The Bear and the Nightingale(36)

Konstantin’s blue glance flicked toward her, though she could not read his expression.

“Insolence!” shrieked Anna. “Sacrilege!”

Vasya, chin high, kept silence even as her stepmother’s willow switch whistled down. Konstantin watched, grave and inscrutable. Vasya met his eyes and refused to look away.

Anna saw the girl and the priest, their steady mutual regard, and her furious face turned redder than ever. She put all the strength of her arm into the sharp willow. Vasya stood still for it, biting her lip bloody. But the tears welled, despite her best efforts, and hurried down her cheeks.

Behind Anna, Konstantin watched, wordless.

Vasya cried out once toward the end, as much in humiliation as in pain. But then it was over; Alyosha, white-lipped, had gone to find their father. Pyotr saw the blood and his daughter’s white face and seized Anna’s arm.

Vasya said no word to her father or to anyone else; she stumbled away at once, though her brother tried to call her back, and hid in the wood like a wounded thing. If she wept, only the rusalka heard.

“That will teach her the price of sin,” said Anna proudly, when Pyotr reproved her for brutality. “Better she learn now than burn later, Pyotr Vladimirovich.”

Konstantin said nothing. What he thought he did not say.

After her cuts healed, Vasya walked more softly and held her tongue more readily. She spent more time with the horses, and concocted wild plans to dress as a boy and go to join Sasha in his monastery, or send a secret messenger to Olga.

Alyosha, though he did not tell her, began to mark her comings and goings, so that she was never alone with their stepmother.

All this while, Konstantin condemned the people’s offerings—bread or honey-wine—that they made to their hearth-spirits. “Give it to God,” he said. “Forget your demons, lest you burn.” The people listened. Even Dunya was half convinced; she muttered to herself, shook her old head, and picked the sun-symbols from aprons and kerchiefs.

Vasya did not see it; she hid in the wood or in the stable. But the domovoi regretted her absence more than anyone else, because for him now there was nothing but crumbs.





Fall came in a burst of glory that quickly faded to gray. The silence of the waning year lay like a haze over the lands of Pyotr Vladimirovich while the icons multiplied under Father Konstantin’s hand. The men of the village labored over a new icon-screen to hold them: Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the Virgin and the Christ. The people lingered about Konstantin’s room and gazed with awe at the finished icons, at their shapes and shining faces. Konstantin was making a whole iconostasis, one image at a time.

“You owe your salvation to God,” said Konstantin. “Look on His face and be saved.” They had never seen anything like his Christ’s great eyes, the pale flesh, and the long, thin hands. They looked and knelt and sometimes cried.

What is a domovoi, they said, but a tale for bad children? We are sorry, Batyushka, we repent.

Almost no one made offerings, even at the autumn equinox. The domovoi grew feeble and listless. The vazila grew thin and haggard and wild-eyed; the straw lay thick in his tangled beard. He stole rye and barley stored for the horses. The horses themselves began stamping in their stalls and shying at breezes. Tempers in the village grew short.



“WELL, IT WASN’T ME, boy, and it wasn’t a horse or a cat or a ghost,” snarled Pyotr to the stable boy one bitter morning. More barley had vanished in the night, and Pyotr, already on edge, was furious.

“I didn’t see!” cried the boy, sniffling. “I would never—”

The air smarted, those mornings in November, and the earth seemed to ring underfoot, brittle with frost. Pyotr stood nose to nose with the youth and answered his denials with a clenched fist. There was a thud and a howl of pain. “Never steal from me again,” Pyotr said.

Vasya, just slipping through the stable-door, frowned. Her father was never short-tempered. He never even beat Anna Ivanovna. What is happening to us? Vasya ducked out of sight and climbed into the hayloft. It took her a moment to locate the vazila, who was curled in on himself and half-buried in straw. She shivered at the look in his eyes.

“Why are you eating the barley?” she asked, gathering her courage.

“Because there have been no offerings.” The vazila’s eyes glowed disconcertingly black.

“Are you frightening the horses?”

“Their moods are mine and mine theirs.”

“You are very angry, then?” the girl whispered. “But my people do not mean it. They are only frightened. The priest will go away one day. Things will not always be so.”

The vazila’s eyes gleamed darkly, but Vasya thought she saw sorrow in them as well as anger.

“I am hungry,” he said.

Vasya felt a rush of sympathy. She had often been hungry. “I can bring you bread,” she said stoutly. “I am not frightened.”

The vazila’s eyelids flickered. “I need little,” he said. “Bread. Apples.”

Vasya tried not to think too hard about giving away part of her meals. Food was never plentiful after midwinter; soon she would be grudging every crumb. But— “I will bring them to you. I swear it,” she said, looking earnestly into the demon’s round, brown eyes.

“My thanks,” returned the vazila. “Keep your pledge and I will leave the grain alone.”