Olga went back to the oven, to her white-faced children.
“Is it true, Matyushka?” snuffled Daniil. “Is there a ghost?”
Marya said nothing, her hands clenched together. The tears still stood in her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Olga calmly. “Hush, children, do not be afraid. We are protected by God. Come, it is time for bed.”
2.
Two Holy Men
Marya woke her nurse twice in the night with screaming. The second time, the nurse, unwisely, slapped the child, who leaped from her bed, flew like a hawk through the halls of her mother’s terem, and darted into Olga’s room before her nurse could stop her. She crawled over the sleeping maidservants and huddled, quaking, against her mother’s side.
Olga had not been asleep. She heard her daughter’s footsteps and felt the child tremble when she came close. The watchful Varvara caught Olga’s eye in the near-dark, then without a word went to the door to dismiss the nurse. The nurse’s stertorous breathing retreated, indignantly, down the hall. Olga sighed and stroked Marya’s hair until she calmed. “Tell me, Masha,” she said, when the child’s eyes had grown heavy.
“I dreamed a woman,” Marya told her mother in a small voice. “She had a gray horse. She was very sad. She came to Moscow and she never left. She was trying to say something to me, but I wouldn’t listen. I was scared!” Marya was weeping again. “Then I woke up and she was there, just the same. Only now she is a ghost—”
“Just a dream,” Olga murmured. “Just a dream.”
THEY WERE AWAKENED JUST after daybreak by voices in the dooryard.
In the heavy moment between sleep and waking, Olga tried to recover a dream of her own: of pines in the wind, of herself barefoot in the dust, laughing with her brothers. But the noise rose, and Marya jerked awake. Just like that, the country-girl Olga had been was once again gone and forgotten.
Olga pushed back the covers. Marya popped upright. Olga was glad to see a little color in the child’s face, the night-horrors banished with daylight. Among the voices spiraling up from the dooryard was one she recognized. “Sasha!” Olga whispered, scarcely believing. “Up!” she cried to her women. “There is a guest in the dooryard. Prepare hot wine, and heat the bathhouse.”
Varvara came into the room, snow in her hair. She had risen in the dark and gone out in search of wood and water. “It is your brother returned,” she said without ceremony. Her face looked pale and strained, Olga did not think she had slept, after Marya waked them with nightmares.
In contrast, Olga felt a dozen years younger. “I knew no storm could kill him,” she said, getting to her feet. “He is a man of God.”
Varvara made no reply, but stooped and began to rebuild the fire.
“Leave that,” Olga told her. “Go to the kitchens and see that the ovens are drawing. Make sure there is food ready. He will be hungry.”
Hastily, Olga’s women dressed the princess and her children, but before Olga was quite ready or her wine drunk, before Daniil and Marya had eaten their honey-drenched porridge, the footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Marya flew to her feet. Olga frowned. The child had a fey gaiety that belied her pallor. Perhaps the night was not forgotten after all. “Uncle Sasha is back!” Marya cried. “Uncle Sasha!”
“Bring him here,” Olga said. “Masha—”
Then a dark figure stood in the gap of the door, face shadowed by a hood.
“Uncle Sasha!” Marya cried again.
“No, Masha, it is not right, to address a holy man so!” cried her nurse, but Marya had already overset three stools and a wine-cup and run up to her uncle.
“God be with you, Masha,” said a warm, dry voice. “Back, child, I am all over snow.” He put his cloak and hood aside, flinging snow in all directions, made the sign of the cross over Marya’s head, and embraced her.
“God be with you, brother,” Olga said from the oven. Her voice was calm, but the light in her face stripped away her winters. She added, because she could not help it, “Wretch, I was afraid for you.”
“God be with you, sister,” the monk returned. “You must not be afraid. I go where the Father sends me.” He spoke gravely, but then smiled. “I am glad to see you, Olya.”
A cloak of fur hung clasped about his monk’s robe, and his hood, thrown back, revealed black hair, tonsured, and a black beard rattling with icicles. His own father would barely have recognized him; the proud boy had grown-up, broad-shouldered and calm, soft-footed as a wolf. Only his clear eyes—his mother’s eyes—had not changed since that day ten years ago when he rode away from Lesnaya Zemlya.