The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3)(59)

“The people are afraid,” said the boyar carefully. “Thrice have the dead come walking since the season turned. Now this? If you shut the gates of Moscow and deny church to the sick, I do not know what they will do. Already there is much talk that the city is cursed.”

Dmitrii understood war, and the managing of men, but curses were outside his experience. “I will take thought for the comfort of the city,” he said. “But we are not cursed.” In his own heart, though, Dmitrii wasn’t sure. He wanted Father Sergei’s advice, but the old monk was not there. So instead, grudgingly, the Grand Prince turned to his steward. “Send for Father Konstantin.”



* * *





“THE FAIR-HAIRED PRINCE IS no fool,” said the Bear. “But he is young. He has sent a messenger for you. When you go to him, you must convince him to let you give service in the cathedral. Call the people together and pray for rain or salvation or whatever it is men ask of their gods in this age. But call them together.”

Konstantin was alone in the scriptorium of the Archangel, wearing only the lightest of cassocks; sweat dewed his forehead, his upper lip. “I am painting,” he said. He turned a pot of color in the light. His colors lay before him like a string of jewels—some were actually made from precious stones. At Lesnaya Zemlya, he had made his colors from bark and berries and leaves. Now anxious boyars showered him with lapis for his blues and jasper for his reds. They paid the finest silversmiths in Moscow to make icon-covers for him, of hammered silver, studded with pearls.

The third time dead things came whispering through the streets, it had taken the whole night to drive them off: first one, then another, and finally a third. “It cannot seem to be too easy,” the Bear had told him afterward, when Konstantin had wakened screaming from a dream of dead faces. “Do you think the defeat of a single child-upyr would have been enough to win over all Moscow, peasant and boyar? Drink wine, man of God, and do not fear the darkness. Have I not done all I promised?”

“Every last thing,” Konstantin had said miserably, shivering in his cooling sweat. He was to be made bishop. He had been granted property commensurate with his dignity. The people of Moscow worshipped him with wild-eyed fervor. But that did not help him in the night, when he dreamed dead hands, reaching.

Now, in the scriptorium, Konstantin turned away from his wooden panel, found the devil standing just behind him. His breath left him silently. He could never get used to the demon’s presence. The beast knew his thoughts, waked him from nightmares, whispered advice in his ear. Konstantin would never be free of him.

Perhaps I don’t wish to be, Konstantin thought in his more clearheaded moments. Always, when he met the devil’s single eye, the creature stared steadily back.

    The beast saw him.

Konstantin had waited to hear the voice of God for so long, but God was silent.

This devil never stopped talking.

Nothing would quiet Konstantin’s nightmares, though. He’d tried drinking mead, to thicken his sleep, but the honey-wine only made his head ache. Finally, in desperation, Konstantin asked the monks for brushes and wooden panels, for oil and water and pigment, and set himself to writing icons. When he painted, his soul seemed to exist only in his eye and hand; his mind went quiet.

“I can see you are painting,” said the Bear, with an edge. “In a monastery, alone. Why? I thought you wanted earthly glories, man of God.”

Konstantin swept his arm at the image on the panel. “I have my earthly glories. And this? Is it not glorious too?” His voice was thick with bitter irony: the icon painted by a man without faith.

The Bear peered over Konstantin’s shoulder. “That is a strange picture,” he said. His thick finger went out to trace the image.

The image was of Saint Peter. He was dark-haired and wild-eyed, hands and feet streaming blood, his eyes turned blindly to heaven, where angels waited. But the angels had eyes as flat and inimical as the swords in their hands. The host welcoming the apostle to heaven looked more like an army holding the gates. Peter had not the serene look of a saint. His eyes saw, his hands gestured, expressive. He was as alive as Konstantin’s gift, and the raw, wretched hunger the priest could not uproot from his soul, could make him.

“It is very beautiful,” said the Bear. His finger traced over the lines without quite touching; he looked almost perplexed. “How do you make it live—so? You have not magic.”

“I don’t know,” said Konstantin. “My hands move without me. What do you know of beauty, monster?”

“More than you,” said the Bear. “I have lived longer and seen more. I can make dead things live, but only in mockery of the living. This—is something else.”

    Was that wonder, in that sardonic, single eye? Konstantin couldn’t be sure.

The Bear reached out and turned the icon’s wooden panel to the wall. “You still must go and give service in the cathedral. Have you forgotten our bargain?”

Konstantin threw his brush aside. “What if I don’t? Will you damn me? Steal my soul? Put me to torture?”

“No,” said the Bear, and touched his cheek, lightly. “I will disappear, be gone, fling myself back into the fiery pit and leave you all alone.”

Konstantin stood still. Alone? Alone with his thoughts? Sometimes this devil seemed like the only thing real in this hot, nightmarish world.