The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

He kicked her in the stomach. Her ribs cracked. Blackness exploded across her vision. He raised a hand, limned with red light. Then the light became blood-colored flames wrapping his fingers. She could smell the fire. Somewhere behind him, Marya gave a thin, pained cry.

He bent nearer, put the burning hand almost onto her face. “Who do you think you are, compared to me?”

“Morozko spoke true,” Vasya whispered, unable to take her eyes off the flames. “You are a sorcerer. Kaschei the Deathless.”

Kasyan’s answering smile had an edge of grimy secrets, of lightless years, of famine, and terror, and endless, gnawing hunger. The fire in his hand went blue, then vanished. “My name is Kasyan Lutovich,” he said. “The other is a foolish nickname. I was a little thin creature as a child, you know, and so they nicknamed me for my bones. Now I am the Grand Prince of Moscow.” He straightened up, looked down at her, and laughed suddenly. “A poor champion, you,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come. You won’t be my wife. I’ve changed my mind. I will keep Masha for that, and you may be my slave. I will break you slowly.”

Vasya didn’t answer. Her vision still sparked red-black with pain.

Kasyan bent down and gripped her hard by the back of her neck. He put his other forefinger to where her tears pooled just at the corner of her eyes. His hands were cold as death. “Perhaps you don’t need to see at all,” he whispered. He tapped her eyelid with a long-nailed hand. “I would like that; you an eyeless drudge in my Tower of Bones.”

Vasya’s breathing snarled in her throat. Behind him, Marya had left off her cakes, and she was watching them with a dull, incurious expression.

Suddenly Kasyan’s head jerked up. “No,” he said.

Vasya, shivering, her cracked ribs afire, rolled over to follow his gaze.

There stood the ghost—the ghost of the staircase, the ghost from her sister’s tower. The scanty hair streamed, the loose-lipped mouth gaped on emptiness. She was bent as though with pain. But she spoke. “Don’t touch her,” the ghost said.

“Tamara,” Kasyan said. Vasya stiffened in surprise. “Go back outside. Go back to your tower; that is where you belong.”

“I will not,” croaked the ghost. She stepped forward.

Kasyan recoiled, staring. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. “Don’t look at me that way. I never hurt you—no, never.”

The ghost glanced at Vasya, urgently, and then moved toward Kasyan, drawing his eyes.

“Are you afraid?” the ghost whispered, a parody of intimacy. “You were always afraid. You feared my mother’s horses. I had to catch yours for you—put your bridle on the mare’s head—do you remember? I loved you in those days; I would do just as you said.”

“Be silent!” he hissed. “You should not be here. You cannot be here. I set you apart from me.”

Ghost and sorcerer were staring at each other with mingled rage and hunger and bitter loss. “No,” breathed the ghost. “That is not how it was. You wanted to keep me. I fled. I came to Moscow and went into Ivan’s tower, where you could not follow.” One bony hand went to her throat. “Even then, I could never be free of you. But my daughter—she died free. Beloved. I won that much.”

Tamara, Vasya thought.

Grandmother.

While the ghost whispered, Vasya had crept to where Marya sat silent beside the stove, still eating, not looking up. Tears had made tracks in the child’s dirty face. Vasya tried pulling her toward the door. But Marya only sat stiff, dull-eyed. Vasya’s cracked ribs burned with the effort.

A heavy step and a whiff of perfumed oil warned her, but she did not turn in time. Kasyan seized Vasya from behind and wrenched her arm up, so that she choked back a scream. The sorcerer spoke into her ear. “You think you can trick me?” he hissed. “A girl, a ghost, and a child? I don’t care what witch bore you all; I am master.”

“Marya Vladimirovna,” said the ghost in her strange, blurred voice. “Look at me.”

Marya’s head slowly rose, her eyes slowly opened.

She saw the ghost.

She screamed, a raw, child’s wail of terror. Kasyan’s gaze shifted toward the girl for just a moment and Vasya reached back, ribs aching, and seized Kasyan’s knife—her knife, where it hung from his belt. She tried to stab him. He recoiled, and she missed, but his grip on her arm weakened.

Vasya hurled herself forward and rolled. She came up holding the knife. Armed now, at least, and on her feet, but it hurt to breathe, and Kasyan was between her and Marya.

Kasyan drew his sword and bared his teeth. “I am going to kill you.”

Vasya had no hope; a half-trained girl against an armed man. Kasyan’s blade came slicing down and Vasya just managed to turn it with her dagger. Masha sat swaying like a sleepwalker. “Masha!” Vasya shouted frantically. “Get up! Get to the door! Go, child!” She kicked a table at Kasyan and backed up, sobbing for breath.

Kasyan cut sideways and Vasya ducked. Now it seemed that a black-cloaked figure waited in the corner. For me, she thought. He is here for me, for the last time. The sword came whistling across to cut her in two. She jumped back, barely.

For an instant, Vasya’s gaze flew again to the ghost. Tamara, behind Kasyan, had put a hand to her own throat, at the place where once a talisman had hung around Vasya’s neck. A talisman that bound her…Then Tamara’s frantic eyes shot to the child, and Vasya understood.

She dodged Kasyan’s sword, dodged again. Every strike fell closer; Vasya could barely draw breath. There was Marya, sitting stiff. In the instant before the sword fell a final time, Vasya reached for Marya and found a red-gold thing, heavy and cold beneath the child’s blouse. Vasya broke it off with a wrench—so that the metal cut into her palm and bloodied the child’s throat—and in the same motion, she whirled and flung it at the sorcerer’s face. It struck him with a splatter of gold and red light, and then fell, broken, to the floor.

Kasyan stared from it to Vasya, shock in his eyes.

Then he staggered back. His face began to change. Years seemed to rush in, as though a dam had broken. Suddenly he was transformed into an old man, skeletal, red-eyed. They stood in a room that was no magic sorcerer’s lair, but only the empty tower workroom of the Grand Princess of Moscow, dusty and smelling of wet wool and women, its inner door barred.

“Bitch!” Kasyan roared. “Bitch! You dare?” He advanced again, but now he was stumbling. His guard dropped, and Vasya had not forgotten her days under the tree with Morozko. She dodged his wavering arm, came up inside his guard, and drove the knife between his ribs.

Kasyan grunted. It was the ghost who screamed. The sorcerer bled not at all, but Tamara’s side was bleeding in the place where Vasya had stabbed Kasyan.

The ghost doubled over and crumpled to the floor.

Kasyan straightened, unwounded, and advanced again, teeth bared, ancient, unkillable. Vasya had dragged Marya bodily upright and now she backed toward the door. Marya went with her, trembling, life in her steps once more, though she uttered no sound, her eyes the eyes of a girl in a nightmare. Vasya’s ribs felt as though they would pierce through her skin with each step. Kasyan still had his sword…

“There is nowhere to go,” Kasyan whispered. “You cannot kill me. Besides, the city is on fire, you murderess. You will stay here in the tower, while your family burns.”