted in her direction, and the golden mare’s ear twitched.

Kasyan’s lips thinned, but still there was that laughter in his eyes. “A great prize,” he said. “A great prize indeed. You are in the horse-collecting business now, I see, Vasya.” He put a soft intimacy into her name that brought her up short. “Very well,” he continued. “I will wager my horse against your hand in marriage.”

Her shocked gaze flew to his face.

And found him bending over the mare’s neck, snorting with laughter. “Do you think we are all as blind as the Grand Prince?”

She thought, No. Then—Admit it, deny it, has he known all the time? But before she could speak at all, he had urged the mare toward the starting line, his laughter still floating back, diamond-hard, over the still morning air.

The horses thudded down onto the ice, toward the gleaming ranks of people. The course had been marked out, twice around the city and back along the river, to where the Grand Prince waited.

Vasya’s breath steamed out between her lips. He knows. What does he want?

Solovey had gone stiff beneath her, his head up, his back rigid. A wild impulse surged through her: to run away and hide, where evil could never find her. No, she thought. No, better to face him. If he means wickedness, I will do no good by running. But to Solovey, she murmured grimly, “We will win. Whatever happens, we must win. If we win, he will never tell my secret. For he is a man, and he will never admit that a girl beat him.”

The horse’s ears eased back in answer.

As the horses went further out onto that great stretch of river-ice, the shouting, the wagering slowly went silent. In the stillness, the only movement was of smoke, spiraling against the pure sky.

No more time for talk. The start had been scratched in the pebbled snow, and a blue-lipped bishop, cap and cross black against the innocent sky, waited to bless the racers.

The blessing said, Kasyan bared his teeth at Vasya and spun his mare away. Vasya nudged Solovey, who turned in the opposite direction. The two horses made circles and came up walking side by side to the start. She could feel a ferocity gathering in the stallion beneath her, a hunger for speed, and she felt a loosening, an answering savagery in her own breast.

“Solovey,” she whispered, with love, and she knew the horse understood. She had a final impression of white sun and white snow and a sky the precise color of Morozko’s eyes. Then the two horses broke at the same instant. Any words Vasya might have said were whipped away and lost with the wind of their speed and the throat-shattering shriek of the crowd.

THE FIRST PART OF THE RACE took them straight down the river, where they would turn sharply to cut across the thick snow at the city’s foot. Solovey bounded along like a hare, and Vasya whooped as they raced for the first time past the crowd: a howl that defied them, defied her rival, defied the world.

The people’s answering cries floated over the snow and then it was as though the two horses were alone, running along the flat stride for stride.

The mare ran like a star falling, and Vasya realized, with disbelief, that on the open ground, she was faster than Solovey. The mare pulled ahead by a stride, and then another. The foam flew from her lips as her rider lashed her with the heavy rein. Could she keep it up, twice around the city? Vasya sat quiet and forward on Solovey’s back and the horse ran fast but easily. They were coming to the turn; Vasya could see the ice blue and slick. She sat up. Solovey gathered himself and turned up the bank without skidding.

The golden mare was going so fast that she nearly missed it; Kasyan hauled her around and she stumbled, but recovered, long ears flat to her head, while her rider shouted her on. Vasya whispered to Solovey and he took a short stride, gathered his quarters beneath him, and sprang smoothly to the right, gaining ground. His head hung level with the mare’s hip. The mare was half-frantic and floundering with her rider’s steady whipping. Solovey ran in great leaps, and soon they were drawing ahead; now Kasyan’s stirrup was level with Solovey’s heel.

Kasyan whooped and saluted her, teeth bared, when they passed him, and Vasya, despite her fear, felt answering laughter rise in her own throat. Fear and thought were all gone; there was only the speed, the wind and cold, the perfect heave and surge of her horse beneath her. She leaned forward, whispering encouragement to Solovey. The horse’s ears tilted toward her, and then he found a speed greater still. They were nearly a horse-length in front, and Vasya had frozen tears running down her face. The wind dried her lips and cracked them. Her teeth ached with cold. To the right again, and then they were in the thick snow, running beneath the kremlin-wall. Shouts rained on them from the wall-top. Down and down, faster and faster, and with her legs and her weight and her soft voice, Vasya bade the horse keep his feet under himself, his head forward and driving. Go, she told him. Go!

They hit the ice again with the speed of a storm, ahead of their rivals, and now there was the sound of the boyars cheering. They had made the first circle.

Some of the younger men were galloping their horses along the ice, racing the speeding Solovey, but even their fresh horses could not keep up and they fell back and away. Vasya shouted laughing abuse at them, and they answered in kind; then she risked a look behind.

The golden mare had opened up when she came back onto the river, running over the ice faster than Vasya had ever seen a horse run, chased by the howls of the watchers. She was gaining on Solovey again, foam speckling her breast. Vasya leaned forward and whispered to her horse. The stallion found something in him: a breath, a swifter stride still, and when the mare caught him, he matched her. This time they hit the turn side by side, and Kasyan had learned his lesson; he checked the mare a stride before, so that she would not slide on the ice.

No possibility of speech, of thought. Like horses yoked to a wagon, the mare and the stallion circled the city side by side, galloping at full stretch but neither one gaining, until they were racing again down the twisting road of the posad, down again toward the riverbank and the end of the race.

But—there—a sledge—a heedless sledge halted too soon, fouling their path. People all around it, shouting, heaving. The riders had circled the city faster than these fools had thought possible, and so the way was blocked.

Kasyan glanced at her with joyful invitation, and Vasya couldn’t help it, she grinned back at him. Down they tore to the sledge heaped high, and Vasya was counting Solovey’s strides now, a hand on his neck. Three, two, and there was not room for another. The horse heaved himself up and over, tucking his hooves. He came down lightly on the slick snow and launched himself down the final stretch of river, toward the end of the race.

The mare leaped the sledge a stride behind; she hit the ice like a bird, then they were racing along the flat with all Moscow screaming. For the first time, Vasya cried aloud to Solovey: shouted, and she felt him answer, but the mare equaled him, tearing along, wild-eyed, and the two horses ran down the ice together, their riders’ knees jostling.

Vasya did not see the hand until it was too late.

One minute Kasyan was riding, fingers urgent on the reins. The next he had reached over and seized the ties that bound her hood, seized them and wrenched them apart, so that the sheepskin cap tumbled away. Her hair tumbled out, her plait raveled, and then the black banner of her hair was flying loose for all to see.

Solovey could not have stopped even if he had wished to. He drove on heedless of everything. Vasya, her battle-madness gone cold and dead, could only cling to him, panting.

The stallion thrust his head in front, then his shoulder, and then they stormed past the finish to a stunned silence. Vasya knew that, win or lose the race, Kasyan had beaten her at a game she had not known she was playing.

SHE SAT UP. SOLOVEY SLOWED. The stallion was heaving for breath, spent. Even if she had wanted to escape, the horse could not manage it now.

Vasya dropped to the ground, getting her weight off him, and turned back to face the crowd of boyars, of bishops, and the Grand Prince himself, who stood looking at her in horrified silence.

Her hair wrapped her body, snagged on the fur of her cloak. Kasyan had already slid off his golden mare. The horse stood still, her head low, blood and foam dripping from the tender corners of her mouth, where the bit had cut deep.

Vasya, in the midst of horror, knew a sudden fury at that golden bridle. Jerkily, she set a hand on the headstall, meaning to rip it off.

But Kasyan’s gloved hand shot out, knocked her fingers away, and hauled her back.

Solovey squealed and reared, striking out, but men with ropes—Kasyan’s men—beat the exhausted horse away. Vasya was thrust onto her knees in the snow in front of the Grand Prince, her hair hanging all about her face and all Moscow watching.

Dmitrii was salt-white above his pale beard. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What is this?” All about him his boyars were staring.

“Please,” said Vasya, yanking at the hand that held her. “Let me go to Solovey.” Behind her, the horse squealed again. Men were shouting. She twisted around to look. They had flung ropes over his neck, but the stallion was fighting them.

Kasyan solved the problem. He hauled Vasya to her feet, put a knife to her throat, and said very softly, “I’ll kill her.” He spoke so low that none heard except for the girl and the keen-eared stallion.

Solovey went deathly still.

He knew everything, Vasya thought. That she was a girl, that Solovey understood men’s speech. His hand around her arm was going to leave fingermarks.

Kasyan addressed Solovey, softly. “Let them lead you to the Grand Prince’s stable,” he said. “Go quiet, and she will live and be returned to you. You have my word.”

Solovey shrilled defiance. He kicked out and a man fell gasping into the snow. Vasya. She read the word in the stallion’s wild eye. Vasya.

Kasyan’s hand tightened on her arm until she gasped and the knife beneath her jaw dug in until she felt the skin just split…

“Run!” Vasya cried to the horse desperately. “Do not be a prisoner!”

But the horse had already dropped his head in defeat. Vasya felt Kasyan let out a satisfied breath.

“Take him,” he said.

Vasya cried out in wordless protest, but now grooms were running up to put a bridle with a twisted chain on Solovey’s head. She tasted tears of rage. The stallion let himself be led away, head low, still exhausted. Kasyan’s knife disappeared, but he did not release her arm. He spun her around to face the Grand Prince, the crowd of boyars. “You should have listened this morning,” he murmured into her ear.

Sasha was still mounted; Tuman had bulled her way onto the ice, and her brother had a sword in his hand, his hood cast back from his pale face. His eyes were on the trickle of blood running down the side of her throat.

“Let her go,” Sasha said.

Dmitrii’s guards had drawn their swords; Kasyan’s men circled her brother on their fine horses. Blades dazzled in the indifferent sun.

“I’m all right, Sasha,” Vasya called to her brother. “Don’t—”

Kasyan cut her off. “I suspected,” he said in an even voice, directing his words to the Grand Prince. The half-formed brawl on the ice paused. “I only knew for sure today, Dmitrii Ivanovich.” Kasyan’s expression was grave, except for the glint in his eyes. “There is a great lie and a gross immodesty here, if not worse.” He turned to Vasya, even touched her cheek with a burning finger. “But surely it is the fault of her lying brother, who wished to dupe a prince,” he added. “I would not blame the girl, so young is she, and perhaps half-mad.”

Vasya said nothing; she was looking for a way out. Solovey gone, her brother surrounded by armed men…If any of the chyerti were there, she couldn’t see them.

“Morozko,” she whispered, reluctantly, furiously, despairingly. “Please—”

Kasyan cuffed her across the mouth. She tasted blood on a split lip; his expression had turned venomous. “None of that,” he spat.

“Bring her here,” said Dmitrii in a strangled voice.

Before Kasyan could move, Sasha sheathed his sword, slid from his mare’s back, and stepped toward the Grand Prince. A thicket of spears brought him to a halt. Sasha unbuckled his sword-belt, cast the blade into the snow, and showed his empty hands. The spears retreated a little. “Cousin,” Sasha said. At Dmitrii’s look of fury he changed it. “Dmitrii Ivanovich—”

“Did you know of this?” hissed Dmitrii. The prince’s face was naked with the shock of betrayal.

In Dmitrii’s face, for a moment, Vasya saw the plaintive phantom of a child who had loved and trusted her brother wholeheartedly, his illusions now dashed and broken. Vasya drew a breath that was almost a sob. Then the child was gone; there was only the Grand Prince of Moscow: solitary, master of his world.

“I knew,” replied Sasha, still in that calm voice. “I knew. I beg you will not punish my sister for it. She is young, she did not understand what she did.”

“Bring her here,” said Dmitrii again, gray eyes shuttered.

This time, Kasyan hauled her forward.

“Is this truly a woman?” Dmitrii demanded of Kasyan. “I will have no mistake. I cannot believe—”

That we fought bandits together, Vasya finished for him, silently. That we endured the snow, and the dark, and that I drank in your hall and offered you my service. All that Vasilii Petrovich did, for Vasilii Petrovich was not real. It is as though a ghost did it.

And indeed, looking into the bow-marks of strain bracketing Dmitrii’s mouth, it was as though Vasilii Petrovich had died.

“Very well,” said Kasyan.

Vasya did not know what was happening until she felt Kasyan’s hand on the ties of her cloak. And then she understood and threw herself at him, snarling. But Kasyan got a hand on her dagger before she could; he kicked her legs out from under her and pushed her facedown into the snow. A knife-blade—her own knife-blade—slid cold and precise down her back. “Be still, wild-cat,” Kasyan murmured while she thrashed, suppressed laughter in his voice. “I will cut you else.”

Dimly she heard Sasha, “No, Dmitrii Ivanovich, no, that is a true maid, that is my sister Vasilisa, I beg you will not—”

Kasyan pulled the cloth apart. Vasya jerked once at the claws of cold on her skin, and then Kasyan hauled her upright. His free hand ripped away jacket and shirt together, so that she was left half-naked before the eyes of the city.

Tears gathered in her eyes, of shock and shame. She shut them a moment. Stand. Do not faint. Do not cry.

The bitter air scoured her skin.

One of Kasyan’s hands ground the bones of her arm together; the other seized her hair, twisted it, and pulled it away from her face so that she had not even that to hide behind.

A noise rose from the watching crowd: of laughter mingled with righteous indignation.

Kasyan paused a moment, breathing into her ear. She felt his glance flicker over her breasts and throat and shoulders. Then the lord raised his eyes to the Grand Prince.

Vasya stood shaking, afraid for her brother, who had launched himself at the men hemming him in and been brought down by three, held hard in the snow.

The prince and his boyars stared with expressions ranging from bewilderment, horror, and rage to sniggering glee and dawning lust.

“A girl, as I said,” Kasyan continued, his reasonable voice at odds with the violent hands. “But an innocent fool, I think, and under the sway of her brother.” His sorrowful glance took in Sasha, kneeling, appalled, held by guards.

A murmur swept through the crowd, out and back. “Peresvet,” she heard, and “Sorcery. Witchcraft. No true monk.”

Dmitrii’s glance slid from her booted feet to her bared breasts. It stopped at her face and lingered there, without feeling.

“This girl must be punished!” cried one of the young boyars. “She and her brother have brought shame on all of us with their blasphemy. Let her be whipped; let her be burned. We will not suffer witches in our city.”

A howl of approval met his cry, and the blood drained slowly from Vasya’s face.

Another voice replied: not loud, but cracked with age, and decisive. “This is unseemly,” it said. The speaker was fat, his beard a fringe, and his voice calm against the gathering rage. Father Andrei, thought Vasya, putting a name to him. Hegumen of the monastery of the Archangel.

“Punishment need not be debated before all Moscow,” said the hegumen. His eyes flicked to the people seething on the riverbank. The shouts were growing louder, more insistent. “These will riot,” he added pointedly. “And perhaps endanger the innocent.”

Vasya was already cold and sick and frightened, but these words gave her a fresh jolt of terror.

Kasyan’s hand tightened on her arm, and Vasya, looking up, saw his flash of irritation. Did Kasyan want the people to riot?

“As you say,” said Dmitrii. He sounded suddenly weary. “You—girl.” His lip curled on the word. “You will go to a convent until we decide what to do with you.”

Vasya had her lips open on another protest—but it was Kasyan who spoke first. “Perhaps this poor girl would be easier with her sister,” he said. “Truly I think she is an innocent in her brother’s wicked plotting.”

Vasya saw the quick malice in his eyes, directed at Sasha. But it did not enter his voice.

“Very well,” said the Grand Prince flatly. “Convent or tower, it is all one. But I will put my own guards at the gate. And you, Brother Aleksandr, will be confined under guard in the monastery.”

“No!” cried Vasya. “Dmitrii Ivanovich, he did not—”

Kasyan twisted her arm once more, and Sasha met her eyes and shook his head very slightly. He put out his hands to be bound.

Vasya watched, shivering, as her brother was pulled away.

“Put the girl in a sledge,” Dmitrii said.

“Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya called again, ignoring Kasyan’s grip. Her eyes watered with the pain, but she was determined to speak. “You promised me friendship once. I beg you—”

The prince rounded on her with savage eyes. “I promised friendship to a liar, and to a boy that is dead,” he said. “Get her out of my sight.”

“Come, wild-cat,” Kasyan said in a soft voice. She no longer fought his grip. He seized her cloak from the snow, wrapped it about her, and dragged her away.

21. The Sorcerer’s Wife

Varvara was not slow to bring Olga the news. Indeed, she was the first to come clattering into the princess’s workroom, grim with the weight of disaster, snow in her faded plait.

Olga’s terem strained to bursting with women and their finery. This was their festival, there in that close-packed tower, where they ate and drank and impressed each other with silk brocades and headdresses and scents, listening to the roar of the revel outside.

Eudokhia sat nearest the oven, preening dourly. A few admirers sat about her, praising her pregnancy and begging favors. But even Eudokhia’s unborn child could not compete with this famous horse-race. A good deal of furtive, giggled betting had marked the morning, while the pious ones pinched their lips.

Will it be that handsome stripling—Olga’s younger brother—who carries the prize? they asked one another, laughing. Or the fire-haired prince, Kasyan, who—so the slaves say—has a smile like a saint’s and strips like a pagan god in the bathhouse? Kasyan was the general favorite, for half the maidens were in love with him.

“No!” Marya cried doughtily, while the women fed her cakes. “It will be my uncle Vasilii! He is the bravest and he has the greatest horse in all the world.”

The roar of the start seemed to shake the terem-walls, and the screaming of the race wrapped the city in noise. The women listened with heads close together, following the riders by the sounds of their passing.

Olga took Marya onto her lap and held her tightly.

Then the clamor died away. “It is over,” the women said.

It was not over. The noise started up again, louder than before, with a new and ugly note. This noise did not fade; it slipped nearer and nearer the tower, to curl around Olga’s walls like a rising tide.

On this tide, like a piece of flotsam, came Varvara, running. She slid into the workroom with well-feigned calm, went straight to Olga, and bent to whisper in her ear.

But though Varvara was first, though she was fast, she was not quick enough.

Word came up the stairs like a wave, breaking slowly, then all at once. No sooner had the slave whispered disaster in Olga’s ear than a murmur like a moan rose from the women, carried on the lips of other servants. “Vasya is a girl!” Eudokhia shrieked.

No time, no time for anything—certainly not for Olga to empty her tower—not even time to calm them.

“Coming here, you said?” Olga asked Varvara. She fought to think. Dmitrii Ivanovich must be in a rage. To send Vasya here would only tie Olga—and her husband—in with the deceit, would only inflame the Grand Prince more. Whose idea was that?

Kasyan, Olga thought. Kasyan Lutovich, the new player in this game: our mysterious lord. What better way to worm his way nearer the Grand Prince’s side? This will displace Sasha and my husband both. Fools, not to see it.

Well, that was their mistake, and she would have to make the best of it. What else could she do, a princess in a tower? Olga straightened her spine and put calm into her voice.

“Bid my women attend me,” she said to Varvara. “Prepare a chamber for Vasya.” She hesitated. “See that there is a bolt on the outside.” Olga had both hands laced over her belly, knuckles white. But she held her self-possession and would not relinquish it. “Take Masha with you,” she added. “See that she is kept out of the way.”

Marya’s small, wise imp’s face was full of alarm. “This is bad, isn’t it?” she asked her mother. “That they know that Vasya is a girl?”

“Yes,” said Olga. She had never lied to her children. “Go, child.”

Marya, white-faced and suddenly docile, followed Varvara out.

Word had passed among Olga’s guests with the speed of a new-lit fire. The more virtuous were gathering up their things, mouths pursed up small, preparatory to hurrying away.

But they fussed overlong with their headdresses and cloaks, with the lay of their veils, and that was not to be wondered at, for soon more steps—a great procession of steps—were heard on the stairs of Olga’s tower.

Every head in the workroom swiveled. The ones who’d been about to leave sat back down with suspicious alacrity.

The inner door opened, and two men of Dmitrii’s household stood in the doorway, holding Vasya by the arms. The girl hung between them, wrapped awkwardly in a cloak.

A sound of appalled delight ran among the women. Olga imagined them talking later, Did you see the girl, her torn clothes, her hair hanging loose? Oh, yes, I was there that day: the day of the ruin of the Princess of Serpukhov and Aleksandr Peresvet.

Olga kept her eyes on Vasya. She would have expected her sister to come in subdued—repentant, even—but (fool, this is Vasya) the girl was starry-eyed with rage. When the men flung her contemptuously to the floor, she rolled, turning her fall into something graceful. All the women gasped.

Vasya got to her feet, the stormy hair hanging all about her face and cloak. She tossed it back and stared down the scandalized room. Not a boy, but also as unlike the buttoned, laced, and tower-bred women as a cat from chickens.

The guards hovered a pace behind, leering at the girl’s slenderness and the glossy darkness of her hair. “You have finished your errand,” Olga snapped at them. “Go.”

They did not move. “She must be confined, by the Grand Prince’s orders,” said one.

Vasya shut her eyes for the barest instant.

Olga inclined her head, crossed her arms over a belly heavy with child, and—with a look that gave her a sudden and startling resemblance to her sister—she gazed coldly at the men until they squirmed. “Go,” she said again.

They hesitated, then turned and left, but not without a touch of insolence; they knew which way the wind was blowing. The set of their shoulders told Olga much about feeling outside her tower. Her teeth sank into her lower lip.

The latch clattered down; the outer door was shut. The two sisters were left staring at each other, the whole avid mob of women watching. Vasya clutched the cloak around her shoulders; she was shivering hard. “Olya—” she began.

The room had fallen perfectly silent, so as not to miss a word.

Well, they had enough gossip already. “Take her to the bathhouse,” Olga ordered her servants, coolly. “And then to her room. Lock the door. See that she is guarded.”

GUARDS—DMITRII’S MEN—FOLLOWED VASYA TO the bathhouse and stood outside the door. Inside, Varvara was waiting. She stripped away Vasya’s torn clothes, hands brisk and impersonal. She didn’t even bother to peer at the sapphire necklace, although she looked long at the great flowering of bruises on the girl’s arm. For her part, Vasya could scarcely stand the sight of her own winter-pallid flesh. It had betrayed her.

Then Varvara, still not speaking, ladled water over the hot stones of the oven, shoved Vasya into the inner room of the bathhouse, closed the inner door, and left her alone.

Vasya sank onto a bench, naked in the warmth, and allowed herself, for the first time, to cry. Biting her fist, she made no sound, but she wept until the spasm of shame and grief and horror had eased. Then, gathering herself, she raised her head to whisper to the listening air.

“Help me,” she said. “What should I do?”

She was not quite alone, for the air had an answer.

“Remember a promise, poor fool,” said Olga’s fat, frail bannik, in the hiss of water on stone. “Remember my prophecy. My days are numbered; perhaps this will be the last prophecy I ever make. Before the end of Maslenitsa it will all be decided.” He was fainter than the steam: only a strange stirring in the air marked his presence.

“What promise?” Vasya asked. “What will be decided?”

“Remember,” breathed the bannik, and then she was alone.

“Damn all chyerti anyway,” said Vasya, and closed her eyes.

Her bath went on for a long time. Vasya wished it might last forever, despite the soft, crude jokes of the guards, clearly audible outside. Every breath of the oven’s steam seemed to wash away more of the smell of horse and sweat: the smell of her hard-won freedom. When Vasya left her bath, she would be a maiden once more.

Finally Vasya, birth-naked and sweating, went into the antechamber to be doused with cold water, dried, salved, and dressed.

The shift and blouse and sarafan they found her smelled thickly of their previous owner, and they hung heavy from Vasya’s shoulders. In them she felt all the constraint she had shaken off.

Varvara plaited the girl’s hair with swift yanking hands. “Olga Vladimirova has enemies who would like nothing better than to see her in a convent, when her babe is born,” she growled at Vasya. “And what of the babe itself? Such shocks its lady mother has had since you came. Why could you not go quietly away again, before making a spectacle of yourself?”

“I know,” Vasya said. “I am sorry.”

“Sorry!” Varvara spat with uncharacteristic emotion. “Sorry, the maiden says. I give that”—she snapped her fingers—“for sorry, and the Grand Prince will give less, when he decides your fate.” She tied off Vasya’s plait with a scrap of green wool and said, “Follow me.”

They had prepared a chamber for her in the terem: dim and close, low-ceilinged, but warm, heated from below by the great stove in the workroom. Food waited for her there—bread and wine and soup. Olga’s kindness stung worse than anger had done.

Varvara left Vasya at the threshold. The last thing Vasya heard was the sound of the bolt sliding home, and her swift, light step as she walked away.

Vasya sank onto the cot, clenched both her fists, and refused to weep again. She didn’t deserve the solace of tears, not when she had caused her brother and sister such trouble. And your father, mocked a soft voice in her skull. Don’t forget him—that your defiance cost him his life. You are a curse to your family, Vasilisa Petrovna.

No, Vasya whispered back against that voice. That is not it, not it at all.

But it was hard to remember exactly what was true—there in that dim, airless room, wearing a stifling tent of a sarafan, with her sister’s frozen expression hanging before her eyes.

For their sake, Vasya thought, I must make it right.

But she could not see how.

OLGA’S VISITORS DEPARTED AS soon as the excitement was over. When they had all gone, the Princess of Serpukhov walked heavily down the steps to Vasya’s room.

“Speak,” Olga said, as soon as the door swung shut behind her. “Apologize. Tell me that you had no idea this would happen.”

Vasya had risen when her sister entered, but she said nothing.

“I did,” Olga went on. “I warned you—you and my fool of a brother. Do you realize what you have done, Vasya? Lied to the Grand Prince—dragged our brother in—you will be sent to a convent at best now; tried as a witch at worst, and I cannot prevent it. If Dmitrii Ivanovich decides I have had a hand in it, he will make Vladimir put me aside. They will put me in a convent, too, Vasya. They will take my children away.”

Her voice broke on the last word.

Vasya’s eyes, wide with horror, did not leave Olga’s face. “But—why would they send you to a convent, Olya?” she whispered.

Olga shaped her answer to punish her idiot sister. “If Dmitrii Ivanovich is angry enough and thinks I am complicit, he will. But I will not be taken from my children. I will denounce you first, Vasya, I swear it.”

“Olga,” said Vasya, bowing her shining head. “You would be right to. I am sorry. I am—so sorry.”

Brave and miserable—suddenly her sister was eight again, and Olga was watching her with exasperated pity while their father thrashed her, resignedly, for yet another foolishness.

“I am sorry, too,” Olga said then, and she was.

“Do what you must,” Vasya said. Her voice was hoarse as a raven’s. “I am guilty before you.”

OUTSIDE THE HOUSE OF the prince of Serpukhov, that day passed in a glorious exchange of rumors. The heave and riot of festival—what better breeding-ground for gossip? Nothing so delicious as this had happened for many a year.

That young lord, Vasilii Petrovich. He is no lord at all, but a girl!

No.

Indeed it is true. A maiden.

Naked for all to see.

A witch, in any case.

She ensnared even holy Aleksandr Peresvet with her wiles. She had mad orgies in secret in the palace of Dmitrii Ivanovich. She had them all as she liked: prince and monk, turn and turn about. We live in a time of sinners.

He put a stop to all that, did Prince Kasyan. He revealed her wickedness. Kasyan is a great lord. He has not sinned.

Gaily the rumors swirled all through that long day. They reached even a golden-haired priest, hiding in a monk’s cell from the monsters of his own memory. He jerked his head up from his prayers, face gone very pale.

“It cannot be,” he said to his visitor. “She is dead.”

Kasyan Lutovich was considering the yellow embroidery on the sash about his waist, lips pursed in discontent, and he did not look up when he replied. “Indeed?” he said. “Then it was a ghost; a fair, young ghost indeed, that I showed the people.”

“You ought not to have,” said the priest.

Kasyan grinned at that and glanced up. “Why? Because you could not be there to see it?”

Konstantin recoiled. Kasyan laughed outright. “Don’t think I don’t know where your mania for witches comes from,” he said. He leaned against the door, casual, magnificent. “Spent too much time with the witch-woman’s granddaughter, did you; watched her grow up, year by year, had one sight too many of those green eyes, and the wildness that will never belong to you—or to your God, either.”

“I am a servant of God; I do not—”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Kasyan, heaving himself upright. He crossed over to the priest, step by soft step, until Konstantin recoiled, almost stumbling into the candlelit icons. “I see you,” the prince murmured. “I know which god you serve. He has one eye, doesn’t he?”

Konstantin licked his lips, eyes fastened on Kasyan’s face, and said not a word.

“That is better,” said Kasyan. “Now heed me. Do you want your vengeance, after all? How much do you love the witch?”

“I—”

“Hate her?” Kasyan laughed. “In your case, it is the same thing. You will have all the vengeance you like—if you do as I tell you.”

Konstantin’s eyes were watering. He looked once, long, at his icons. Then he whispered, without looking at Kasyan, “What must I do?”

“Obey me,” said Kasyan. “And remember who your master is.”

Kasyan bent forward to whisper into Konstantin’s ear.

The priest jerked back once. “A child? But—”

Kasyan went on talking in a soft, measured voice, and at last Konstantin, slowly, nodded.

VASYA HERSELF HEARD NO RUMORS, and no plotting, either. She stayed locked in her room, sitting beside the slit of a window. The sun sank below the walls as Vasya thought of ways to escape, to make it all right.

She tried not to think of the day she might have had, down in the street below, had her secret been kept. But thoughts of that kept creeping in, too; of her lost triumph, the burn of wine inside her, the laughter and the cheering, the prince’s pride, the admiration of all.

And Solovey—had he been walked cool and cared for after the race? Had he even suffered the grooms to touch him, after the first exhausted yielding? Perhaps the stallion had fought, perhaps they had even killed him. And if not? Where was he now? Haltered, bound, locked in the Grand Prince’s stable?

And Kasyan—Kasyan. The lord who had been kind to her and who had, smiling, humiliated her before all Moscow. The question came with renewed force: What does he gain from this? And then: Who was it who helped Chelubey pass himself off as the Khan’s ambassador? Who supplied the bandits? Was it Kasyan? But why—why?

She had no answer; she could only think herself in circles, and her head ached with suppressed tears. At last she curled herself onto the cot and drifted into a shallow sleep.

SHE JOLTED AWAKE, SHIVERING, just at nightfall. The shadows in her room stretched monstrously long.

Vasya thought of her sister Irina, far off at Lesnaya Zemlya. Before she could prevent it, other thoughts crowded hard upon: her brothers beside the hearth of the summer kitchen, the golden midsummer evening pouring in. Her father’s kindly horses, and the cakes Dunya made…

Next moment, Vasya was crying helplessly, like the child she certainly was not. Dead father, dead mother, brother imprisoned, home far away—

A hissing whisper, as of cloth dragged along the floor, jarred her from her weeping.

Vasya jerked upright, wet-faced, still choking on tears.

A piece of darkness moved, moved again, and stopped just in the faint beam of twilight.

Not darkness at all, but a gray, grinning thing. It had the form of a woman, but it was not a woman. Vasya’s heart hammered; she was on her feet and backing away. “Who are you?”

A hole on the gray thing’s face opened and closed, but Vasya heard nothing. “Why have you come to me?” she managed, gathering her courage.

Silence.

“Can you speak?”

A monstrous black stare.

Vasya simultaneously wished for light and was glad of the darkness, to hide that lipless countenance. “Have you something to tell me?” she asked.

A nod—was that a nod? Vasya thought a moment, and then she reached into her dress, where the cool, blue sharp-edged talisman hung. She hesitated, then dragged the edge along the inside of her forearm. The blood welled out between her fingers.

As it pattered on the floor, the ghost held out a bony hand, snatching at the jewel. Vasya jerked back. “No,” she said. “It is mine. No—but here.” She held her bloody arm out to the horror, hoping that she was not being foolish. “Here,” she said again, clumsily. “Blood helps sometimes, with things that are dead. Are you dead? Will my blood make you stronger?”

No answer. But the shadow crept forward, bent its jagged face to her arm, and lapped at the welling blood.

Then the mouth fastened hard and sucked greedily, and just when Vasya was on the point of prying it off, the ghost let go and staggered back.

Its—her, Vasya realized—looks were not improved. She had a little of the appearance of flesh now, but it was flesh desiccated and mummified by airless years—gray and brown and stringy. But the pit of a mouth had a tongue now, and the tongue made words.

“Thank you,” it said.

A polite ghost at least. “Why are you here?” Vasya returned. “This is not a place for the dead. You have been frightening Marya.”

The ghost shook her head, “It is not—a place for the living,” she managed. “But—I am—sorry. About the child.”

Vasya felt again the walls about her, between her skin and the twilight, and bit her lips. “What have you come to tell me?”

The ghost’s mouth worked. “Go. Run. Tonight, he means it for tonight.”

“I cannot,” said Vasya. “The door is barred. What happens tonight?”

The bony hands twisted together. “Run now,” it said, and pointed at herself. “This—he means this for you. Tonight. Tonight he will take a new wife; and he will take Moscow for himself. Run.”

“Who means that for me?” Vasya asked. “Kasyan? How will he take Moscow for himself?”

She thought then of Chelubey, of his palace full of trained riders. A terrible understanding dawned. “The Tatars?” she whispered.

The ghost’s hands twisted hard together. “Run!” she said. “Run!” Her mouth was open: a hellish maw.

Vasya could not help it; she recoiled from that horror, panting, swallowing a scream.

“Vasya,” said his voice from behind her. A voice that meant freedom and magic and dread, that had nothing to do with the stifling world of the tower.

The ghost was gone, and Vasya wrenched round.

Morozko’s hair was part of the night, his robe a sweep of lightless black. There was something old and dire in his eyes. “There is no more time,” he said. “You must get out.”

“So I hear,” she said, standing still. “Why have you come? I called—I asked—Mother of God, when I was naked before all Moscow! You could not be bothered then! Why help me now?”

“I could not come to you today at all, not before now,” he said. The frost-demon’s voice was soft and even, but his eyes slid, once, from her tear-tracked cheeks to her bleeding arm. “He had gathered all his strength, to shut me out. He planned this day well. I couldn’t go near you today, before your blood touched the sapphire. He can hide from me: I didn’t know he had come back. If I had, I would never have let—”

“Who?”

“The sorcerer,” said Morozko. “This man you call Kasyan. He has been long in strange places, beyond my sight.”

“Sorcerer? Kasyan Lutovich?”

“In other days, men called him Kaschei,” said Morozko. “And he can never die.”

Vasya stared. But that is a fairy tale. So is a frost-demon.

“Cannot die?” she managed.

“He made a magic,” said Morozko. “He has—hidden his life outside his body, so that I—that death—may never go near him. He can never die, and he is very strong. He kept me from seeing him; he kept me away today. Vasya, I would not have—”

She wanted to fold herself in his cloak and disappear. She wanted to crumple against him and cry. She held herself still. “Have what?” she whispered.

“Let you face this day alone,” he said.

She sought to read his eyes in the dark, and he drew back, so that the gesture died unfinished. For an instant, his face might have been human, and an answer was there, in his eyes, just beyond her understanding. Tell me. But he did not. He tilted his head, as though listening. “Come away, Vasya. Ride away. I will help you escape.”

She could go and get Solovey. Ride away. With him. Into the moon-silvered dark, with that promise lurking, as though despite him, in his eyes. And yet—“But my brother and sister. I cannot abandon them.”

“You aren’t—” he began.

A heavy step in the corridor sent Vasya whirling round. She turned to face the door just as the bolt shot back.

Olga looked wearier than she had that morning: pale, waddling with the weight of her unborn child. Varvara stood at her shoulder, glaring. “Kasyan Lutovich has come to see you,” Olga said curtly. “You will give him a hearing, sister.”

The two women bustled into Vasya’s chamber, and when the light scoured its corners, the frost-demon was gone.

VARVARA ARRANGED VASYA’S TOUSLED plait so that it lay smoothly and bound an embroidered headdress around her brows, so that icy silver rings hung down and framed her face. Then Vasya was herded out onto the frozen staircase. She descended between Olga and Varvara, blinking. They went down a level, where Varvara opened a new door; they crossed an antechamber and entered a sitting-room that smelled of sweet oil.

At the threshold, Olga said, bowing, “My sister, Gospodin,” and stood aside for Vasya to pass.

Kasyan was newly bathed and dressed for the festival, in white and pale gold. His hair curled vividly against his embroidered collar.

He said gravely, “I beg you will leave us, Olga Vladimirova. What I have to say to Vasilisa Petrovna is best said alone.”

It was impossible, of course, that Vasya should be left alone with any man not her betrothed, now that she was a girl again. But Olga nodded tightly and left them.

The door shut with a soft snick.

“Well met,” Kasyan said softly, a little smile playing about his mouth, “Vasilisa Petrovna.”

Deliberately she bowed, as a boy would have. “Kasyan Lutovich,” she said icily. Sorcerer. The word beat in her head, so strange and yet…“Was it you who sent men after me in the bathhouse in Chudovo?”

He half-smiled. “I am astonished you didn’t guess before. I killed four of them for losing you.”

His eyes skimmed her body. Vasya crossed her arms. She was clothed from head to foot, and she had never felt more naked. Her bath seemed to have washed away recourse and ambition both; she must watch now, and wait, and let others act. She was naked with powerlessness.

No. No. I am no different than yesterday.

But it was hard to believe. In his eyes was a monumental and amused confidence.

“Do not,” Vasya said, almost spitting, “come near me.”

He shrugged. “I may do as I like,” he replied. “You gave up all pretense to virtue when you appeared in the kremlin dressed as a boy. Not even your sister would prevent me now. I hold your ruin in the palm of my hand.”

She said nothing. He smiled. “But enough of that,” he added. “Why should we be enemies?” His tone turned placating. “I saved you from your lies, now you are free to be yourself, to adorn yourself as a girl ought—”

Her lip curled. He broke off with an elegant shrug.

“You know as well as I that it is a convent for me now,” Vasya said. She put her arms behind her and pressed her back against the door, the wood driving splinters into her palms. “If I am not put in the cage and burned as a witch. Why are you here?”

He ran a hand through his russet hair. “I regretted today,” he said.

“You enjoyed it,” Vasya retorted, wishing her voice were not thin with remembered humiliation.

He smiled and gestured to the stove. “Will you sit down, Vasya?”

She did not move.

He huffed out a laugh and sank onto a carved bench beside the fire. A wine-jar studded with amber sat beside two cups; he poured one for himself and drank the pale liquid down. “Well, I did enjoy it,” he admitted. “Playing with our hotheaded prince’s temper. Watching your self-righteous brother squirm.” He slanted a look at where she stood, frozen with disgust, by the door and added more seriously, “And you yourself. No one would ever take you for a beauty, Vasilisa Petrovna, but then no one would ever want to. You were lovely, fighting me so. And charming in your boy’s clothes. I could hardly wait as long as I did. I knew, you know. I always knew, whatever I might have told the Grand Prince. All those nights on the road. I knew.”

He made his glance tender; his tone invited her to soften, but there was still laughter in the back of his eyes, as though he mocked his own words.

Vasya remembered the icy kiss of the air on her skin, the boyars’ leering, and her flesh crept.

“Come,” he went on. “Are you telling me you didn’t enjoy it, wild-cat? The eyes of Moscow upon you?”

Her stomach turned over. “What do you want?”

He poured more wine and raised his gaze to hers. “To rescue you.”

“What?”

His glance returned, heavy-lidded, to the fire. “I think you understand me very well,” he said. “As you said yourself, it is the convent or a witch-trial for you. I met a priest not so long ago—oh, a very holy man, so handsome and pious—who will be quite willing to tell the prince all about your wicked ways. And if you are condemned,” he went on musingly, “what price your brother’s life? What price your sister’s freedom? Dmitrii Ivanovich is the laughingstock of Moscow. Princes who are laughed at do not hold their realms long, and he knows it.”

“How,” Vasya asked, between gritted teeth, “do you mean to save me?”

Kasyan paused before replying, savoring his wine. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”

She stayed where she was. He sighed with kindly exasperation, took another swallow. “Very well,” he said. “You have but to tap on the door; the slave will come and take you back to your room. I will not enjoy watching the fire take you, Vasilisa Petrovna, not at all. And your poor sister—how she will weep, to say farewell to her children.”

Vasya stalked to the fire and sat on the bench opposite him. He smiled at her with unconcealed pleasure. “There you are!” he cried. “I knew you could be reasonable. Wine?”

“No.”

He poured her a cup and sipped at his own. “I can save you,” he said. “And your brother and sister in the bargain. If you marry me.”

An instant of silence.

“Are you saying you mean to marry this witch-girl, this slut who paraded about Moscow in boy’s clothes?” Vasya asked acidly. “I don’t believe you.”

“So untrusting, for a maiden,” he returned cheerfully. “It is unbecoming. You won my heart with your little masquerade, Vasya. I loved your spirit from the first. How the others did not suspect, I cannot think. I will marry you and take you to Bashnya Kostei. I tried to tell you as much this morning. All this could have been avoided, you know…but no matter. When we are wed, I will see that your brother is freed—to return to the Lavra, as is proper, to live out his days in peace.” His face soured. “Politicking is not the work of a monk, anyway.”

Vasya made no reply.

His eye found hers; he leaned forward and added, more softly, “Olga Vladimirova may live out her days in her tower with her children. Safe as walls can make her.”

“You think our marriage will calm the Grand Prince?” Vasya returned.

Kasyan laughed. “Leave Dmitrii Ivanovich to me,” he said, eyes gleaming beneath lowered lids.

“You paid the bandit-captain to pass himself as the ambassador,” Vasya said, watching his face. “Why? Did you pay him to burn your own villages, too?”

He grinned at her, but she thought she saw something harden in his eyes. “Find out for yourself. You are a clever child. Where is the pleasure otherwise?” He leaned nearer. “Were you to wed me, Vasilisa Petrovna, there would be lies and tricks aplenty, and passion—such passion.” Kasyan reached out and stroked a finger down the side of her face.

She drew away and said nothing.

He sat back. “Come, girl,” he said, brisk now. “I do not see you getting any better offers.”

She could hardly breathe. “Give me a day to think.”

“Absolutely not. You might not love your siblings enough; you might bolt, and leave them in the lurch. And leave me, too, for I am quite overcome with passion.” He said this composedly. “I am not such a fool as that, vedma.”

She stiffened.

“Ah,” he said, reading her face before the question formed. “Our wise girl with her magic horse; she has never learned who she is, has she? Well, you might learn that as well, if you were to marry me.” He sat back and looked at her expectantly.

She thought of the ghost’s warning, and Morozko’s.

But—what about Sasha, and Olya? What about Masha? Masha who sees things as I do, Masha who will be branded a witch herself if the women discover her secret.

“I will marry you,” she said. “If my brother and sister are kept safe.” Perhaps later she could devise her escape.

His face broke into a glittering smile. “Excellent, excellent, my sweet little liar,” he said caressingly. “You won’t regret it, I promise you.” He paused. “Well, you might regret it. But your life will never be boring. And that is what you fear, is it not? The gilded cage of the Russian maiden?”

“I have agreed,” Vasya said only. “My thoughts are my own.” She was on her feet. “I am going now.”

He did not stir from his chair. “Not so fast. You belong to me now, and I do not give you leave to go.”

She stood still. “You have not bought me yet. I named a price and you have not met it.”

“That is true,” he said, leaning back in his chair and putting together his fingertips. “And yet, if you are disobedient, I can still toss you back.”

She stayed where she was.

“Come here,” he said, very softly.

Her feet carried her to a spot beside his bench, though she was scarcely aware of it, so angry was she. Yesterday a lord’s son, and nobody’s dog, today she was meat for this schemer. She fought to keep her thoughts from her face.

He must have seen her inward struggle, for he said, “Good, that is good. I like a little fight. Now kneel.” She stilled and he said, “Here—between my feet.”

She did so, brusquely, stiff-limbed as a doll. The bewildering, scathing sweetness of a frost-demon in the moonlight had in no wise prepared her for the dusty, animal smell of this man’s perfumed skin, his half-choked laughter. He cupped her jaw, traced the bones of her face with his fingers. “Just alike,” he murmured, voice gone rough. “Just like the other. You’ll do.”

“Who?” asked Vasya.

Kasyan didn’t answer. He pulled something from a pouch. It gleamed between his heavy fingers. She looked and saw it was a necklace, made of thick gold, hung with a red stone.

“A bride-gift,” he murmured, almost laughing, breathing into her mouth. “Kiss me.”

“No.”

He lifted a languid brow and pinched her earlobe so that her eyes watered. “I will not tolerate a third disobedience, Vasochka.” The childish nickname lay ugly on his tongue. “There are biddable maidens in Moscow who would be happy to be my bride.” He leaned forward again and murmured, “Perhaps if I ask, the Grand Prince will have you all three burned together—so cozy, the children of Pyotr Vladimirovich—while your niece and nephew look on.”

Her stomach roiled, but she leaned forward. He was smiling. With her kneeling, their faces were on a level.

She put her mouth to his.

His hand shot up, seizing her behind her head, at the base of her plait. She jerked back instinctively, breath coming short in disgust, but he only tightened his grip and, leisurely, put his tongue in her mouth. She controlled herself, barely; she did not bite it off. The necklace sparkled in his other hand. He was going to drop it over her head. Vasya jerked away a second time, full of a new fear that she didn’t understand. The golden thing swung heavily from his fist. He wrenched her head back—

But then Kasyan swore, and the jewel in his hand clattered to the floor. Breathing fast, he dragged out Vasya’s sapphire talisman. The stone was glowing faintly; it threw blue light between them.

Kasyan hissed, dropped her charm, and cuffed her across the face. Her vision filled with red sparks and she tumbled back onto the floor. “Bitch!” he snarled, on his feet. “Idiot! You of all people—”

Vasya scrambled upright, shaking her head. Kasyan’s would-be gift lay like a snake on the ground. Kasyan gathered it up tenderly, frowning, and stood. “I suppose you let him do it,” he said. His eyes were bright with malice now, though somewhere, lurking deep down, she thought she saw fear. “I suppose he persuaded you to wear it, with his blue eyes. I’m surprised, girl, truly, that you would allow that monster to enslave you.”

“I am no one’s slave,” Vasya snapped. “That jewel was a gift from my father.”

Kasyan laughed. “Who told you that?” he asked. “Him?” The laughter disappeared from his face. “Ask him, fool. Ask him why a death-god befriends a country girl. See what he answers.”

Vasya was afraid in ways she could not understand. “The death-god told me you have another name,” she said. “What is your true name, Kasyan Lutovich?”

Kasyan smiled a little, but he made no answer. His eyes were quick and dark with thought. Abruptly he strode forward, caught her by the shoulder, crowded her against the wall, and kissed her again. His open mouth ate at her leisurely and one hand closed painfully on her breast.

She endured it, standing rigid. He did not try to put the necklace on her again.

Just as suddenly he stepped aside and flung her away from him, back into the room.

She kept her feet but without grace, breathing fast, her stomach heaving.

He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “Enough,” he said. “You’ll do. Tell your sister you have accepted the match, and that you are to be confined until the wedding.” He paused, and his voice hardened. “Which will be tomorrow. By then, you will have taken that charm—that abomination—off and destroyed it. Any disobedience, and I will see your family punished, Vasya. Brother and sister and little children alike. Now go.”

She stumbled for the door, routed, sick, the taste of him sour in her mouth. His soft, satisfied laughter chased her into the hall when she fled the room.

Vasya cannoned into Varvara the instant she was away, then bent over in the hall, retching.

Varvara’s lip curled. “A handsome lord means to save you from ruin,” she said, the sarcasm sharp. “Where is your gratitude, Vasilisa Petrovna? Or did he have your virtue there beside the oven?”

“No,” Vasya retorted, straightening with a supreme effort. “He—he wants me to be afraid of him. I think he succeeded.” She scrubbed a hand across her mouth and was almost sick again. The hall was full of a beating, eager darkness, only a little repelled by the lamp in Varvara’s hand—although that was perhaps the darkness in her own head. Vasya wanted to press her knees together, and she wanted to weep.

Varvara’s lip curled the more, but she only said, “Come, poor thing, your sister wants you.”

OLGA WAS ALONE IN the workroom. She held her distaff in her hands, turning it over and over, but she was not working. Her back pained her; she felt old and worn. She looked up at once when Varvara led Vasya in.

“Well?” she said, without preamble.

“He asked me to marry him,” said Vasya. She did not come properly into the room, but stood off, in the shadows near the door, her head tilted proudly. “I agreed. He says that if I marry him, he will intervene with the Grand Prince. Have Sasha spared, and you absolved of blame.”

Olga considered her sister. There were dozens of prettier girls in Moscow, better born. Kasyan could not want her for her virtue. Yet he wanted Vasya enough to marry her. Why?

He desires her, Olga thought. Why else would he behave so? And I left her alone with him…

Well, and so? She’s been roaming the streets in his company, dressed as a boy.

“Come in, then, Vasya,” Olga said, irritable with vague guilt. “Don’t hang about the door. Tell me, what did he say to you?” She laid her distaff aside. “Varvara, build up the fire.”

The slave went about it, soft-footed, while Vasya came forward. The fierce color in her face from that morning was quite gone; her eyes were big and dark. Olga’s limbs ached; she wished she felt less old, less angry, and less sorry for her sister. “It is better than you deserve,” she said. “An honorable marriage. You were a breath away from the convent, or worse, Vasya.”

Vasya nodded once, her lids veiled with a sweep of black lashes. “I know, Olya.”

Just then, a roar, as though in agreement, came from outside the prince of Serpukhov’s gates. They had just flung the effigy of Lady Maslenitsa onto the fire; her hair streamed away in torrents of fire and her eyes shone, as though alive, as she burned.

Olga fought her irritation down, trying to keep both the anger and the pity from her face. A sharp pain stabbed through her back. “Come, then,” she said, as kindly as she could. “Eat with me. We will call for cakes and honey-wine, and we will celebrate your marriage.”

The cakes came, and the sisters ate together. Neither could swallow much. The silence stretched out.

“When I first came here,” said Olga, abruptly, to Vasya, “I was a little younger than you, and I was very frightened.”

Vasya had been looking down at the untasted thing in her hand, but now she glanced up quickly. “I knew no one,” Olga went on. “I understood nothing. My mother-in-law—she had wanted a proper princess for her son, and she hated me.”

Vasya made a sound of painful sympathy, and Olga lifted a hand to silence her. “Vladimir could not protect me, for it is not the business of men, what goes on in the terem. But the oldest woman in the terem—the oldest woman I have ever known—she was kind to me. She held me when I wept; she brought me porridge when I missed the taste of home. Once I asked her why she bothered. ‘I knew your grandmother,’ she replied.”

Vasya was silent. Their grandmother—said the story—had come riding into Moscow one day all alone. No one knew where she came from. Word of the mysterious maiden reached the ears of the Grand Prince, who summoned her for sport and fell in love. He married her, and the girl bore their mother, Marina, and died in the tower.

“ ‘You are fortunate,’ this old woman said to me,” Olga continued, “ ‘that you are not like her.’ She—she was a creature of smoke and stars. She was no more made for the terem than a snowstorm is, and yet…she came riding into Moscow willingly—indeed, as though all hell pursued her—riding a gray horse. She wed Ivan without demur, though she wept before her wedding night. She tried to be a good wife, and perhaps would have been, but for her wildness. She would walk in the yard, looking at the sky; she would talk with longing of her gray horse, which vanished on the night of her marriage. ‘Why do you stay?’ I asked her, but she never answered. She was dead in her heart long before she died in truth, and I was glad when her daughter, Marina, married away from the city—”

Olga broke off. “That is to say,” she went on, “that I am not like our grandmother, and I am a princess now, the head of my house, and it is a good life, sweet mixed with bitter. But you—when I saw you first, I thought of that tale of our grandmother, riding into Moscow on her gray horse.”

“What was our grandmother’s name?” asked Vasya low. She had asked her nurse, once. But Dunya would never tell her.

“Tamara,” said Olga. “Her name was Tamara.” She shook her head. “It is all right, Vasya. You will not share her fate. Kasyan has vast lands, and many horses. There is freedom in the countryside that Moscow does not offer. You will go there, and be happy.”

“With a man who stripped me naked before Moscow?” Vasya asked sharply. The half-eaten cakes were being taken away. Olga made no answer. Vasya said, “Olya, if I must marry him to make this right, then I will marry him. But—” She hesitated, and then finished in a rush, “I believe that it was Kasyan who paid the bandits, who turned them loose on the villages. And—the bandit-captain is in Moscow now, posing as the Tatar ambassador. He is in league with Kasyan, and I think they intend to depose the Grand Prince. I think it is to happen tonight. I must—”

“Vasya—”

“The Grand Prince must be warned,” Vasya finished.

“Impossible,” Olga said. “None of my household can go near the Grand Prince tonight. We are all colored by your disgrace. It is all nonsense anyway—why would a lord pay men to burn his own villages? In any case, could Kasyan Lutovich expect to hold the patent for Moscow?”

“I don’t know,” said Vasya. “But Dmitrii Ivanovich has no son—only a pregnant wife. Who would rule, if he died tonight?”

“It is not your place or your business,” Olga said sharply. “He is not going to die.”

Vasya did not seem to have heard. She was pacing the room; she looked more like Vasilii Petrovich than her own self. “Why not?” she murmured. “Dmitrii is angry with Sasha—for Kasyan took up the lie—the weapon I put into his hand. Your husband, Prince Vladimir, is not here. So the two men the Grand Prince most trusts are set at remove. Kasyan has his own people in the city, and Chelubey has more.” Vasya stilled her pacing with a visible effort, stood light and restless in the center of the room. “Depose the Grand Prince,” she whispered. “Why does he need to marry me?” Her eyes went to her sister.

But Olga had stopped listening. Blood was beating like wings in her ears, and a great sinking pain began to eat her from the inside. “Vasya,” she whispered, a hand on her belly.

Vasya saw Olga’s face, and her own face changed. “The baby?” she asked. “Now?”

Olga managed a nod. “Send for Varvara,” she whispered. She swayed, and her sister caught her.

22. Mother

The bathhouse, where Olga was brought to labor, was hot and dark, humid as a summer night, and it smelled of fresh wood, and smoke, and sap and hot water and rot. If Olga’s women noted Vasya’s presence they did not question it. They had no breath for questioning, and no time. Vasya had strong and capable hands; she had seen childbirth before, and in the ferocious, steaming half-light, the women asked no more.

Vasya stripped down to her shift like the others, anger and uncertainty forgotten in the messy urgency of childbirth. Her sister was already naked; she squatted on a birthing-stool, black hair streaming. Vasya knelt, took her sister’s hands, and did not flinch when Olga crushed her fingers.

“You look like our mother, you know,” Olga whispered. “Vasochka. Did I ever tell you?” Her face changed as the pain came again.

Vasya held her hands. “No,” she said. “You never told me.”

Olga’s lips were pale. Shadows made her eyes bigger, and shrank the difference between them. Olga was naked, Vasya nearly so. It was as if they were small girls again, before the world came between them.

The pain came and went and Olga breathed and sweated and bit down on her screams. Vasya talked to her sister steadily, forgetting their troubles in the world outside. There was only the sweat and the labor, the pain endured and endured again. The bathhouse grew hotter; steam wreathed their sweating bodies; the women labored in the near-darkness, and still the child was not born.

“Vasya,” said Olga, leaning against her sister and panting. “Vasya, if I die—”

“You won’t,” snapped Vasya.

Olga smiled. Her eyes wandered. “I will try not,” she said. “But—you must give my love to Masha. Tell her I am sorry. She will be angry; she will not understand.” Olga broke off, as the agony came again; she still did not scream, but a sound climbed in the back of her throat, and Vasya thought her hands would break in her sister’s grip.

The room smelled of sweat and birth-water now, and black blood showed between Olga’s thighs. The women were only vague, sweating shapes in the vapor. The smell of blood stuck, chokingly, in Vasya’s throat.

“It hurts,” Olga whispered. She sat panting, limp and heavy.

“Be brave,” said the midwife. “All will turn out well.” Her voice was kind, but Vasya saw the dark look she exchanged with the woman beside her.

Vasya’s sapphire flared suddenly with cold, even in the heat of the bathhouse. Olga looked over her sister’s shoulder and her eyes widened. Vasya turned to follow her sister’s gaze. A shadow in the corner looked back at them.

Vasya let go of Olga’s hands. “No,” she said.

“I would have spared you this,” the shadow returned. She knew that voice, knew the pale, indifferent stare. She had seen it when her father died, when…

“No,” said Vasya again. “No—no, go away.”

He said nothing.

“Please,” whispered Vasya. “Please. Go away.”

They used to beg, when I walked among men, Morozko had told her once. If they saw me, they would beg. Evil came of that; better I step softly, better only the dead and the dying can see me.

Well, she was cursed with sight; he could not hide from her. Now it was her turn to beg. Behind her, the women muttered, but his eyes were the only things she could see.

She crossed the room without thinking and put a hand in the center of his chest. “Please go.” For an instant, she might have been touching a shadow, but then his flesh was real, though cold. He drew away as though her hand hurt him.

“Vasya,” he said. Was that feeling, in his indifferent face? She reached for him again, pleading. When her hands found his, he stilled, looking troubled and less like a nightmare.

“I am here,” he told her. “I do not choose.”

“You can choose,” she returned, following him when he drew back. “Leave my sister alone. Let her live.”

Death’s shadow stretched nearly to where Olga sat, spent, on the bathhouse-bench, surrounded by sweating women. Vasya did not know what the others saw, or if they thought she was speaking to the darkness.

He loved Vasya’s mother, the people had said of her father. He loved that Marina Ivanovna. She died bringing Vasilisa forth, and Pyotr Vladimirovich put half his soul in the earth when they buried her.

Her sister wailed, a thin and bone-chilling cry. “Blood,” Vasya heard, from the crowd beside. “Blood—too much blood. Get the priest.”

“Please!” Vasya cried to Morozko. “Please!”

The noise of the bathhouse faded and the walls faded with it. Vasya found herself standing in an empty wood. Black trees cast gray shadows over the white snow, and Death stood before her.

He wore black. The frost-demon had eyes of palest blue, but this—his older, stranger self—had eyes like water: colorless, or nearly. He stood taller than she had ever seen him, and stiller.

A faint, gasping cry. Vasya let go his hands and turned. Olga crouched in the snow, translucent and bloody, naked, swallowing her anguished breathing.

Vasya stooped and gathered her sister up. Where were they? Was this what lay beyond life? A forest and a single figure, waiting…Somewhere beyond the trees she could smell the hot reek of the bathhouse. Olga’s skin was warm, but the smell and the heat were fading. The forest was so cold. Vasya held her sister tightly; tried to pour all the heat she had—her burning, furious life—into Olga. Her hands felt hot enough to scorch, but the jewel hung bitterly cold between her breasts.

“You cannot be here, Vasya,” the death-god said, and a hint of surprise threaded his uninflected voice.

“Cannot?” Vasya retorted. “You cannot have my sister.” She clung to Olga, looking for a way back. The bathhouse was still there—all around them—she could smell it. But she didn’t know which steps would take them there.

Olga hung slack in Vasya’s arms, her eyes glazed and milky. She turned her head and breathed a question at the death-god. “What of my baby? What of my son? Where is he?”

“It is a daughter, Olga Petrovna,” Morozko returned. He spoke without feeling and without judgment, low and clear and cold. “You cannot both live.”

His words struck Vasya like two fists and she clutched her sister. “No.”

With a terrible effort, Olga straightened up, her face drained of color and of beauty both. She put Vasya’s arms aside. “No?” she said to the frost-demon.

Morozko bowed. “The child cannot be born alive,” he said evenly. “The women may cut it from you, or you may live and let it smother and be born dead.”

“She,” said Olga, her voice no more than a thread. Vasya tried to speak and found she could not. “She. A daughter.”

“As you say, Olga Petrovna.”

“Well, then, let her live,” said Olga simply, and put out a hand.

Vasya could not bear it. “No!” she cried, and flung herself on Olga, struck the outstretched hand away, wrapped her sister in her arms. “Live, Olya,” she whispered. “Think of Marya and Daniil. Live, live.”

The death-god’s eyes narrowed.

“I will die for my child, Vasya,” Olga said. “I am not afraid.”

“No,” Vasya breathed. She thought she heard Morozko speak. But she did not care what he said. Such a current of love and rage and loss ran between her and her sister at that moment that all else was drowned and forgotten. Vasya put forth all her strength—and she dragged Olya by force back to the bathhouse.

Vasya came to, staggering, and found that she was leaning against the bathhouse wall. Splinters pricked her hands; her hair stuck to her face and neck. A thick, sweating crowd hovered around Olga, seeming to strangle her with their many arms. Among them stood one fully dressed, in a black cassock, intoning the last rites in a voice that carried easily over them all. A streak of golden hair gleamed in the dark.

Him? Vasya, in a quick rage, stalked across the writhing room, pushed past the crowd, and took her sister’s hands in hers. The priest’s deep voice stopped abruptly.

Vasya had no thought to spare for him. In her mind’s eye, Vasya saw another black-haired woman, another bathhouse, and another child who had killed her mother. “Olya, live,” she said. “Please, live.”

Olga stirred; her pulse leaped up under Vasya’s fingers. Her dazed eyes blinked open. “There is its head!” cried the midwife. “There—one more—”

Olga’s glance met Vasya’s, and then widened with agony; her belly rippled like water in a storm, and then the child came slithering out. Her lips were blue. She did not move.

An anxious, breathless hush replaced the first cries of relief, as the midwife cleared the scum from the girl-child’s lips and breathed into her mouth.

She lay limp.

Vasya looked from the small gray form to her sister’s face.

The priest thrust his way forward, knocking Vasya aside. He smoothed oil over the baby’s head, began the words of the baptism.

“Where is she?” stammered Olga, groping with feeble hands. “Where is my daughter? Let me see.”

And still the child did not move.

Vasya stood there, empty-handed, jostled by the crowd, sweat running down her ribs. The heat of her fury cooled and left the taste of ashes in her mouth. But she was not looking at Olga. Or the priest. Instead, she was watching a black-cloaked figure put out a hand, very gently, take up the chalky, bloody scrap of humanity, and carry it away.

Olga made a terrible sound, and Konstantin’s hand fell, the baptism finished: the only kindness anyone would ever do the child. Vasya stood where she was. You are alive, Olya, she thought. I saved you. But the thought had no force.

OLGA’S EXHAUSTED EYES SEEMED to stare through her. “You have killed my daughter.”

“Olya,” Vasya began, “I—”

An arm, black-robed, reached out and seized her. “Witch,” hissed Konstantin.

The word fell like a stone, and silence rippled out in its wake. Vasya and the priest stood in the center of a faceless ring, full of reddened eyes.

The last time Vasya had seen Konstantin Nikonovich, the priest had cowered while she bade him go: to return to Moscow—or Tsargrad or hell—but to leave her family in peace.

Well, Konstantin had indeed come to Moscow, and he looked as though he’d endured the torments of hell between there and here. His jutting bones cast shadows on his beautiful face; his golden hair hung knotted to his shoulders.

The women watched, silent. A baby had just died in their arms, and their hands twitched with helplessness.

“This is Vasilisa Petrovna,” said Konstantin, spitting out the words. “She killed her father. Now she has killed her sister’s child.”

Behind him, Olga shut her eyes. One hand cradled the dead infant’s head.

“She speaks to devils,” Konstantin continued, not taking his eyes from her face. “Olga Vladimirova was too kind to turn her own lying sister away. And now, this has come of it.”

Olga said nothing.

Vasya was silent. What defense was there? The infant lay still, curled like a leaf. In the corner, a twist of steam might almost have been a small, fat creature, and it was weeping, too.

The priest’s glance slid to the faint figure of the bannik—she could swear they did—and his pale face grew paler. “Witch,” he whispered again. “You will answer for your crimes.”

Vasya gathered herself. “I will answer,” she said to Konstantin. “But not here. This is wrong, what you do here, Batyushka. Olya—”

“Get out, Vasya,” said Olga. She did not look up.

Vasya, stumbling with weariness, blinded with tears, made no protest when Konstantin dragged her out of the inner room of the bathhouse. He slammed the door behind them, cutting off the smell of blood and the sounds of grief.

Vasya’s linen shift, soaked to transparency, hung from her shoulders. Only when she felt the chill from the open outer door did she dig in her heels. “Let me put on clothes at least,” she said to the priest. “Or do you want me to freeze to death?”

Konstantin let her go suddenly. Vasya knew he could see every line of her body, her nipples hard through her shift. “What did you do to me?” he hissed.

“Do to you?” Vasya returned, bewildered with sorrow, dizzy with the change from heat to cold. The sweat stood on her face; her bare feet scraped the wooden floor. “I did nothing.”

“Liar!” he snapped. “Liar. I was a good man, before. I saw no devils. And now—”

“See them now, do you?” Shocked and grieving as she was, Vasya could muster nothing more than bitter humor. Her hands stank with her sister’s blood, with the ripe, ugly reality of stillbirth. “Well, perhaps you did that to yourself, with all your talk of demons; did you think of that? Go and hide in a monastery; no one wants you.”

He was as pale as she. “I am a good man,” he said. “I am. Why did you curse me? Why do you haunt me?”

“I don’t,” said Vasya. “Why would I want to? I came to Moscow to see my sister. Look what came of it.”

Coldly, shamelessly, she stripped off her wet shift. If she was to go out into the night, she did not mean to court death.

“What are you doing?” he breathed.

Vasya reached for her sarafan and blouse and outer robe, discarded in the anteroom. “Putting on dry clothes,” she said. “What did you think? That I am going to dance for you, like a peasant girl in spring, while a child lies dead just there?”

He watched her dress, hands opening and closing.

She was beyond caring. She tied her cloak and straightened her spine. “Where do you wish to take me?” she inquired, with bitter humor. “I don’t think you even know.”

“You are going to answer for your crimes,” Konstantin managed, in a voice caught between anger and bewildered wanting.

“Where?” she inquired.

“Do you mock me?” He gathered some measure of his old self-possession, and his hand closed on her upper arm. “To the convent. You will be punished. I promised I would hunt witches.” He stepped nearer. “Then I will see devils no longer; then all will be as it was.”

Vasya, rather than falling back, stepped closer to him, and that was obviously the one thing he did not expect. The priest froze.

Closer still. Vasya was afraid of many things, but she was not afraid of Konstantin Nikonovich.

“Batyushka,” she said, “I would help you if I could.”

His lips shut hard.

She touched his sweating face. He did not move. Her hair tumbled damply over his hand, where it lay locked around her arm.

Vasya made herself stand still despite his pinching grip. “How can I help you?” she whispered.

“Kasyan Lutovich promised me vengeance,” Konstantin whispered, staring, “if I would—but never mind. I do not need him. You are here; it is enough. Come to me now. Make me whole again.”

Vasya met his eyes. “That I cannot do.”

And her knee came up with perfect accuracy.

Konstantin did not scream, nor fall wheezing to the floor; his robes were too thick. But he doubled over with a grunt, and that was all Vasya needed.

She was out in the night—crossing the walkway, then running out through the dooryard.

23. The Jewel of the North

A corpse-gray moon just showed above Olga’s tower. The prince of Serpukhov’s dooryard echoed with the shriek of the still reveling city outside, but Vasya knew there would be guards about. In a moment Konstantin would raise the alarm. She must warn the Grand Prince.

Vasya was already running for Solovey’s paddock before she remembered that he would not be there.

But then there came a thump and a snowy crunch of hooves.

Vasya turned with relief to fling her arms around the stallion’s neck.

It was not Solovey. The horse was white, and she had a rider.

Morozko slid down the mare’s shoulder. Girl and frost-demon faced each other in the sickly moonlight. “Vasya,” he said.

The stench of the bathhouse clung to Vasya’s skin, and the smell of blood. “Is that why you wanted me to run away tonight?” she asked him, bitterly. “So I wouldn’t see my sister die?”

He did not speak, but a fire, blue as a summer sky, leaped up between them. No wood fueled it; yet its heat drove back the night, and cradled her shivering skin. She refused to be grateful. “Answer me!” She gritted her teeth and stamped on the flames. They died as quickly as they had risen.

“I knew the mother or the child was to die,” Morozko said, stepping back. “I would have spared you, yes. But now—”

“Olga threw me out.”

“Rightly,” he finished, coldly. “It was not your choice to make.”

Vasya felt the words like a blow. There was a ball in her gut, a knot in her throat. Her face was sticky with dried tears.

“I came to save you, Vasya,” Morozko said then. “Because—”

The knot of grief broke and lashed out. “I don’t care why! I don’t know if you will tell me the truth; why should I listen? You have guided me as though I were a dog on the hunt, bidden me go here and there and yet told me nothing. So you knew Olga was to die tonight? Or—that my father was to die, there in the Bear’s clearing? Could you have warned me then? Or—” She wrenched out the sapphire from beneath her shirt and held it up. “What is this? Kasyan said it made me your slave. Was he lying, Morozko?”

He was silent.

She came quite close and added, low, “If you ever cared, even a little, for the poor fools you kiss in the dark, you will tell me all the truth. I can stomach no more lies tonight.”

They looked at each other, stone-faced in the silvered darkness. “Vasya,” he whispered from the shadows. “It is not the time. Come away, child.”

“No,” she breathed. “It is the time. Am I such a child, that you must lie to me?”

When he still said nothing, she added, the faintest of breaks in her voice, “Please.”

A muscle twitched in his cheek. “The night before he died,” Morozko said flatly, “Pyotr Vladimirovich lay awake beside the ashes of a burnt village. I came to him at moonset. I told him of your fading chyerti, of the priest sowing fear, of the Bear worming his way free. I told Pyotr that his life could save his people’s. He was willing—more than willing. I guided your father after me, through the woods, on the day the Bear was bound, so that he came timely to the clearing—and he died. But I did not kill him. I gave him the choice. That is what he chose. I cannot take a life out of season, Vasya.”

“You lied to me, then,” Vasya said. “You told me my father happened upon the Bear’s clearing. What else have you lied about, Morozko?”

Again, he was silent.

“What is this?” she whispered, holding the jewel between them.

His glance went from the stone to her face, sharp as shards. “I made it,” he said. “With ice and my own hands.”

“Dunya—”

“Took it on your behalf from your father. Pyotr received it from me when you were a child.”

Vasya yanked the necklace down so that it lay gripped in her hand, chain dangling, broken. “Why?”

For a moment, she thought he would not answer. Then he said, “Long ago, men dreamed me to life, to give a face to the cold and the dark. They set me to rule over them.” His glance strayed beyond hers. “But—the world wound on. The monks came with vellum and ink, with songs and icons, and I diminished. Now I am only a fairy tale for bad children.” He looked at the blue jewel. “I cannot die, but I can fade. I can forget and be forgotten. But—I am not ready to forget. So I bound myself to a human girl, with power in her blood, and her strength made me strong again.” A flush of blue washed his pale eyes. “I chose you, Vasya.”

Vasya felt very far from herself. This, then, was the bond between them, not shared adventure, wry affection, or even the fire he might set in her flesh, but this—thing. This jewel, this not-magic. She thought of the pale wisps of chyerti, fading in their bell-bound world, and how her hand, her words, her gifts could make them briefly real again.

“Is that why you brought me to your house in the forest?” Vasya whispered. “Why you fought my nightmares and gave me presents? Why you—kissed me in the dark? Because I was to be your worshipper? Your—your slave? It was all a scheme to make yourself strong?”

“You are no slave, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he snapped.

When she was silent, he went on, more gently. “I have had enough of those. It was emotions I needed from you—feelings.”

“Worship,” retorted Vasya. “Poor frost-demon. All your poor believers turned to newer gods, and you were left groping for the hearts of stupid girls who don’t know better. That is why you came so often, and why you left again. That is why you bade me wear the jewel and remember you.”

“I saved your life,” he returned, harsh now. “Twice. You have carried that jewel, and your strength has sustained me. Is it not a fair exchange?”

Vasya could not speak. She barely heard him. He had used her. She was a doom to her kin. Her family lay in ruins—and her heart.

“Find another,” she said, surprised at the calm in her voice. “Find another to wear your charm. I cannot.”

“Vasya—no, you must listen—”

“I will not!” she cried. “I want nothing of you. I want no one. The world is wide; surely you will find another. Perhaps this time you will not use her unknowing.”

“If you leave me now,” he answered, just as evenly, “you will be in terrible danger. The sorcerer will find you.”

“Help me, then,” she said. “Tell me what Kasyan means to do.”

“I cannot see. He is wound about with magic, to keep me out. Better to leave, Vasya.”

Vasya shook her head. “Perhaps I will die here, as others have died. But I will not die your creature.”

Somehow the wind had risen in the space between her heartbeats, and to Vasya it seemed they stood alone in the snow, that the stinks and the shapes of the city were gone. There were only herself and the frost-demon, in the moonlight. The wind shrieked and gibbered all around them, yet her plait did not stir in the gusts.

“Let me go,” she said. “I am no one’s slave.”

Her hand opened and the sapphire fell; he caught it. It melted in his hand until it was not a jewel at all but a palmful of cold water.

Abruptly, the wind died and all around was churned-up snow and hulking palaces.

She turned away from him. The dooryard of the prince of Serpukhov had never seemed so large, the snow so deep. She did not look back.