The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Well…I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” he said. He gave her a faint smile. “Come on. Let’s go get your slow horse. By the time you get her out of the stable, maybe these other sleepyheads will have gotten up.” He turned back and banged on the door again. “Svetochka!” he called. “Susanna! Time to get up!”

  A muffled groan came through the thin door. Oleg banged on it again, making it jump half off its hinges. Another groan issued from the chamber, louder than the previous one, followed by the sounds of Svetochka and Susanna getting up and moving around.

  “If you could change things so that they would get up and get dressed a little faster, the world would be a much better place,” Oleg muttered to her.

  “Maybe that is your task,” Dasha told him with a saucy smile. As soon as it crossed her face, she had a most peculiar sensation of recognition: this was his smile, one that had come directly from his face to hers. Which was perhaps why he rolled his eyes at her, and shooed her away to go get her horses, since, “By the time you lead that speckled creature you call a horse out of the stable, the rest of us will have long eaten and headed down the road.” Dasha wrinkled her nose at that, which restored his good humor entirely, and she felt it was safe to leave him.

  ***

  Pyatnyshki did indeed slow them down once they set off, despite being given no burdens at all. Everyone grumbled about it for the first few versts, but by the end of the afternoon the guards were sneaking her bits of food when they stopped, and Oleg was willing to admit that, slow as she was, she was a sweet old thing, and had served Dasha well by getting her as far as she had.

  “And if we’re attacked by wolves or bears, they’ll be sure to go for her first, which’ll save the rest of us,” he said. Dasha gave him a very stern look at that, but he pretended not to see it, and she could tell that he had found a reason for keeping Pyatnyshki that he could justify to himself, which was the best she could hope for from him right now, so she let it stand.

  They were not, however, attacked by wolves, bears, bandits, bad weather, or any of the other things that plagued travelers, and two afternoons later they came riding very peacefully up to the gates of Lesnograd.

  Chapter Eight

  Although Lesnograd was the closest thing to a proper city that they had been in since they had left Krasnograd, it looked to Dasha more like a larger version of a waystation or a travelers’ cabin. The wall around it was just a stockade fence, with the gate thrown wide open. Two guards were squatting down by it, playing cards and only glancing occasionally at people going in and out. They were displeased when Oleg interrupted their game—until they recognized him, that is. Then they broke into broad grins, slapped him on the back, and told him he’d been in the South far too long.

  “And what’s this?” asked the slightly taller of the two, looking Susanna up and down with curiosity. “Who’d you bring back from the South, Oleg Svetoslavovich? Are we being invaded by these black-browed beauties?” He grinned some more. “One look at you and all of Lesnogorod will be at your feet, noblewoman,” he told Susanna.

  “At home we say that Northerners have ice in their blood,” Susanna said, looking very pleased at their admiration. “But I see that is not true. I see you also have proper men up here.”

  The two guards slapped each other’s shoulders in congratulation at this, and gave Susanna a deep bow, still grinning hard enough to split their faces.

  “Oh by all the gods,” said Oleg in disgust. “She’s going to think the men up here have no modesty at all.”

  “And she’d be right,” said the chattier of the two guards, winking at Susanna and making Dasha blush, even though they weren’t paying her any attention at all.

  “We do not concern ourselves so much with modesty in Avkhazovskoye,” Susanna informed them, much to the guards’ delight. Oleg only ended their flirtation by sending Yaroslav, the chattier guard, away to announce their arrival, and herding the rest of them through the gate and down the streets.

  The streets were all dirt, with huge dips and divots that must fill with water whenever it rained. At the moment they were mostly filled with a choking dust.

  “Why don’t they put down cobblestones?” Dasha asked Oleg. “You couldn’t get a cart down half these streets if you tried!”

  “Not a lot of stone up here,” he told her. “They’d have to import it from the coast, along with stonemasons. Lesnograd is rich in timber and fur and not much else. Some places they put down planks to cover the puddles, but most people don’t bother. Besides, for most of the year it’s frozen and covered in snow, anyway. It’s just now in the summer that it’s a problem. This isn’t the black earth district, you know. We’re practically up in the tundra.”

  “Oh.” Dasha looked around. Everything was made of wood. Lots of buildings were made of wood in Krasnograd too, including large portions of the kremlin, but there was also lots of brick and stone. But here everything was made of wood. The finer buildings had domes on them, like they did in Krasnograd, but they were four-sided and covered in wooden shingles, instead of being round and gilded. Nothing shone and sparkled as it did in Krasnograd; everything had the dull warmth of wood. And it all smelled of wood and dust and wood and chickens and wood. Everyone was on foot, and the women wore plain caps without any of the horns and other embellishments that people normally wore in the black earth district. Even though it was summer, fur and wool were still much in evidence, and when the sun disappeared behind the clouds and the wind picked up for a moment, Dasha could see why. Her bare head ached from the chill of the wind as if she had just taken a big gulp of cold water in winter. But then the sun returned, and it was summer again.

  There was another stockade fence around the kremlin and its compound, although once again the gate was wide open and the guards waved them right through. These guards not only recognized Oleg, but also Dasha and Svetochka as his daughters, and bowed very low as they rode past, and then broke into a fervent whisper over which one of the two redheads was the Tsarinovna, and which was the commoner. They guessed—correctly—that Svetochka was the commoner because of her “slumpy sour look, not at all like a Tsarinovna.” Dasha hoped most devoutly that Svetochka, who was ahead of her, had not heard that remark. Judging by her shoulders, if she had, she was pretending not to.

  Dasha wasn’t sure what kind of reception to expect, but Aunty Olga came running out of the kremlin to meet them on the square, before the stablehands had even taken their horses away. At first Dasha thought she looked just the same as she always did, but when she threw her arms around Dasha, Dasha could see that her hair was no longer the bright red it once had been, but a soft reddish-silver, and the lines around her face were deeper than ever, and some of them were from sorrow. She held Dasha tightly, in a way she never had before, and when she finally pulled away from her and held her out at arms’ length to look at her, Dasha thought she might be about to cry. Dasha wanted to say everything she had been thinking, about how sorry she was over what had happened with Lisochka, and how much Aunty Olga must have suffered, and how much she still loved her and how glad she was to see her, but none of the words would come out, and she ended up doing nothing more than swallowing silently.

  “Well, look at you!” Aunty Olga exclaimed, blinking and biting her lips. “All grown up! How long has it been? More than two years, hasn’t it? And you’re taller than ever, my head for beheading.”

  “It’s been two and a half years,” Dasha confirmed. Aunty Olga made it a practice to come by Krasnograd every couple of years, and so Dasha had spent more time with her than with any of her other kin, except Oleg. “And I haven’t gotten any taller since then, at least I don’t think so,” she added. “I’ve been this tall since my fourteenth summer.” She thought saying it and reminding everyone that she was nearly a woman grown now would make her feel more grown-up, but the words sounded childish as they came out of her mouth, and being this close to Aunty Olga, who hadn’t seen her since she really had been a child, made her feel
as if she were returning to that same age again. “I’ve been my full height for years now,” she said, trying and failing to sound like a woman, not a little girl.

  Aunty Olga looked her up and down again. “Really? I could have sworn the last time I saw you, you were no higher than my shoulder, and now look at you! Staring me straight in the eye! You’re as tall as me, the gods take my eyes if you’re not.”

  “You said that the last time, too,” Dasha told her. She thought that might have been too rude, but Aunty Olga only laughed and clapped her on the shoulder and said, “No doubt you’re right! She got her mother’s sharpness, didn’t she?” she added, looking over at Oleg as she said it.

  “No question about that,” said Oleg, with a small smile.

  “But the rest of you is all ours! Tell me: when I take that kaftan off of you, am I going to find shoulders to rival my own? I can already tell you’ve got me beat when it comes to the bosom!” And Aunty Olga winked at her and laughed heartily, much to Dasha’s discomfort, which she did her best to hide.

  “And…Svetochka?” asked Aunty Olga, turning away from Dasha, to her relief, and fixing her eyes on Svetochka. “So you made it to Krasnograd! And now you’re back?”

  “You remember me, Olga Vasilisovna?” said Svetochka stiffly.

  “Of course! I just saw you in Pearlmoon! And before that, when you were just a slip of a girl—well, some might say you’re still a slip of a girl, you’re so young, but none of us have ever really been little slips of a girl, have we? But I saw you when you must have been, oh, twelve, I suppose. I came through Khladniye Vody and stopped by to check on you. I often stopped by to check on you,” said Aunty Olga, giving a quick glance in Oleg’s direction.

  “I remember,” said Svetochka. “My mother…was always very grateful.” She choked out the words as if they hurt her, which Dasha supposed they must. How grating it must have been, she thought, to have Olga Vasilisovna Severnolesnaya come by to check on her, and to know that she was blood kin, but that she lived in a kremlin in Lesnograd, while Svetochka lived in a hut in Khladniye Vody, which from everything Dasha had heard, was hardly even worth calling a village, it was so small and poor.

  “And I want to hear everything about her! And about your journey down to Krasnograd!” said Aunty Olga, and folded Svetochka into a firm embrace and kissed both her cheeks, much to Svetochka’s embarrassment, before releasing her to hug Oleg as well. When Oleg introduced Susanna to her, she didn’t hug Susanna, but she did kiss both her cheeks. Dasha had never seen Aunty Olga so affectionate, and she knew it was because of what had happened to Lisochka, which was a terrible thought, but she tried not to think it. She would tell Aunty Olga all her thoughts, and pass on to her all her mother’s condolences, later, she promised herself, at a more conducive time.

  “Well, come on in, come on in,” Aunty Olga told them, once the horses had been taken away and their guards had been sent off to the barracks. “Vladya’s in the middle of a judgment, but she’ll be glad to see you, sure enough. We can just slip in the back of the hall and wait till she’s done.”

  “Vladya’s giving judgments, then?” asked Dasha. The last time Dasha had seen Vladya, she had been Dasha’s age now, and since it was hard for her to imagine herself sitting in judgment over anyone, it was hard for her to imagine Vladya doing it, although Vladya had always been so…forceful and so certain about everything, so maybe it wasn’t so hard after all. Well, it was easy for her to imagine Vladya judging others, but (although she tried to squelch this thought, and she desperately hoped that none of the others could guess she was thinking it, even though it felt like it must be burning right through her head and revealing itself to everyone) it was harder for Dasha to imagine her judging them well. A judge shouldn’t be so certain, of that Dasha was sure, although now that she’d put it like that to herself…she jerked herself back from the pointless circling of her thoughts before they could suck her down entirely, like a whirlpool.

  “Vasya should be doing it, but more and more she lets our Vladya take over,” said Aunty Olga. “And I can’t say who’s worse at it. No, that’s not true. Our Vladya’s not a bad judge, when she sets her mind to it. But what she’ll do about this case, I don’t know.”

  “Is the guilt unclear, then?” asked Susanna, sounding interested. “I have always thought that must be very difficult!”

  Aunty Olga sighed and rolled her eyes. “The guilt’s not unclear,” she said. “It’s a simple enough case, when you get down to it. It’s just what to do about it that’s the problem. A few days ago this girl came to us, saying that she’d gone to a tryst with a boy, only when she got there, he wasn’t the only one waiting for her, and, well…things didn’t go so well. You know how young men can be. Never should be let out of their mothers’ sight till they’re married, and maybe not afterwards, either.” She shook her head in disgust. “So we rounded up all the lads she’d named, and they’re all swearing on their mothers’ heads they never meant her any harm. Which was probably true. It was all just fun and games to them, and it never crossed their little minds that what they were doing was rape, so if you ask them if they did it, they’ll say ‘no,’ and think they’re telling the truth, and be sure she’s lying, even though she’s not. She’s sure she was raped, or at least she was when she came to us, but they’re just as sure they didn’t do it, because they were just playing around, they were just being kind to her, showing her attention, you know, all the usual lies that get told in these cases. I even think they believe it themselves, they believe they were doing the right thing, being kind, and so on. And now their mothers have come to protect their boys and insist that she must be lying, and the girl is starting to doubt herself, and anyway she doesn’t want to accuse them any more, because the penalty for rape is the mines, and she doesn’t want to be the one who sends them off there, especially since their mothers will kill her, sure as sure, if she speaks against them and has them sent away, and what do you do, they were just being stupid and thoughtless, they didn’t mean to do anything terrible, but they did, and we can’t have them running around loose, not without learning a good stiff lesson, because even if they didn’t mean any harm, harm they did, and they’ll go on doing it if we don’t do something to stop them, and meanwhile their mothers are all wealthy merchants, and they’re hinting they might take their trade and their taxes elsewhere, if their sons are sent away to the mines, and the girl doesn’t have a grosh to her name, and…anyway, it’s Vladya’s problem, not mine, thank the gods.”

  Dasha wanted to say that it wasn’t very nice of Aunty Olga to leave the hard judgments to Vladya, who was the youngest and wasn’t even the real ruler of Lesnograd and Severnolesnoye yet. And what did those on whom she was sitting in judgment think about that, anyway? But she held her tongue. Aunty Olga was the kindest, friendliest, warmest-hearted person in the world, at least as far as Dasha was concerned, as long as you didn’t ask her to do anything she didn’t want to do, or suggest that she should be doing things she didn’t want to do. And probably Vladya was the best choice for this: neither Aunty Olga, nor Vasilisa Vasilisovna, were prone to patience and weighing all the claims and options carefully. Dasha hadn’t seen Vasilisa Vasilisovna since she had come to Krasnograd to bring Vladya back to Lesnograd, ten years ago, but she hadn’t much cared for her then, shameful as it was to admit that of Vladya’s own mother, and everything she had heard of her since had done nothing to improve her opinion of her. But Aunty Olga probably didn’t need to hear that either. Dasha knew that Aunty Olga didn’t much care for her sister, but all her good humor would disappear faster than Flowermoon snow if someone else were to criticize her. So Dasha resolved to say as little as possible while she was Lesnograd. Silence and observation would serve her better than running her mouth off like a fool, she told herself, no matter how severe the provocation.

  Her mother had told her that the Lesnograd kremlin was everything a person could hope for in barbaric splendor, and Dasha was glad to see that it was true. The o
uter wall had domes on every tower, just like the Krasnograd kremlin, but like all the other domes she had seen so far, they were four-cornered and made of wooden scales, unlike the round golden domes of Krasnograd. Less impressive, to be sure, but still, the sight of domes and walls and all the things that had surrounded her as she had grown up made Dasha feel even more like a child, like she was slipping back into childhood as she went deeper and deeper into the kremlin.

  Like the wall, the main kremlin was also largely of wood. Dasha wanted to ask how likely it was to withstand an actual attack, but she supposed that the Severnolesniye hadn’t had to defend their own kremlin for hundreds of years. No other princess had dared to attack them directly for generations, even during periods when the feuding between the great families had descended to outright war, and they were hundreds and hundreds of versts from any border. The only real enemy Lesnograd had was winter, and against that, Dasha guessed by the enormous tiled stove that filled half the entry hall, they were amply defended.

  Once they’d taken off their outer clothes, Aunty Olga led them through one twisting dark corridor after another. Unlike the spacious stone corridors of the Krasnograd kremlin, which were twice as high as a woman’s head and always kept brightly whitewashed, these were barely high enough for Aunty Olga to walk down them without ducking, and the walls were of a jumbled mixture of unwhitewashed wood, earth, and brick, with no sconces or windows to make them cheerier or easier to navigate. Dasha caught glimpses through low doorways of what appeared to be kitchens and storerooms and servants’ quarters, but as they turned this way and that and went up and down steps and climbed over lintels, she couldn’t have said what other chambers the kremlin held, or where they were in it.

  They stepped through a half-sized doorway, with a lintel as high as Dasha’s knees and a frame no higher than her shoulders, and abruptly found themselves in a large chamber, which Dasha guessed to be the Great Hall. Like everything else, its walls and ceilings were of soot-covered wood chinked with earth and brick, but it was large enough to hold a hundred people, and there were tattered banners hanging from the rafters and a fire blazing in an enormous open hearth. Even from across the hall, Dasha could feel its heat making her cheeks flush.