22.

Mother

The bathhouse, where Olga was brought to labor, was hot and dark, humid as a summer night, and it smelled of fresh wood, and smoke, and sap and hot water and rot. If Olga’s women noted Vasya’s presence they did not question it. They had no breath for questioning, and no time. Vasya had strong and capable hands; she had seen childbirth before, and in the ferocious, steaming half-light, the women asked no more.

Vasya stripped down to her shift like the others, anger and uncertainty forgotten in the messy urgency of childbirth. Her sister was already naked; she squatted on a birthing-stool, black hair streaming. Vasya knelt, took her sister’s hands, and did not flinch when Olga crushed her fingers.

“You look like our mother, you know,” Olga whispered. “Vasochka. Did I ever tell you?” Her face changed as the pain came again.

Vasya held her hands. “No,” she said. “You never told me.”

Olga’s lips were pale. Shadows made her eyes bigger, and shrank the difference between them. Olga was naked, Vasya nearly so. It was as if they were small girls again, before the world came between them.

The pain came and went and Olga breathed and sweated and bit down on her screams. Vasya talked to her sister steadily, forgetting their troubles in the world outside. There was only the sweat and the labor, the pain endured and endured again. The bathhouse grew hotter; steam wreathed their sweating bodies; the women labored in the near-darkness, and still the child was not born.

“Vasya,” said Olga, leaning against her sister and panting. “Vasya, if I die—”

“You won’t,” snapped Vasya.

Olga smiled. Her eyes wandered. “I will try not,” she said. “But—you must give my love to Masha. Tell her I am sorry. She will be angry; she will not understand.” Olga broke off, as the agony came again; she still did not scream, but a sound climbed in the back of her throat, and Vasya thought her hands would break in her sister’s grip.

The room smelled of sweat and birth-water now, and black blood showed between Olga’s thighs. The women were only vague, sweating shapes in the vapor. The smell of blood stuck, chokingly, in Vasya’s throat.

“It hurts,” Olga whispered. She sat panting, limp and heavy.

“Be brave,” said the midwife. “All will turn out well.” Her voice was kind, but Vasya saw the dark look she exchanged with the woman beside her.

Vasya’s sapphire flared suddenly with cold, even in the heat of the bathhouse. Olga looked over her sister’s shoulder and her eyes widened. Vasya turned to follow her sister’s gaze. A shadow in the corner looked back at them.

Vasya let go of Olga’s hands. “No,” she said.

“I would have spared you this,” the shadow returned. She knew that voice, knew the pale, indifferent stare. She had seen it when her father died, when…

“No,” said Vasya again. “No—no, go away.”

He said nothing.

“Please,” whispered Vasya. “Please. Go away.”

They used to beg, when I walked among men, Morozko had told her once. If they saw me, they would beg. Evil came of that; better I step softly, better only the dead and the dying can see me.

Well, she was cursed with sight; he could not hide from her. Now it was her turn to beg. Behind her, the women muttered, but his eyes were the only things she could see.

She crossed the room without thinking and put a hand in the center of his chest. “Please go.” For an instant, she might have been touching a shadow, but then his flesh was real, though cold. He drew away as though her hand hurt him.

“Vasya,” he said. Was that feeling, in his indifferent face? She reached for him again, pleading. When her hands found his, he stilled, looking troubled and less like a nightmare.

“I am here,” he told her. “I do not choose.”

“You can choose,” she returned, following him when he drew back. “Leave my sister alone. Let her live.”

Death’s shadow stretched nearly to where Olga sat, spent, on the bathhouse-bench, surrounded by sweating women. Vasya did not know what the others saw, or if they thought she was speaking to the darkness.

He loved Vasya’s mother, the people had said of her father. He loved that Marina Ivanovna. She died bringing Vasilisa forth, and Pyotr Vladimirovich put half his soul in the earth when they buried her.

Her sister wailed, a thin and bone-chilling cry. “Blood,” Vasya heard, from the crowd beside. “Blood—too much blood. Get the priest.”

“Please!” Vasya cried to Morozko. “Please!”

The noise of the bathhouse faded and the walls faded with it. Vasya found herself standing in an empty wood. Black trees cast gray shadows over the white snow, and Death stood before her.

He wore black. The frost-demon had eyes of palest blue, but this—his older, stranger self—had eyes like water: colorless, or nearly. He stood taller than she had ever seen him, and stiller.

A faint, gasping cry. Vasya let go his hands and turned. Olga crouched in the snow, translucent and bloody, naked, swallowing her anguished breathing.

Vasya stooped and gathered her sister up. Where were they? Was this what lay beyond life? A forest and a single figure, waiting…Somewhere beyond the trees she could smell the hot reek of the bathhouse. Olga’s skin was warm, but the smell and the heat were fading. The forest was so cold. Vasya held her sister tightly; tried to pour all the heat she had—her burning, furious life—into Olga. Her hands felt hot enough to scorch, but the jewel hung bitterly cold between her breasts.

“You cannot be here, Vasya,” the death-god said, and a hint of surprise threaded his uninflected voice.

“Cannot?” Vasya retorted. “You cannot have my sister.” She clung to Olga, looking for a way back. The bathhouse was still there—all around them—she could smell it. But she didn’t know which steps would take them there.

Olga hung slack in Vasya’s arms, her eyes glazed and milky. She turned her head and breathed a question at the death-god. “What of my baby? What of my son? Where is he?”

“It is a daughter, Olga Petrovna,” Morozko returned. He spoke without feeling and without judgment, low and clear and cold. “You cannot both live.”

His words struck Vasya like two fists and she clutched her sister. “No.”

With a terrible effort, Olga straightened up, her face drained of color and of beauty both. She put Vasya’s arms aside. “No?” she said to the frost-demon.

Morozko bowed. “The child cannot be born alive,” he said evenly. “The women may cut it from you, or you may live and let it smother and be born dead.”

“She,” said Olga, her voice no more than a thread. Vasya tried to speak and found she could not. “She. A daughter.”

“As you say, Olga Petrovna.”

“Well, then, let her live,” said Olga simply, and put out a hand.

Vasya could not bear it. “No!” she cried, and flung herself on Olga, struck the outstretched hand away, wrapped her sister in her arms. “Live, Olya,” she whispered. “Think of Marya and Daniil. Live, live.”

The death-god’s eyes narrowed.

“I will die for my child, Vasya,” Olga said. “I am not afraid.”

“No,” Vasya breathed. She thought she heard Morozko speak. But she did not care what he said. Such a current of love and rage and loss ran between her and her sister at that moment that all else was drowned and forgotten. Vasya put forth all her strength—and she dragged Olya by force back to the bathhouse.

Vasya came to, staggering, and found that she was leaning against the bathhouse wall. Splinters pricked her hands; her hair stuck to her face and neck. A thick, sweating crowd hovered around Olga, seeming to strangle her with their many arms. Among them stood one fully dressed, in a black cassock, intoning the last rites in a voice that carried easily over them all. A streak of golden hair gleamed in the dark.

Him? Vasya, in a quick rage, stalked across the writhing room, pushed past the crowd, and took her sister’s hands in hers. The priest’s deep voice stopped abruptly.

Vasya had no thought to spare for him. In her mind’s eye, Vasya saw another black-haired woman, another bathhouse, and another child who had killed her mother. “Olya, live,” she said. “Please, live.”

Olga stirred; her pulse leaped up under Vasya’s fingers. Her dazed eyes blinked open. “There is its head!” cried the midwife. “There—one more—”

Olga’s glance met Vasya’s, and then widened with agony; her belly rippled like water in a storm, and then the child came slithering out. Her lips were blue. She did not move.

An anxious, breathless hush replaced the first cries of relief, as the midwife cleared the scum from the girl-child’s lips and breathed into her mouth.

She lay limp.

Vasya looked from the small gray form to her sister’s face.

The priest thrust his way forward, knocking Vasya aside. He smoothed oil over the baby’s head, began the words of the baptism.

“Where is she?” stammered Olga, groping with feeble hands. “Where is my daughter? Let me see.”

And still the child did not move.

Vasya stood there, empty-handed, jostled by the crowd, sweat running down her ribs. The heat of her fury cooled and left the taste of ashes in her mouth. But she was not looking at Olga. Or the priest. Instead, she was watching a black-cloaked figure put out a hand, very gently, take up the chalky, bloody scrap of humanity, and carry it away.

Olga made a terrible sound, and Konstantin’s hand fell, the baptism finished: the only kindness anyone would ever do the child. Vasya stood where she was. You are alive, Olya, she thought. I saved you. But the thought had no force.

OLGA’S EXHAUSTED EYES SEEMED to stare through her. “You have killed my daughter.”

“Olya,” Vasya began, “I—”

An arm, black-robed, reached out and seized her. “Witch,” hissed Konstantin.

The word fell like a stone, and silence rippled out in its wake. Vasya and the priest stood in the center of a faceless ring, full of reddened eyes.

The last time Vasya had seen Konstantin Nikonovich, the priest had cowered while she bade him go: to return to Moscow—or Tsargrad or hell—but to leave her family in peace.

Well, Konstantin had indeed come to Moscow, and he looked as though he’d endured the torments of hell between there and here. His jutting bones cast shadows on his beautiful face; his golden hair hung knotted to his shoulders.

The women watched, silent. A baby had just died in their arms, and their hands twitched with helplessness.

“This is Vasilisa Petrovna,” said Konstantin, spitting out the words. “She killed her father. Now she has killed her sister’s child.”

Behind him, Olga shut her eyes. One hand cradled the dead infant’s head.

“She speaks to devils,” Konstantin continued, not taking his eyes from her face. “Olga Vladimirova was too kind to turn her own lying sister away. And now, this has come of it.”

Olga said nothing.

Vasya was silent. What defense was there? The infant lay still, curled like a leaf. In the corner, a twist of steam might almost have been a small, fat creature, and it was weeping, too.

The priest’s glance slid to the faint figure of the bannik—she could swear they did—and his pale face grew paler. “Witch,” he whispered again. “You will answer for your crimes.”

Vasya gathered herself. “I will answer,” she said to Konstantin. “But not here. This is wrong, what you do here, Batyushka. Olya—”

“Get out, Vasya,” said Olga. She did not look up.

Vasya, stumbling with weariness, blinded with tears, made no protest when Konstantin dragged her out of the inner room of the bathhouse. He slammed the door behind them, cutting off the smell of blood and the sounds of grief.

Vasya’s linen shift, soaked to transparency, hung from her shoulders. Only when she felt the chill from the open outer door did she dig in her heels. “Let me put on clothes at least,” she said to the priest. “Or do you want me to freeze to death?”

Konstantin let her go suddenly. Vasya knew he could see every line of her body, her nipples hard through her shift. “What did you do to me?” he hissed.

“Do to you?” Vasya returned, bewildered with sorrow, dizzy with the change from heat to cold. The sweat stood on her face; her bare feet scraped the wooden floor. “I did nothing.”

“Liar!” he snapped. “Liar. I was a good man, before. I saw no devils. And now—”

“See them now, do you?” Shocked and grieving as she was, Vasya could muster nothing more than bitter humor. Her hands stank with her sister’s blood, with the ripe, ugly reality of stillbirth. “Well, perhaps you did that to yourself, with all your talk of demons; did you think of that? Go and hide in a monastery; no one wants you.”

He was as pale as she. “I am a good man,” he said. “I am. Why did you curse me? Why do you haunt me?”

“I don’t,” said Vasya. “Why would I want to? I came to Moscow to see my sister. Look what came of it.”

Coldly, shamelessly, she stripped off her wet shift. If she was to go out into the night, she did not mean to court death.

“What are you doing?” he breathed.

Vasya reached for her sarafan and blouse and outer robe, discarded in the anteroom. “Putting on dry clothes,” she said. “What did you think? That I am going to dance for you, like a peasant girl in spring, while a child lies dead just there?”

He watched her dress, hands opening and closing.

She was beyond caring. She tied her cloak and straightened her spine. “Where do you wish to take me?” she inquired, with bitter humor. “I don’t think you even know.”

“You are going to answer for your crimes,” Konstantin managed, in a voice caught between anger and bewildered wanting.

“Where?” she inquired.

“Do you mock me?” He gathered some measure of his old self-possession, and his hand closed on her upper arm. “To the convent. You will be punished. I promised I would hunt witches.” He stepped nearer. “Then I will see devils no longer; then all will be as it was.”

Vasya, rather than falling back, stepped closer to him, and that was obviously the one thing he did not expect. The priest froze.

Closer still. Vasya was afraid of many things, but she was not afraid of Konstantin Nikonovich.

“Batyushka,” she said, “I would help you if I could.”

His lips shut hard.

She touched his sweating face. He did not move. Her hair tumbled damply over his hand, where it lay locked around her arm.

Vasya made herself stand still despite his pinching grip. “How can I help you?” she whispered.

“Kasyan Lutovich promised me vengeance,” Konstantin whispered, staring, “if I would—but never mind. I do not need him. You are here; it is enough. Come to me now. Make me whole again.”

Vasya met his eyes. “That I cannot do.”

And her knee came up with perfect accuracy.

Konstantin did not scream, nor fall wheezing to the floor; his robes were too thick. But he doubled over with a grunt, and that was all Vasya needed.

She was out in the night—crossing the walkway, then running out through the dooryard.