CHAPTER 30:
THE LADY OF THE LAKE
Newly fallen snow coated the frozen surface of the lake, sparkling in the moonlight. The western shore was nothing more than a pale suggestion beyond the moon-lit lake, and if the Teutonics had watchers along the shore, Illarion could not see them. In turn, he hoped he and Nika could not be seen as they made their way along the ice-crusted eastern shoreline. Illarion appreciated that the moonlight reflected from the snow made torches unnecessary, but he still felt exposed.
Nika led the way, and he followed in her shallow footsteps as her boots compressed the shining snow. There was no sound except for the gentle slap of water against the ice beneath the surface of the lake and his loud breathing. The Shield-Maiden moved like a ghost. Overhead there were no clouds, making for a cold night, and the sky was awash with brilliant stars. But for the moon, it was a night identical to the one in Kiev months ago, when the ghostly fog had flowed into the city.
Alexander’s camp lay behind them, far enough away from the shore that it was marked only by an orange glow through the frost-rimed trees. The men were restless, and there had been a number of strenuous arguments in the Kynaz’s tent. Andrei did not argue with his brother in front of the soldiers, but Illarion knew that Andrei was pressing Alexander to take the fight to the Teutonics. So far, the prince’s conviction about Lake Peipus remained firm, but if the Teutonics did not attack soon, Illarion worried that the prince’s position would crumble.
“You’ve sent good men to their deaths, brother,” Andrei had said during their last argument, “and abandoned them when we retreated.”
“There are no victories without sacrifices,” Alexander had replied.
“Strange,” Andrei had said, after a long pause, “to hear you say that, who alone amongst the Princes of Rurik’s house would not raise his sword against Batu Khan, who brokered peace with our last conquerors. Now you’re all verve and fire and talk of sacrifice.” The lilt of the prince’s voice had suggested an excess of wine.
“Tell me brother,” Alexander had asked, his voice tired and sad, “would you have had me throw all that remained of Rus the way of Father and Grandfather? Would a Khan’s slaughter in the streets of Novgorod have pleased you?”
“That is not what I speak of, Alexander,” Andrei said. “I speak only of honor.”
“Families have burned for honor, Andrei,” Alexander said. “Tribes, villages, cities, have all given their lives up to the consuming fires of personal vendettas and sullied pride. A ruler’s first priority is his people, or he is unworthy of his throne.”
“Yet here you are,” Andrei answered, “fighting to keep from one foe what you would not from another.”
“The difference between you and me,” Alexander finally said, “is that I understand that only the battles we can win are worth fighting.”
Nika slowed, turning her head from side to side as if she were searching for some sign. Illarion saw nothing but snow-covered rocks and trees.
“There,” Nika said, pointing to a cluster of spruce that leaned out from the rest of the forest. She walked over to the middle tree and reached up to brush away the intermittent layer of snow on the trunk. Illarion saw the mark then, and marveled that Nika had seen it at all. It was nothing more than a series of gashes in the bark—some long, some short—stripping away the dark outer layer to reveal the pale trunk beneath. “There will be another mark soon,” she said. “Not much farther now.”
Illarion glanced back the way they had come. He could still see the glow of the fires from Alexander’s camp. “Is it not a risk to come this close to the prince’s camp?” he wondered.
“She is very skilled at remaining unseen,” Nika said with a wry smile. “And even if others stumbled across her, what would they do? I fear more for them than for her, should that happen.”
“When I have met her in my dreams, she…” Illarion trailed off, unwilling to give voice to that which he feared.
“This way,” Nika said. She continued on, and before he followed her, Illarion reached up and laid two of his fingers across the gashes in the tree. They were as wide as his fingers and he could almost imagine the hand that had swiped across the bark, gouging out the pair of marks. Suppressing a shudder, he hurried after the Shield-Maiden.
She spotted another mark and this time he saw it as well, pale scratches high enough on the trunk that they weren’t obscured by snow, and she turned away from the lake, disappearing into the woods. He followed, clumsily thrashing through the snow-covered undergrowth.
Nika moved gracefully through the forest, and no matter how hard he tried to follow her course, Illarion foundered more often than not—stepping in hidden drifts, catching his cloak on spindly branches, tripping over hidden logs. He was sweating profusely by the time she stopped.
“How do you know these signs are from her?” he asked, partly as an excuse to catch his breath.
“Although they look like signs that fur traders and hunters might use, they have none of the marks that would indicate they were cut by a knife or an ax.” She held up three fingers. “And they are too few to be made by a bear.”
Illarion shivered. “How many times have you met with her?” he asked, trying to keep his annoyance from his voice. He knew that Nika hadn’t told him everything, nor had he ever thought she would, but to think that the enigmatic witch was following and watching them was deeply unnerving. He could dismiss the dreams—though it had been harder of late to do so—but to be here, in the woods, about to confront that which had been haunting him was something else entirely.
Nika paused, turning her head slightly but not looking directly at him. “She is to be obeyed, Illarion. I do not call into question things greater than myself, especially when they call on me to fulfill my own vows.”
Illarion said nothing, thinking of the vow Baba Yaga had extracted from him. It is my turn now, he thought.
Nika nodded past the line of trees in front of them. The moonlight played tricks with her face, casting it in an array of unsettling shadows. “What lies beyond these trees is for you to know,” she said. “I am merely your guide, and I can go no further.”
Illarion noticed a gap between two trees that he would have sworn had not been there moments before. He tried to find some parting words to say to Nika, but realized everything he could think of sounded as if he were not expecting to return. His relationship with the Shield-Maiden had been a strange one from the beginning, born of mutual pain and boredom—a sensation of having lost their place in the world. Their hearts had both turned to stone long ago, and no deep affection lay between them, but here and now it seemed that there was trust and understanding.
“I have not always been as kind as I should have,” he said to her.
“Nor I,” she answered.
In the silence that lingered between them, Illarion realized the value of her friendship. It was his turn to initiate the embrace, though she was as awkward as she had been the last time. Still, he caught a glimpse of something in her gaze that made him glad he had hugged her.
He didn’t think the gap between the trees would be wide enough for him, but when he turned sideways and sidled through, he fit easily. The trees were packed more tightly together than he expected, and the gap turned into a narrow passage. It turned to the left, and he lost sight of Nika. He stopped, breathing heavily, and then set aside his fear and continued on. When the passage narrowed, he had to duck several times to get past thick branches that stretched across the gap.
The passage turned again, and he followed it, his sense of direction utterly confused. The passage took another of its impossible left turns—how many there had been now he couldn’t remember—and he found himself standing in an open space in the woods. The ground was flat and clear, and there were no stumps or breaks in the ground that suggested trees had been cleared. The verge of the circle was marked by wooden stakes driven into the ground, and at the center of the clearing there was a ring of stones. A fire of cedar logs burned in the ring.
Illarion stepped into the clearing, turning about as his feet crunched upon the hard-packed snow. He thought he saw a shadow beyond the trees, hulking and unmoving, like a cottage elevated from the ground, though he could not see by what. When he approached the fire, he spotted three skulls carefully arranged on the stones as if they were watching the flames dance. One was gray, one was black, and one was smeared with blood that glistened in the firelight. He felt his guts tighten and his hand reflexively brushed the hilt of his sword.
“There is no need for steel here, Ilya.”
At once, she was there, though he could not have said from whence she came. She was stooped and ancient beyond imagining, swathed in layers of furs. A cowl hid most of her face.
“Sit,” she said.
Even though there was no chair or bench, he obeyed. The ground was cold beneath him, even through his fur-lined cloak. A distant part of his mind found it strange that he, a child of Rus who was no stranger to the endless winters, could be so chilled. Other parts of his mind were frozen with fear, unwilling to accept anything of what he was seeing and hearing. He knew a man’s senses could be tricked, and he could assuage some of the fear with a reasoned reminder of this fact, but he could not dismiss everything.
“Do you know why you are here?” the crone asked. She reached out to draw warmth from the slumbering fire, and her hands were so gnarled that they looked to Illarion like the dried bones of a corpse.
“I have dreamed of you several times,” he said at last. His throat was dry, though from thirst or terror he could not say. “In them, your words have been maddeningly opaque to me. I admit that I understand little of what you have said.”
She let out a cackle of dry laughter, and when she turned her cowled head toward him, he saw her wrinkled chin and gaping mouth. “Is that why you have come?” she asked. “Do you seek explanation of your dreams?”
“No,” he said, swallowing heavily. “I fear that a plain-spoken explanation will be even more terrifying than what I imagine.”
She nodded slowly. “It is said that you are a ghost—a man with one foot still in the grave. You have seen what this fear brings out in other men. And you have seen the power of being a ghost too, have you not?”
“I have,” Illarion said.
“Which do you prefer?”
“I asked for neither.”
She nodded as if he had responded correctly a second time. “Which serves Rus better?” she asked.
“What does Rus need?” he asked in return.
She leaned forward. “Is this a game you would play with me, Illarion Illarionovich? Answering my questions with a question of your own?”
“Rus needs a savior,” he said, answering his own question, but as soon as he had said it, he realized it wasn’t the correct answer. “Rus has one already,” he said. “Prince Alexander Iaroslavich.”
She nodded. “He can save the people of Rus, should he desire, and they are the bones and the meat of the body that is Rus, but they are not the blood of Rus.”
“You mean like royal blood?” Illarion asked. “He is far more regal than I.” Illarion knew his heritage, as every boy raised in noble birth was required to. The first years of his life had been spent memorizing the names of his descendants, until he knew them as well as he did the young and old of his living family.
“Aye,” she agreed. “The blood of Svyatoslav of Kiev runs deep in Rus, but it is more than that. Svyatoslav was the first. He gave shelter to my sisters and me. He swore a vow to us and we to him. We are bound, his blood and mine, bound to Rus for all eternity.”
Her words confused him, and he let his mind wander over the family trees he had memorized as a boy. Blood mattered, he thought, but not that of the royal line. Who else?
We are bound, his blood and mine.
Nika had told him already. Baba Yaga had been a Shield-Maiden once, and it was with Svyatoslav that the Shield-Maidens had first found sanctuary in Rus. Svyatoslav had had many concubines, from which had sprung many bloodlines ennobled by their origins, but barred from his throne by birth. One—or more—of them must have been Skjalddis. He struggled to recall the dim beginnings of the family lines he had memorized as a child, and then the name came to him. “Malusha,” he whispered. Malusha, daughter of Grimhildr.
“Aye, she is the one,” Baba Yaga said. “You can cut back a tree so that grows no new branches, but unless you pull down the trunk, its roots will still spread, hidden from sight. Eventually, when the land is fertile again, new growth may occur. New leaves may sprout.”
The fire crackled between them, and in the firelight, the skulls seemed to be grinning at Illarion.
“There is little magic left in the world,” Baba Yaga said. “But a little is enough. You have not sworn the old vows; you have not given an oath to protect the old ways, but you have the blood. Your flesh bears the mark.”
“Is that why you call me Ilya?” Illarion asked.
A small smirk passed across the gnarled, wrinkled mouth. “What that not a name you had as a child?”
“No,” Illarion said. “It wasn’t.”
“Is it a name that suits you?”
Illarion stared at the ash-blackened skull. Its eye sockets were black holes that seemed to suck up the firelight. He knew her question was not as innocent as it seemed, nor as nonsensical. Dreams were often filled with strange dichotomies—sweet promises mixed with threats of horrific pain and suffering—and more often than not, the power of the dream realm made it easy to overlook the darkness lurking beneath the surface. There was no veil over his eyes now. He saw the skulls for what they were. He saw the emptiness within the eyes of the black one. He saw the blood-smeared teeth of the other one.
If he were offered a chance to take revenge upon those who had killed his family, would he take it? If a sword were put in his hand, would he not use it to protect those he cared about?
Would he protect Rus from those who threatened her?
“I am no saint,” he said.
“No?” She cocked her head at him. “Who are you then?”
“My name does not matter,” he said. He stretched out his right arm, pushing back his sleeve. The bare skin of his forearm was unmarked, but he could feel the skin itching. “Only my actions matter.”
“Aye,” the old crone answered. “That much has always been true.”
She hobbled over to him and bent to draw his sword out of its scabbard. He tried not to flinch as she raised his weapon, but once she had freed it from the scabbard, she moved away from him, back to the fire.
There was no fanfare or ceremony to what followed. It was a simple, utilitarian ritual of the sort long left behind by much of the world, where priests sang dirges and let swing incense-burning censors. The sort of rite that would always be true.
She reached into the fire, which refused to burn her, and brought forth a handful of ash which she smeared on the hilt of his sword. Holding the blade carefully, she pushed the weapon into the coals so that the pommel was in the hottest part of the fire. When she lifted it free a few moments later, the handle smoked and the pommel stone glowed orange and red. She turned and peered at him from under her cowl. He did not look away, nor did he withdraw his hand.
She pressed the hilt of the sword against his palm. It wasn’t as hot as he expected and he curled his fingers around the ash-covered hilt. She raised the tip of the blade so that the red-hot pommel stone pressed into his bare forearm.
His flesh burned beneath the improvised brand, and Illarion had thought that he knew enough of pain to hold his tongue against crying out.
He was wrong.