The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2)(83)

Vasya got to her feet, the stormy hair hanging all about her face and cloak. She tossed it back and stared down the scandalized room. Not a boy, but also as unlike the buttoned, laced, and tower-bred women as a cat from chickens.

The guards hovered a pace behind, leering at the girl’s slenderness and the glossy darkness of her hair. “You have finished your errand,” Olga snapped at them. “Go.”

They did not move. “She must be confined, by the Grand Prince’s orders,” said one.

Vasya shut her eyes for the barest instant.

Olga inclined her head, crossed her arms over a belly heavy with child, and—with a look that gave her a sudden and startling resemblance to her sister—she gazed coldly at the men until they squirmed. “Go,” she said again.

They hesitated, then turned and left, but not without a touch of insolence; they knew which way the wind was blowing. The set of their shoulders told Olga much about feeling outside her tower. Her teeth sank into her lower lip.

The latch clattered down; the outer door was shut. The two sisters were left staring at each other, the whole avid mob of women watching. Vasya clutched the cloak around her shoulders; she was shivering hard. “Olya—” she began.

The room had fallen perfectly silent, so as not to miss a word.

Well, they had enough gossip already. “Take her to the bathhouse,” Olga ordered her servants, coolly. “And then to her room. Lock the door. See that she is guarded.”



GUARDS—DMITRII’S MEN—FOLLOWED VASYA TO the bathhouse and stood outside the door. Inside, Varvara was waiting. She stripped away Vasya’s torn clothes, hands brisk and impersonal. She didn’t even bother to peer at the sapphire necklace, although she looked long at the great flowering of bruises on the girl’s arm. For her part, Vasya could scarcely stand the sight of her own winter-pallid flesh. It had betrayed her.

Then Varvara, still not speaking, ladled water over the hot stones of the oven, shoved Vasya into the inner room of the bathhouse, closed the inner door, and left her alone.

Vasya sank onto a bench, naked in the warmth, and allowed herself, for the first time, to cry. Biting her fist, she made no sound, but she wept until the spasm of shame and grief and horror had eased. Then, gathering herself, she raised her head to whisper to the listening air.

“Help me,” she said. “What should I do?”

She was not quite alone, for the air had an answer.

“Remember a promise, poor fool,” said Olga’s fat, frail bannik, in the hiss of water on stone. “Remember my prophecy. My days are numbered; perhaps this will be the last prophecy I ever make. Before the end of Maslenitsa it will all be decided.” He was fainter than the steam: only a strange stirring in the air marked his presence.

“What promise?” Vasya asked. “What will be decided?”

“Remember,” breathed the bannik, and then she was alone.

“Damn all chyerti anyway,” said Vasya, and closed her eyes.

Her bath went on for a long time. Vasya wished it might last forever, despite the soft, crude jokes of the guards, clearly audible outside. Every breath of the oven’s steam seemed to wash away more of the smell of horse and sweat: the smell of her hard-won freedom. When Vasya left her bath, she would be a maiden once more.

Finally Vasya, birth-naked and sweating, went into the antechamber to be doused with cold water, dried, salved, and dressed.

The shift and blouse and sarafan they found her smelled thickly of their previous owner, and they hung heavy from Vasya’s shoulders. In them she felt all the constraint she had shaken off.

Varvara plaited the girl’s hair with swift yanking hands. “Olga Vladimirova has enemies who would like nothing better than to see her in a convent, when her babe is born,” she growled at Vasya. “And what of the babe itself? Such shocks its lady mother has had since you came. Why could you not go quietly away again, before making a spectacle of yourself?”

“I know,” Vasya said. “I am sorry.”

“Sorry!” Varvara spat with uncharacteristic emotion. “Sorry, the maiden says. I give that”—she snapped her fingers—“for sorry, and the Grand Prince will give less, when he decides your fate.” She tied off Vasya’s plait with a scrap of green wool and said, “Follow me.”

They had prepared a chamber for her in the terem: dim and close, low-ceilinged, but warm, heated from below by the great stove in the workroom. Food waited for her there—bread and wine and soup. Olga’s kindness stung worse than anger had done.

Varvara left Vasya at the threshold. The last thing Vasya heard was the sound of the bolt sliding home, and her swift, light step as she walked away.

Vasya sank onto the cot, clenched both her fists, and refused to weep again. She didn’t deserve the solace of tears, not when she had caused her brother and sister such trouble. And your father, mocked a soft voice in her skull. Don’t forget him—that your defiance cost him his life. You are a curse to your family, Vasilisa Petrovna.

No, Vasya whispered back against that voice. That is not it, not it at all.

But it was hard to remember exactly what was true—there in that dim, airless room, wearing a stifling tent of a sarafan, with her sister’s frozen expression hanging before her eyes.

For their sake, Vasya thought, I must make it right.

But she could not see how.