The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

“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.