“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 clo
se 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 V
asya 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.”
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