Kasyan shrugged and glanced out into the darkness. “They might count life among slavers a mercy,” he said. “At least those girls are worth coin to a slaver, which is more than they are to their families. Do you think anyone wants a half-grown girl, another frail mouth to feed, in February? No. They lie atop the oven until they starve. Some might die going south to the slave-markets, but at least the slaver will give them the mercy-stroke when they can no longer walk. And the strong—the strong will live. If one is pretty or clever, she might be bought by a prince and live richly in some sun-drenched hall. Better than a dirt floor in Rus’, Vasilii Petrovich. We are not all born lords’ sons.”
The voice of the Grand Prince broke the silence that fell between them.
“Rest while you can,” Dmitrii told his men. “We will ride at moonrise.”
DMITRII’S PEOPLE FIRED THE BANDIT-CAMP and returned to the Lavra in the silvered dark. Despite the hour, many of the villagers gathered in the shadow of the monastery gate. They shouted savage approbation at the returning riders. “God bless you, Gosudar!” they cried. “Aleksandr Peresvet! Vasilii Petrovich!”
Vasya heard her name called with the others, even in her haze of exhaustion, and she found the strength to at least ride in straight-backed.
“Leave the horses,” said Rodion to them all. “They will be well looked after.” The young monk did not look at Vasya. “The bathhouse is hot,” he added, a little uneasily.
Dmitrii and Kasyan slid at once from their horses, jostling each other, victorious and carefree. Their men followed suit.
Vasya busied herself at once with Solovey, so no one would wonder why she didn’t go and bathe with the others.
Father Sergei was nowhere to be found. As Vasya curried her horse, she saw Sasha set off to find him.
THE LAVRA HAD TWO BATHHOUSES. They had heated one for the living. In the other, the Muscovite dead from that day’s battle were already washed and wrapped, by Sergei’s steady hand, and that was where Sasha found his hegumen.
“Father bless,” said Sasha, coming into the darkness of the bathhouse: that orderly world of water and warmth, where folk in Rus’ were born, and where they lay after dying.
“May the Lord bless you,” said Sergei, and then embraced him. For a moment, Sasha was a boy again, and he pressed his face against the frail strength of the old monk’s shoulder.
“We succeeded,” said Sasha, collecting himself. “By the grace of God.”
“You succeeded,” echoed Sergei, looking down at the dead men’s faces. He made a slow sign of the cross. “Thanks to this brother of yours.”
The rheumy old eyes met those of his disciple.
“Yes,” Sasha said, answering the silent question. “She is my sister, Vasilisa. But she bore herself bravely today.”
Sergei snorted. “Naturally. Only boys and fools think men are first in courage. We do not bear children. But this is a dangerous course you are taking, you and she both.”
“I cannot see a safer,” said Sasha. “Especially now that there will be no more fighting. There will be an appalling scandal if she is discovered, and some of Dmitrii’s men would happily force her, on some dark night, if they knew her secret.”
“Perhaps,” said Sergei heavily. “But Dmitrii has much faith in you; he will not take kindly to deception.”
Sasha was silent.
Sergei sighed. “Do what you must, I will pray for you.” The hegumen kissed Sasha on both cheeks. “Rodion knows, doesn’t he? I will speak to him. Now go. The living need you more than the dead. And they are harder to comfort.”
DARKNESS TURNED THE HOLY GROUNDS of the Lavra into a pagan place, full of shadow and strange voices. The bell tolled for povecheriye, and even the bell’s cry could not contain the dark and chaotic aftermath of battle, or Sasha’s own troubled thoughts.
Outside the bathhouse, people dotted the snow: villagers left destitute, hurled on the mercy of God. A woman near the bathhouse was weeping, mouth open. “I had only one,” she whispered. “Only one, my firstborn, my treasure. And you could not find her? No trace, Gospodin?”
Vasya, astonishingly, was there and still upright. She stood wraithlike and insubstantial before the woman’s grief. “Your daughter is safe now,” Vasya replied. “She is with God.”
The woman put her hands over her face. Vasya turned a stricken look on her brother.
Sasha’s torn arm ached. “Come,” he said to the woman. “We will go to the chapel. We will pray for your daughter. We will ask the Mother of God, who takes all into her heart, to treat your child as her own.”
The woman looked up, eyes starry with tears in the blotched and swollen ruin of her timeworn face. “Aleksandr Peresvet,” she whispered, voice smeared with weeping.
Slowly, he made the sign of the cross.
He prayed with her a long time, prayed with the many who had gone to the chapel for comfort, prayed until all were quieted. For that was his duty, as he counted it, to fight for Christians and tend to the aftermath.
Vasya stayed in the chapel until the last person left. She was praying too, though not aloud. When they left at last, dawn was not far off. The moon had set long since, and the Lavra was bathed in starlight.
“Can you sleep?” Sasha asked her.
She shook her head once. He had seen that look in warriors before, driven past exhaustion to a state of sick wakefulness. It had been the same when he killed his first man. “There is a cot for you in my own cell,” he said. “If you cannot sleep, we will give thanks to God instead, and you will tell me how you came here.”
She only nodded. Their feet groaned in the snow as they crossed the monastery side by side. Vasya seemed to be gathering her strength. “I have never been so glad in my life as when I recognized you, brother,” she managed, low, as they walked. “I am sorry I could not show it before.”
“I was glad to see you too, little frog,” he returned.
She halted as though stricken. Suddenly she threw herself at him, and he found himself holding an armful of sobbing sister. “Sasha,” she said. “Sasha, I missed you so.”
“Hush,” he said, stroking her back awkwardly. “Hush.”
After a moment, she pulled herself together.
“Not quite the behavior of your bold brother Vasilii, is it?” she said, scrubbing at her running nose. They started walking again. “Why did you never come back?”
“Never mind that,” Sasha returned. “What were you doing on the road? Where did you get that horse? Did you run away from home? From a husband? The truth now, sister.”
They had come to his own cell, squat and unlovely in the moonlight, one of a cluster of little huts. He dragged the door open and lit a candle.
Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Father is dead.”
Sasha went still, the lit candle in his hand. He had promised to go home after he became a monk, but he never had. He never had.
“You are no son of mine,” Pyotr had said in his anger, when he rode away.
Father.
“When?” Sasha demanded. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “How?”
“A bear killed him.”
He could not read her face in the darkness.
“Come inside,” Sasha told her. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”
IT WAS NOT THE truth, of course. It could not be. Much as Vasya had loved her brother, and had missed him, she did not know this broad-shouldered monk, with his tonsure and his black beard. So she told—part of the story.