Enchantment (25 page)

“Thank you,” she said. “We can go now.”

Sergei turned and saw her in her simplest dress, the one she wore when she helped with the harvest. Every year she bound sheaves with the best of them, her fingers as deft as any woman’s at tying them off, and Sergei had often seen this dress covered in straw and dust. No matter. She was as beautiful in this simple clothing as she ever was in the more royal finery.

She opened the door for him.

“But it’s my place to open the latch for you, princess,” he said.

“I’m on my way to help my lord escape from this land,” she said. “What do I care about courtesy?”

Sergei followed her out the door. “Then the marriage,” he said softly. “It’s real, despite all?”

“I’ll have no other,” she said. “My word is given.”

At that moment, they heard a tumult outside. Shouting. Much running.

“I think perhaps I heard someone shout your husband’s name,” said Sergei.

Katerina stopped, crossed herself. “Holy Mother, make me fleet of foot,” she said. Then, hiking up her skirts, she scampered down the corridor, into the great room, and out the door.

Ivan thought everything was going so well. Father Lukas might be humorless and rigid about religion, but when it came to politics, he knew how to be flexible. Why was Ivan surprised? There was a reason why Christianity thrived in the barbarian kingdoms of Europe, and this was it: The missionary priests knew how to make themselves useful, how to put royalty into their debt. Katerina wanted to save the life of this preposterous husband she acquired through witchcraft? Very well, Father Lukas would do his part.

They headed westward through the village, toward the gap in the woods where Katerina had first shown him the village. A few children ran along, chattering to the priest, calling out to him. Many people waved a greeting. But one little girl, snot-lipped and covered with dirt, paid no attention to Father Lukas. She came right up to Ivan, tugged at his robe, tagged along beside him.

“What’s wrong with your foot?” she demanded.

Ivan did not want to speak. He didn’t want anybody hearing that his voice was not Sergei’s. Ivan’s accent wasn’t bad—but it wasn’t native, either, not in proto-Slavonic.

“I said, what’s wrong with your foot!”

Father Lukas came to his rescue. “His foot has been twisted from birth.”

“
Sergei’s
foot is twisted, but this one’s just pretending!” cried the little girl at top volume.

“That
is
Sergei. Now hush and go away.”

“That’s not Sergei,” said the little girl. “Sergei always calls me dewdrop and warns the fairies not to switch me for a changeling.”

Ivan cursed silently. There was no way he could have prepared himself for this.

“He did not speak to you because he has taken a vow of silence,” said Father Lukas.

Ivan welcomed the lie. Everyone was probably going to hell, now—who was left who hadn’t lied today?—but it was decent of Father Lukas to do it.

“He did not!” said the girl. She began running around, shouting at any villager who might listen. “The new man is wearing Sergei’s clothes! The new man is wearing Sergei’s clothes!”

People began paying attention. People weren’t the problem, though. It was the knights of the druzhina they were trying to avoid. Ivan had not seen any along the way, though with his head in a hood and his face downcast, it’s not as though he had much of a view.

Father Lukas quickened his pace. Ivan could hear adults now, asking questions. “
Is
it Katerina’s husband? Is it the new man? What’s he doing? Where’s he going?” Some even called out to Father Lukas. “Who’s that with you, Father Lukas?” In answer, Father Lukas walked even more quickly.

And then, abruptly, he stopped. Ivan bumped into him.

Father Lukas’s voice was so soft that it took a moment for Ivan to realize he was speaking. “Now would be a good time to run.”

“What?” asked Ivan.

Father Lukas’s answer was much louder this time. “Cast off the hood, hitch up the skirts, and run, you fool!”

Ivan cast off the hood and saw Dimitri and two other druzhinniks jogging toward him, weapons in hand.

“It
is
the interloper!” said one of them.

“Running away!”

“Deserting King Matfei and Princess Katerina.”

Ivan recognized this as an attempt to justify in advance the unfortunate necessity of killing the traitorous Ivan. He started to run for the woods, but his legs got caught up in the skirts and he fell on his face in the grass. He might have got right up, but Father Lukas was trying to help him by gripping his robe and pulling in the wrong direction. Ivan couldn’t get purchase with his hands to push himself up, and Lukas hadn’t the strength to stand him up by main strength.

Finally, with the pounding of the knights’ feet almost upon them, Ivan simply raised his arms straight above his head and slipped out of the robe, the linen undergarment and all. Once again, he was as naked as the day he arrived there. Only this time he didn’t give a damn about that. At least he was leathershod—he’d be able to run much better this time without every pebble or twig slicing at the bottoms of his feet.

“Look at the coward!” said one man.

“Father Lukas has plucked his feathers—now to get him on the spit for roasting!” cried Dimitri.

But their good cheer evaporated quickly when they realized that Ivan was twice as fast as any of them, laden as they were with weapons, and untrained for speed. He reached the woods long before they were even close. Good thing none of them has a bow, he thought.

An arrow twanged into the trunk of a tree ten feet from his head.

All right, so they had a bowman. Just not a good one.

Ivan dodged among the trees, taking care to put as many trunks as possible between himself and his pursuers.

“He won’t get far in the woods!” shouted Dimitri. “Where are the dogs!”

The tumult continued, and Ivan heard some crashing in the underbrush far behind him, but he couldn’t make out any more words.

Maybe the king would call off the search before it got too far, Ivan thought as the branches again whipped and sliced his skin. He couldn’t go full speed in the woods. Worse yet, he had no idea where he was going. Katerina had not led him on a straight path coming here, and everything looked different in this direction, anyway. It was uphill, too—but Ivan was used to that on his daily runs back in Tantalus. In the future, to train for this, he’d have to run naked with two assistants alongside, whipping him with wands and switches every few seconds. He wondered if there was any chance of making that an Olympic event.

Katerina came outside the house to find the village in an uproar, everybody running toward the west, calling out that Katerina’s husband was running away. Katerina did not join the general pursuit. Instead, she took a circuitous route among the houses, entering the woods well to the south of where Ivan had gone in.

Sergei watched her go, unable to keep up, and not particularly interested in trying. It was all out of his hands.

Still, he was curious, so he limped along the grassy main street until he came upon Father Lukas, who was grumpily coming the other way. “Foolish business anyway,” he said. “That snot-faced little girl you call ‘dewdrop’ caught on that it wasn’t you in the robe and wouldn’t shut up about it.”

“Dewdrop?” said Sergei. “Dewdrop is dead. She died when I was only nine years old.”

Father Lukas glared at him for a moment; then the expression gave way to something else. Fear? Not Father Lukas, surely.

“Never mind,” said Sergei. “We know the Widow uses us like sheep, shearing us or skinning us at her pleasure.”

“A girl about this tall?” asked Father Lukas, still trying to make sense of things.

“Yes, yes,” said Sergei. “But it wasn’t her. There’s been no resurrection, Father Lukas. It was the Widow, as I said.”

“Making us see a little girl?”

“Why not? She showed herself as an old woman before she burned down the church this morning,” said Sergei. “She wants this Ivan dead, and she’s going to keep trying till he’s filleted and roasted.”

“Not those stories of her eating her captives again,” said Father Lukas.

“They say she does.”

“Who says?” said Father Lukas. “Who is it who saw her eating, but she didn’t eat
them
?” He held out the robe and undergarment Ivan had been wearing. “Now you can have these back.”

“What’s Ivan wearing?” asked Sergei.

“What Adam wore in the garden,” said Father Lukas. “What Noah wore when he was drunk in his tent after the flood. What David wore when he danced in triumph in the streets after his victory.”

“Naked come we into the world,” said Sergei, getting into the spirit of things, “and naked we go out of it.”

“Well,” said Father Lukas, “naked except for boots.”

Sergei took the clothing. “The robe is mine, all right,” he said. “But the linen is his.”

“He’s running at full speed through the woods,” said Father Lukas. “You’re welcome to follow him and return it.” With that, Father Lukas passed him and headed back toward the king’s house.

Father Lukas had been joking, but Sergei liked the idea better the more he thought of it. But there was no point in following Ivan—he’d be running, and dodging all pursuers. The princess, however, would be dodging no one—if a druzhinnik met her in the woods they’d do her no harm, and she was still under the protection of the spells that had counteracted Baba Yaga’s curse in the first place, so she had nothing to fear from that source, either.

Sergei left the street and wandered among the houses till he found the place where Katerina had gone into the woods. It was a plain enough path; she had not departed from it. Nor was she moving all that quickly. When she stopped at the rendezvous place, Sergei wouldn’t be all that far behind her.

It was near dark, and though the moon was almost full, not that much light penetrated to the lower reaches of the forest. Ivan was hopelessly lost, but it had been a couple of hours since he last heard dogs barking or men calling out to each other. So he was safe enough. Unless Baba Yaga sent the bear back for a second try. Or he fell off a cliff in the darkness. Or he sprained his ankle and died of exposure trying to crawl back to civilization.

Civilization? Yes, that’s what Taina was, by contemporary standards. Men with swords who had no qualms about killing a man and expected to have no punishment for it—it was civilization in the same sense that some drug dealer’s turf was civilized. What was the difference between Dimitri and some thug with an Uzi?

Not fair. Dimitri lived in a different time. If he were in the U.S. in 1992 and wanted Ivan out of the way, he’d hire a lawyer and sue. Had he been in Kiev in 1970, he’d have whispered a hint to the KGB. He wielded a sword here in Taina because that’s what men used to settle quarrels.

Why am I giving the man who wants to kill me the benefit of the doubt? Screw him. Let
him
break his ankle and fall off a cliff and get eaten by a bear. Let
him
marry the princess and become the king. Come to think of it, that’s probably what Dimitri had in mind. He’d make the better husband. It should have been him all along. If I died right now it would be better for everybody.

The hell it would. It would be worse for
me
, and selfish as it might be, I want to live. I even want to go home.

The path, such as it was, went straight, but Ivan turned to the left and slid down a rather steep slope. Why did I do that? he wondered. Why did I choose that way? It came to him that for the past hour, he had been following, not the line of least resistance, as he had before, but a fairly straight line toward . . .

Toward Katerina. The hairs tied around his wrist. She was calling him. He should have known that she’d anticipate his lack of skill in the woods.

It wasn’t long after that before he followed his “intuition” into a wide, moon-washed clearing, perfectly round, with a pit in the middle of it, and a pedestal rising in the middle of the pit. Katerina was waiting for him in the moonlight.

Ivan looked around to see if anyone else was there.

“No one,” she said. “The place is hidden from anyone but us, because the bridges are ours. Even the Widow can’t see, though she put me here, and her bear to guard me. If she couldn’t see here, who else would ever find me?”

Ivan hardly listened. He was trying not to be shy of his nakedness. Then he laughed at the impulse. He had nothing to hide from her now. Not only had she seen him before, she was now his wife.

He had almost reached her when he saw movement behind her, at the edge of the woods. “If this place is hidden,” he said, “who’s that?”

She turned, startled, afraid. “Come out!” she said. “Show yourself!”

A shadow emerged from the wood, moving with a strange, rolling gait. When it reached the moonlight, it turned into Sergei.

Ivan called out in greeting, but Katerina was annoyed. “How did you find this place?”

“I followed you,” he said.

Ivan laughed. “So much for this place being hidden.”

“It
is
. Sergei must have a right to be here.”

Ivan shrugged. “I don’t know how these things work.”

“I’ll be gone soon enough,” said Sergei. “I only brought these for Ivan.” He held out the wool robe and linen tunic Ivan had been wearing.

“But that’s
your
robe,” Ivan said.

“I’m not naked.”

“Trade me, at least,” said Ivan. “Your own proper robe for you, and I’ll wear the one that Father Lukas burned holes in today.” He pulled the tunic on over his head. The cloth snagged on the rough and broken skin of his chest and thighs, and his wounds stung as the linen brushed them. But it was good to be dressed again. “Thank you, Sergei,” he said.

In the meantime, Sergei had doffed Father Lukas’s castoff clothing, and Ivan pulled it on. It smelled of smoke. Burnt wool—a nasty odor. Wool and fire and something else, too. Horsehair. Was there horsehair woven into the robe?

No, of course not. Father Lukas wears a hair shirt. The private penance of those who feared they were not humble enough. Ivan rather liked the fact that at least Father Lukas knew his own primary sin and was trying to deal with it.