Кэтрин Арден - The Girl in the Tower

He had been a big man, but now his beard bristled with frost, and his open eyes stared out, frozen and blank. He lay in a bloody stretch of trampled snow.

Vasya, reluctantly, slid to the ground. Swallowing back nausea, she saw what the man had died of: the stroke of a sword or an ax, in the notch where his neck met his shoulder, that had split him to the ribs. Her gorge rose; she forced it down.

Vasya touched his stiff hand. A single pair of bootprints had taken this man, running, to his end.

But where were the killers? Vasya bent to retrace the dead man’s steps. A dusting of new snow had left them blurry. Solovey followed her, blowing nervously.

Abruptly the trees ended, and they found themselves at the edge of cleared fields. In the middle of the fields lay a village, burned.

Vasya felt sick again. The burnt village was very like her own: izby and barns and bathhouses, a wooden palisade and stumpy wintertime fields. But these huts were smoldering ruins. The palisade lay on its side like a wounded deer. The smoke rolled out over the forest. Vasya bent her head to breathe through a fold of her cloak. She could hear the wailing.

They are gone, the ones who did this, said Solovey.

Not long gone, though, Vasya thought. Here and there little fires still dotted the landscape, that time or labor had not put out . Vasya vaulted to Solovey’s back. “Go closer , ” she told the horse, and she hardly recognized her own voice.

They slipped out from between the trees beside the remains of the palisade. Solovey leaped it, nostrils showing red. The survivors in the village moved stiffly, as if ready to join the dead they were piling before the ruin of a little church. It was too cold for the bodies to smell. The blood had clotted on their wounds, and they stared open-mouthed at the brilliant sky.

The living did not raise their eyes.

In the shadow of one izba, a woman with two dark plaits knelt beside a dead man. Her hands curled into each other like dead leaves, and her body slumped, though she was not weeping.

Something about the line of the woman’s hair, black as gall against a slender back, caught at Vasya’s memory. She was off Solovey before she thought.

The woman stumbled upright, and of course she was not Vasya’s sister; she was no one Vasya knew. Only a peasant with too many cold days stamped on her face. The blood had been ground into her palms, where she must have tried to stanch a death-wound. A dirty knife appeared in her hand and she pressed her back to the wall of her house. Her voice came grating from her throat. “Your fellows came and went already,” she said to Vasya. “We have nothing else. One of us will die, boy, before you can touch me.”

“I—no,” said Vasya, stammering in her pity. “I am not one of the ones who did this; I am only a traveler.”

The woman did not lower her knife. “Who are you?”

“I—I am called Vasya,” said the girl cautiously, for Vasya could be a nickname for a boy, Vasilii, as well as a girl, Vasilisa. “Can you tell me what has happened here?”

The woman’s furious laughter shrilled in Vasya’s ears. “Where do you come from, that you do not know? The Tatars came.”

“You, there,” said a hard voice. “Who are you?”

Vasya’s head jerked around. An old muzhik was striding toward her, hard and broad and death-pale under his beard. His split knuckles bled around the bloody scythe clutched in his hand. Others appeared, stepping around the burning places. They all held rude weapons, axes and hunting-knives; most had blood on their faces. “Who are you?” The cry came from half a dozen throats, and then the villagers were closing round her. “Horseman,” said one. “A straggler. A boy. Kill him.”

Without thinking, Vasya threw herself onto Solovey. The stallion took a great galloping stride and leaped over the heads of the nearest villagers, who fell swearing into the bloody snow. The horse came down light as a leaf and would have kept running then, out of the wreckage and back into the forest, but Vasya ground her seat-bones into his back and forced him to a halt. Solovey stood still, barely, poised on the edge of flight.

Vasya found herself facing a ring of frightened, furious faces. “I mean you no harm,” she said, heart hammering. “I am no raider, only a traveler, alone.”

“Where did you come from?” called one villager.

“From the forest,” said Vasya, with half-truth. “What has happened here?”

An ugly pause, full of violent grief. Then the woman with black hair spoke. “Bandits. They brought fire and arrows and steel. They came for our girls.”

“Your girls? Did they take them?” demanded Vasya. “Where?”

“They took three,” said the man bitterly. “Three little ones. It has been so since the winter started, in every village in these parts. They come, they burn what they will, and then they take their pick of the children.” He gestured vaguely at the forest. “Girls—always girls. Rada there”—he gestured toward the black-haired woman—“had her daughter stolen, and her husband slain when he fought. She has no one now.”

“They took my Katya.” Rada’s bloody hands twisted together. “I told my husband not to fight, that I could not lose them both. But when they dragged our girl away, he couldn’t bear it…” Her voice strangled and fell silent.

Words filled Vasya’s mouth, but there was not one that would serve. “I am sorry,” she said at length. “I am—” She was trembling all over. Suddenly Vasya touched Solovey’s side; the horse wheeled and galloped away. Behind her she heard cries, but she did not look back. Solovey vaulted the damaged palisade and slipped in among the trees.

The horse knew her thought before she voiced it. We aren’t going on, are we?

“No.”

I wish you’d learn how to fight properly before you start getting into them, the horse said unhappily. A white ring showed around his eye. But he made no protest when she nudged him back to where the dead man lay in the wood.

“I’m going to try to help,” said Vasya. “Bogatyry ride the world, rescuing maidens. Why not I?” She spoke with more bravado than she felt. Her ice-dagger seemed a mighty responsibility, in its sheath along her spine. She thought also of her father, her mother, her nurse: the people she had not been able to save.

The horse did not reply. The wood was perfectly still, beneath a careless sun. The horse’s breathing and hers seemed loud in the silence. “No, I don’t mean to get into a fight,” she said. “I’d be killed, and then Morozko will have been right, and I can’t allow that. Sneaking, Solovey, we will sneak, as little girls who steal honeycakes do.” She tried for a tone of careless courage, but her gut was cold and shaking.

She slid to the ground beside the dead man and began to search in earnest for tracks. But she found nothing to show where the raiders had gone.

“Bandits are not ghosts,” Vasya said to Solovey in frustration. “What manner of men do not leave tracks?”

The horse switched his tail, uneasy, but made no answer.

Vasya was thinking hard. “Come on, then,” she said. “We have to go back to the village.”

The sun had passed its zenith. The trees nearest the palisade threw long shadows onto the ruined izby and hid a little of the horror. Solovey halted at the edge of the wood. “Wait for me here,” said Vasya.“If I call, you must come for me at once. Knock people down if you have to. I am not going to die because of their fear.”

The horse dropped his nose into her palm.

The village lay in ghostly silence. Its people had all gone to the church, where a pyre was building. Vasya, clinging to the shadows, crept past the palisade and flattened herself against the wall of Rada’s house. The woman was nowhere in sight, though there were drag marks where they had taken her husband away.