The Girl in the Tower Page 5

  “Let them in,” the prince said.

  The bay horse skidded to a halt just inside the gate, and the monks at once urged the groaning hinges shut. The rider handed the girls down and then slid off his horse’s shoulder himself. “The children are cold,” he said. “They are frightened. They must be taken to the bathhouse at once—or the oven. They must be fed.”

  But the girls clung to their rescuer’s cloak when two of the village women came up to lead them away. Sasha strode forward. The clamor had drawn him from the chapel and he had heard the last of the exchange from the wall-top. “Have you seen these bandits?” he demanded. “Where are they?”

  The rider fastened green eyes onto his face and froze. Sasha stopped as though he’d walked into a tree.

  The last time he had seen that face, it had been eight years ago. But although the bones had grown bolder since then—the mouth full-lipped—nonetheless Sasha recognized her.

  Had he stumbled onto a wood-sprite, he could not have been more astonished. The rider was staring at him, openmouthed. Then his—her—face lit. “Sasha!” she cried.

  At the same time, he said, “Christ, Vasya, what are you doing here?”

  6.

  The Ends of the Earth

  Some weeks earlier, a girl sat on a bay horse at the edge of a fir-grove. Snow slanted down, catching in her eyelashes and the horse’s mane. In the fir-grove stood a house, with an open doorway.

  The figure of a man waited in the gap. The firelight behind emptied the man’s eyes and filled his face with shadows.

  “Come in, Vasya,” he said. “It is cold.” Could the snow-laden night speak, it might have spoken with that voice.

  The girl drew breath to reply, but the stallion had already started forward. Deeper in the fir-grove, the branches twined too thick for the girl to ride. Stiffly, she slid to the ground, and staggered as pain shot through her half-frozen feet. Only a fierce effort, clinging to the horse’s mane, kept her from falling. “Mother of God,” she muttered.

  She tripped over a root, lurched to the threshold, stumbled again, and would have fallen, but the man in the doorway caught her. Close in, his eyes were no longer black, but the palest of blues: ice on a clear day. “Fool,” he said after a pause, holding her upright. “Thrice a fool, Vasilisa Petrovna. But come in.” He set her on her feet.

  Vasilisa—Vasya—opened her mouth, once more thought better of it, and stepped across the threshold, swaying like a foal.

  The house resembled a stand of fir-trees that had decided to become a house for the night but gone about it badly. A livid darkness, as of clouds and fitful moonlight, filled the space near the rafters. The shadows of branches swooped back and forth across the floor, though the walls seemed solid enough.

  But one thing was certain: the far end of the house held a vast Russian oven. Vasya stumbled toward it like a blind girl, stripped off her mittens, put her hands near the blaze, and shuddered at the heat on her cold fingers. Beside the oven stood a tall white mare, licking at some salt. This mare nuzzled Vasya briefly in greeting. Vasya, smiling, laid her cheek against the mare’s nose.

  Vasilisa Petrovna was no beauty as her people counted it. Too tall, the women had said when she came of age. Far too tall. As for a figure, she has scarce more than a boy.

  Mouth like a frog, her stepmother had added, with spite. What man would take a girl with that chin? And as for her eyes—

  In truth, the stepmother could not find words for Vasya’s eyes—green and deep and set far apart—nor for her long black plait that strong sunlight would spark with red.

  “No beauty, perhaps,” echoed Vasya’s nurse, who had loved her very much. “No beauty, my girl—but she draws the eye. Like her grandmother.” The old lady always crossed herself when she said it, for Vasya’s grandmother had not died happily.

  Vasya’s stallion plowed his way into the house behind her and looked about with a proprietary air. The hours in the frozen forest had not quenched him. He went at once to the girl by the oven. The white mare, his dam, snorted softly at him.

  Vasya smiled, scratching the stallion’s withers. He wore neither saddle nor bridle. “That was bravely done,” she murmured. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever find it.”

  The horse shook his mane complacently.

  Vasya, grateful for the horse’s buoyant strength, drew her belt-knife and bent to dig the balled-up ice from his hooves.

  A spiteful winter gust slammed the door.

  Vasya jerked upright; the stallion snorted. With the door shut, the storm was set at remove, and yet, somehow, tree-shadows still swung across the floor.

  The master of the house stood an instant, facing the door, and then he turned. Snowflakes starred his hair. All around him was the same soundless force as that of the snow falling outside.

  The stallion’s ears eased back.

  “Doubtless you mean to tell me, Vasya,” said the man, “why you have risked your life a third time, running into the deep woods in winter.” He crossed the floor, light as smoke, until he stood in the light cast by the oven, and she could see his face.

  Vasya swallowed. The master of the house looked like a man, but his eyes betrayed him. When he had first walked in that forest, the maidens called to him in a different tongue.

  Vasya thought, If you start being afraid of him, you will never stop, straightened her back—and found that her reply would not come. Grief and weariness had driven words out, and she could only stand, throat working: an interloper in a house that was not there.

  The frost-demon added drily, “Well? Were the flowers unsatisfactory? Are you looking for the firebird this time? The horse with the golden mane?”

  “Why do you think I am here?” Vasya managed, stung into speech. She had bidden her brother and sister farewell that very night. Her father’s grave lay raw in the frozen earth, and her sister’s furious sobs had followed her into the forest. “I could not stay home. ‘Witch-woman,’ the people whispered. There are those who would burn me if they could. Father—” Her voice wavered. “Father is not there to check them.”

  “Such a sad story,” the frost-demon replied, unmoved. “I have seen ten thousand sadder, yet you are the only one to come stumbling to my doorstep because of it.” He bent nearer. The firelight beat on his pale face. “Do you mean to stay with me now? Is that it? Be a snow-maiden in this forest that never changes?”

  The question was half gibe, half invitation, and full of a tender mockery.

  Vasya flushed and recoiled. “Never!” Her hands had begun to warm, but her lips felt stiff and clumsy. “What would I do in this house in the fir-grove? I am going away. That is why I left home—I am going far away. Solovey will take me to the ends of the earth. I will see palaces and cities and rivers in summer, and I will look at the sun on the sea.” She had unfastened her sheepskin hood, almost stammering in her eagerness. The fire threw flashes of red across her black hair.

  His eyes darkened, seeing it, though Vasya did not notice. As though speaking had loosed a torrent, now she found her tongue. “You showed me there is more in this world than the church and the bathhouse and my father’s forests. I want to see it.” Her vivid gaze saw beyond him. “I want to see it all. There is nothing for me at Lesnaya Zemlya.”

  The frost-demon might have been taken aback. Certainly he turned away from her and sank into a chair like a broken oak-stump, there by the fire, before he asked, “What are you doing here, then?” His pointed glance took in the shadows near the ceiling, the vast bed heaped like a snowdrift, the Russian oven, the hangings on the walls, the carven table. “I see no palaces and no cities, and certainly not the sun on the sea.”

  It was her turn to pause. The color came to her face. “Once you offered me a dowry…” she began.

  Indeed, the bundles still lay heaped in one corner: fine cloth and gems, strewn like a serpent’s hoard. His glance followed hers and he smiled, coldly. “You spurned it and ran away, as I recall.”

  “Because I do not wish to marry,�
�� Vasya finished. The words sounded strange even as she said them. A woman married. Or she became a nun. Or she died. That was what being a woman meant. What, then, was she? “But I do not want to beg my bread in churches. I came to ask— May I take a little of that gold with me, when I ride away?”

  Startled silence. Then Morozko leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, incredulity in his voice, “You have come here, where no one has ever come without my consent, to beg a little gold for your wanderings?”

  No, she might have said. It is not that. Not entirely. I was afraid when I left home, and I wanted you. You know more than I, and you have been kind to me. But she could not bring herself to say it.

  “Well,” said Morozko, sitting back. “All that is yours.” He jerked his chin at the heap of treasure. “You may go to the ends of the earth dressed as a princess, with gold to plait into Solovey’s mane.”

  When she didn’t answer, he added, with elaborate courtesy, “Would you like a cart for it? Or will Solovey drag it all behind you, like beads on a string?”

  She clung to her dignity. “No,” she said. “Only what can easily be carried and will not attract thieves.”

  Morozko’s pale stare, unimpressed, swept her from tousled hair to booted feet. Vasya tried not to think how she must appear to him: a hollow-eyed child, her face pale and dirty. “And then what?” the frost-demon asked meditatively. “You stuff your pockets with gold, ride out tomorrow morning, and freeze to death at once? No? Or perhaps you will live a few days until someone kills you for your horse, or rapes you for your green eyes? You know nothing of this world, and now you mean to go out and die in it?”

  “What else am I to do?” Vasya retorted. Tears of bewildered exhaustion gathered, though she did not let them fall. “My own people will kill me if I go home. Shall I become a nun? No—I cannot bear it. Better to die on the road.”

  “Many people say ‘Better to die’ until the time comes to do it,” Morozko returned. “Do you want to die alone in some forest hollow? Go back to Lesnaya Zemlya. Your people will forget, I swear it. All will be as it was. Go home and let your brother protect you.”

  Sudden anger burned out Vasya’s gathering hurt. She pushed back her chair and stood again. “I am not a dog,” she snapped. “You may tell me to go home, but I may choose not to. Do you think that is all I want, in all my life—a royal dowry, and a man to force his children into me?”

  Morozko was scarce taller than she, yet she had to hold herself to stillness before his pale, scathing stare. “You are talking like a child. Do you think that anyone, in all this world of yours, cares what you want? Even princes do not have what they want, and neither do maidens. There is no life for you on the road, nothing but death, soon or late.”

  Vasya bit her lips. “Do you think that I—” she began hotly, but the stallion had lost patience, hearing the fierce anguish in her voice. He thrust his head over her shoulder and his teeth snapped a finger’s breadth from Morozko’s face.

  “Solovey!” Vasya cried. “What are you—?” She tried shoving him out of the way, but he would not go.

  I’ll bite him, the stallion said. His tail lashed his sides; one hoof scraped the wooden floor.

  “He’d bleed water, and turn you into a snow horse,” said Vasya, still shoving. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Go away, you ox,” Morozko advised the stallion.

  Solovey did not move for a moment, but then Vasya said, “Go on.” He met her eye, flicked his tongue in halfhearted apology, and turned away.

  The tension had broken. Morozko sighed a little. “No, I should not have spoken so.” Some of the nasty edge had gone from his voice. He sank once more into his chair. Vasya did not move. “But—the house in the fir-grove is no place for you now, much less the road. You shouldn’t have been able to find the house anymore, even with Solovey, not after—” He met her eyes, broke off, resumed. “There, among your own kind, that is the world for you. I left you safely bestowed with your brother, the Bear asleep, the priest fled into the forest. Could you not have been satisfied with that?” His question was almost plaintive.

  “No,” said Vasya. “I am going on. I will see the world beyond this forest, and I will not count the cost.”

  A silence. Then he laughed, softly and unwillingly. “Well done, Vasilisa Petrovna. I have never been gainsaid in my own house before.”

  It is high time, then, she thought, though she did not say it aloud. Had something changed about him since that night he flung her across his saddlebow to keep her from the Bear? What was it? Were his eyes bluer now? Some new clarity in the bones of his face?

  Vasya felt suddenly shy. A fresh silence fell. In the pause, all her weariness seemed to strike, as though it had waited for her to let down her guard. She leaned hard against the table to steady herself.

  He saw it and got to his feet. “Sleep here, tonight. Mornings are wiser than evenings.”

  “I can’t sleep.” She meant it, though the table was the only thing keeping her upright. An edge of horror crept into her voice. “The Bear is waiting in my dreams, and Dunya, and Father. I’d rather stay awake.”

  She could smell the winter night on his skin. “That at least I can give you,” he said. “A night of sleep untroubled.”

  She hesitated, exhausted, untrusting. His hands could give sleep, of a kind. But it was a strange, thick sleep, a cousin to death. She could feel him watching her.

  “No,” he said suddenly. “No.” The roughness in his voice startled her. “No, I will not touch you. Sleep as you may. I will see you in the morning.”

  He turned away, spoke a soft word to his horse. She did not turn until she heard the sound of hoofbeats, and when she did, Morozko and his white mare were gone.

  MOROZKO’S SERVANTS WERE NOT invisible—not exactly. Out of the corner of her eye, Vasya would sometimes catch a whisking movement, or a dark shape. If she were quick, she might turn and get the impression of a face: seamed as oak-bark or cherry-cheeked or mushroom-gray and scowling. But Vasya never saw them when she was looking for them. They moved between one breath and the next, between one blink and another.

  After Morozko disappeared, these servants laid out food for her while she sat in a weary haze—rough bread and porridge, shriveled apples. A glorious bowl of wintergreen berries, wintergreen leaves. Honey-wine and beer and achingly cold water. “Thank you,” said Vasya to the listening air.

  She ate what she could, in her weariness, and fed her bread-crusts to the gluttonous Solovey. When she finally pushed her bowl away, she found that the coals in the oven had been scraped out and that they had made a steam-bath for her.

  Vasya stripped off her clammy clothes and crawled in at once, grinding the bones of her knees against the brick. Once inside, she turned over, with ash on her stomach, and lay looking up at nothing.

  In winter it is almost impossible to be still. Even sitting by the fire, one is watching the coals, stirring the soup, fighting—always fighting—the eager frost. But in the singing heat, the soft breath of the steam, Vasya’s breath slowed, and slowed again, until she lay quiet in the darkness and the frigid knot of grief inside her loosened. She lay on her back, open-eyed, and the tears ran down her temples, to mingle with her sweat.

  When Vasya could not bear it anymore she ran outside naked and flung herself, shrieking, into a snowbank. When she came back in, she quivered, fiercely, defiantly alive, and calmer than she’d been since the season turned.

  Morozko’s unseen servants had left out a gown for her, long and loose and light. She put it on, crawled into the great bed, with its coverlets like blown snow, and was at once asleep.

  AS SHE HAD FEARED, Vasya dreamed, and her dreams were not kind.

  She did not dream of the Bear, or of her dead father, or her stepmother with her throat torn away. Instead she wandered lost, in a narrow darkened place, smelling dust and cold incense, the moonlight seeping in. She wandered a long time, tripping over her own dress, and always she heard a woman weeping just b
eyond her sight.

  “Why are you crying?” Vasya called. “Where are you?”

  There was no answer but weeping. Far ahead, Vasya thought she saw a white figure. She hurried toward it. “Wait—”

  The white figure whirled.

  Vasya recoiled before its bone-white flesh, the shriveled pits of its eyes, and the mouth too large, wide and black. The mouth gaped; the creature croaked, “Not you! Never—Go! Get out! Leave me alone—Leave me—”

  Vasya fled, hands over her ears, and jolted, gasping, awake to find herself in the house in the fir-grove with the morning light filtering in. The pine-scented air of the winter morning chilled her face but could not pierce the snow-colored covers on the bed. Her strength had returned in the night. A dream, she thought, breath coming fast. Just a dream.

  A hoof scraped on wood, and a large, whiskered nose thrust itself against hers.

  “Go away,” Vasya said to Solovey, and pulled the blanket over her head. “Go away now. It is ridiculous for a creature of your size to act like a dog.”

  Solovey, undeterred, threw his head up and down. He snorted his warm breath into her face. It is day, he informed her. Get up! He shook his mane and set his teeth to the covers and tugged. Vasya snatched, too late, yelped, and came upright laughing.

  “Idiot,” she said. But she did get to her feet. Her hair had come loose of its plait and hung around her body; her head was clear, her body light. The ache of grief and anger and bad dreams lay muted in the back of her mind. She could shake away nightmares and smile at the beauty of the unmarked morning, the sunlight slanting in and stippling the floor.

  Solovey, recalling his dignity, sauntered back to the oven. Vasya’s gaze followed him. A little of the laughter died in her throat. Morozko and the white mare had returned in the dark before dawn.

  The mare stood quietly, chewing at her hay. Morozko was staring into the fire and did not turn his head when she rose. Vasya thought of the long featureless years of his life, wondered how many nights he sat alone by a fire, or if he wandered the wild instead and made his dwelling seem to have a roof and walls and a fire only to please her.