The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

“Now what?” whispered Rodion, while they skulked in the shadow of the wall opposite.

“We must get in,” said Vasya impatiently. “The Grand Prince must be woken and warned.”

“How can you be—” Rodion began.

“There are two smaller gates,” cut in Sasha, “besides the main one. But they will be barred from the inside.”

“We must go over the wall,” said Vasya shortly.

Sasha looked at his sister. He had never thought of her as girlish, but the last trace of softness was gone. The quick brain, the strong limbs were there: fiercely, almost defiantly present, though concealed beneath her encumbering dress. She was more feminine than she had ever been, and less.

Witch. The word drifted across his mind. We call such women so, because we have no other name.

She seemed to catch his thought; she bent her head in troubled acknowledgment. Then she said, “I am smaller than either of you. If you help me, I can get over the wall. I will open a gate for you.” Her eye traveled once more over the snowy, silent street. “Watch for enemies in the meantime.”

“Why are you giving orders?” Rodion managed. “How do you know all this?”

“How,” interrupted Sasha with impatience of his own, “do you mean to open a gate for us?”

Both men distrusted Vasya’s answering smile; wide and careless. “Watch,” she said.

Sasha and Rodion glanced at each other. They had seen men on battlefields wear that face, and it rarely ended well.

Vasya ran like a wraith for the Grand Prince of Moscow’s walls. Sasha followed her. In her face was a fitful light that he did not like. “Lift me up,” she said.

“Vasya—”

“There is no time, brother.”

“Mother of God,” Sasha muttered, and bent to take her weight. She was bird-light when she stepped to his back, and then, as he straightened, to his shoulders. She was still short of the wall, but then she jumped unexpectedly, sending him sprawling backward, and caught the wall-top with the first two joints of her strong fingers. She had no mittens. She pulled herself up by main force. One booted foot rose to touch the wall-top. An instant Vasya crouched there, almost invisible. Then she dropped into the deep snow on the other side.

Sasha got to his feet, brushing off snow. Rodion came up behind him, shaking his head. “When I met her at Lesnaya Zemlya I was lost in the rain,” he said. “She was gathering mushrooms, wet as a water-spirit, and riding a horse with no bridle. I knew she was not a girl formed for convents but—”

“She is herself,” said Sasha. “Doom and blessing both, and it is for God to judge her. But in this, I will trust her. We must watch for enemies, and wait.”

VASYA DROPPED FROM THE WALL into a snowbank and rose to her feet unhurt. Now she got some good out of her silly footrace around Dmitrii Ivanovich’s palace—it seemed so long ago—for she was reasonably sure of her ground. There—stables. There—brewery. Smokehouse, tannery, blacksmith. The palace itself.

Above all, Vasya wanted her horse. She wanted his strength, his warm breath, his uncomplicated affection. Without him, she was a lost girl in a dress; on his back, she felt invincible.

But first there was another boon from that footrace, and she must use it.

With freezing fingers, Vasya reopened the cut on her wrist, that had given the ghost suck earlier. She let three drops fall into the snow.

A dvorovoi is a dooryard-spirit, rarer than a domovoi, less understood and sometimes vicious. This one peeled softly out of the starlight and the muddy earth, looking like a heap of filthy snow, faint as all the chyerti in Moscow were faint.

Vasya was glad to see him.

“You again,” it said, baring its teeth. “You have broken into my yard.”

“To save your master,” Vasya returned.

The dvorovoi smiled. “Perhaps I want a new master. The red sorcerer will wake the sleeper and silence the bells, and perhaps then folk will leave gifts for me again.”

The sleeper…Vasya shook her head sharply. “You do not pick and choose,” she told him. “You are bound to your people for good and for ill, and you must help them at need. I mean no harm. Will you help me now?” She reached out, gingerly, and pressed her bloody fingers to the dvorovoi’s cold, misshapen face.

“What would you have me do?” asked the dvorovoi warily, smelling of her blood. He was more flesh than snow now.

Vasya smiled at him, coldly. “Make noise,” she said. “Rouse the whole cursed palace. The time for secrets is past.”

A DRINK-SODDEN HUSH LAY over the palace of the Grand Prince, and the city outside had gone quiet. But it was not a peaceful quiet, as was proper after days of cakes and drink. A tension ran through the silence, and Vasya’s skin prickled. The dvorovoi had heard her out, narrow-eyed, then abruptly disappeared.

From childhood, Vasya had been able to walk softly, but now she crept from shadow to shadow with a robber’s care, almost afraid to breathe, keeping the wall on her left. Where was the postern-gate? She avoided the guttering pools of torchlight, watching for the door, watching for guards, listening, listening…

Suddenly from across the dooryard there came a shrieking, as though a thousand cats were having their tails pulled. The dogs in their kennels began to bay.

A torch ran along a gallery above, and a lamp was lit. Then another, and another, as the clamor grew in the dooryard. A woman shrieked. Vasya almost smiled. No room for secrecy now.

Next moment, Vasya tripped over a man’s legs and sprawled in the thick snow. Heart racing, she scrambled up and whirled round. To her right was the postern-gate, sunk in shadow. The single gate-guard sat before it with his head sunk on his breast. It was his legs she had tripped over.

Vasya crept nearer. The man did not move. She put her fingers near his face. No breath. When she shook him by the shoulder, his head lolled on his neck. His throat was cut, gashed deep, and that was not pools of shadow on the snow but blood—

The noise in the dooryard was mounting. Suddenly a rush of bodies—four—six—strong, soft-footed men, darted out of the shadows opposite her and made for the palace steps. Kasyan let them in during the revel, Vasya thought. I am too late. Gathering her strength, she dug her numb hands beneath the dead guard’s arms and dragged him away, breathing a prayer for his soul, slipping on the snow.

As soon as she opened the gate, Sasha thrust his way past her into the dooryard.

“Where is Rodion?” she demanded.

Her brother only shook his head, eyes already up on the swimming shadows, the scrum of bodies, firelight and darkness, a new and unmistakable sound of fighting. A man fell through the fine screen-work that protected the stairs and fell yelling into the dooryard. The dogs still bayed in the kennels. Vasya thought she glimpsed Kasyan, standing taut before the palace-gate, his red hair black in the darkness.

Then above it all rose a roaring battle-cry—reassuringly hale but hoarse with surprise and urgency—the voice of the Grand Prince of Moscow.

“Mitya,” Sasha breathed. Something in that childish nickname—probably not said to Dmitrii’s face since he was crowned at sixteen—held a living echo of their shared youth, and Vasya thought suddenly, That is why he did not come back. However he loved us, he loves this prince more, and Dmitrii needed him.