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The prince rounded on her with savage eyes. “I promised friendship to a liar, and to a boy that is dead,” he said. “Get her out of my sight.”
“Come, wild-cat,” Kasyan said in a soft voice. She no longer fought his grip. He seized her cloak from the snow, wrapped it about her, and dragged her away.
21.
The Sorcerer’s Wife
Varvara was not slow to bring Olga the news. Indeed, she was the first to come clattering into the princess’s workroom, grim with the weight of disaster, snow in her faded plait.
Olga’s terem strained to bursting with women and their finery. This was their festival, there in that close-packed tower, where they ate and drank and impressed each other with silk brocades and headdresses and scents, listening to the roar of the revel outside.
Eudokhia sat nearest the oven, preening dourly. A few admirers sat about her, praising her pregnancy and begging favors. But even Eudokhia’s unborn child could not compete with this famous horse-race. A good deal of furtive, giggled betting had marked the morning, while the pious ones pinched their lips.
Will it be that handsome stripling—Olga’s younger brother—who carries the prize? they asked one another, laughing. Or the fire-haired prince, Kasyan, who—so the slaves say—has a smile like a saint’s and strips like a pagan god in the bathhouse? Kasyan was the general favorite, for half the maidens were in love with him.
“No!” Marya cried doughtily, while the women fed her cakes. “It will be my uncle Vasilii! He is the bravest and he has the greatest horse in all the world.”
The roar of the start seemed to shake the terem-walls, and the screaming of the race wrapped the city in noise. The women listened with heads close together, following the riders by the sounds of their passing.
Olga took Marya onto her lap and held her tightly.
Then the clamor died away. “It is over,” the women said.
It was not over. The noise started up again, louder than before, with a new and ugly note. This noise did not fade; it slipped nearer and nearer the tower, to curl around Olga’s walls like a rising tide.
On this tide, like a piece of flotsam, came Varvara, running. She slid into the workroom with well-feigned calm, went straight to Olga, and bent to whisper in her ear.
But though Varvara was first, though she was fast, she was not quick enough.
Word came up the stairs like a wave, breaking slowly, then all at once. No sooner had the slave whispered disaster in Olga’s ear than a murmur like a moan rose from the women, carried on the lips of other servants. “Vasya is a girl!” Eudokhia shrieked.
No time, no time for anything—certainly not for Olga to empty her tower—not even time to calm them.
“Coming here, you said?” Olga asked Varvara. She fought to think. Dmitrii Ivanovich must be in a rage. To send Vasya here would only tie Olga—and her husband—in with the deceit, would only inflame the Grand Prince more. Whose idea was that?
Kasyan, Olga thought. Kasyan Lutovich, the new player in this game: our mysterious lord. What better way to worm his way nearer the Grand Prince’s side? This will displace Sasha and my husband both. Fools, not to see it.
Well, that was their mistake, and she would have to make the best of it. What else could she do, a princess in a tower? Olga straightened her spine and put calm into her voice.
“Bid my women attend me,” she said to Varvara. “Prepare a chamber for Vasya.” She hesitated. “See that there is a bolt on the outside.” Olga had both hands laced over her belly, knuckles white. But she held her self-possession and would not relinquish it. “Take Masha with you,” she added. “See that she is kept out of the way.”
Marya’s small, wise imp’s face was full of alarm. “This is bad, isn’t it?” she asked her mother. “That they know that Vasya is a girl?”
“Yes,” said Olga. She had never lied to her children. “Go, child.”
Marya, white-faced and suddenly docile, followed Varvara out.
Word had passed among Olga’s guests with the speed of a new-lit fire. The more virtuous were gathering up their things, mouths pursed up small, preparatory to hurrying away.
But they fussed overlong with their headdresses and cloaks, with the lay of their veils, and that was not to be wondered at, for soon more steps—a great procession of steps—were heard on the stairs of Olga’s tower.
Every head in the workroom swiveled. The ones who’d been about to leave sat back down with suspicious alacrity.
The inner door opened, and two men of Dmitrii’s household stood in the doorway, holding Vasya by the arms. The girl hung between them, wrapped awkwardly in a cloak.
A sound of appalled delight ran among the women. Olga imagined them talking later, Did you see the girl, her torn clothes, her hair hanging loose? Oh, yes, I was there that day: the day of the ruin of the Princess of Serpukhov and Aleksandr Peresvet.
Olga kept her eyes on Vasya. She would have expected her sister to come in subdued—repentant, even—but (fool, this is Vasya) the girl was starry-eyed with rage. When the men flung her contemptuously to the floor, she rolled, turning her fall into something graceful. All the women gasped.
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.
