Кэтрин Арден - The Girl in the Tower

“Your father is dead.”

Silence fell, so that they heard logs crumbling in the hot stove.

Olga sat dumbstruck. Her father dead? He had never even met her children.

What matter? He was happy now; he was with Mother. But—he lay forever in his beloved winter earth and she would never see him again. “God give him peace,” Olga whispered, stricken.

“I am sorry,” said the priest.

Olga shook her head, throat working.

“Here,” added the priest unexpectedly. He thrust the cup into her hand. “Drink.”

Olga tipped the wine down her throat, then handed the empty cup to Varvara. She scrubbed a sleeve across her eyes and managed to ask, steadily, “How did he die?”

“It is an evil tale.”

“But I will hear it,” returned Olga.

Murmurs rippled among the women.

“Very well,” said the priest. A sulfurous note slipped into his voice. “He died because of your sister.”

Gasps of delighted interest from her audience. Olga bit the inside of her cheek. “Out,” Olga said, without raising her voice. “Go back upstairs, Darinka, I beg.”

The women grumbled, but they went. Only Varvara stayed behind, for propriety’s sake. She retreated into the shadows, crossing her arms over her breast.

“Vasya?” Olga asked, rough-voiced. “My sister, Vasilisa? What could she have to do with—?”

“Vasilisa Petrovna knew neither God nor obedience,” the priest said. “A devil lived in her soul. I tried—long I tried—to instruct her in righteousness. But I failed.”

“I don’t see—” Olga began, but the priest had hauled himself higher on his pillows; sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat.

“She would look at things that were not there,” he whispered. “She walked in the woods but knew no fear. Everywhere in the village, people talked of it. The kinder said she was mad. But others spoke of witchcraft. She grew to womanhood, and, witchlike, she drew the eyes of men, though she was no beauty…” His voice fractured, rallied again. “Your father, Pyotr Vladimirovich, arranged a marriage in haste, that she be wed before worse befell her. But she defied him and drove away her suitor. Pyotr Vladimirovich made arrangements to send her to a convent. He feared—by then he feared for her soul.”

Olga tried to imagine her fey green-eyed sister grown into the girl the priest described, and she succeeded all too well. A convent? Vasya? “The little girl I knew could never bear confinement,” she said.

“She fought,” agreed the priest. “ No, she said, and no again. She ran into the forest, at night, on Midwinter, still crying defiance. Pyotr Vladimirovich went after his daughter, as did Anna Ivanovna, her poor stepmother.”

The priest paused.

“And then?” Olga whispered.

“A beast found them,” he said. “We thought—they said a bear.”

“In winter?”

“Vasilisa must have gone into its cave. Maidens are foolish.” The priest’s voice rose. “ I don’t know; I did not see. Pyotr saved his daughter’s life. But he himself was slain, and his poor wife with him. A day later, Vasilisa, maddened still, ran away, and no one has heard anything of her since. We can only assume she is dead as well, Olga Petrovna. She and your father both.”

Olga pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. “Once I promised Vasya that she could come live with me. I might have taken a hand. I might have—”

“Do not grieve,” the priest said. “Your father is with God, and your sister deserved her fate.”

Olga lifted her head, startled. The priest’s blue eyes were expressionless—she thought she had imagined the venom in his voice.

Olga mastered herself. “You have braved dangers to bring this news,” she said. “What—what will you have in return? Forgive me, Father. I don’t even know your name.”

“My name is Konstantin Nikonovich,” said the priest. “And I desire nothing. I will join the monastery, and I will pray for this wicked world.”

Metropolitan Aleksei had founded the monastery of the Archangel in Moscow, and its hegumen, Father Andrei, was, like Sasha, a disciple of the holy Sergei. Andrei was formed like a mushroom, round and soft and short. He had the face of a cheerful and dissolute angel, possessed a surprisingly worldly grasp of politics, and kept a table that would have been the envy of any three monasteries. “The glutton cannot turn his mind to God,” he said dismissively. “But neither can the starving man.”

As soon as the Grand Prince let him go, Sasha made straight for the monastery. While Konstantin prayed in the warmth of Olga’s palace, Andrei and Sasha talked in the monastery refectory over salt fish and cabbage (for it was suppertime on a fast-day). When Andrei had heard the younger man’s tale, he said, chewing thoughtfully, “I am sorry to hear of the burning. But God works in mysterious ways, and this news has come betimes.”

That was not the reaction Sasha expected; he raised a questioning brow. His hands, a little cracked with cold, lay laced together and quiet on the wooden table. Andrei went on impatiently, “You must get the Grand Prince out of the city. Take him with you to kill bandits. Let him lie with a pretty girl who he is not desperate to get a son on.” The old monk said this unblushing. He had been a boyar before he vowed himself to God, and had fathered seven children. “Dmitrii is restless. His wife gives him no pleasure in bed, and no children to spend his hopes on. If it goes on much longer, Dmitrii will make his war on the Tatar—or someone—as a mad cure for boredom. The time is not ripe, as you say. Take him to kill bandits instead.”

“I will,” said Sasha, draining his cup and rising. “Thank you for the warning.”

BROTHER ALEKSANDR’S CELL HAD been kept clean for his return. A good bearskin lay on the narrow cot. The corner opposite the cell-door held an icon of the Christ and the Virgin. Sasha prayed a long time, while the bells of Moscow rang and the pagan moon rose over her snowy towers.

Mother of God, remember my father, my brothers, and my sisters. Remember my master at the monastery in the wilderness, and my brothers in Christ. I beg you will not be angry, that we do not fight the Tatar yet, for they are still too strong and too many. Forgive me my sins. Forgive me.

The candlelight danced over the Virgin’s narrow face, and her Child seemed to watch him out of dark, inhuman eyes.

The next morning, Sasha went to outrenya, the morning office, with the brothers. He bowed before the iconostasis, face to the floor. After he had said his prayers, he went out at once into the sparkling, half-buried city.

Dmitrii Ivanovich had his faults, but indolence was not among them; Sasha found the Grand Prince already down in his dooryard, apple-cheeked and cheerful, waving a sword, attended by his younger boyars. His pet swordsmith from Novgorod had made a new blade, serpent-hilted. The two cousins, prince and monk, examined the sword with a doubtful admiration.

“It will strike fear into my enemies,” Dmitrii said.

“Until you try to club someone in the face with the hilt and it shatters,” returned Sasha. “Look at the thin place—there—where the snake’s head joins the body.”

Dmitrii considered the hilt again. “Well, try it with me,” he said.

“God keep you,” said Sasha at once. “But if you are going to break that sword-hilt on someone, let it not be me.”

Dmitrii was just turning to hail one of his more irritating boyars when Sasha’s voice, continuing, turned him back. “Enough playing,” Sasha said impatiently. “Come, the storm is over. There are villages burning. Will you ride out with me?”