The Girl in the Tower (The Winternight Trilogy #2)(4)

Olga paused again.

“But some say she died,” she said sadly. “For that is the price of loving.”

A silence should have fallen, as is proper, at the end of a well-told story. But this time it did not. For at the moment Olga’s voice died away, her daughter Masha sat bolt upright and screamed.

“Look!” she cried. “Mother, look! It is her, just there! Look!…No—no! Don’t— Go away!” The child stumbled to her feet, eyes blank with terror.

Olga turned her head sharply to the place her daughter stared: a corner thick with shadow. There—a white flicker. No, that was only firelight. The whole room roiled. Daniil, awake, clung to his mother’s sarafan.

“What is it?”

“Silence the child!”

“I told you!” Darinka squealed triumphantly. “I told you the ghost was real!”

“Enough!” snapped Olga.

Her voice cut through the others. Cries and chatter died away. Marya’s sobbing breaths were loud in the stillness. “I think,” Olga said, coolly, “that it is late, and that we are all weary. Better help your mistress to bed.” This was to Eudokhia’s women, for the Grand Princess was inclined to hysteria. “It was only a child’s nightmare,” Olga added firmly.

“Nay,” groaned Eudokhia, enjoying herself. “Nay, it is the ghost! Let us all be afraid.”

Olga shot a sharp glance at her own body-servant, Varvara, of the pale hair and indeterminate years. “See that the Grand Princess of Moscow goes safe to bed,” Olga told her. Varvara too was staring into Marya’s shadowed corner, but at the princess’s order, she turned at once, brisk and calm. It was the firelight, Olga thought that had made her expression seem an instant sad.

Darinka was babbling. “It was her!” she insisted. “Would the child lie? The ghost! A very devil…”

“And be sure that Darinka gets a draught and a priest,” Olga added.

Darinka was pulled out of the room, whimpering. Eudokhia was led away more tenderly, and the tumult subsided.

Olga went back to the oven, to her white-faced children.

“Is it true, Matyushka?” snuffled Daniil. “Is there a ghost?”

Marya said nothing, her hands clenched together. The tears still stood in her eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Olga calmly. “Hush, children, do not be afraid. We are protected by God. Come, it is time for bed.”





2.


Two Holy Men




Marya woke her nurse twice in the night with screaming. The second time, the nurse, unwisely, slapped the child, who leaped from her bed, flew like a hawk through the halls of her mother’s terem, and darted into Olga’s room before her nurse could stop her. She crawled over the sleeping maidservants and huddled, quaking, against her mother’s side.

Olga had not been asleep. She heard her daughter’s footsteps and felt the child tremble when she came close. The watchful Varvara caught Olga’s eye in the near-dark, then without a word went to the door to dismiss the nurse. The nurse’s stertorous breathing retreated, indignantly, down the hall. Olga sighed and stroked Marya’s hair until she calmed. “Tell me, Masha,” she said, when the child’s eyes had grown heavy.

“I dreamed a woman,” Marya told her mother in a small voice. “She had a gray horse. She was very sad. She came to Moscow and she never left. She was trying to say something to me, but I wouldn’t listen. I was scared!” Marya was weeping again. “Then I woke up and she was there, just the same. Only now she is a ghost—”

“Just a dream,” Olga murmured. “Just a dream.”



THEY WERE AWAKENED JUST after daybreak by voices in the dooryard.

In the heavy moment between sleep and waking, Olga tried to recover a dream of her own: of pines in the wind, of herself barefoot in the dust, laughing with her brothers. But the noise rose, and Marya jerked awake. Just like that, the country-girl Olga had been was once again gone and forgotten.

Olga pushed back the covers. Marya popped upright. Olga was glad to see a little color in the child’s face, the night-horrors banished with daylight. Among the voices spiraling up from the dooryard was one she recognized. “Sasha!” Olga whispered, scarcely believing. “Up!” she cried to her women. “There is a guest in the dooryard. Prepare hot wine, and heat the bathhouse.”

Varvara came into the room, snow in her hair. She had risen in the dark and gone out in search of wood and water. “It is your brother returned,” she said without ceremony. Her face looked pale and strained, Olga did not think she had slept, after Marya waked them with nightmares.

In contrast, Olga felt a dozen years younger. “I knew no storm could kill him,” she said, getting to her feet. “He is a man of God.”

Varvara made no reply, but stooped and began to rebuild the fire.

“Leave that,” Olga told her. “Go to the kitchens and see that the ovens are drawing. Make sure there is food ready. He will be hungry.”

Hastily, Olga’s women dressed the princess and her children, but before Olga was quite ready or her wine drunk, before Daniil and Marya had eaten their honey-drenched porridge, the footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Marya flew to her feet. Olga frowned. The child had a fey gaiety that belied her pallor. Perhaps the night was not forgotten after all. “Uncle Sasha is back!” Marya cried. “Uncle Sasha!”