But Dmitrii had thrown an arm around his sister’s thin shoulders. “Such a horse you have, cousin!” he said. “I did not think they bred such good horses so far north. We will find you your porridge—and some soup besides—and grain for the beast. And then we ride.”
A third time, Vasya spoke before her astonished brother could. Her eyes had gone cold and distant, as though reliving bitter memory. She spoke through bared teeth. “Yes, Dmitrii Ivanovich,” she said. “I will hurry. We must find these bandits.”
VASYA’S NERVES STILL TINGLED with the aftermath of danger, of urgent flight, the ugly shock of killing, and the joyous shock of seeing her brother. Her nerves, she decided, had undergone altogether too much.
She thought a moment, with black humor, of melting into shrieks the way her stepmother used to. It would be easier to go mad. Then Vasya remembered how she had last seen her stepmother, crumpled up small on the bloody earth, and she swallowed back nausea. Then she remembered the moment her knife had slipped like rain into the bandit’s neck, and Vasya decided that she really was going to be sick.
Her head swam. It was a day since she had eaten. She stumbled, reached instinctively for Solovey, and found her brother there instead, gripping her arm with a sword-hardened hand. “Don’t you dare faint,” he said into her ear.
Solovey squealed; his hooves crunched in the snow, and a voice called, alarmed. Vasya pulled herself together. A monk had approached the stallion with a rope halter and a kindly expression, but Solovey wasn’t having it.
“You’d better let him follow us,” Vasya croaked to the monk. “He is used to me. He can have his hay at the kitchen door, can’t he?”
But the monk wasn’t looking at the horse anymore. He was gaping at Vasya, with a look of almost comical shock on his face. Vasya went very still.
“Rodion,” said Sasha at once, quickly and clearly. “This boy was my brother, before I gave myself to God. Vasilii Petrovich. You must have met him at Lesnaya Zemlya.”
“I did,” croaked Rodion. “Then—yes, I did indeed.” When Vasya was a girl. Rodion was looking at Sasha very hard.
Sasha shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
“I—I will get hay for the beast,” Rodion managed. “Brother Aleksandr—”
“Later,” said Sasha.
Rodion went off, but not without many backward glances.
“He did meet me at Lesnaya Zemlya,” said Vasya urgently, when Rodion had gone. She was breathing quickly. “He—”
“He will keep quiet until he talks to me,” replied her brother. Sasha had something of Dmitrii’s dazzling air of authority, though more contained.
Vasya looked her gratitude at him. I did not know I was lonely, she thought, until I was no longer alone.
“Come on, Vasya,” Sasha said. “Sleep you cannot have, but soup will mend things a little. Dmitrii Ivanovich is serious when he says he means to ride off immediately. You do not know what you have let yourself in for.”
“It would not be the first time,” returned Vasya, with feeling.
The monastery’s winter-kitchen was all hazed with oven-smoke, the heat almost shocking. Vasya crossed the threshold, took a sharp breath of the roiling air, and pulled up. It was too hot, too small, too full of people.
“May I eat outside?” she asked hastily. “I do not want to leave Solovey.”
There was also the fact that if she surrendered to the warmth, and ate hot food on a comfortable bench, there would be no getting herself onto her feet again.
“Yes, of course,” put in Dmitrii, unexpectedly, popping out of the kitchen doorway like a house-spirit. “Drink your soup standing, boy, and then we will go. You there! Bowls for my cousins; we must hurry.”
VASYA PULLED OFF HER HORSE’S SADDLEBAGS while they waited, glancing around her all the while with a wondering expression. Sasha had to admit to himself that his sister made a convincing boy, all angles, her movements fluid and bold, with none of a woman’s diffidence. A leather hood tied beneath her hat concealed her hair, and she did not give herself away, save perhaps （in Sasha’s nervous imagination） in her long-lashed eyes. Sasha wanted to tell her to keep them downcast, but that would only make her appear more like a girl.
She broke the ice from her horse’s whiskers, checked his feet, and opened her mouth to speak half a dozen times, before each time falling silent. Then a novice appeared with soup and hot loaves and pie, and the chance for talk had passed.