The Girl in the Tower

by Katherine Arden

  “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. Hav
e 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.”