“Do not,” Vasya said, almost spitting, “come near me.”
He shrugged. “I may do as I like,” he replied. “You gave up all pretense to virtue when you appeared in the kremlin dressed as a boy. Not even your sister would prevent me now. I hold your ruin in the palm of my hand.”
She said nothing. He smiled. “But enough of that,” he added. “Why should we be enemies?” His tone turned placating. “I saved you from your lies, now you are free to be yourself, to adorn yourself as a girl ought—”
Her lip curled. He broke off with an elegant shrug.
“You know as well as I that it is a convent for me now,” Vasya said. She put her arms behind her and pressed her back against the door, the wood driving splinters into her palms. “If I am not put in the cage and burned as a witch. Why are you here?”
He ran a hand through his russet hair. “I regretted today,” he said.
“You enjoyed it,” Vasya retorted, wishing her voice were not thin with remembered humiliation.
He smiled and gestured to the stove. “Will you sit down, Vasya?”
She did not move.
He huffed out a laugh and sank onto a carved bench beside the fire. A wine-jar studded with amber sat beside two cups; he poured one for himself and drank the pale liquid down. “Well, I did enjoy it,” he admitted. “Playing with our hotheaded prince’s temper. Watching your self-righteous brother squirm.” He slanted a look at where she stood, frozen with disgust, by the door and added more seriously, “And you yourself. No one would ever take you for a beauty, Vasilisa Petrovna, but then no one would ever want to. You were lovely, fighting me so. And charming in your boy’s clothes. I could hardly wait as long as I did. I knew, you know. I always knew, whatever I might have told the Grand Prince. All those nights on the road. I knew.”
He made his glance tender; his tone invited her to soften, but there was still laughter in the back of his eyes, as though he mocked his own words.
Vasya remembered the icy kiss of the air on her skin, the boyars’ leering, and her flesh crept.
“Come,” he went on. “Are you telling me you didn’t enjoy it, wild-cat? The eyes of Moscow upon you?”
Her stomach turned over. “What do you want?”
He poured more wine and raised his gaze to hers. “To rescue you.”
“What?”
His glance returned, heavy-lidded, to the fire. “I think you understand me very well,” he said. “As you said yourself, it is the convent or a witch-trial for you. I met a priest not so long ago—oh, a very holy man, so handsome and pious—who will be quite willing to tell the prince all about your wicked ways. And if you are condemned,” he went on musingly, “what price your brother’s life? What price your sister’s freedom? Dmitrii Ivanovich is the laughingstock of Moscow. Princes who are laughed at do not hold their realms long, and he knows it.”
“How,” Vasya asked, between gritted teeth, “do you mean to save me?”
Kasyan paused before replying, savoring his wine. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
She stayed where she was. He sighed with kindly exasperation, took another swallow. “Very well,” he said. “You have but to tap on the door; the slave will come and take you back to your room. I will not enjoy watching the fire take you, Vasilisa Petrovna, not at all. And your poor sister—how she will weep, to say farewell to her children.”
Vasya stalked to the fire and sat on the bench opposite him. He smiled at her with unconcealed pleasure. “There you are!” he cried. “I knew you could be reasonable. Wine?”
“No.”
He poured her a cup and sipped at his own. “I can save you,” he said. “And your brother and sister in the bargain. If you marry me.”
An instant of silence.
“Are you saying you mean to marry this witch-girl, this slut who paraded about Moscow in boy’s clothes?” Vasya asked acidly. “I don’t believe you.”
“So untrusting, for a maiden,” he returned cheerfully. “It is unbecoming. You won my heart with your little masquerade, Vasya. I loved your spirit from the first. How the others did not suspect, I cannot think. I will marry you and take you to Bashnya Kostei. I tried to tell you as much this morning. All this could have been avoided, you know…but no matter. When we are wed, I will see that your brother is freed—to return to the Lavra, as is proper, to live out his days in peace.” His face soured. “Politicking is not the work of a monk, anyway.”