19.

Maslenitsa

The sun sank in a panoply of purple and scarlet beneath the flickering stars, and Vasya went to service in the evening, with her silent brother, with Dmitrii Ivanovich, with a whole throng of boyars and their wives. On great days, the women were allowed, veiled, into the dusky streets, to go and worship with their kin.

Olga did not go; she was too near her time, and Marya stayed in the terem with her mother. But the other highborn women of Moscow paced the rutted road to church, clumsy in their embroidered boots. Walking all together, with their servants and their children, they made a winter meadow of flowers, marvelously and comprehensively veiled. Vasya, half-smothered in the scrum of Dmitrii’s boyars, watched the brightly clad figures with a mix of curiosity and terror until a mocking elbow dug between her ribs. One of the boys in the Grand Prince’s train said, “Better not look too long, stranger, unless you want a wife or a broken head.”

Vasya, not knowing whether to laugh or be vexed, turned her gaze elsewhere.

The towers of the cathedral were a fistful of magic flames in the light of the setting sun. The double cathedral-doors, bronze-studded, stretched to twice the height of a man. When they passed from narthex to vast, echoing nave, Vasya stood still an instant, lips parted.

It was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. The scale alone awed her, the smell of incense…the gold-clad iconostasis, the painted walls, the silver stars in their blue on the vault of the ceiling…the multitude of voices…

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?”

He turned, smiling, to Vasya. What was he doing?

“I propose one amusement,” Kasyan went on. “Vasilii Petrovich is a great horseman, we have all seen. Well, let me try his paces. Will you race tomorrow, Vasilii Petrovich? Before all Moscow? I challenge you now, with these men to witness.”

Vasya gaped. A horse-race? What had that to do with—?

A pleased murmur rolled through the crowd. Kasyan was watching her with a strange intensity. “I will race,” she said in confused reflex. “If you permit, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”

Dmitrii sat back, looking pleased. “I will say nothing against it, Kasyan Lutovich, but I have seen no creature of yours that is any match for his Solovey.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Kasyan, smiling.

“Heard and witnessed, then!” Dmitrii cried. “Tomorrow morning. Now eat, all of you, and give thanks to God.”

The talk rose, the singing, and the music. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya began again.

But Kasyan stumbled off his bench and sank down beside Vasya, throwing an arm round her shoulders. “I thought you might be about to commit an indiscretion,” he murmured into her ear.

“I am tired of lies,” she whispered to him. “Dmitrii Ivanovich may believe me or not as he chooses; that is why he is Grand Prince.”

On her other side, Dmitrii was shouting toasts to his son-to-be, a hand on the shoulder of his almost-smiling wife, and flinging bits of gristle to the dogs at his feet. The firelight shone redder and redder as midnight approached.

“This is not a lie,” said Kasyan. “Only a pause. Truths are like flowers, better plucked at the right moment.” The hard arm tightened around Vasya’s shoulders. “You have not drunk enough, boy,” he said. “Not nearly enough.” He sloshed wine into a cup and held it toward her. “Here—that is for you. We are going to race, you and I, in the morning.”

She took the cup, sipped. He watched, and grinned slowly. “No. Drink more, so I may win the easier.” He leaned forward, confiding. “If I win, you will tell me everything,” he murmured. His hair almost brushed her face. She sat very still. “Everything, Vasya, about yourself and your horse—and that fine blue dagger that hangs at your side.”

Vasya’s lips parted in surprise. Kasyan was tossing back his own wine. “I was here before,” he said. “Here in this very palace. Long ago. I was looking for something. Something I’d lost. Lost. Lost to me. Almost. Not quite. Do you think I will find it again, Vasya?” His eyes were blurred and shining and faraway. He reached for her, pulled her nearer. Vasya knew her first jolt of unease.

“Listen, Kasyan Lutovich—” Vasya began.

She felt him go rigid, and felt him, indeed, listening, but not to her. Vasya fell silent, and slowly she also grew aware of a silence: an old, small silence, gathering beneath the roar and clatter of the feast, a silence that slowly filled with the soft rushing of a winter wind.

Vasya forgot Kasyan altogether. It was as though a skin had been plucked from her eyes. Into the stinks and smokes and noise of this boyars’ feast in Moscow, another world had come creeping, unnoticed, to feast with its people.

Under the table, a creature dressed in magnificent rags, with a potbelly and a long mustache, was busily sweeping up crumbs. Domovoi, Vasya thought. It was Dmitrii’s domovoi.

A tiny flossy-haired woman stood on Dmitrii’s table, skipping between the dishes and sometimes kicking over an unwary man’s cup. That was the kikimora—for the domovoi sometimes has a wife.

A rustle of wings high above; Vasya looked up for an instant into a woman’s unblinking eyes before she vanished in the smoke of the upper walls. Vasya felt a chill, for the woman-headed bird is the face of fate.

Seen and unseen alike, Vasya felt the weight of their gazes. They are watching, they are waiting—why?

Then Vasya raised her eyes to the doorway, and saw Morozko there.

He stood in a pool of dim torchlight. Behind him, the firelight streamed out into the night. In shape and in coloring, he might have been a man in truth, except for his bare head and beardless face, and the snow on his clothes that did not melt. He was dressed in a blue like winter twilight, rimed and edged with frost. His black hair lifted and stirred with a pine-tasting wind that came dancing and cleared a little of the fumes from the hall.

The music freshened; men sat straighter on their benches. But no one seemed to see him.

Save Vasya. She stared at the frost-demon, as at an apparition.

The chyerti turned. The bird above spread her vast wings. The domovoi had stopped his sweeping. His wife had come to a halt; they all stood deathly still.

Vasya made her way down the center of the hall, between raucous tables, between the watching spirits, to where Morozko stood watching her come, a faint, wry curve to his mouth.

“How came you here?” she whispered. So near him, she smelled snow and years and the pure, wild night.

He lifted a brow at the watching chyerti. “Am I not permitted to join the throng?” he asked.

“But why would you wish to?” she asked him. “There is no snow here, and no wild places. Are you not the winter-king?”

“The sun-feast is older than this city,” Morozko replied. “But it is not older than I. They once strangled maidens in the snow on this night, to summon me and also to bid me go, and leave them the summer.” His eyes measured her. “There are no sacrifices now. But I still come to the feasting sometimes.” His eyes were paler than stars and more remote, but they rested on the red faces all about them with a cold tenderness. “These are still my people.”

Vasya said nothing. She was thinking of the dead girl in the fairy tale, a moralizing story for children on cold nights, to mask a history of blood.

“It marks the waning of my power, this feast,” Morozko added mildly. “Soon it will be spring, and I will stay in my own forest, where the snow does not melt.”

“Have you come for a strangled maiden, then?” asked Vasya, a chill in her voice.

“Why?” he asked. “Will there be one?”

A pause while they looked at each other. Then—“I would believe anything of this mad city,” said Vasya, pushing the strangeness aside. She did not look again at the years in his eyes. “I will not see you, will I?” she asked. “When it is spring?”

He said nothing; he had turned away from her. His frowning glance flicked all around the hall.

Vasya followed his gaze. She thought she glimpsed Kasyan, watching them. But when she tried to see him full, Kasyan was not there.

Morozko sighed and the starry glance withdrew. “Nothing,” he said, almost to himself. “I twitch at shadows.” He turned again to look at her. “No, you will not see me,” he said. “For I am not, in spring.”

It was the old, faint sorrow in his face that prompted her to ask then, formally, “Will you sit at the high table this night, winter-king?” She spoiled the effect by adding in practical tones, “The boyars are all falling off their benches by now; there is room.”

Morozko laughed, but she thought he looked surprised. “I have been a vagabond in the halls of men, but it has been a long time—long and long—since I was invited to the feasting.”

“Then I invite you,” said Vasya. “Though this is not my hall.”

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.

So she clung and her bones loosened and her whole body lit with cool fire. Even your brothers would call you damned now, she thought, but she utterly did not care. A light wind sent the last of the clouds scudding across the sky, and the stars shone clear on them both.

When he drew away at last, she was wide-eyed, flushed, burning. His eyes were a brilliant, perfect, flame-heart blue, and he could have been human.

He let her go abruptly.

“No,” he said.

“I do not understand.” Her hand was at her mouth, her body trembling, wary as the girl he had once thrown across his saddlebow.

“No,” he said. He dragged a hand through his dark curls. “I did not mean—”

Dawning hurt. She crossed her arms. “Did you not? Why did you come, really?”

He ground his teeth. He had turned away from her, his hands clenched hard. “Because I wanted to tell you—”

He broke off, looked into her face. “There is a shadow over Moscow,” he said. “Yet whenever I try to look deeper, I am turned aside. I do not know what is causing it. Were you not—”

“Were I not what?” Vasya asked, hating her voice as it creaked painfully from her throat.

A pause. The blue flame deepened in his eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” said Morozko. “But, Vasya—”

It seemed for a moment that he really meant to speak, that some secret would come pouring out. But he sighed and closed his lips. “Vasya, be wary,” he said in the end. “Whatever you choose, be wary.”

Vasya did not really hear him. She stood there cold and tense and burning all at once. No? Why no?

If she’d been older, she would have seen the conflict in his eyes. “I will,” she said. “Thank you for your warning.” She turned, with deliberate steps, and swung onto Solovey’s back.

She had already galloped away, and so she did not see that he stood for a long time, watching her go.

Later, much later, in the chill and bitter hour before dawn, a red light like a flash of fire streaked across the sky over Moscow. The few who saw it called it a portent. But most did not see it. They were asleep, dreaming of summer suns.

Kasyan Lutovich saw it. He smiled, and he left his room in Dmitrii’s palace to go down into the dooryard and make his final arrangements.

Morozko would have known the flash for what it was. But he did not see, for he was galloping alone, in the wild places of the world, face set and shut against the lonely night.