The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

Instinct drove Vasya to the left of the nave, where the women worshipped, until she recalled herself. Then she stood, marveling, in the throng behind the Grand Prince.

For the first time in a long while, Vasya pitied Father Konstantin. This is what he lost, she thought, when he came to live at Lesnaya Zemlya. This glimpse of his Heaven, this jewel-setting where he might worship and be beloved. No wonder it all turned to threats and bitterness and damnation.

The service wound on, the longest service that Vasya had ever stood through. Chanting replaced speech, which replaced prayer, and all the while she stood in a half-dream, until the Grand Prince and his party left the cathedral. Vasya, surfeited with beauty, was glad to go. The night released them to violent freedom, after three hours of sober ritual.

The Grand Prince’s procession turned back toward Dmitrii’s palace; as they wound through the streets, the bishops blessed the crowd.

They clashed briefly with another procession, a spontaneous one, marching in the snow with Lady Maslenitsa, the effigy-doll, borne high above. In all the confusion, a throng of young boyars came up and surrounded Vasya.

Fair hair and wide-set eyes, jeweled fingers and sashes askew; this was surely yet another clutch of cousins. Vasya crossed her arms. They jostled like a dog-pack.

“I hear that you are high in the Grand Prince’s favor,” said one. His young beard was a hopeful down on his skinny face.

“Why should I not be?” Vasya returned. “I drink my wine and do not spill it, and I ride better than you.”

One of the young lords shoved her. She gave back gracefully before it, and kept her feet. “Strong breeze tonight, wouldn’t you say?” she said.

“Vasilii Petrovich, are you too good for us?” another boy asked, grinning around a rotted tooth.

“Probably,” said Vasya. A certain recklessness of temper, quelled in childhood, but now nourished by the rough world in which she found herself, had burst giddily to life in her soul. She smiled at the young boyars and she found herself, truly, unafraid.

“Too good for us?” they jeered. “You are only a country lord’s son, a nobody, jumped-up, the grandchild of a morganatic marriage.”

Vasya refuted all this with a few inventive insults of her own, and laughing and snarling at once, they eventually informed her that they meant to run twice about the palace of Dmitrii Ivanovich and a wine-jar to the winner.

“As you like,” said Vasya, fleet-footed from childhood. She had put all thoughts of bandits, mysteries, failures from her mind; she meant to enjoy her evening. “How much of a start would you like?”

CLUTCHING HER WINE, TIPSY ALREADY, Vasya was borne by a wave of new friends into Dmitrii Ivanovich’s hall, a little of her worry drowned in triumph, only to find most of the players in her deceitful drama already present in the cavern of the Grand Prince’s hall.

Dmitrii, of course, sat in the central place. A woman whose robe stuck straight out from her shoulders, beneath a round-faced expression of sour complacency, sat beside him. His wife…

Kasyan—Vasya frowned. Kasyan was calm as ever, magnificently dressed, but he wore an expression of grave thought, a line between his red brows. Vasya was wondering if he’d had bad news, when her brother appeared and caught her by the arm.

“You heard,” said Vasya resignedly.

Sasha pulled her into a corner, displacing a flirtatious conference, to the irritation of both parties. “Olga told me you took Marya into the city.”

“I did,” said Vasya.

“And that you won a horse from Chelubey in a wager.”

Vasya nodded. She could hear him grinding his teeth. “Vasya, you must stop all this,” Sasha said. “Making a spectacle of yourself and drawing that child in? You must—”

“What?” Vasya snapped. She loved too well this clear-eyed, strong-handed son of her father, and was all the angrier for it. “Step quietly off into the night, back into a locked room in Olya’s palace, there to arrange my linen forthwith, say prayers in the morning, and rally my feeble charms for the seduction of boyish lords? All this while Solovey languishes in the dooryard? Do you mean to sell my horse, then, brother, or take him for yourself, when I go into the terem? You are a monk. I don’t see you in a monastery, Brother Aleksandr. Shouldn’t you be growing a garden, chanting, praying without pause? Instead you are here, the nearest adviser of the Grand Prince of Moscow. Why you, brother? Why you and not I?” Her shoulders heaved; she had surprised even herself with the flow of words.

Sasha said nothing. She realized that he had said all this over to himself in the thinking silences of the monastery, argument and counterargument, and had no answers either. He was looking at her with a frank and unhappy bewilderment that smote her heart.

“No,” she said. Her hand found his, thin and strong, there on her fur-clad arm. “You know as well as I do that I cannot go into the terem any more than a real boy could. Here I am and here I remain. Unless you mean to reveal us both as liars before all the company?”

“Vasya,” he said. “It cannot last.”

“I know. And I will end it. I swear it, Sasha.” Her mouth quirked, darkly. “But there is nothing for it; let us feast now, my brother, and tell our lies.”

Sasha flinched, and Vasya stalked away from him before he could reply, high-headed in her fading anger, with sweat pooling at her temples, beneath the hated hat, and tears pooling in her eyes, because her brother had loved the child Vasilisa. But how can one love a woman who is too much like that child, still brash, still unafraid?

I must go, she thought suddenly and clearly. I cannot wait until the end of Maslenitsa. I am wounding him the worst, with this lie on my behalf, and I must go.

Tomorrow, brother, she thought. Tomorrow.

Dmitrii waved her over, smiling as ever, and only his stone-cold sobriety showed that perhaps the prince was not as at ease as he appeared. His city and his boyars seethed with talk; a Tatar lord lounged in his city, demanding tribute, and the Grand Prince’s heart bade him fight while his head bade him wait, and both those things required money that he did not have.

“I hear you won a horse from Chelubey,” Dmitrii said to her, banishing trouble from his face with practiced ease.

“I did,” said Vasya breathlessly, smacked in the back by a passing platter. Already the first dishes were going around, a little touched with snow from their trip across the dooryard. No meat, but every kind of delicacy that flour and honey and butter and eggs and milk could contrive.

“Well done, boy,” said the Grand Prince. “Although I cannot approve. Chelubey is a guest, after all. But boys will be boys; you would think the horse-lord could manage a filly better.” Dmitrii winked at her.

Vasya, until then, had felt the pain of Sasha’s lie to the Grand Prince; she had never felt the guilt of her own. But now she remembered a promise of service and her conscience smote her.

Well, one secret, at least, could be told. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya said suddenly. “There is something I must tell you—about this horse-lord.”

Kasyan was drinking his wine and listening; now he came to his feet, shaking back his red hair.

“Shall we have no entertainment, for the festival-season?” he roared drunkenly at the room at large, quite drowning her out. “Shall we have no amusements?”