“I hear that you are high in the Grand Prince’s favor,” said one. His young beard was a hopeful down on his skinny face.
“Why should I not be?” Vasya returned. “I drink my wine and do not spill it, and I ride better than you.”
One of the young lords shoved her. She gave back gracefully before it, and kept her feet. “Strong breeze tonight, wouldn’t you say?” she said.
“Vasilii Petrovich, are you too good for us?” another boy asked, grinning around a rotted tooth.
“Probably,” said Vasya. A certain recklessness of temper, quelled in childhood, but now nourished by the rough world in which she found herself, had burst giddily to life in her soul. She smiled at the young boyars and she found herself, truly, unafraid.
“Too good for us?” they jeered. “You are only a country lord’s son, a nobody, jumped-up, the grandchild of a morganatic marriage.”
Vasya refuted all this with a few inventive insults of her own, and laughing and snarling at once, they eventually informed her that they meant to run twice about the palace of Dmitrii Ivanovich and a wine-jar to the winner.
“As you like,” said Vasya, fleet-footed from childhood. She had put all thoughts of bandits, mysteries, failures from her mind; she meant to enjoy her evening. “How much of a start would you like?”
CLUTCHING HER WINE, TIPSY ALREADY, Vasya was borne by a wave of new friends into Dmitrii Ivanovich’s hall, a little of her worry drowned in triumph, only to find most of the players in her deceitful drama already present in the cavern of the Grand Prince’s hall.
Dmitrii, of course, sat in the central place. A woman whose robe stuck straight out from her shoulders, beneath a round-faced expression of sour complacency, sat beside him. His wife…
Kasyan—Vasya frowned. Kasyan was calm as ever, magnificently dressed, but he wore an expression of grave thought, a line between his red brows. Vasya was wondering if he’d had bad news, when her brother appeared and caught her by the arm.
“You heard,” said Vasya resignedly.
Sasha pulled her into a corner, displacing a flirtatious conference, to the irritation of both parties. “Olga told me you took Marya into the city.”
“I did,” said Vasya.
“And that you won a horse from Chelubey in a wager.”
Vasya nodded. She could hear him grinding his teeth. “Vasya, you must stop all this,” Sasha said. “Making a spectacle of yourself and drawing that child in? You must—”
“What?” Vasya snapped. She loved too well this clear-eyed, strong-handed son of her father, and was all the angrier for it. “Step quietly off into the night, back into a locked room in Olya’s palace, there to arrange my linen forthwith, say prayers in the morning, and rally my feeble charms for the seduction of boyish lords? All this while Solovey languishes in the dooryard? Do you mean to sell my horse, then, brother, or take him for yourself, when I go into the terem? You are a monk. I don’t see you in a monastery, Brother Aleksandr. Shouldn’t you be growing a garden, chanting, praying without pause? Instead you are here, the nearest adviser of the Grand Prince of Moscow. Why you, brother? Why you and not I?” Her shoulders heaved; she had surprised even herself with the flow of words.
Sasha said nothing. She realized that he had said all this over to himself in the thinking silences of the monastery, argument and counterargument, and had no answers either. He was looking at her with a frank and unhappy bewilderment that smote her heart.
“No,” she said. Her hand found his, thin and strong, there on her fur-clad arm. “You know as well as I do that I cannot go into the terem any more than a real boy could. Here I am and here I remain. Unless you mean to reveal us both as liars before all the company?”
“Vasya,” he said. “It cannot last.”
“I know. And I will end it. I swear it, Sasha.” Her mouth quirked, darkly. “But there is nothing for it; let us feast now, my brother, and tell our lies.”
Sasha flinched, and Vasya stalked away from him before he could reply, high-headed in her fading anger, with sweat pooling at her temples, beneath the hated hat, and tears pooling in her eyes, because her brother had loved the child Vasilisa. But how can one love a woman who is too much like that child, still brash, still unafraid?
I must go, she thought suddenly and clearly. I cannot wait until the end of Maslenitsa. I am wounding him the worst, with this lie on my behalf, and I must go.
Tomorrow, brother, she thought. Tomorrow.
Dmitrii waved her over, smiling as ever, and only his stone-cold sobriety showed that perhaps the prince was not as at ease as he appeared. His city and his boyars seethed with talk; a Tatar lord lounged in his city, demanding tribute, and the Grand Prince’s heart bade him fight while his head bade him wait, and both those things required money that he did not have.
“I hear you won a horse from Chelubey,” Dmitrii said to her, banishing trouble from his face with practiced ease.
“I did,” said Vasya breathlessly, smacked in the back by a passing platter. Already the first dishes were going around, a little touched with snow from their trip across the dooryard. No meat, but every kind of delicacy that flour and honey and butter and eggs and milk could contrive.
“Well done, boy,” said the Grand Prince. “Although I cannot approve. Chelubey is a guest, after all. But boys will be boys; you would think the horse-lord could manage a filly better.” Dmitrii winked at her.
Vasya, until then, had felt the pain of Sasha’s lie to the Grand Prince; she had never felt the guilt of her own. But now she remembered a promise of service and her conscience smote her.
Well, one secret, at least, could be told. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya said suddenly. “There is something I must tell you—about this horse-lord.”
Kasyan was drinking his wine and listening; now he came to his feet, shaking back his red hair.
“Shall we have no entertainment, for the festival-season?” he roared drunkenly at the room at large, quite drowning her out. “Shall we have no amusements?”
He turned, smiling, to Vasya. What was he doing?
“I propose one amusement,” Kasyan went on. “Vasilii Petrovich is a great horseman, we have all seen. Well, let me try his paces. Will you race tomorrow, Vasilii Petrovich? Before all Moscow? I challenge you now, with these men to witness.”
Vasya gaped. A horse-race? What had that to do with—?
A pleased murmur rolled through the crowd. Kasyan was watching her with a strange intensity. “I will race,” she said in confused reflex. “If you permit, Dmitrii Ivanovich.”
Dmitrii sat back, looking pleased. “I will say nothing against it, Kasyan Lutovich, but I have seen no creature of yours that is any match for his Solovey.”
“Nevertheless,” replied Kasyan, smiling.
“Heard and witnessed, then!” Dmitrii cried. “Tomorrow morning. Now eat, all of you, and give thanks to God.”
The talk rose, the singing, and the music. “Dmitrii Ivanovich,” Vasya began again.
But Kasyan stumbled off his bench and sank down beside Vasya, throwing an arm round her shoulders. “I thought you might be about to commit an indiscretion,” he murmured into her ear.
“I am tired of lies,” she whispered to him. “Dmitrii Ivanovich may believe me or not as he chooses; that is why he is Grand Prince.”
On her other side, Dmitrii was shouting toasts to his son-to-be, a hand on the shoulder of his almost-smiling wife, and flinging bits of gristle to the dogs at his feet. The firelight shone redder and redder as midnight approached.