“Please,” said Vasya, yanking at the hand that held her. “Let me go to Solovey.” Behind her, the horse squealed again. Men were shouting. She twisted around to look. They had flung ropes over his neck, but the stallion was fighting them.
Kasyan solved the problem. He hauled Vasya to her feet, put a knife to her throat, and said very softly, “I’ll kill her.” He spoke so low that none heard except for the girl and the keen-eared stallion.
Solovey went deathly still.
He knew everything, Vasya thought. That she was a girl, that Solovey understood men’s speech. His hand around her arm was going to leave fingermarks.
Kasyan addressed Solovey, softly. “Let them lead you to the Grand Prince’s stable,” he said. “Go quiet, and she will live and be returned to you. You have my word.”
Solovey shrilled defiance. He kicked out and a man fell gasping into the snow. Vasya. She read the word in the stallion’s wild eye. Vasya.
Kasyan’s hand tightened on her arm until she gasped and the knife beneath her jaw dug in until she felt the skin just split…
“Run!” Vasya cried to the horse desperately. “Do not be a prisoner!”
But the horse had already dropped his head in defeat. Vasya felt Kasyan let out a satisfied breath.
“Take him,” he said.
Vasya cried out in wordless protest, but now grooms were running up to put a bridle with a twisted chain on Solovey’s head. She tasted tears of rage. The stallion let himself be led away, head low, still exhausted. Kasyan’s knife disappeared, but he did not release her arm. He spun her around to face the Grand Prince, the crowd of boyars. “You should have listened this morning,” he murmured into her ear.
Sasha was still mounted; Tuman had bulled her way onto the ice, and her brother had a sword in his hand, his hood cast back from his pale face. His eyes were on the trickle of blood running down the side of her throat.
“Let her go,” Sasha said.
Dmitrii’s guards had drawn their swords; Kasyan’s men circled her brother on their fine horses. Blades dazzled in the indifferent sun.
“I’m all right, Sasha,” Vasya called to her brother. “Don’t—”
Kasyan cut her off. “I suspected,” he said in an even voice, directing his words to the Grand Prince. The half-formed brawl on the ice paused. “I only knew for sure today, Dmitrii Ivanovich.” Kasyan’s expression was grave, except for the glint in his eyes. “There is a great lie and a gross immodesty here, if not worse.” He turned to Vasya, even touched her cheek with a burning finger. “But surely it is the fault of her lying brother, who wished to dupe a prince,” he added. “I would not blame the girl, so young is she, and perhaps half-mad.”
Vasya said nothing; she was looking for a way out. Solovey gone, her brother surrounded by armed men…If any of the chyerti were there, she couldn’t see them.
“Morozko,” she whispered, reluctantly, furiously, despairingly. “Please—”
Kasyan cuffed her across the mouth. She tasted blood on a split lip; his expression had turned venomous. “None of that,” he spat.
“Bring her here,” said Dmitrii in a strangled voice.
Before Kasyan could move, Sasha sheathed his sword, slid from his mare’s back, and stepped toward the Grand Prince. A thicket of spears brought him to a halt. Sasha unbuckled his sword-belt, cast the blade into the snow, and showed his empty hands. The spears retreated a little. “Cousin,” Sasha said. At Dmitrii’s look of fury he changed it. “Dmitrii Ivanovich—”
“Did you know of this?” hissed Dmitrii. The prince’s face was naked with the shock of betrayal.
In Dmitrii’s face, for a moment, Vasya saw the plaintive phantom of a child who had loved and trusted her brother wholeheartedly, his illusions now dashed and broken. Vasya drew a breath that was almost a sob. Then the child was gone; there was only the Grand Prince of Moscow: solitary, master of his world.
“I knew,” replied Sasha, still in that calm voice. “I knew. I beg you will not punish my sister for it. She is young, she did not understand what she did.”
“Bring her here,” said Dmitrii again, gray eyes shuttered.
This time, Kasyan hauled her forward.
“Is this truly a woman?” Dmitrii demanded of Kasyan. “I will have no mistake. I cannot believe—”
That we fought bandits together, Vasya finished for him, silently. That we endured the snow, and the dark, and that I drank in your hall and offered you my service. All that Vasilii Petrovich did, for Vasilii Petrovich was not real. It is as though a ghost did it.
And indeed, looking into the bow-marks of strain bracketing Dmitrii’s mouth, it was as though Vasilii Petrovich had died.
“Very well,” said Kasyan.
Vasya did not know what was happening until she felt Kasyan’s hand on the ties of her cloak. And then she understood and threw herself at him, snarling. But Kasyan got a hand on her dagger before she could; he kicked her legs out from under her and pushed her facedown into the snow. A knife-blade—her own knife-blade—slid cold and precise down her back. “Be still, wild-cat,” Kasyan murmured while she thrashed, suppressed laughter in his voice. “I will cut you else.”
Dimly she heard Sasha, “No, Dmitrii Ivanovich, no, that is a true maid, that is my sister Vasilisa, I beg you will not—”
Kasyan pulled the cloth apart. Vasya jerked once at the claws of cold on her skin, and then Kasyan hauled her upright. His free hand ripped away jacket and shirt together, so that she was left half-naked before the eyes of the city.
Tears gathered in her eyes, of shock and shame. She shut them a moment. Stand. Do not faint. Do not cry.
The bitter air scoured her skin.
One of Kasyan’s hands ground the bones of her arm together; the other seized her hair, twisted it, and pulled it away from her face so that she had not even that to hide behind.
A noise rose from the watching crowd: of laughter mingled with righteous indignation.
Kasyan paused a moment, breathing into her ear. She felt his glance flicker over her breasts and throat and shoulders. Then the lord raised his eyes to the Grand Prince.
Vasya stood shaking, afraid for her brother, who had launched himself at the men hemming him in and been brought down by three, held hard in the snow.
The prince and his boyars stared with expressions ranging from bewilderment, horror, and rage to sniggering glee and dawning lust.
“A girl, as I said,” Kasyan continued, his reasonable voice at odds with the violent hands. “But an innocent fool, I think, and under the sway of her brother.” His sorrowful glance took in Sasha, kneeling, appalled, held by guards.
A murmur swept through the crowd, out and back. “Peresvet,” she heard, and “Sorcery. Witchcraft. No true monk.”
Dmitrii’s glance slid from her booted feet to her bared breasts. It stopped at her face and lingered there, without feeling.
“This girl must be punished!” cried one of the young boyars. “She and her brother have brought shame on all of us with their blasphemy. Let her be whipped; let her be burned. We will not suffer witches in our city.”
A howl of approval met his cry, and the blood drained slowly from Vasya’s face.
Another voice replied: not loud, but cracked with age, and decisive. “This is unseemly,” it said. The speaker was fat, his beard a fringe, and his voice calm against the gathering rage. Father Andrei, thought Vasya, putting a name to him. Hegumen of the monastery of the Archangel.
“Punishment need not be debated before all Moscow,” said the hegumen. His eyes flicked to the people seething on the riverbank. The shouts were growing louder, more insistent. “These will riot,” he added pointedly. “And perhaps endanger the innocent.”
Vasya was already cold and sick and frightened, but these words gave her a fresh jolt of terror.
Kasyan’s hand tightened on her arm, and Vasya, looking up, saw his flash of irritation. Did Kasyan want the people to riot?
“As you say,” said Dmitrii. He sounded suddenly weary. “You—girl.” His lip curled on the word. “You will go to a convent until we decide what to do with you.”