The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

They both turned to look at the high table. Indeed, some of the men had fallen off the bench and lay snoring, but the ones still upright had invited women to sit beside them. Their wives had all gone to bed. The Grand Prince had two girls, one on each arm. He caught one girl’s breast in his broad palm, and Vasya’s face heated. Beside her, Morozko said, voice threaded with suppressed laughter, “Well, I will defer my feast. Will you ride with me instead, Vasya?”

All about them thrummed the churn and the reek, shouts and half-screamed singing. Suddenly Moscow stifled her. She had had enough of the musty palaces, hard eyes, deception, disappointments…

All around, the chyerti watched.

“Yes,” Vasya said.

Morozko gestured, elegantly, toward the doors, then followed her out into the night.

SOLOVEY SAW THEM FIRST and loosed a ringing neigh. Beside him stood Morozko’s white mare, a pale ghost against the snow. Zima cowered against the fence, watching the newcomers.

Vasya ducked between the bars of the fence, murmured reassurance to the filly, and leaped onto Solovey’s familiar back, heedless of her fine clothes.

Morozko mounted the white mare and laid a hand on her neck.

All around were the high bars of the paddock. Vasya set her horse at them. Solovey cleared the fence, the white mare only a stride behind. Overhead the last of the cloud-haze blew away, and the living stars shone down.

They passed the prince of Serpukhov’s gate like wraiths. Below them, the kremlin-gate was open still, in honor of festival-night, and the posad below the kremlin proper was full of red hearth-light and slurred singing.

But Vasya had no care for hearths or songs. The other, older world had hold of her now, with its clean beauty, its mysteries, its savagery. They galloped unremarked through the kremlin-gate, and the horses swung to the right, racing between the feast-filled houses. Then the sound of the horses’ hooves changed, and the river unrolled ribbon-like before them. The smoke of the city fell behind, and all around was snow and clear moonlight.

Vasya was still more than half-drunk, despite the cleansing shock of the night air. She cried aloud, and Solovey’s stride lengthened; then they were galloping down the length of the Moskva. The two horses raced stride for stride across ice and silver snow, and Vasya laughed, teeth bared against the wind.

Morozko rode beside her.

They galloped a long time. When Vasya had ridden enough, she drew Solovey to a walk, and on impulse dived, still laughing, into a snowbank. Sweating under her heavy clothes, she wrenched off both hat and hood and bared her tousled black head to the night.

Morozko pulled up when Solovey halted and dropped lightly onto the river-ice. He had raced with a mad glee to match hers, but now there was something gathered and careful in his expression. “So you are a lord’s son now,” Morozko said.

Some of Vasya’s forgetful ease faded. She got up, brushing herself off. “I like being a lord. Why was I ever born a girl?”

A blue gleam, from beneath veiled lids. “You are none so ill as a girl.”

It was the wine—only the wine—that brought heat to her face. Her mood changed. “Is that all there is for me, then? To be a ghost—someone real and not real? I like being a young lord. I could stay here and help the Grand Prince. I could train horses, and manage men, and wield a sword. But I really cannot, for they will have my secret in time.”

She turned abruptly. The starlight shone in her open eyes. “If I cannot be a lord, I can still be a traveler. I want to ride to the ends of the world, if Solovey will bear me. I would see the green land beyond the sunset, the island—”

“Buyan?” Morozko murmured, from behind her. “Where the waves beat upon a rocky shore, and the wind smells of cold stone and orange blossom? Ruled by a swan-maiden with sea-gray eyes? The land of the fairy tale? Is that what you want?”

The heat of the wine and the wild ride were dimming now, and all around was the deathly hush before the dawn wind rises. Vasya shivered suddenly, cloaked in wolfskin and in the skeins of her black hair. “Is that why you came?” she asked, not turning around. “To tempt me from Moscow? Or are you going to tell me that I am better off here, dressed as a girl, married? Why did the chyerti come to the feasting? Why was the gamayun waiting above—yes, I know what the bird means. What is happening?”

“Are we not permitted to feast with the people?”

She said nothing. She moved again, pacing like a cat in a cage despite the sweep of ice and forest and sky. “I want freedom,” she said at length, almost to herself. “But I also want a place and a purpose. I am not sure I can have either, let alone both. And I do not want to live a lie. I am hurting my brother and sister.” She stopped abruptly and turned. “Can you solve this riddle for me?”

Morozko raised an eyebrow. The dawn wind made eddies of the snow at the horses’ feet. “Am I an oracle?” he asked her coldly. “Can I not come to a feast, ride in the moonlight, without being called on to hear the plaints of Russian maidens? What care I for your little mysteries, or your brother’s conscience? Here is my answer: that you ought not to listen to fairy tales. I spoke truly once: Your world does not care what you want.”

Vasya pressed her lips together. “My sister said the same thing. But what about you? Do you care?”

He fell silent. Clouds were massing overhead. The mare shivered her skin all over.

“You can mock,” Vasya continued, angry now in turn, stepping closer, and closer still. “But you live forever. Perhaps you don’t want anything, or care about anything. And yet—you are here.”

He said nothing.

“Should I live out my life as a false lord, until they find me out and put me in a convent?” she demanded. “Should I run away? Go home? Never see my brothers again? Where do I belong? I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. And I have eaten in your house, and nearly died in your arms, and you rode with me tonight and—I hoped you might know.”

The word sounded foolish even as she said it. She bit her lip. The silence stretched out.

“Vasya,” he said.

“Don’t. You never mean it,” she said, drawing away. “You are immortal, and it is only a game—”

His answer was not in words, but his hands, perhaps, spoke for him when his fingertips found the pulse behind her jaw. She did not move. His eyes were cold and still: pale stars to make her lost. “Vasya,” he said again, low and—almost ragged, into her ear. “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.

“It is all I have,” he said. Then he slid his fingers through her hair and kissed her.

She made a sound like a sob, anger and wanting together. Then her arms went round him.

She had never been kissed before, not thus. Not long and—deliberately. She didn’t know how—but he taught her. Not with words, no: with his mouth, and his fingertips, and a feeling that did not have words. A touch, dark and exquisite, that breathed along her skin.