The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy 1)

Perhaps an hour later, Vasya roused herself from an exhausted stupor and eyed her half-dry clothes. The sun had passed its zenith and begun to tilt west, which meant, in the long days of midsummer, that the afternoon was well advanced. By now Anna would be seething, and even Dunya would give her a tight-lipped glare when she slunk in the door. Irina was no doubt crouched over the sweltering oven or wearing out her fingers with mending. Feeling guilty, Vasya crept down to a lower limb—and froze.

Father Konstantin was sitting in the grass. He might have been a handsome farmer and not a priest at all. He had traded his robe for a linen shirt and loose trousers, studded with bits of barley-stem, and his uncovered hair blazed in the afternoon sun. He was looking out at the lake. What is he doing here? Vasya was still screened by the tree’s foliage; she hooked her knees around the branch, let herself down, and snatched her clothes, quick as a squirrel. Perching awkwardly on an upper limb, trying not to fall and break an arm, she slipped into her shirt and leggings—stolen from Alyosha—and used her fingers to wrestle some order into her hair. Finally she flicked the end of a lumpy braid behind her, caught the tree-limb, and swung to the ground. Maybe if I creep away very quietly…

Then Vasya saw the rusalka. She was standing in the water. Her hair floated around her, half-masking her bare breasts. She smiled, just a little, at Father Konstantin. The priest, entranced, stood up and swayed toward her. Without thinking, Vasya darted at him and caught his hand. But he shoved her off, almost casually, stronger than he looked.

Vasya turned to the rusalka. “Leave him alone!”

“He will kill us all,” the rusalka replied, voice soft, eyes never leaving her prey. “Already it has begun. If he goes on as he has, all the guardians of the deep forest will disappear; the storm will come and the land will go undefended. Have you not seen it? Fear is first, then fire, then famine. He made your people afraid. And then the fires burned, and now the sun scorches. You will be hungry when the cold comes. The winter-king is weak, and his brother very near. He will come if the wards fail. Better anything than that.” Her voice shook with passion. “Better I take this one now.”

Father Konstantin took another step. The water welled up around his boots. He was on the very brink of the lake.

Vasya shook her head, trying to clear it. “You must not.”

“Why not? Is his life worth everyone else’s? And I say to you surely that if he lives now, many will die.”

Vasya hesitated a long moment. She remembered, unwillingly, the priest praying beside Timofei’s stiffening corpse, mouthing the words long after his voice had gone. She remembered him holding the boy’s mother upright when she would have fallen weeping to the snow. The girl set her teeth and shook her head.

The rusalka threw back her head and shrieked. And then she wasn’t there at all; there was only sun on the water, weeds, and tree-shadows. Vasya caught the priest’s hand and yanked him away from the edge. He looked down at her and awareness came back to his eyes.

KONSTANTIN’S FEET WERE COLD, and he felt strangely bereft. Cold because he was standing in six inches of water on the very brink of the lake, but he wondered at the stab of loneliness. He never felt lonely. A face was swimming into focus. Before he could put a name to it, the person caught his hand and dragged him stumbling back to dry land. The light glanced red off the black braid and suddenly he knew her. “Vasilisa Petrovna.”

She dropped his hand, turned and looked at him. “Batyushka.”

He felt his wet feet, remembered the woman in the lake, and felt the beginnings of fear. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Saving your life,” she replied. “The lake is a danger to you.”

“Demons…”

Vasya shrugged. “Or the guardian of the lake. Call her what you will.”

He made as though to turn back to the water, fumbling at his cross with one hand.

She reached forward and seized it, breaking the thong that held it around his neck. “Leave it, and her,” the girl said fiercely, holding the cross out of reach. “You’ve done enough damage; can you not let them be?”

“I want to save you, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said. “I will save you all. There are dark forces that you do not understand.”

To his surprise, and perhaps to hers, she laughed. Amusement smoothed the angles of her face. Caught, he stared at her in unwilling admiration.

“It seems to me, Batyushka, that it is you who do not understand, as it was your life that needed saving. Go back to the work in the barley-fields and leave the lake alone.” She turned without waiting to see if he followed, feet noiseless on the moss and pine needles. Konstantin fell in beside her. She still held his wooden cross between her two fingers.

“Vasilisa Petrovna,” he tried again, cursing his clumsiness. Always he knew what to say. But this girl turned her clear gaze on him, and all his certainty grew vague and foolish. “You must leave your barbaric ways. You must return to God in fear and true repentance. You are the daughter of a good Christian lord. Your mother will run mad if we do not exorcise the demons from her hearth. Vasilisa Petrovna, turn. Repent.”

“I go to church, Father,” she replied. “Anna Ivanovna is not my mother, nor is her madness my business. Just as my soul is not yours. And it seems to me we did very well before you came; for if we prayed less, we also wept less.”

She had walked swiftly. Through the tree-trunks he could see the palisade of the village.

“Mark me, Batyushka,” she said. “Pray for the dead, comfort the sick, and comfort my stepmother. But leave me alone, or next time one of them comes for you, I shall not lift a finger to stop it.” She did not wait for a reply but thrust his cross back into his hand and strode off toward the village.

It was warm from her hand, and his fingers curled reluctantly around it.

The blinding afternoon sunlight gave way to honey-gold, and at last to amber and rust. A faint half moon showed just above a line of pale yellow sky. The heat of the day went with the light, and the men in the barley-field shivered in their cooling sweat. Konstantin put his scythe over his shoulder. Bloody blisters had blossomed beneath the hardened skin of his palms. He balanced the scythe with his fingertips and avoided Pyotr Vladimirovich. Longing closed his throat and wrath stole his voice. It was a demon. It was your imagination. You did not cast her out; you crawled toward her.

God, he wanted to go back to Moscow—or Kiev—or further yet. To eat bread hot and plentiful instead of starving half the year, to leave the plowing to farmers, to speak before thousands, and never lie awake, wondering.

No. God had given him a task. He could not lay it aside half-finished.

Oh, if I could but finish.

His jaw set. He would. He must. And before he died he would live again in a world where girls did not defy him and demons did not walk in Christian daylight.

Konstantin passed the mown barley and skirted the horse-pasture. The edge of the wood threw hungry shadows. He turned his face away, toward Pyotr’s herds grazing in the long twilight. A flash of brightness showed among the grays and chestnuts. Konstantin narrowed his eyes. One horse—Pyotr’s war-stallion—stood still, his head up. A slender figure stood at the beast’s shoulder, silhouetted against the sunset. Konstantin knew her at once. The stallion curved its wicked head around to nibble at her braid, and she laughed like a child.