The Winter of the Witch Page 19

  Konstantin did not know whether to be relieved or terrified.

  “But,” murmured the Bear, “the cathedral.”

  * * *

  DMITRII DIDN’T AGREE. “Divine service for all Moscow?” he asked. “Father, be reasonable. Folk will faint from the heat, or perhaps be trampled. Feelings are running high enough already without calling everyone together to sweat and pray and kiss icons, pleasing as it may be to God.” This last was tacked on as an afterthought.

  The Bear, watching invisibly, said with satisfaction, “I do love sensible men. They always try to make sense of the impossible and they can’t. Then they blunder. Come now, little father. Blind him with eloquence.”

  Konstantin gave no sign he heard, beyond a tightening of his mouth. But aloud he said, reproof in his tone, “It is God’s will, Dmitrii Ivanovich. If there is any chance to lift this curse from Moscow we must take it. The dead are infecting Moscow with fear, and what if I am called too late? What if worse comes than upyry, and my prayers do not stop it? No, I think it better that the whole city pray together, and perhaps make an end of this curse.”

  Dmitrii was frowning still, but he agreed.

  * * *

  TO KONSTANTIN, THE WORLD seemed less real when he donned his new robes of white and scarlet, his collar high and stiffened in the back. Sweat ran like rivers down his spine as he put a hand to the door of the sanctuary.

  The Bear said, “I wish to go in.”

  “Then go in,” said Konstantin, his mind elsewhere.

  The devil made a sound of impatience and took Konstantin’s hand. “You must bring me with you.”

  Konstantin’s hand curled in the demon’s. “Why can’t you go in yourself?”

  “I am a devil,” said the Bear. “But I am also your ally, man of God.”

  Konstantin drew the Bear into the sanctuary with him, and gave the icons a spiteful look. See what I do, when you will not speak to me? The Bear looked about him curiously: at the gilding, and jeweled icon-covers, at the scarlet and blue of the ceiling.

  At the people.

  For the cathedral was packed with people, a shoving, swaying throng, smelling of sour sweat. Crammed together before the icon-screen, they wept and they prayed, watched over by the saints and also by a silent devil with one eye.

  For the Bear walked out with the clergy, when the doors of the iconostasis were thrown open. Surveying the crowd, he said, “This bodes well. Come now, man of God. Show me your quality.”

  When he began the service, Konstantin did not know whom he chanted for: the watching throng or the listening demon. But he flung all the torment of his tattered soul into it, until the whole cathedral wept.

  Afterward, Konstantin went back to his cell in the monastery, kept against the furnishing of his own house, and lay down, wordless, in his sweat-soaked linen. His eyes were shut, and the Bear did not speak, but he was there. Konstantin could feel the dazzling, sulfurous presence.

  Finally the priest burst out, without opening his eyes, “Why are you silent? I did what you asked.”

  The Bear said, almost growling, “You have been painting the things you will not say. Shame and sorrow and all the tedious rest. It is all there, in your Saint Peter’s face, and today you sang what you cannot bring yourself to utter. I could feel it. What if someone realizes? Are you trying to break your promise?”

  Konstantin shook his head, his eyes still shut. “They will hear what they want to hear and see what they want to see,” he said. “Make what I feel their own, without understanding.”

  “Well, then,” said the Bear, “men are great fools.” He let it go. “In any case, that scene in the cathedral should make enough.” Now he sounded pleased.

  “Enough what?” said Konstantin. The sun had gone down by then; the green dusk brought some respite from the savage heat. He lay still, breathing, seeking in vain a breath of cool air.

  “Enough dead,” said the Bear, unsparing. “They all kissed the same icon. I have use for the dead. Tomorrow you have to go to the Grand Prince. Secure your place with him. That monk of witch’s getting—Brother Aleksandr—he is going to come back. You must see to it that his place by the Grand Prince’s side is not waiting for him.”

  Konstantin lifted his head. “The monk and the Grand Prince have been friends from boyhood.”

  “Yes,” said the Bear. “And the monk saw fit to lie to Dmitrii, more than once. Whatever stiff-necked oaths he has sworn since, I assure you, it will not be enough to get back the prince’s trust. Or is it harder than setting a mob to kill a girl?”

  “She deserved it,” Konstantin muttered, throwing an arm over his eyes. The blackness behind his eyelids gave him back a bruised, deep-green gaze, and he opened his eyes again.

  “Forget her,” said the Bear. “Forget the witch. You are going to drive yourself mad with lust and pride and regret.”

  That was too close to the bone; Konstantin sat up and said, “You cannot read my mind.”

  “No,” the Bear retorted. “But I can read your face, which is much the same thing.”

  Konstantin subsided into the rough blankets. Softly, he said, “I thought I’d be satisfied.”

  “It is not your nature to be satisfied,” said the Bear.

  “The Princess of Serpukhov wasn’t at the cathedral today,” said Konstantin. “Nor her household.”

  “That would be because of the child,” said the Bear.

  “Marya? What about her?”

  “Warned,” said the Bear. “The chyerti warned her. Did you think you killed all the witches in Moscow when you burned the one? But never fear. There will be no more witches in Moscow before the first snow.”

  “No?” Konstantin breathed. “How?”

  “Because you brought all Moscow to the cathedral today,” said the Bear, with satisfaction. “I needed an army.”

  * * *

  “THEY MUSTN’T GO!” MARYA had cried to her mother. “No one!”

  Daughter and mother each wore the thinnest of shifts, sweat dewing their faces, identical dark eyes glassy with weariness. In the terem that summer, all the women lived in twilight. There were no fires lit indoors, no lamps or candles. The heat would have been unbearable. They opened the windows at night, but fastened them all tightly by day, to keep in what coolness they could. So the women lived in gray darkness and it told on all of them. Marya was pallid under her sweat, thin and drooping.

  Gently Olga said to her daughter, “If folk wish to go pray at the cathedral, I can hardly prevent them.”

  “You have to,” said Marya urgently. “You have to. The man in the oven said. He said that people will come away sick.”

  Olga considered her daughter, frowning. Marya hadn’t been herself since the heat gripped them. Ordinarily, Olga would have taken her family out of the city, to the rough-built town of Serpukhov proper, where they could at least hope for some quiet and cooler air. But this year there were reports of fires to the south, and if anyone so much as put a nose out of doors, they saw a hellish white haze and breathed the smoke. Now there was plague in the posad outside the walls, and that settled it. She would keep her family where it was. But—

  “Please,” said Marya. “Everyone has to stay here. With our gates shut.”

  Olga was still frowning. “I cannot keep our gates shut forever.”

  “You won’t have to,” said Marya, and Olga noticed uneasily the directness of her daughter’s gaze. She was growing up too quickly. Something about the fire and its aftermath had changed her. She saw things her mother did not. “Just until Vasya gets back.”

  “Masha—” Olga began gently.

  “She is coming back,” said her daughter. She did not shout it defiantly, did not weep or plead with her mother to understand. She just said it. “I know it.”

  “Vasya wouldn’t dare,” said Varvara, coming in with damp
cloths, a jar of wine that had been packed in straw in the cool cellar. “Even assuming she lives still, she knows what a risk it would be to all of us.” She handed the cloth to Olga, who dabbed her temples.

  “Has that ever stopped Vasya?” Olga asked, taking the cup that Varvara gave her. The two women exchanged worried glances. “I will keep the servants from the cathedral, Masha,” Olga said. “Though they will not thank me for it. And—if you—hear—that Vasya has come, will you tell me?”

  “Of course,” said Marya at once. “We must have supper ready for her.”

  Varvara said to Olga, “I do not think she will come back. She has gone too far.”

  20.

  The Golden Bridle

  VASYA’S HEAD WAS FULL OF winter midnights, and she was shaking with the want of light. She wasn’t sure they would ever come out at all. They rode without pause, over ridges and valleys glazed with ice, filled up with darkness as if they’d never seen day. Morozko’s presence at her back was no comfort here; he was a part of the long, lonely night, untroubled by the frost.

  She tried to think of Sasha, to think of Moscow and daylight and her own life waiting for her on the other side of the darkness. But the touchstones of her life had all been thrown into disarray, and it grew harder and harder to focus her mind, as they rode through the icy night.

  “Stay awake,” Morozko said in her ear. Her head was lolling on his shoulder; she jerked upright, half in a panic, so that the white mare slanted a reproving ear. “If I guide us, we will end somewhere on my own lands, in the deep of winter,” he continued. “If you still want to make it to Moscow, in summer, you must stay awake.” They were crossing a glade full of snowdrops, stars overhead and the faint sweetness of the flowers at her feet.

  Hastily Vasya straightened her back, tried to refocus her mind. The darkness seemed to mock her. How could you separate the winter-king from winter? Impossible even to try. Her head swam.

  “Vasya,” he said, more gently. “Come with me to my own lands. Winter will come soon enough to Moscow. Otherwise—”

  “I am not asleep yet,” she said, suddenly fierce. “You set the Bear free; you must help me bind him.”

  “With pleasure. In winter,” he said. “It is only a breath of time, Vasya; what are two seasons?”

  “Little to you, perhaps, but a great deal for me and mine,” she said.

  He did not argue again.

  She was thinking of that forgetfulness, the strange slip of reality that made fire from nothing, or kept the eyes of all Moscow from seeing her. Impossible that the winter-king should walk abroad in summer. Impossible, impossible.

  She clenched her fists. No, she thought. It isn’t.

  “A little farther,” she said, and wordless, the white mare cantered on.

  At last, when Vasya’s concentration was wavering like a flame in a high wind, when exhaustion ate at her, and his arm about her waist was the only thing keeping her upright, the cold grew a little less fierce. Then mud showed under the snow. Then they were in a world of rustling leaves. The white mare’s hooves rimed the leaves with frost where they fell, and still Vasya hung on.

  Finally, she and Morozko and the two horses stepped between one night and the next, and she saw a campfire nestled in the bend of a river.

  In the same instant, the full weight of summer’s heat fell on her body like a hand, and the last trace of winter fell away behind them.

  Morozko sagged weightless against her back. She was alarmed to see his hand growing fainter and fainter, as frost dissolves at the touch of warm water.

  Vasya half-turned and caught hold of his hands. “Look at me,” she snapped. “Look at me.”

  He raised absolutely colorless eyes to hers, set in a face equally colorless, without depth, the way light flattens in a snowstorm. “You promised not to leave me,” Vasya said. “You are not alone, you said. Are you so easily forsworn, winter-king?” Her hands crushed his.

  He straightened up. He was still there, though faint. “I am here,” he said, and the ice of his breathing stirred, impossibly, the leaves of a summertime wood. A note of wry humor entered his voice. “More or less.” But he was shaking.

  You are back in your own midnight now, Pozhar informed them, indifferent to impossibilities. I am going. My debt is paid.

  Vasya cautiously let go of Morozko’s hands. He did not immediately vanish, and so she slid down the white mare’s shoulder. “Thank you,” Vasya said to the golden mare. “More than I can say.”

  Pozhar flicked an ear, spun, and trotted off without another word.

  Vasya watched the mare go, a little forlorn, trying, yet again, not to think of Solovey. The campfire by the river glimmered bright in the darkness. “Traveling by midnight is all very well,” Vasya muttered. “But it involves far too much creeping up on folk in the dark. Who do you suppose that is?”

  “I have no notion,” said Morozko shortly. “I can’t see.” He said it matter-of-factly, but he looked shaken. In winter, his senses stretched far.

  They crept nearer, and halted outside the firelight. A gray mare stood without hobbles on the other side of the flames. She raised her head uneasily, listening to the night.

  Vasya knew her. “Tuman,” she breathed, and then she saw three men camped beyond the mare, sleeping rough. Three fine horses and a pack-horse. One of the men was just a dark bundle wrapped in a cloak. But the others were sitting upright beside the fire, talking, despite the late hour. One was her brother, his face thinned with days of travel, raw with sunburn. There were threads of white in his hair. The other was the holiest man in Rus’, Sergei Radonezhsky.

  Sasha’s head came up, seeing the horses restless. “Something in the wood,” he said.

  Vasya didn’t know how a monk—even her brother—would react to her just then, drenched as she was in magic and darkness, hand-fast with a frost-demon. But she nerved herself and stepped forward. Sasha wrenched round, and Sergei rose to his feet, spry despite his years. The third man jerked upright, blinking. Vasya recognized him: Rodion Oslyabya, a brother of the Trinity Lavra.

  Three monks, dirty from days on the road, camping in a clearing in the summer night. Painfully ordinary; they made the winter midnights at her back feel like a dream.

  But it wasn’t. She had brought the two worlds together.

  She didn’t know what would happen.

  * * *

  THE FIRST BROTHER ALEKSANDR saw of his sister was a slim figure with a bruised face. He blasphemed in his mind; he sheathed his sword, offered up prayers, and ran to her.

  She was so thin. Every plane of her face was blade-sharp: a skull picked out with firelight. But she returned his embrace with strength, and when he looked at her he saw her lashes wet.

  Perhaps he was weeping, too. “Marya said you were alive. I—Vasya—I am sorry. Forgive me. I wanted to go find you. I—Varvara said you had gone beyond our reckoning, that you—”

  She cut into this flow of words. “There is nothing to forgive.”

  “The fire.”

  Her face hardened. “It is over, brother. Both fires.”

  “Where have you been? What happened to your face?”

  She touched the scar across her cheekbone. “This is from the night the mob came for me in Moscow.”

  Sasha bit his lip. Father Sergei broke in, his voice sharp. “There is a white horse there in the wood. And a—shadow.”

  Sasha spun, his hand again going to the hilt of his sword. In the darkness, just touched by the edges of the firelight, stood a mare, white as the moon on a winter night.

  “Yours?” Sasha said to his sister, and then he looked again. Beside the mare, the shadow was watching them.

  Again, he put a hand to his sword-hilt.

  “No,” said his sister. “You don’t need it, Sasha.”

  The shadow, Sasha realized, was a man. A man whose eyes
were two points of light, colorless as water. Not a man. A monster.

  He drew his sword. “Who are you?”

  * * *

  MOROZKO MADE NO ANSWER, but Vasya could feel the anger in him. He and the monks were natural enemies.

  Catching her brother’s eye, she saw with an unpleasant feeling that Sasha’s fury wasn’t just the impersonal disdain of a monk for a devil. “Vasya, do you know this—creature?”

  Vasya opened her mouth, but Morozko stepped into the light and spoke first. “I marked her from her childhood,” he said coolly. “Took her into my own house, bound her to me with ancient magic, and put her on the road to Moscow.”

  Vasya glared wordlessly at Morozko. Her brother’s disdain was obviously not one-sided. Of all the things he might have said to Sasha first.

  “Vasya,” Sasha said. “Whatever he has done to you—”

  Vasya cut him off. “It doesn’t matter. I have ridden across Rus’ dressed as a boy; I have walked alone into darkness and come out alive. It is too late for your scruples. Now—”

  “I am your brother,” said Sasha. “It concerns me; it concerns every man in our family that this—”

  “You left us when I was a child!” she interrupted. “You have given yourself first to your religion and second to your Grand Prince. My life and my fate lie beyond your judgment.”

  Rodion broke in, bristling. “We are men of God,” he said. “That is a devil. Surely nothing more needs to be said?”

  “I think,” said Sergei, “that a little more must be said.” He did not speak loudly, but everyone turned to him.

  “My daughter,” said Sergei calmly, “we will hear your tale from the beginning.”

  * * *