The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy, #2)

by Katherine Arden

That glittering pagan city made Moscow look like a mud-castle built in a day by incompetent children.

Thus Vasilisa Petrovna, murderer, savior, lost child, rode away from the house in the fir-grove.

Vasya frowned. What would a country boy do, beneath a lord’s thoughtful look? Not blush, surely. Even if his eyes were large and liquid and drowning-dark.

what if he's a gay little country boy. what then

I wish you’d learn how to fight properly before you start getting into them, the horse said unhappily.

“I’m going to try to help,” said Vasya. “Bogatyry ride the world, rescuing maidens. Why not I?” She spoke with more bravado than she felt.

POLYANITSAAAAA

Midnight was smiling. “Has the world run dry of warriors?” she asked. “All out of brave lords? Are they sending out maidens these days to do the work of heroes?” “There were no heroes,” said Vasya between her teeth. “There was only me. And Solovey.”

have grown tall and gaunt as a wolfhound,

What can I say? Sasha wondered. Dmitrii Ivanovich, let me present my mad sister Vasilisa, who has come where no woman should be, is dressed like a man in defiance of all decency, has flouted her father and very likely run off with a lover. Here is the brave little frog, the sister that I loved.

Vasya sat his back like a hero, fey-eyed and pale.

Older by far than the bells and crosses that marked its passing, though it had been given the trappings of religion to mask its pagan soul.

I am going to run away before they try to make me a girl again.

“Mamai has a rival in the south, I hear, a warlord called Tokhtamysh. This man is also putting forth a claimant for the throne. If Mamai must go to war to put down this rival—”

wait I actually know this guy. tokhtamish was the protege turned rival of Tamerlane, which gives this a definite timeframe

“I can keep a secret,” she said. “I want to be a boy, too.” Vasya decided it was too early in the morning for this conversation.

It is going to end, Vasya thought. One day. This world of wonders, where steam in a bathhouse can be a creature that speaks prophecy. One day, there will be only bells and processions. The chyerti will be fog and memory and stirrings in the summer barley.

Above them, the rim of sun, like a ring of copper, showed its edge above the kremlin-wall. It coaxed color from all the brilliant churches, so that the gray light fled and the world glowed green and scarlet and blue.

The sun set diamonds in her dark eyes, and she drank in all they saw.

I did not know I was to be outdone by a little magic boy and his tricks,” he said. “I salute you, magician.” He swept her a bow from horseback. Vasya did not return the bow. “To small minds,” she told him, spine very straight, “any skill must look like sorcery.”

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.

“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.

“But there is nothing for it; let us feast now, my brother, and tell our lies.”

“This is not a lie,” said Kasyan. “Only a pause. Truths are like flowers, better plucked at the right moment.”

But Vasya had no care for hearths or songs. The other, older world had hold of her now, with its clean beauty, its mysteries, its savagery.

“I want freedom,” she said at length, almost to herself. “But I also want a place and a purpose. I am not sure I can have either, let alone both. And I do not want to live a lie. I am hurting my brother and sister.”

“Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

She could feel a ferocity gathering in the stallion beneath her, a hunger for speed, and she felt a loosening, an answering savagery in her own breast.

Solovey bounded along like a hare, and Vasya whooped as they raced for the first time past the crowd: a howl that defied them, defied her rival, defied the world.

The mare ran like a star falling,

Fear and thought were all gone; there was only the speed, the wind and cold, the perfect heave and surge of her horse beneath her.

She would have expected her sister to come in subdued—repentant, even—but (fool, this is Vasya) the girl was starry-eyed with rage.

“Do what you must,” Vasya said. Her voice was hoarse as a raven’s. “I am guilty before you.”

“Were you to wed me, Vasilisa Petrovna, there would be lies and tricks aplenty, and passion—such passion.” Kasyan reached out and stroked a finger down the side of her face.

“I will marry you,” she said. “If my brother and sister are kept safe.” Perhaps later she could devise her escape. His face broke into a glittering smile. “Excellent, excellent, my sweet little liar,” he said caressingly. “You won’t regret it, I promise you.” He paused. “Well, you might regret it. But your life will never be boring. And that is what you fear, is it not? The gilded cage of the Russian maiden?”

Yesterday a lord’s son, and nobody’s dog, today she was meat for this schemer.

“ ‘You are fortunate,’ this old woman said to me,” Olga continued, “ ‘that you are not like her.’ She—she was a creature of smoke and stars. She was no more made for the terem than a snowstorm is, and yet…she came riding into Moscow willingly—indeed, as though all hell pursued her—riding a gray horse. She wed Ivan without demur, though she wept before her wedding night. She tried to be a good wife, and perhaps would have been, but for her wildness. She would walk in the yard, looking at the sky; she would talk with longing of her gray horse, which vanished on the night of her marriage.

Witch. The word drifted across his mind. We call such women so, because we have no other name.

“She is herself,” said Sasha. “Doom and blessing both, and it is for God to judge her. But in this, I will trust her.

“Kasyan Lutovich means to make himself Grand Prince,” said Sasha. Dmitrii smiled at that, slow and grim. “Then I will kill him,” he said very simply. “Come with me, cousin.”