The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2)(11)

But the next morning, they left the tamed lands, and any expectation of shelter for the night. The wood grew dark and trackless, dotted with tiny hamlets. The men rode hard by day, camped in the snow, and kept watch by night.

For all their care, the riders saw neither beast nor bird, and certainly no bandits, but on the seventh day they came upon a burnt village.

Tuman smelled the smoke first and snorted. Sasha curbed her with steady hands and turned his head into the wind himself. “Smoke.”

Dmitrii reined his horse. “I smell it.”

“There,” said Kasyan beside them. He pointed a mittened hand.

Dmitrii snapped out hasty orders and the men circled nearer. There was no hope of a silent approach, not with so many. The dry snow groaned beneath the horses’ feet.

The village was burned to ashes, as though crushed by some giant hand of fire. At first it seemed utterly dead, empty and cold, but in the middle stood a chapel, which the fire had mostly spared, and a little smoke rose from a hole hacked in the roof.

The men drew nearer, swords drawn, bracing for the whine of arrows. Tuman rolled an anxious eye back toward her rider. The village had once had a palisade, but it was burned to a slag-heap.

Dmitrii snapped out more orders—some men to stand guard, others to look for survivors in the surrounding forest. In the end, only he and Sasha and Kasyan leaped what was left of the palisade, with a few men at their backs.

Bodies lay strewn as they had died, black as the burnt houses, with pleading finger-bones and grinning skulls. Though Dmitrii Ivanovich was not a man given to either imagination or sentiment, he grew white around the mouth. But his voice was quite steady when he said to Sasha, “Go and knock on the door of the church.” For they could hear sounds inside.

Sasha dropped to the snow, rapped on the church-door with his sword-hilt, and called, “God be with you.”

No reply.

“I am Brother Aleksandr,” Sasha called. “I am no bandit and no Tatar. I will help you if I can.”

Silence behind the door, then a skittering of conversation. The door flew open. The woman inside had an ax in her hand and a bruised face. Beside her stood a priest, streaked with blood and soot. When these two saw Sasha, tonsured, indubitably a monk, their makeshift weapons dropped a fraction.

“May the Lord bless you,” said Sasha, although the words stuck in his throat. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

“What matter?” said the priest, full of wild-eyed laughter. “You have come too late.”



IN THE END, IT was the woman who spoke, and she could tell them little. The bandits had come at daybreak, fine snow flying from their horses’ hooves. There had been a hundred at least—or it seemed so. They were everywhere. Nearly all the men and women died under their swords. Then they went for the children. “They took the girl-children away,” the woman said. “Not all—but many. One man looked into each of our girls’ faces and seized the ones he wanted.” In the woman’s hand lay a small, bright kerchief that had clearly belonged to a child. Her wavering gaze rose, found Sasha’s. “I beg you will pray for them.”

“I will pray for them,” said Sasha. “We will find these bandits if we can.”

The riders shared what food could be spared and helped make a pyre for the half-burned bodies. Sasha took some fat and linen and eased the burns of the survivors, although there were those who would have benefited more from the mercy-stroke.

At dawn they rode away.

The Grand Prince threw the burnt village a look of dislike as it disappeared into the forest. “We will be a season on the road, cousin, if you must bless every corpse and feed every mouth we meet. As it is, we have lost a day. Not one of those people will last the winter where they are—not with their grain all burned—and it did the horses no good to stop.”

Dmitrii was still white to the lips.

Sasha made no answer.



IN THE THREE DAYS after their first burnt village, they came upon two more. In the first, the villagers had succeeded in slaying a bandit’s horse, but the raiders had retaliated with great slaughter before firing the chapel. Their iconostasis was splinters and blowing ash, and the survivors stood around it, staring. “God has abandoned us,” they told Sasha. “They took the girls. We await judgment.”

Sasha blessed the villagers; they returned only empty stares, and he left them.

The trail was very cold. Or perhaps there had never been a trail.

The third village was simply deserted. Everyone had gone: men, and women, babes and grandmothers, down to the stock and the hens, their tracks muffled in new snowfall.

“Tatars!” Dmitrii spat, standing in this final village, with the smell of stock and smoke lingering. “Tatars indeed. And you say I will not have my war, Sasha, and take God’s vengeance on these infidels?”

“The men we seek are bandits,” Sasha retorted, breaking off the icicles that had gathered in Tuman’s whiskers. “You cannot take vengeance on a whole people because of the doings of a few wicked men.”

Kasyan said nothing. The next day he announced that he and his men meant to leave them.

Dmitrii returned coldly, “Are you afraid, Kasyan Lutovich?”

Another man would have bristled; Kasyan looked thoughtful. By then the men were all pallid with cold, with swipes of color across nose and cheeks. The distinction between lord and monk and guardsman had quite vanished. They all resembled irascible bears, huddled as they were in layers of felt and fur. Kasyan was the exception: composed and pale as he had been in the start, his eyes still quick and bright.