The Girl in the Tower

by Katherine Arden

  Vasya felt a rush of gratitude that he believed her, and that he knew what to do. Above them the bells rang. The two horses nosed for dry grass beneath the snow, determinedly ignoring each other.

  “I will wait, then,” Vasya said, with renewed confidence. “But I will not wait too long. Soon I must try my luck with Dmitrii Ivanovich, witnesses or no.”

  “Understood,” said Kasyan practically, clapping a hand to her shoulder. “Go and wash yourself, Vasilii Petrovich. We must go to church, and then there will be feasting.”

  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 he
r. “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.