“Quite the hero, your brother,” said Kasyan, breaking into her thoughts. He sat down beside her and offered her his skin of mead.
“Yes,” replied Vasya, with some sharpness. “Yes, he is.” There was something almost—not quite—mocking, in Kasyan’s voice. She did not take the honey-wine.
Kasyan seized her mittened hand and slapped the vessel into it. “Drink,” he said. “I meant no insult.”
Vasya hesitated, then drank. She still had not gotten used to this man: to his secret eyes and sudden laughter. His face had perhaps paled a little, with the week of travel, but that only made the colors of him more vivid. She would meet his glance at odd moments, and fight down a blush, though she had never been a girl for simpering. How would he react, she sometimes found herself wondering, if he knew I was a girl?
Don’t think of it. He will never know.
The silence between them stretched out, but he made no move to go. To break it, Vasya asked, “Have you been to Moscow before, Kasyan Lutovich?”
His lips quirked. “I came to Moscow not long after the year turned, to rally the Grand Prince to my cause. But before that? Once. Long ago.” An arid suggestion of feeling just tinged his voice. “Perhaps every young fool goes seeking his heart’s desire in cities. I never went back, until this winter.”
“What was your heart’s desire, Kasyan Lutovich?” Vasya asked.
He gave her a look of good-natured scorn. “Are you my grandmother now? You are showing your small years, Vasilii Petrovich. What do you think? I loved a woman.”
Across the fire, Sasha’s head turned.
Dmitrii had been making jokes and watching the stew like a cat at a mouse-hole （their rations did not suit his appetite）， but he overheard and spoke first. “Did you, Kasyan Lutovich?” he asked interestedly. “A Muscovite woman?”
“No,” said Kasyan, speaking now to the listening company. His voice was soft. “She came from far away. She was very beautiful.”
Vasya bit her lower lip. Kasyan usually kept to himself. He was silent more often than speaking, except that he and Dmitrii sometimes rode side by side, passing a companionable wineskin. But now everyone was listening.
“What happened to her?” asked Dmitrii. “Come, let us have the story.”
“I loved her,” said Kasyan carefully. “She loved me. But she disappeared, on the day I was to have taken her away to Bashnya Kostei, to be my own. I never saw her again.” A pause. “She is dead now,” he added, sharply. “That is all. Get me some stew, Vasilii Petrovich, before these gluttons eat it all.”
Vasya got up to do so. But she wondered very much at Kasyan’s expression. Nostalgic tenderness, when he talked of his dead lover. But—just for an instant, and right at the end—there had been such an expression of baffled rage that her blood crept. She went to eat her soup with Solovey, resolving to think no more of Kasyan Lutovich.
WINTER WAS STILL DIAMOND-HARD, full of black frosts and dead beggars, but the old, rigid snow had begun to show its age on the day Dmitrii Ivanovich rode back into Moscow beside his cousins: the monk Aleksandr Peresvet and the boy Vasilii Petrovich. With him also were Kasyan and his followers, who, at Dmitrii’s urging, had not gone home.
“Come, man—come to Moscow and be my guest for Maslenitsa,” said Dmitrii. “The girls are prettier in Moscow than in your old tower of bones.”
“I do not doubt it,” Kasyan said wryly. “Though I think you wish to secure my taxes, Gosudar.”
Dmitrii bared his teeth. “That, too,” he said. “Am I wrong?”
Kasyan only laughed.
They rose that morning in a fine spitting haze of snowflakes and rode down to Moscow along the vast sweep of the Moskva. The city was a white crown on the dark hilltop, blurred by curtains of blown snow. Her pale walls smelled of lime; her towers seemed to split the sky. Sasha could never still a leap of his heart at the sight.
Vasya was riding beside him, snow in her eyebrows. Her smile was infectious. “Today, Sashka,” she said, when the first towers came into sight, thrusting above the gray-white world. “We will see Olga today.” Solovey had caught his rider’s mood; he was almost dancing as they walked.
The role of Vasilii Petrovich had grown on Vasya like skin. If she did tricks on Solovey, they cheered her; if she picked up a spear, Dmitrii laughed at her clumsiness and promised her teaching. If she asked questions, they were answered. A hesitant happiness had begun to show in her expressive face. Sasha felt his lie the more keenly for it, and did not know what to do.