Prince Ivan (13 page)

“I’m impressed,” he said. As Prince Mikhail leaned forward to push the wine-flagon across the table, Ivan saw beads of sweat catching the candle-light from high up on his brow. Evidently the effort hadn’t been all on one side, and though no one paid him any compliments on that subject, Ivan felt strangely pleased that he’d acquitted himself so well.

“You’ve already heard,” said Mikhail, “of Mar’ya Morevna, the beautiful Princess.”

Ivan grinned; he had indeed, and if it wasn’t quite enough to whet his appetite, that being an unseemly attitude for a Prince to have towards ladies of rank, then it was certainly enough to bring him beyond curiosity and well into fascination.

“‘
Beautiful
as
the
sun
in
the
morning
’ was how Lizochka described her. Also ‘
strong
of
mind
and
of
body
’. That was Vasiliy.”

“It would have been. And he probably mentioned ‘powerful’, too.” Ivan nodded, and the Raven smiled. “It would have surprised me if he hadn’t. Powerful both as your father the Tsar would reckon it, in command of wide lands and brave armies, and… And as I and my brothers would reckon it, in command of bright magic.”

“Mar’ya
Koldunovna
Morevna,” said Tsarevich Ivan thoughtfully. “The enchanter’s daughter. Vasiliy told me about that too, a little.”

“He told you enough.”

Ivan stared again, just as he’d stared before; but this time there was a certain amount of feeling behind it. Impatience mixed with annoyance simmered behind that stare. It was the look of a man grown tired of subtle, mysterious replies that answered nothing; a man on the brink of asking hard questions and wanting solid answers, and be damned to manners and courtesy.

“And are you going to tell me more?” he said, and though he kept the abrupt snap from his voice, the echo of it was very plain. “Or must I demand the information from you right out here before the good God and your wife, my sister?”

That same sister tut-tutted disapprovingly at him. “Really, Vanyushka,” she said. “There’s no need to be rude.”

“No, my love, not rude,” said Mikhail, a Raven without one feather out of place despite Ivan’s outburst. “Understandable, if nothing else. He’s heard nothing but surmise and hint and vagueness ever since Mar’ya Morevna’s name was first mentioned. That would try the patience of a saint, and from what your sisters tell me, Prince Ivan is no saint.”

“More sinned against than sinning, all the same,” said Ivan tartly. “You’re becoming evasive again, Mikhail Charodeyevich. Are you going to give me an honest answer, even if just to mind my own damned business?”

“Very well,” said the Raven. “Mind your own damned business.” All the same, there was a twinkle in his eye as he said it – or was it the dangerous glint of a man and a Prince unaccustomed to being spoken to like that in his own hall and at his own table…?

Ivan felt a little knot of tension forming in the pit of his stomach, and wondered if, as on far too many prior occasions, he’d overstepped the bounds of what anyone was willing to accept as fair comment. He picked up his wine-cup, pledged Mikhail and Yelena as he drank its contents, then sat back and waited for events to develop.

“Of course,” said Prince Mikhail Voronov in a voice as smooth and suave as silk, “you should realize by now that Mar’ya Morevna
is
your own business…”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I know her. And I think I also know you, enough at least to make a guess at how things might develop.”

Ivan glanced back and forth between the two of them, not sure whether to be amused or annoyed by all this. The reason for the annoyance was obvious enough, at least. “I decided to go journeying,” he said, “in hope of getting away from the marriage brokers who infest Khorlov’s kremlin. It looks like they’ve been keeping pace with me all along.”

“We’re not arranging your marriage, Vanya,” said Yelena. “Just arranging a meeting between you and a prospective bride. After that, the decision rests with you.”

“So once I meet the woman, what if I don’t like her…?”

“You can leave again.”

“What does Mar’ya Morevna know about all this?”

Yelena glanced at her husband, who shrugged expressively and shook his head. “Nothing,” she said. “All our arrangements were one-sided. Anything else would make us no better than Dmitriy Vasil’yevich Strel’tsin and his lists.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Ivan swirled wine around the inside of his glass and watched the garnet spirals smooth and settle. “One last question on this subject. Where am I to meet her?” Of all the responses he had been expecting, the most unlikely was a repeat of Mikhail’s shrug.

“Somewhere,” said the Raven, and this time he no longer sounded like someone being deliberately vague for dramatic effect.

“You really don’t know?”

“We’re not so well acquainted with Mar’ya Morevna that we keep track of her movements across the wide white world,” said Mikhail Voronov. He smiled again, a little smile with little humour. “She’s a person who would resent such tracking, and her resentment is nothing the wise would wish to attract.”

Ivan wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, though he puzzled over its implications for several minutes while a fresh wine-flagon was opened, the cups were refilled and dishes of honey-cake were set out on the table. Still puzzling, Ivan took one of the little pastries and absently pulled it into pieces too small to eat, but too large to ignore – especially when the crumbs stuck to his fingers and made taking an inspirational swallow of wine something of an adventure.

“Quite finished thinking it through?” asked Yelena, who had been watching the performance with the honey-cake and hiding a smile behind her hand.

“Yes, as far as thinking makes any difference.” Ivan wiped his crumb-and-honey-coated fingers ineffectually on a linen napkin, then set dignity to one side and licked them clean while his sister rolled her eyes despairingly at his manners.

Ivan muttered under his breath about that, but didn’t bother saying anything aloud. There was another matter on his mind than honeyed crumbs, and it wasn’t Mar’ya Morevna. He saved it until he was properly unsticky, then rinsed the sweetness from his mouth with a long draft of snow-chilled white wine and gave both Yelena and the Raven another of those long stares. There had been a lot of staring and gazing and considering during this dinner, one way and another, but this time he had another motive than simply proving how steady he might be under pressure. He wanted to fix their expressions in his mind’s eye, to see how they might change when he wiped his silver eating-spoon with the napkin and spun it on the table.

Round and round it went, before he stopped its rotation with one finger and slid the spoon out towards Prince Mikhail and his sister. They looked at it, then at him, as he took one of the gold spoons from the table setting and dropped it into the case at his belt.

“Have mine as a keepsake,” he said softly, “to help you remember me. And now I suppose I should beware of Koshchey the Undying…?”

Ivan had been expecting a change so subtle that it would need all the sharpness of his eyes to see. Instead Yelena’s face went white, a shocking pallor against the rich black of her garments and surroundings, and she crossed herself three times so vehemently that Ivan wondered if he shouldn’t have kept the subject private between himself and Mikhail.

For his own part, Prince Mikhail the Raven shifted not a finger, not a muscle, not an eyelash, but the dilation of his pupils turned his eyes into pits of darkness that reflected only the flames of the candles, and those small as though very far away. The flames didn’t gutter or dance in an unfelt wind or burn low and blue. It might have been better if they had, for the very unchanging ordinariness of his surroundings was sending chills down Ivan’s spine.

“You’re too easy with what you know nothing about, Vanya my brother,” said the Raven, in a voice such as a dead man might use. “‘
Speak
the
name
,
summon
the
named
.’ True or not, be more careful.”

Ivan felt foolish and guilty and scared all at once. “I spoke that same name to Vasiliy,” he began, reluctant as always to take refuge behind an excuse, and at the same time wanting to vindicate himself. “He told me things about it, but he wasn’t shocked.”

“Perhaps because at his closest, he lives nine days’ hard ride away,” said Yelena. She had regained some colour, and some of the chilly majesty which had been laid aside once she became his sister again as well as the wife of a sorcerer Prince. It was obvious she was using that grandeur as a shield so Ivan couldn’t see how she truly felt behind it. To find his own sister had to hide her true feelings from him was as unpleasant as any of the other abrupt revelations of the past few minutes. “Koshchey the Undying was said to live close to where we are now. Our kremlin wouldn’t be here except to meet you, but when we heard you were travelling in this direction…”

Already recovering from his initial embarrassed discomfort, Ivan noted two important things in what Yelena said: firstly, and as he had suspected ever since he set eyes on the palace of Fenist the Falcon, the kremlins of the three brothers were no more fixed in one place than a Falcon or an Eagle or a Raven would choose to be. Secondly, and more to the point, Koshchey the Undying was for one reason or another, no longer a near neighbour.

“He
was
said
to live? Then where is he now?”

“Only the good God knows,” said Mikhail. “There’s been no mention of Old Rattlebones for half a lifetime now, but just because you don’t hear the wolf howl doesn’t mean he’s left the forest. That’s why I’d prefer you guard your tongue when speaking his name, at least until you become aware of what you might be summoning.”

“A necromancer,” said Ivan flatly, not wanting the conversation to go spiralling off into aphorisms again. “So Vasiliy the Eagle told me, unless he was wrong about that as well.”

“He was right, but less than complete.” Mikhail the Raven leaned his elbows on the table and made a steeple of his fingers, gazing for a long time at their interwoven tips before he began to speak. “Koshchey can’t die. He is
Evil
. Do you understand what I mean? Not merely evil in the way that someone may be wicked, but as a source of that wickedness. He’s as evil as you are human, and,” he unlinked his fingers and stroked one hand across the lustrous blue-black feathers that trimmed his robe, “much less likely to change. Remember it, Vanya. Yelena tells me your memory was never of the best, but I would strongly advise you not to forget the words you spoke yourself.
Beware
of
Koshchey
the
Undying
…”

Even the remark about his memory wasn’t enough to provoke a reaction from Ivan, for it seemed to him that the fires in the hall were no longer as warm as they’d been when dinner began, nor the candles as bright. He shivered and, even when the conversation shifted to more pleasant things, drank rather more than was good for him.

*

That was why he had no memory at all of being helped to bed. Not that there was any room for memory inside his skull next morning, or even space for a coherent thought, because a headache filled it from nape to crown to temples until his brain was a hot cinder pressed against the backs of his closed eyes. First he was spectacularly sick. Then he took an hour of strong steam and a long drink of water, and was sick again. But after more water he began to feel better, enough to admit that there might be life before death after all.

“Well, that was a waste of good food,” said Prince Mikhail the Raven while Ivan crawled back into bed, moving as if the quilts were stuffed with lead. “Here,” he poured clear liquid from a silver flask into the small silver cup of its lid, and held it out. “Try a hair from the dog that bit you.”

Ivan looked at the brimming cup with a jaundiced eye and made a sound like a cat with a hairball, but took his medicine in a single wincing gulp and shuddered all over. “I think I need the pelts of the whole damn pack,” he said in a voice that despite the steam was still raw at the edges. “Never again.”

“Everyone says that till the next time.”

Ivan made another cat-strangling noise, gulped a little more vodka and lay back very gently on the wonderful coolness of his pillows. “If there’s a next time,” he mumbled, “I don’t want to know.”

A small smile crossed Mikhail’s face like the beat of a bird’s wing, but not so small and fast that Ivan failed to see it. His brother-in-law was wondering what the fairest Princess in all the Russias would think of this candidate for her prospective husband if she could see him now. To Ivan’s relief Mikhail didn’t say it aloud. Instead he left the flask of vodka and its cup where Ivan could reach it without moving too much, and went to tell Tsarevna Yelena that her little brother wasn’t really dead.

Tsarevich Ivan closed his eyes and tried to be sure.

CHAPTER FIVE

How
Prince
Ivan
met
an
old
drinking
-
companion
,
and
what
happened
afterwards