The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

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.