11.

We Are Not All Born Lords’ Sons

“Well met, Kasyan Lutovich!” called Dmitrii. “We looked for you sooner.” A careless scarlet splatter covered one cheek and crusted in his yellow beard; there was blood on his ax and on the neck of his horse. His eyes were very bright.

Kasyan smiled back and sheathed his sword. “I beg you will forgive me, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

“This time,” retorted the Grand Prince, and they laughed. Of the bandits, only the dead and the badly wounded lay huddled in the snow; the rest had fled. Kasyan’s men were already cutting the wounded men’s throats. Vasya, shaken, did not watch; she concentrated on her hands, binding up her brother’s forearm. The cold breeze still whispered through the clearing. Right before the bandits appeared, she could have sworn she heard Morozko’s voice. Vasya, he had said. Vasya. And then the wind had come screaming, the wind that turned the bandits’ arrows. Vasya even thought she had seen the white mare, with the frost-demon on her back, turning the blades that came nearest to touching her.

But perhaps she was mistaken.

The breeze died. The tree-shadows seemed to thicken. Vasya turned her head, and he was there.

Barely. A faint, black-and-bone presence stepped softly into the clearing, its eyes disconcertingly familiar.

Morozko stilled beneath her glance. This was not the frost-demon, this was his other, older self, black-cloaked, pale, long-fingered. He was here for the dead. Suddenly the sunlight seemed muted. She felt his presence in the blood on the earth, in the touch of the cold air on his face, old and still and strong.

She drew a deep breath.

He inclined his head slowly.

“Thank you,” she whispered into the cold morning, too low for anyone to hear.

But he heard. His eyes found hers, and for an instant he looked—almost—real. Then he turned away, and there was no man there at all, but only the cold shadow.

Biting her lip, Vasya finished binding her brother’s arm. When she looked back, Morozko had gone. The dead men lay in their blood, and the sun shone gaily down.

A clear voice was speaking. “Who is that boy,” asked Kasyan, “who looks so much like Brother Aleksandr?”

“Why, this is our young hero,” returned Dmitrii, raising his voice. “Vasya!”

Vasya touched Sasha’s arm, said, “This must be cleaned later, with hot water, and bound with honey,” and then turned.

“Vasilii Petrovich,” said Dmitrii, when she had crossed the clearing and bowed to the two men. Solovey followed her anxiously. “My cousin—my father’s sister-son. This is Kasyan Lutovich. Between you, you have won my victory.”

“But we have met,” said Kasyan to Vasya. “You did not tell me you were the Grand Prince’s cousin.” At Dmitrii’s startled glance, he added, “I met this boy by chance in a town market a sennight ago. I knew he looked familiar—he is the image of his brother. I wish you had told me who you were, Vasilii Petrovich. I could have brought you with honor to the Lavra.”

Kasyan’s dark scrutiny had not softened since that day in Chudovo, but Vasya, cocooned in the tranquillity of extreme weariness and shock, returned equably, “I had run away from home, and did not want word getting back too soon. I did not know you, Gospodin. Besides”—she found herself grinning impishly, almost drunkenly, and wondered at the feeling rising in her throat: laughter or sob, she could not have said—“I came in good time. Did I not, Dmitrii Ivanovich?”

Dmitrii laughed. “You did indeed. A wise boy. A wise boy, indeed; for only fools trust, when they are alone on the road. Come, I wish you to be friends.”

“As do I,” said Kasyan, his eyes on hers.

Vasya nodded, wishing he would not stare, and wondering why he did. A girl might well pray to the Blessed Virgin to have hair of that deep russet color. She looked hastily away.

“Sasha, are you fit?” called Dmitrii.

Sasha was looking Tuman over for scratches. “Yes,” he returned shortly. “Although I will have to hold my sword in my shield-hand.”

“Well enough,” said Dmitrii. His own gelding had a great gash in his flank; the Grand Prince mounted one of his men’s horses. “We have another hunt before us now, Kasyan Lutovich. The stragglers must be tracked to their lair.” Dmitrii bent from the saddle to give instructions to those who would bring the wounded men back to the Lavra.

Kasyan mounted up and paused, looking Vasya over. “Have a care for this boy, Brother Aleksandr,” he said lightly. “He is the color of the snow.”

Sasha frowned at Vasya’s face. “You should go back with the wounded.”

“But I am not wounded,” Vasya pointed out, with a floating, detached logic that did not appear to reassure her brother. “I want to see this done.”

“Of course you do,” put in Dmitrii. “Come, Brother Aleksandr, do not shame the boy. Drink this, Vasya, and let us go now; I want my supper.”

He handed her his skin of mead, and Vasya gulped it down, welcoming the warmth that washed away feeling. The wind had dropped now and the dead men lay huddled alone in the snow. She looked at them, and looked away.

Solovey had taken no hurt in the melee, but his head was high, his eye wild with the smell of blood.

“Come,” Vasya said, stroking the stallion’s neck. “We are not finished.”

I do not like this, said Solovey, stamping. Let us run into the woods.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

DMITRII AND KASYAN RODE FIRST: now one ahead, now the other, now talking in low tones, now silent, in the manner of men exploring a fragile trust. Sasha rode at Solovey’s flank and did not speak at all. He held his torn arm stiffly.

The snow had been trampled in the survivors’ flight, all dappled and spotted with blood. Solovey had quieted but he was nothing like calm; he would not walk, but went sideways instead, almost cantering in place, with swiveling ears.

Their pace was not the swiftest, to spare the weary horses, and the day dragged on. They trotted from clearing to shadow and back again, and they all grew colder and colder.

At last Dmitrii’s warriors rode down a single wounded bandit. “Where are the others?” the Grand Prince demanded, while Kasyan held the man jerking in the snow.

The man said something in his own tongue, eyes wide.

“Sasha,” said Dmitrii.

Sasha slid down Tuman’s shoulder and spoke, to Vasya’s surprise, in the same language.

The man shook his head frantically and poured out a stream of syllables.

“He says they have a camp just to the north. A verst, no more,” said Sasha in his measured voice.

“For that,” said Dmitrii to the bandit, stepping back, “I will kill you quickly. Here, Vasya, you have earned it.”

“No, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya choked, when Dmitrii offered her his own weapon, and gestured, grandly, to where Kasyan held the bandit. She feared she would be sick; Solovey was on the edge of bolting. “I cannot.”

The bandit must have caught the sense of the words, for he bent his head, lips moving in prayer. He was no monster now, no child-thief, but a man afraid, taking his last breaths.

Sasha, though he stood steadily, had gone gray with his wound. He drew breath to speak, but Kasyan spoke first. “Vasilii is only a reedy boy, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” he said, still gripping his captive. “Perhaps he would miss his stroke, and the men have had enough to do today without hearing a man scream and die, gutted.”

Vasya swallowed hard, and the look on her face seemed to convince the prince, for he thrust the blade through the man’s throat, petulantly. He stood an instant with heaving shoulders, recovered his good humor, wiped off the splatter, and said, “All well and good. But we will feed you properly in Moscow, Vasilii Petrovich, and you will be spearing boars at a stroke before long.”

THE BANDITS’ CAMP WAS A SMALL, crude thing. Huts to keep out the cold, and pens for the beasts, but little more. No wall or ditch or palisade; the bandits had not feared attack.

There was no sound and no movement. No smoke from cook-fires, and the whole effect was of chill stillness, grim and sad.

Kasyan spat. “They are gone, I think, Dmitrii Ivanovich. Those that survived.”

“Search everywhere,” said Dmitrii.

In and out of each hut Dmitrii’s men went, searching through the grime and darkness and reek of those men’s lives. Vasya’s hatred began to flake away, leaving only a faint sickness behind.

“Nothing,” said Dmitrii, when the last place was searched. “They are dead or fled.”

“It was well fought, Gosudar,” said Kasyan. He took off his hat and ran a hand through his matted hair. “I do not think they will trouble us again.” Unexpectedly he turned to Vasya. “Why so troubled, Vasilii Petrovich?”

“We never found their leader,” Vasya said. She cast her gaze once more about the squalid encampment. “The man who commanded them in the forest, when I stole the children back.”

Kasyan looked taken aback. “What sort of man is this leader?”

Vasya described him. “I looked for him in the battle, and among the dead,” she concluded. “I could not easily forget his face. But where is he?”

“Fled,” said Kasyan promptly. “Lost in the forest, and hungry already, if he is not dead. Do not worry, boy. We will set fire to this place. Even if this captain lives, he will not easily find more men to go adventuring in the wild. It is over.”

Vasya nodded slowly, not quite agreeing, and then she said, “What of their captives? Where have they taken them?”

Dmitrii was giving orders that fires be built and meat be shared out for the comfort of them all. “What of them?” the Grand Prince asked. “We have killed the bandits; there will be no more burnt villages.”

“But all those stolen children!”

“What of them? Be reasonable,” said Dmitrii. “If the girls are not here, then they are dead, or far away. I cannot go galloping through the thickets with weary horses to look for peasants.”

Vasya had her mouth open on an angry retort, when Kasyan’s hand fell heavily on her shoulder. She bit her tongue and whirled on him.

Dmitrii had already walked away, calling more orders.

“Do not touch me,” Vasya snapped.

“I meant no harm, Vasilii Petrovich,” Kasyan said. Evening shadows blackened his fiery hair. “It is best not to antagonize princes. There are better means to get your way. In this case, though, he is right.”

“No, he isn’t,” she said. “A good lord cares for his people.”

The men were gathering up whatever would burn. The smell of wood-smoke began drifting out into the forest.

Kasyan snorted. His amused look made her feel, resentfully, like the country girl Vasilisa Petrovna, and not at all like Dmitrii’s young hero Vasilii. “But which people, that is the question, boy. I suppose your father was the lord of some country estate.”

She said nothing.

“Dmitrii Ivanovich is responsible for a thousand times as many souls,” Kasyan continued. “He must not waste his men’s strength on futility. Those girls are gone. Do not think of heroics tonight. You are dead on your feet; you look like a mad child’s ghost.” He glanced at Solovey: a looming presence at her shoulder. “Your horse is not in much better case.”

“I do well enough,” said Vasya coldly, drawing herself straight, though she could not keep from glancing worriedly at Solovey. “Better than those stolen children.”

Kasyan shrugged and glanced out into the darkness. “They might count life among slavers a mercy,” he said. “At least those girls are worth coin to a slaver, which is more than they are to their families. Do you think anyone wants a half-grown girl, another frail mouth to feed, in February? No. They lie atop the oven until they starve. Some might die going south to the slave-markets, but at least the slaver will give them the mercy-stroke when they can no longer walk. And the strong—the strong will live. If one is pretty or clever, she might be bought by a prince and live richly in some sun-drenched hall. Better than a dirt floor in Rus’, Vasilii Petrovich. We are not all born lords’ sons.”

The voice of the Grand Prince broke the silence that fell between them.

“Rest while you can,” Dmitrii told his men. “We will ride at moonrise.”

DMITRII’S PEOPLE FIRED THE BANDIT-CAMP and returned to the Lavra in the silvered dark. Despite the hour, many of the villagers gathered in the shadow of the monastery gate. They shouted savage approbation at the returning riders. “God bless you, Gosudar!” they cried. “Aleksandr Peresvet! Vasilii Petrovich!”

Vasya heard her name called with the others, even in her haze of exhaustion, and she found the strength to at least ride in straight-backed.

“Leave the horses,” said Rodion to them all. “They will be well looked after.” The young monk did not look at Vasya. “The bathhouse is hot,” he added, a little uneasily.

Dmitrii and Kasyan slid at once from their horses, jostling each other, victorious and carefree. Their men followed suit.

Vasya busied herself at once with Solovey, so no one would wonder why she didn’t go and bathe with the others.

Father Sergei was nowhere to be found. As Vasya curried her horse, she saw Sasha set off to find him.

THE LAVRA HAD TWO BATHHOUSES. They had heated one for the living. In the other, the Muscovite dead from that day’s battle were already washed and wrapped, by Sergei’s steady hand, and that was where Sasha found his hegumen.

“Father bless,” said Sasha, coming into the darkness of the bathhouse: that orderly world of water and warmth, where folk in Rus’ were born, and where they lay after dying.

“May the Lord bless you,” said Sergei, and then embraced him. For a moment, Sasha was a boy again, and he pressed his face against the frail strength of the old monk’s shoulder.

“We succeeded,” said Sasha, collecting himself. “By the grace of God.”

“You succeeded,” echoed Sergei, looking down at the dead men’s faces. He made a slow sign of the cross. “Thanks to this brother of yours.”

The rheumy old eyes met those of his disciple.

“Yes,” Sasha said, answering the silent question. “She is my sister, Vasilisa. But she bore herself bravely today.”

Sergei snorted. “Naturally. Only boys and fools think men are first in courage. We do not bear children. But this is a dangerous course you are taking, you and she both.”

“I cannot see a safer,” said Sasha. “Especially now that there will be no more fighting. There will be an appalling scandal if she is discovered, and some of Dmitrii’s men would happily force her, on some dark night, if they knew her secret.”

“Perhaps,” said Sergei heavily. “But Dmitrii has much faith in you; he will not take kindly to deception.”

Sasha was silent.

Sergei sighed. “Do what you must, I will pray for you.” The hegumen kissed Sasha on both cheeks. “Rodion knows, doesn’t he? I will speak to him. Now go. The living need you more than the dead. And they are harder to comfort.”

DARKNESS TURNED THE HOLY GROUNDS of the Lavra into a pagan place, full of shadow and strange voices. The bell tolled for povecheriye, and even the bell’s cry could not contain the dark and chaotic aftermath of battle, or Sasha’s own troubled thoughts.

Outside the bathhouse, people dotted the snow: villagers left destitute, hurled on the mercy of God. A woman near the bathhouse was weeping, mouth open. “I had only one,” she whispered. “Only one, my firstborn, my treasure. And you could not find her? No trace, Gospodin?”

Vasya, astonishingly, was there and still upright. She stood wraithlike and insubstantial before the woman’s grief. “Your daughter is safe now,” Vasya replied. “She is with God.”

The woman put her hands over her face. Vasya turned a stricken look on her brother.

Sasha’s torn arm ached. “Come,” he said to the woman. “We will go to the chapel. We will pray for your daughter. We will ask the Mother of God, who takes all into her heart, to treat your child as her own.”

The woman looked up, eyes starry with tears in the blotched and swollen ruin of her timeworn face. “Aleksandr Peresvet,” she whispered, voice smeared with weeping.

Slowly, he made the sign of the cross.

He prayed with her a long time, prayed with the many who had gone to the chapel for comfort, prayed until all were quieted. For that was his duty, as he counted it, to fight for Christians and tend to the aftermath.

Vasya stayed in the chapel until the last person left. She was praying too, though not aloud. When they left at last, dawn was not far off. The moon had set long since, and the Lavra was bathed in starlight.

“Can you sleep?” Sasha asked her.

She shook her head once. He had seen that look in warriors before, driven past exhaustion to a state of sick wakefulness. It had been the same when he killed his first man. “There is a cot for you in my own cell,” he said. “If you cannot sleep, we will give thanks to God instead, and you will tell me how you came here.”

She only nodded. Their feet groaned in the snow as they crossed the monastery side by side. Vasya seemed to be gathering her strength. “I have never been so glad in my life as when I recognized you, brother,” she managed, low, as they walked. “I am sorry I could not show it before.”

“I was glad to see you too, little frog,” he returned.

She halted as though stricken. Suddenly she threw herself at him, and he found himself holding an armful of sobbing sister. “Sasha,” she said. “Sasha, I missed you so.”

“Hush,” he said, stroking her back awkwardly. “Hush.”

After a moment, she pulled herself together.

“Not quite the behavior of your bold brother Vasilii, is it?” she said, scrubbing at her running nose. They started walking again. “Why did you never come back?”

“Never mind that,” Sasha returned. “What were you doing on the road? Where did you get that horse? Did you run away from home? From a husband? The truth now, sister.”

They had come to his own cell, squat and unlovely in the moonlight, one of a cluster of little huts. He dragged the door open and lit a candle.

Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Father is dead.”

Sasha went still, the lit candle in his hand. He had promised to go home after he became a monk, but he never had. He never had.

“You are no son of mine,” Pyotr had said in his anger, when he rode away.

Father.

“When?” Sasha demanded. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “How?”

“A bear killed him.”

He could not read her face in the darkness.

“Come inside,” Sasha told her. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”

IT WAS NOT THE truth, of course. It could not be. Much as Vasya had loved her brother, and had missed him, she did not know this broad-shouldered monk, with his tonsure and his black beard. So she told—part of the story.

She told him of the fair-haired priest who had frightened the people at Lesnaya Zemlya. She told him of the bitter winters, the fires. She told him, laughing a little, of a suitor that had come to claim her and ridden away unwed, and that their father had then wished to send her to a convent. She told him of her nurse’s death (but not of what came after), and she told him of a bear. She said that Solovey was a horse of their father’s, although she could tell he didn’t quite believe her. She did not tell him that her stepmother had sent her in search of snowdrops at midwinter, or of a house in a fir-grove, and she certainly did not tell him of a frost-demon, cold and capricious and sometimes tender.

She finished and fell silent. Sasha was frowning. She answered his look, not his words. “No, Father would not have been out looking in the forest, had I not been there,” she whispered. “I did it; it was I, brother.”

“Is that why you ran away?” Sasha asked. His voice (beloved, half-remembered) was uninflected, his face composed, so that she had no idea what he was thinking. “Because you killed Father?”

She flinched, then bowed her head. “Yes. That. And the people—the people feared I was a witch. The priest had told them to fear witches, and they listened. Father was no longer there to protect me, so I ran.”

Sasha was silent. She could not see his face, and at last she burst out, “For God’s sake, say something!”

He sighed. “Are you a witch, Vasya?”

Her tongue felt thick; the vibration of men’s deaths still rang through her body. There were no more lies left in her, and no more half-truths.

“I do not know, little brother,” she said. “I do not know what a witch is, not really. But I have never meant anyone ill.”

At length he said, “I do not think you did right, Vasya. It is sin for a woman to dress so, and it was wrong of you to defy Father.”

Then he fell silent again. Vasya wondered if he was thinking of how he, too, had defied their father.

“But,” he added slowly, “you have been brave, to get this far. I do not blame you, child. I do not.”

The tears came to her throat again, but she swallowed them back.

“Come on, then,” Sasha said, stiffly. “Try to go to sleep now, Vasya. You will come with us to Moscow. Olya will know what to do with you.”

Olya, Vasya thought, her heart lifting. She was going to see Olya again. Her earliest memories—of kind hands and of laughter—were of her sister.

Vasya was sitting opposite her brother, on a cot beside the clay stove. Sasha had built a fire, and the room was slowly warming. Suddenly all Vasya wanted was to pull the furs over her head and sleep.

But she had one last question. “Father loved you. He wished you would come home. You promised me you’d come back. Why didn’t you?”

No answer. He had busied himself with the fire; perhaps he had not heard. But to Vasya, the silence seemed to thicken suddenly with regrets that her brother would not utter.

SLEEP SHE DID: a sleep like winter, a sleep like sickness. In her sleep the men all died again, stoic or screaming, their guts like dark jewels in the snow. The black-cloaked figure stood by, calm and knowing, to mark each death.

But this time a terrible, familiar voice spoke also in her ear. “See him, poor winter-king, trying to keep order. But the battlefield is my realm, and he only comes to pick over my leavings.”

Vasya whirled to find the Bear at her shoulder, one-eyed, lazily smiling. “Hello,” he said. “Does my work please you?”

“No,” she gasped, “no—”

Then she fled, slipping frantic over the snow, tripping on nothing, falling into a pit of endless white. She did not know if she was screaming or not. “Vasya,” said a voice.

An arm caught her, stopped her fall. She knew the shape and turn of the long-fingered hand, the deft and grasping fingers. She thought, He has come for me now; it is my turn, and began to thrash in earnest.

“Vasya,” said his voice in her ear. “Vasya.” Cruelty in that voice—and winter wind and old moonlight. Even a rough note of tenderness.

No, she thought. No, you greedy thing, do not be kind to me.

But even as she thought it, all the fight went out of her. Not knowing if she were awake or still dreaming, she pressed her face into his shoulder, and broke into a storm of violent weeping.

In her dream, the arm went hesitantly round her and his hand cradled her head. Her tears lanced some of the poisoned wound of memory; at last she fell silent and looked up.

They stood together in a little moonlit space, while trees slept all around. No Bear—the Bear was bound, far away. Frost fretted the air like silver-gilt. Was she dreaming? Morozko was a part of the night, his feet incongruously bare, his pale eyes troubled. The living world of bells and icons and changing seasons seemed the dream then, and the frost-demon the only thing real.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you really here?”

He said nothing.

“Today—today I saw—” she stammered. “And you—”

When he sighed, the trees stirred. “I know what you saw,” he said.

Her hands clenched and unclenched. “You were there? Were you only there for the dead?”

Again he did not speak. She stepped back.

“They mean for me to come to Moscow,” she said.

“Do you wish to go to Moscow?”

She nodded. “I want to see my sister. I want to see more of my brother. But I cannot stay a boy forever, and I do not want to be a girl in Moscow. They will try to find me a husband.”

He was silent a moment, but his eyes had darkened. “Moscow is full of churches. Many churches. I cannot—chyerti are not strong in Moscow, not anymore.”

She drew back, crossing her arms over her breast. “Does that matter? I will not stay forever. I am not asking for your help.”

“No,” he agreed. “You are not.”

“The night under the spruce-tree—” she began. All around them the snow floated like mist.

Morozko seemed to gather himself, and then he smiled. It was the smile of the winter-king, old and fair and unknowable. Any hint of deeper feeling vanished from his face. “Well, mad thing?” he asked. “What do you mean to ask me? Or are you afraid?”

“I am not afraid,” said Vasya, bristling.

That was true, and it was also a lie. The sapphire was warm beneath her clothes; it was glowing, too, though she could not see it. “I am not afraid,” she repeated.

His breath slipped cool past her cheek. Goaded, she dared to do dreaming what she would not awake. She twisted her hand in his cloak and pulled him nearer.

She had surprised him again. The breath hitched in his throat. His hand caught hers, but he did not untangle her fingers.

“Why are you here?” she asked him.

For a moment she thought he would not answer, then he said, as though reluctant, “I heard you cry.”

“I—you—you cannot come to me thus and go away again,” she said. “Save my life? Leave me stumbling alone with three children in the dark? Save my life again? What do you want? Do not—kiss me and leave—I don’t—” She could not find the words for what she meant, but her fingers spoke for her, digging into the sparkling fur of his robe. “You are immortal, and perhaps I seem small to you,” she said at last fiercely. “But my life is not your game.”

His grip crushed her hand in turn, right on the edge of pain. Then he untangled her fingers, one by one. But he did not let go. For an instant his eyes found hers and burned them, so full were they of light.

Again the wind stirred the ancient trees. “You are right. Never again,” he said simply, and again it sounded like a promise. “Farewell.”

No, she thought. Not like that—

But he was gone.