10.

Family

Snow fell lightly, fracturing the winter morning. Dmitrii was shouting up at the sentry on the ladder behind the wall. “Do you see them? Anything?” The Grand Prince’s men hastily smothered their fires and began mustering arms. A crowd gathered around the newcomers: a few women hurried forward, crying questions. Their men followed, staring.

Sasha was only half-aware. The pale, smudged creature before him could not be his younger sister.

Absolutely not. His sister Vasilisa must by now be married to one of her father’s sober, earnest neighbors. She was a matron, with a babe in arms. She was certainly not riding the roads of Rus’ with bandits at her back. No. This was some boy who resembled her, and not Vasya at all. His young sister could never have grown tall and gaunt as a wolfhound, nor learned to carry herself with such disturbing grace. And how could her face bear such a stamp of grief and steady courage?

Sasha met the newcomer’s stare, and he knew—Mother of God, he knew that he was not mistaken. He could never—not in a thousand years—forget his sister’s eyes.

Horror replaced shock. Had she run away with a man? What in God’s name had happened at Lesnaya Zemlya, that she would come here?

Interested villagers crept nearer, wondering why the famous monk gaped at a ragged slip of a boy and called him Vasya.

“Vasya—” Sasha began again, forgetful of their surroundings.

Dmitrii’s bellow cut him off. The Grand Prince had come down from the wall in time to intercept Sergei, hurrying toward the commotion. “Back off, all of you, in the name of Christ. Here is your holy hegumen.”

The people made way. Dmitrii was still snarled from sleep, half-armored and loud, but he supported the old monk tenderly on one arm.

“Cousin, who is this?” the Grand Prince demanded, when he had parted the crowd. “The sentry sees nothing from the wall-top, are you sure—?” He broke off, looked more slowly from Sasha to Vasilisa and back again. “God have mercy,” said the Grand Prince. “Take off your beard, Brother Aleksandr, and this boy would be the image of you.”

Sasha, not usually at a loss for words, could not think what to say. Sergei was looking, frowning, from Sasha to his sister.

Vasya spoke up first. “These girls have been riding all night,” she said. “They are very cold. They must have baths at once, and soup.”

Dmitrii blinked; he had not noticed the three pallid scarecrows clinging to the intriguing boy’s cloak.

“Indeed they must,” said holy Sergei. He gave Sasha a lingering look, then said, “God be with you, my daughters. Come with me at once. This way.”

The girls clung to their rescuer tighter than ever, until Vasya said, “Here, Katya, you must be first. Lead them away; you cannot stay outdoors.”

The eldest girl nodded, slowly. The little girls were weeping with pure exhaustion, but at length they allowed themselves to be led away, to food and baths and beds.

Dmitrii folded his arms. “Well, cousin?” he said to Sasha. “Who is this?”

Some of the dispossessed villagers had gone about their business, but a few still listened unabashedly. Half a dozen idle monks had also drifted closer. “Well?” Dmitrii said again.

What can I say? Sasha wondered. Dmitrii Ivanovich, let me present my mad sister Vasilisa, who has come where no woman should be, is dressed like a man in defiance of all decency, has flouted her father and very likely run off with a lover. Here is the brave little frog, the sister that I loved.

Before he could speak, it was she, once more, who spoke first.

“I am called Vasilii Petrovich,” Vasya said clearly. “I am Sasha’s younger brother—or was, before he gave himself to God. I have not seen him in many years.” She shot Sasha a hard look, as though daring him to contradict. Her voice was low for a woman. A long dagger hung sheathed at her hip, and she wore her boy’s clothes without embarrassment. How long had she been wearing them?

Sasha shut his lips. Vasya as a boy solved the immediate problem of instant, appalling scandal, and the real danger for his sister among Dmitrii’s men. But it is wrong—indecent. And Olga will be furious.

“Forgive my silence,” Sasha said to Dmitrii Ivanovich, matching his sister glare for glare. “I was surprised to see my brother here.”

Vasya’s shoulders relaxed. As a child, Sasha had always known her to be clever. Now this woman said calmly, “No more than I, brother.” She turned brilliant, curious eyes upon Dmitrii. “Gosudar,” she said, “you call my brother ‘cousin.’ Are you then Dmitrii Ivanovich, the Grand Prince of Moscow?”

Dmitrii looked pleased, if a little puzzled. “I am,” he said. “How came your youngest brother to be here, Sasha?”

“By great good fortune,” said Sasha in no very pleasant tones, glaring at his sister. “Have you nothing better to do?” he added to the monks and villagers who stood about, staring.

The crowd began to break up, with many backward glances.

Dmitrii took no notice; he clapped Vasya on the back hard enough to make her stagger. “I don’t believe it!” he cried to Sasha. “And outside you said—you were pursued? But the men on the wall have seen no sign.”

Vasya replied, after only a slight hesitation, “I have not seen the bandits since last night. But at dawn, I heard hoofbeats and sought out shelter. Gosudar, yesterday I came to a town, burned—”

“We too have seen burned towns,” said Dmitrii. “Though of the marauders, not a trace. You said—those girls?”

“Yes.” To her brother’s mounting horror, Vasya continued, “I found a burnt village yesterday morning, and tracked the bandits back to their camp, because they had captured those three girls that you saw. I stole the children back.”

Dmitrii’s gray eyes lit. “How did you find the camp? How did you get out alive?”

“I saw the raiders’ fire between the trees.” Vasya was avoiding her brother’s eye. Sasha, to his chagrin, thought he could trace a likeness between his cousin and his sister. Charisma they both had: a thoughtless ferocity, not without charm. “I pulled their horses’ picket and scared their beasts into flight,” she continued. “When the men went into the forest after them, I killed the sentry and took the girls back. But we barely got away.”

Sasha had ridden away from Lesnaya Zemlya ten years ago. Ten years since his little sister watched him go, big-eyed and furious, not crying, but valiant and desolate, standing at the gate of their father’s village. Ten years, Sasha thought grimly. It was ten minutes, no more, since he first saw her again, and already he wanted to shake her.

Dmitrii was pleased. “Well, then!” he cried. “Well met, my young cousin! Found them! Tricked them! So easily! By God, it is more than we could do. I will hear your tale properly. But not now. You said the bandits were following you? They must have turned back when they saw the monastery—we must track them to their camp. Do you remember the way you came?”

“A little,” said Vasya, uncertainly. “But the trail will look different by day.”

“Never mind,” said Dmitrii. “Hurry, hurry.” He was already turning away, calling his orders—let the men assemble, let the horses be saddled, oil the blades—

“My brother ought to rest,” Sasha put in through gritted teeth. “He has been riding all night.” Indeed, Vasya’s face was thin—painfully thin—with shadows beneath her eyes. Also, he was not about to be responsible for allowing his younger sister to go bandit-hunting.

Vasya spoke up again, with a gathered ferocity that startled her brother. “No,” she said. “I do not need to rest. Only—I would like some porridge, please, if there is any to be had. My horse needs hay—and barley. And water that is not too cold.”

The horse had been standing still, ears pricked, his nose on his rider’s shoulder. Sasha had not really marked him, appalled as he was by his sister’s sudden appearance. Now he looked—and stared. Their father bred good horses, but Pyotr would have had to sell nearly all he owned to buy a horse like this bay stallion. Some disaster has driven her from home, for Father would never—“Vasya,” Sasha began.

But Dmitrii had thrown an arm around his sister’s thin shoulders. “Such a horse you have, cousin!” he said. “I did not think they bred such good horses so far north. We will find you your porridge—and some soup besides—and grain for the beast. And then we ride.”

A third time, Vasya spoke before her astonished brother could. Her eyes had gone cold and distant, as though reliving bitter memory. She spoke through bared teeth. “Yes, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” she said. “I will hurry. We must find these bandits.”

VASYA’S NERVES STILL TINGLED with the aftermath of danger, of urgent flight, the ugly shock of killing, and the joyous shock of seeing her brother. Her nerves, she decided, had undergone altogether too much.

She thought a moment, with black humor, of melting into shrieks the way her stepmother used to. It would be easier to go mad. Then Vasya remembered how she had last seen her stepmother, crumpled up small on the bloody earth, and she swallowed back nausea. Then she remembered the moment her knife had slipped like rain into the bandit’s neck, and Vasya decided that she really was going to be sick.

Her head swam. It was a day since she had eaten. She stumbled, reached instinctively for Solovey, and found her brother there instead, gripping her arm with a sword-hardened hand. “Don’t you dare faint,” he said into her ear.

Solovey squealed; his hooves crunched in the snow, and a voice called, alarmed. Vasya pulled herself together. A monk had approached the stallion with a rope halter and a kindly expression, but Solovey wasn’t having it.

“You’d better let him follow us,” Vasya croaked to the monk. “He is used to me. He can have his hay at the kitchen door, can’t he?”

But the monk wasn’t looking at the horse anymore. He was gaping at Vasya, with a look of almost comical shock on his face. Vasya went very still.

“Rodion,” said Sasha at once, quickly and clearly. “This boy was my brother, before I gave myself to God. Vasilii Petrovich. You must have met him at Lesnaya Zemlya.”

“I did,” croaked Rodion. “Then—yes, I did indeed.” When Vasya was a girl. Rodion was looking at Sasha very hard.

Sasha shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“I—I will get hay for the beast,” Rodion managed. “Brother Aleksandr—”

“Later,” said Sasha.

Rodion went off, but not without many backward glances.

“He did meet me at Lesnaya Zemlya,” said Vasya urgently, when Rodion had gone. She was breathing quickly. “He—”

“He will keep quiet until he talks to me,” replied her brother. Sasha had something of Dmitrii’s dazzling air of authority, though more contained.

Vasya looked her gratitude at him. I did not know I was lonely, she thought, until I was no longer alone.

“Come on, Vasya,” Sasha said. “Sleep you cannot have, but soup will mend things a little. Dmitrii Ivanovich is serious when he says he means to ride off immediately. You do not know what you have let yourself in for.”

“It would not be the first time,” returned Vasya, with feeling.

The monastery’s winter-kitchen was all hazed with oven-smoke, the heat almost shocking. Vasya crossed the threshold, took a sharp breath of the roiling air, and pulled up. It was too hot, too small, too full of people.

“May I eat outside?” she asked hastily. “I do not want to leave Solovey.”

There was also the fact that if she surrendered to the warmth, and ate hot food on a comfortable bench, there would be no getting herself onto her feet again.

“Yes, of course,” put in Dmitrii, unexpectedly, popping out of the kitchen doorway like a house-spirit. “Drink your soup standing, boy, and then we will go. You there! Bowls for my cousins; we must hurry.”

VASYA PULLED OFF HER HORSE’S SADDLEBAGS while they waited, glancing around her all the while with a wondering expression. Sasha had to admit to himself that his sister made a convincing boy, all angles, her movements fluid and bold, with none of a woman’s diffidence. A leather hood tied beneath her hat concealed her hair, and she did not give herself away, save perhaps (in Sasha’s nervous imagination) in her long-lashed eyes. Sasha wanted to tell her to keep them downcast, but that would only make her appear more like a girl.

She broke the ice from her horse’s whiskers, checked his feet, and opened her mouth to speak half a dozen times, before each time falling silent. Then a novice appeared with soup and hot loaves and pie, and the chance for talk had passed.

Vasya took the food in both hands and tore into it with nothing like maidenly decorum. Her horse finished his hay and made a winsome play for her bread, blowing warm air on her ear until she laughed and yielded. She fed it to him and finished her soup, while her gaze darted like a finch’s about the walls and clusters of buildings, the chapel with its bell-tower.

“I had never heard bells, before leaving home,” she said to Sasha, finally settling on a safe topic. Unsaid things swam in her eyes.

“You will have all the chances in the world, when we have killed our bandits,” remarked Dmitrii, overhearing. He leaned against the kitchen wall, ostensibly admiring the stallion but really, Sasha thought, taking Vasya’s measure. It made the monk nervous. Whatever Dmitrii thought, though, he hid it behind a ferocious smile and a skin of honey-wine. The wine dripped when he drank, the color of his beard.

Dmitrii Ivanovich was not a patient man. And yet the Grand Prince could be surprisingly steady now and again; he waited, without comment, for Vasya to finish eating. But as soon as she put her bowl aside, the Grand Prince’s grin grew downright savage. “Enough gawping, country boy,” he said. “It is time to ride. The hunter becomes the hunted; won’t you like that?”

Vasya nodded, a little pale, and handed her bowl to the waiting novice. “The saddlebags—?”

“To my own cell,” replied Sasha. “The novice will take them.”

Dmitrii strode off, shouting orders; already the men were mustering in the space before the monastery gate. Sasha walked beside his sister. Her breathing quickened when she saw the men arming. Grimly he said, quick and low, into her ear, “Tell me truly—you found these bandits? You can find them again?”

She nodded.

“Then you must come with us,” said Sasha. “God knows we have had no other luck. But you will stay close to me. You will not speak more than you can help. If you have any more idea of heroics, forget it. You are going to tell me the whole story as soon as we get back. You are also not to be killed.” He paused. “Or wounded. Or captured.” The absurdity struck him again, and he added, almost pleading, “In God’s name, Vasya, how came you here?”

“You sound like Father,” Vasya said ruefully. But she could not say more. Dmitrii was already on his horse. The stallion, overexcited, cavorted in the snow and squealed at Solovey. The prince shouted, “Come, cousin! Come, Vasilii Petrovich! Let us ride!”

Vasya laughed at that, a little wildly. “Let us ride,” she echoed. She turned a mad grin on Sasha, said, “We will have no more burnt villages,” and leaped to her horse’s back with perfect grace and a complete lack of modesty. Solovey still wore no bridle. He reared. The men around them raised a cheer. Vasya sat his back like a hero, fey-eyed and pale.

Sasha, torn between outrage and grudging admiration, went to find his own mare.

The hinges of the monastery-gate, rigid with cold, gave a dying wail and then the way was open. Dmitrii spurred his horse. Vasya leaned forward and followed him.

IT IS NOT EASY TO FOLLOW the track of a cantering horse through the snow, not when a few hours of flurrying have half-filled the marks. But Vasya led them on steadily, brow furrowed in concentration. “I remember that old rock—it looked like a dog by night,” she would say. Or, “There—that stand of pines. This way.”

Dmitrii followed at Vasya’s heel with the look of a wolf on a hunt. Sasha rode behind him, keeping a brooding eye on his sister.

The fine, dry powder came to the horses’ bellies, and fell sparkling from the treetops. It had stopped snowing; the sun broke through the clouds, and all about them was golden light and virgin snow. Still they saw no tracks of bandits, only the marks of Solovey’s hooves, faint but definite, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Vasya led them steadily on. At midday they drank mead without slackening their pace.

An hour passed, then another. The trail grew fainter, and Vasya’s memory less certain. This was the part she had ridden in deep darkness, and the hoofprints had had more time to fade. But still they went, foot by foot.

Toward midafternoon, the forest thinned, and Vasya paused, casting here and there. “We are close now,” she said, “I think. This way.”

The tracks were wholly gone by then, even to Sasha’s eye; his sister was keeping the trail by the memory of trees that she had seen in the dark. Sasha was unwillingly impressed.

“That is a clever boy, your brother,” Dmitrii said to Sasha thoughtfully, watching Vasya. “He rides well. And has a good horse. The beast went all night, and yet he bears the boy easily today. Even though Vasilii is only a slip of a thing—too thin, your brother. We will feed him handsomely. I have a mind to bring him to Moscow myself.” Dmitrii broke off and raised his voice. “Vasilii Petrovich—”

Vasya cut him off. “Someone is here,” she said. Her face was taut with listening. From nowhere, and everywhere, a bitter wind began to blow. “Someone—”

Next moment the wind rose to a shriek, but not loud enough to mask the howl and thump of an arrow, or the cry from a man behind them. Suddenly strong men on stocky horses were riding down on them from every side, blades flashing in the low winter sun.

“AMBUSH!” SHOUTED SASHA, just as Dmitrii roared, “Attack!” The horses reared, startled by the first rush, and more arrows fell. The wind was blowing furiously now—tricky conditions for archery—and Sasha blessed their good fortune. Steppe-archers are deadly.

The men drew together at once, surrounding the Grand Prince. No one panicked. All the men were veterans who had ridden with Dmitrii in his wars.

The dense trees limited lines of sight. The wind was shrieking now. The bandits, howling, galloped down onto the Grand Prince’s men. The two groups met body to body, and then the swords rang out—swords? Expensive things for bandits to carry—

But Sasha had no time to think. In a moment, the melee had broken into a cluster of individual contests, stirrup to stirrup, and Dmitrii’s band was hard-pressed. Sasha blocked a spear-thrust, splintered the shaft with a downstroke, and cut down viciously, felling the first man who tried him. Tuman reared, lashing out with her forefeet, and three more attackers, riding smaller horses, drew back. “Vasya!” Sasha snapped. “Get out! Don’t—” But his unarmed sister bared her teeth, not quite laughing, and hung doggedly at the prince’s flank. Her eyes had grown very cold at the sight of the bandits. She had no sword or spear, which she surely did not know how to use, nor did she draw the knife at her side, which was too short for fighting on horseback.

No, she had her stallion: a weapon worth five men. Vasya had only to cling to his back and direct the beast to each new victim. Solovey’s kicks sent bandits flying; his hooves caved in their skulls. Girl and horse clung determinedly close to Dmitrii’s side, keeping the raiders off with the stallion’s weight. Vasya’s face was dead-white now, her mouth set stiff and unflinching. Sasha guarded his sister’s other side and prayed she wouldn’t fall off the horse. Once in the chaos, he could have sworn he saw a tall white horse beside the bay stallion, whose rider kept the bandits’ blades from finding the girl. But then Sasha realized it was only a cloud of flying snow.

Dmitrii laid about him with an ax, roaring his joy.

After the first frenzy of charge, it was all close work, in deadly earnest. Sasha took a sword-stroke to the forearm that he did not feel, and beheaded the man who gave it to him. “How many bandits can there be?” Vasya shouted, her eyes aglitter with fearful battle-lust. The stallion kicked out, breaking a man’s leg and sending his horse crashing to the snow. Sasha gutted another and booted him out of the saddle, as Tuman shifted to stay beneath him.

One of Dmitrii’s men fell, and a second, and then the battle grew desperate.

“Vasya!” snapped Sasha. “If I fall, or if the Grand Prince does, you must flee. You must go back to the monastery; do not—”

Vasya wasn’t listening. Uncanny how the big bay stallion protected his rider, and none of the Tatars now would bring his horse in range of the beast’s hooves. And yet a single spear-stroke could take him down. They had not managed it yet, but—

Suddenly Dmitrii shouted. A group of men broke out of the wood, churning up bloody snow beneath the strong hooves of their horses. These men were no bandits, but bright-helmed warriors, many warriors, armed with boar-spears. A tall, red-haired man was leading them.

The bandits looked palely on this new arrival, flung their weapons down, and fled.