The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2)(73)

“Listen, Kasyan Lutovich—” Vasya began.

She felt him go rigid, and felt him, indeed, listening, but not to her. Vasya fell silent, and slowly she also grew aware of a silence: an old, small silence, gathering beneath the roar and clatter of the feast, a silence that slowly filled with the soft rushing of a winter wind.

Vasya forgot Kasyan altogether. It was as though a skin had been plucked from her eyes. Into the stinks and smokes and noise of this boyars’ feast in Moscow, another world had come creeping, unnoticed, to feast with its people.

Under the table, a creature dressed in magnificent rags, with a potbelly and a long mustache, was busily sweeping up crumbs. Domovoi, Vasya thought. It was Dmitrii’s domovoi.

A tiny flossy-haired woman stood on Dmitrii’s table, skipping between the dishes and sometimes kicking over an unwary man’s cup. That was the kikimora—for the domovoi sometimes has a wife.

A rustle of wings high above; Vasya looked up for an instant into a woman’s unblinking eyes before she vanished in the smoke of the upper walls. Vasya felt a chill, for the woman-headed bird is the face of fate.

Seen and unseen alike, Vasya felt the weight of their gazes. They are watching, they are waiting—why?

Then Vasya raised her eyes to the doorway, and saw Morozko there.

He stood in a pool of dim torchlight. Behind him, the firelight streamed out into the night. In shape and in coloring, he might have been a man in truth, except for his bare head and beardless face, and the snow on his clothes that did not melt. He was dressed in a blue like winter twilight, rimed and edged with frost. His black hair lifted and stirred with a pine-tasting wind that came dancing and cleared a little of the fumes from the hall.

The music freshened; men sat straighter on their benches. But no one seemed to see him.

Save Vasya. She stared at the frost-demon, as at an apparition.

The chyerti turned. The bird above spread her vast wings. The domovoi had stopped his sweeping. His wife had come to a halt; they all stood deathly still.

Vasya made her way down the center of the hall, between raucous tables, between the watching spirits, to where Morozko stood watching her come, a faint, wry curve to his mouth.

“How came you here?” she whispered. So near him, she smelled snow and years and the pure, wild night.

He lifted a brow at the watching chyerti. “Am I not permitted to join the throng?” he asked.

“But why would you wish to?” she asked him. “There is no snow here, and no wild places. Are you not the winter-king?”

“The sun-feast is older than this city,” Morozko replied. “But it is not older than I. They once strangled maidens in the snow on this night, to summon me and also to bid me go, and leave them the summer.” His eyes measured her. “There are no sacrifices now. But I still come to the feasting sometimes.” His eyes were paler than stars and more remote, but they rested on the red faces all about them with a cold tenderness. “These are still my people.”

Vasya said nothing. She was thinking of the dead girl in the fairy tale, a moralizing story for children on cold nights, to mask a history of blood.

“It marks the waning of my power, this feast,” Morozko added mildly. “Soon it will be spring, and I will stay in my own forest, where the snow does not melt.”

“Have you come for a strangled maiden, then?” asked Vasya, a chill in her voice.

“Why?” he asked. “Will there be one?”

A pause while they looked at each other. Then—“I would believe anything of this mad city,” said Vasya, pushing the strangeness aside. She did not look again at the years in his eyes. “I will not see you, will I?” she asked. “When it is spring?”

He said nothing; he had turned away from her. His frowning glance flicked all around the hall.

Vasya followed his gaze. She thought she glimpsed Kasyan, watching them. But when she tried to see him full, Kasyan was not there.

Morozko sighed and the starry glance withdrew. “Nothing,” he said, almost to himself. “I twitch at shadows.” He turned again to look at her. “No, you will not see me,” he said. “For I am not, in spring.”

It was the old, faint sorrow in his face that prompted her to ask then, formally, “Will you sit at the high table this night, winter-king?” She spoiled the effect by adding in practical tones, “The boyars are all falling off their benches by now; there is room.”

Morozko laughed, but she thought he looked surprised. “I have been a vagabond in the halls of men, but it has been a long time—long and long—since I was invited to the feasting.”

“Then I invite you,” said Vasya. “Though this is not my hall.”

They both turned to look at the high table. Indeed, some of the men had fallen off the bench and lay snoring, but the ones still upright had invited women to sit beside them. Their wives had all gone to bed. The Grand Prince had two girls, one on each arm. He caught one girl’s breast in his broad palm, and Vasya’s face heated. Beside her, Morozko said, voice threaded with suppressed laughter, “Well, I will defer my feast. Will you ride with me instead, Vasya?”

All about them thrummed the churn and the reek, shouts and half-screamed singing. Suddenly Moscow stifled her. She had had enough of the musty palaces, hard eyes, deception, disappointments…

All around, the chyerti watched.