The Girl in the Tower (The Winternight Trilogy #2)(86)

“Sorcerer? Kasyan Lutovich?”

“In other days, men called him Kaschei,” said Morozko. “And he can never die.”

Vasya stared. But that is a fairy tale. So is a frost-demon.

“Cannot die?” she managed.

“He made a magic,” said Morozko. “He has—hidden his life outside his body, so that I—that death—may never go near him. He can never die, and he is very strong. He kept me from seeing him; he kept me away today. Vasya, I would not have—”

She wanted to fold herself in his cloak and disappear. She wanted to crumple against him and cry. She held herself still. “Have what?” she whispered.

“Let you face this day alone,” he said.

She sought to read his eyes in the dark, and he drew back, so that the gesture died unfinished. For an instant, his face might have been human, and an answer was there, in his eyes, just beyond her understanding. Tell me. But he did not. He tilted his head, as though listening. “Come away, Vasya. Ride away. I will help you escape.”

She could go and get Solovey. Ride away. With him. Into the moon-silvered dark, with that promise lurking, as though despite him, in his eyes. And yet—“But my brother and sister. I cannot abandon them.”

“You aren’t—” he began.

A heavy step in the corridor sent Vasya whirling round. She turned to face the door just as the bolt shot back.

Olga looked wearier than she had that morning: pale, waddling with the weight of her unborn child. Varvara stood at her shoulder, glaring. “Kasyan Lutovich has come to see you,” Olga said curtly. “You will give him a hearing, sister.”

The two women bustled into Vasya’s chamber, and when the light scoured its corners, the frost-demon was gone.



VARVARA ARRANGED VASYA’S TOUSLED plait so that it lay smoothly and bound an embroidered headdress around her brows, so that icy silver rings hung down and framed her face. Then Vasya was herded out onto the frozen staircase. She descended between Olga and Varvara, blinking. They went down a level, where Varvara opened a new door; they crossed an antechamber and entered a sitting-room that smelled of sweet oil.

At the threshold, Olga said, bowing, “My sister, Gospodin,” and stood aside for Vasya to pass.

Kasyan was newly bathed and dressed for the festival, in white and pale gold. His hair curled vividly against his embroidered collar.

He said gravely, “I beg you will leave us, Olga Vladimirova. What I have to say to Vasilisa Petrovna is best said alone.”

It was impossible, of course, that Vasya should be left alone with any man not her betrothed, now that she was a girl again. But Olga nodded tightly and left them.

The door shut with a soft snick.

“Well met,” Kasyan said softly, a little smile playing about his mouth, “Vasilisa Petrovna.”

Deliberately she bowed, as a boy would have. “Kasyan Lutovich,” she said icily. Sorcerer. The word beat in her head, so strange and yet…“Was it you who sent men after me in the bathhouse in Chudovo?”

He half-smiled. “I am astonished you didn’t guess before. I killed four of them for losing you.”

His eyes skimmed her body. Vasya crossed her arms. She was clothed from head to foot, and she had never felt more naked. Her bath seemed to have washed away recourse and ambition both; she must watch now, and wait, and let others act. She was naked with powerlessness.

No. No. I am no different than yesterday.

But it was hard to believe. In his eyes was a monumental and amused confidence.

“Do not,” Vasya said, almost spitting, “come near me.”

He shrugged. “I may do as I like,” he replied. “You gave up all pretense to virtue when you appeared in the kremlin dressed as a boy. Not even your sister would prevent me now. I hold your ruin in the palm of my hand.”

She said nothing. He smiled. “But enough of that,” he added. “Why should we be enemies?” His tone turned placating. “I saved you from your lies, now you are free to be yourself, to adorn yourself as a girl ought—”

Her lip curled. He broke off with an elegant shrug.

“You know as well as I that it is a convent for me now,” Vasya said. She put her arms behind her and pressed her back against the door, the wood driving splinters into her palms. “If I am not put in the cage and burned as a witch. Why are you here?”

He ran a hand through his russet hair. “I regretted today,” he said.

“You enjoyed it,” Vasya retorted, wishing her voice were not thin with remembered humiliation.

He smiled and gestured to the stove. “Will you sit down, Vasya?”

She did not move.

He huffed out a laugh and sank onto a carved bench beside the fire. A wine-jar studded with amber sat beside two cups; he poured one for himself and drank the pale liquid down. “Well, I did enjoy it,” he admitted. “Playing with our hotheaded prince’s temper. Watching your self-righteous brother squirm.” He slanted a look at where she stood, frozen with disgust, by the door and added more seriously, “And you yourself. No one would ever take you for a beauty, Vasilisa Petrovna, but then no one would ever want to. You were lovely, fighting me so. And charming in your boy’s clothes. I could hardly wait as long as I did. I knew, you know. I always knew, whatever I might have told the Grand Prince. All those nights on the road. I knew.”