Lord of Snow and Shadows (6 page)

“You lift that flagon for me, girl, my back’s playing me up. . . .”

A gust of his beery breath, stale as the cellar air, made her wrinkle her nose in disgust. She bent to pick up the brimming flagon and felt his hands on her buttocks. She took in a deep breath, then stepped backward, stamping down her heel on his foot, hard. Beer slopped onto the floor.

“Ouch! What’d you want to do that for?”

“Don’t touch me!” she hissed, retreating. “Don’t ever touch me again!”

“I was only brushing off a spider. A big one—”

“Tell that to Sosia.”

“There’s another nine flagons here—”

“You’ll just have to carry them yourself.”

She reached the stairs and, hitching up her skirts with one hand, began to climb up, staggering under the weight of the heavy flagon.

“Hard-hearted whore.” Oleg was muttering to himself, loud enough so that she could hear. “Just like her mother. Cold as you please to honest men.” He had reached the bottom of the stair and was teetering drunkenly upward behind her. “Yet slut enough to open her legs to any passing Arkhel clansman.”

“What did you say?” Kiukiu turned slowly around, gazing down at Oleg.

“You heard me.” His face was twisted now with a vindictive snarl. “Your mother Afimia. Arkhel’s whore.”

“She was
raped
!” Kiukiu shrieked. “She didn’t have any choice!”

Suddenly the day’s accrued insults were too much to endure. She swung the flagon—and emptied it over Oleg’s head. For a moment he stood, mouth open, drenched in the flood of beer. Then as his bellow of outrage echoed around the cellar, she turned and fled, sobbing, toward the kitchen, tearing past Ninusha and Ilsi, toward the back door into the stable yard—and the night.

Kiukiu crouched in the darkest corner of the stables, her apron clutched to her mouth to try to stifle the choking sobs that shook her whole body.

She was sick of her life at Kastel Drakhaon. She was sick of being the butt of Ninusha and Ilsi’s spiteful jokes, of being fumbled by lewd old men like Oleg, of Sosia’s shrill nagging. There was not a single soul in the whole kastel who cared for her, to whom she could go and pour out her heart. She was just a nuisance to them, a thing to be used and abused.

All her life she had been told how grateful she should be to Sosia for taking care of her when Afimia died, how a life of servitude was the best a poor bastard child, misbegotten spawn of the enemy clan, could ever dare to hope for.

Well, she had dared to hope. There had to be more to life than the drudgery of the kitchen and scullery. And she would run away to find it. She wouldn’t stay to be maltreated any longer.

The cold night was suddenly splashed bright with torchflames; Kiukiu heard the kastel gates grind open and the iron clatter of hooves on the cobblestones. She knuckled the tears from her eyes, feeling a gust of frosty night air stinging her wet cheeks.

Run away without catching even one glimpse of Lord Gavril?

She crept to the stable entrance, peeping out into the night. Even though her thoughts were in turmoil, she forgot her unhappiness as she searched among the dismounting warriors for the boy from the portrait. Shadows and torchlight twisted and flickered in the darkness, men shouted to each other—and for a moment, she was certain she had missed him, certain he must have gone ahead into the kastel.

And then she saw him.

He stood gazing about him, the one still figure amid the moving warriors and the tossing horses’ heads, watching, assessing, his face betraying no emotion.
By Saint Sergius,
Kiukiu whispered in her heart,
he is every bit as handsome as I thought he would be. Those eyes, can they really burn so blue? Was Lord Volkh ever so good-looking? It must be his mother’s warm Smarnan blood.
His skin seems to glow gold in the torchlight, the gold that comes from the warm kiss of the summer’s sun, not the harsh burning of the winter’s wind or the cruel dazzle of the high snowfields. . . .

At his side stood Bogatyr Kostya, stiffly protective, gesturing for him to ascend the wide stone stairs that led up to the front door. In the dark, Kiukiu thought, Lord Gavril would not see that the stairs were cracked with frost, the gray stone mottled with lichen and stained with weather.

What must he be thinking?
she wondered as the
druzhina
drew their sabers in salute as Lord Gavril slowly climbed the steps.
He was so young when he was taken away from Azhkendir. Does he remember anything of this place? Does he remember anything of his father?
Then she shuddered.
What had Kostya told Lord Gavril of the Drakhaon, his father? Could he have any idea?

And then, as the heavy front doors to the kastel closed behind Lord Gavril and the
druzhina
came tramping into the stables to rub down their horses, Kiukiu slipped silently into the courtyard.

The night air was damp with frost. Frost was already glistening on the damp cobblestones. Kiukiu shivered, clasping her arms tight to herself.

Winter was coming. If she ran away tonight, she would freeze to death in a ditch. No, better to endure Sosia’s anger one more night. And she would endure it willingly if only to snatch another glimpse of Lord Gavril.

CHAPTER 5

Dish after unfamiliar dish was presented to Gavril: a hot, red soup in which great daubs of soured cream floated; cold jellied carp; salmon baked in papery pastry with bitter, aromatic leaves and rice. . . .

But he was too weary to take more than a mouthful of each course, slowly, mechanically chewing, hardly tasting the food, longing to escape the intense scrutiny of his father’s household. All he really wanted was a hot bath.

“Lord Gavril is tired after the long journey,” Kostya said. “My lord, let me escort you to your bed.”

No hope of escape, even now. Kostya had not let him out of his sight once since they arrived.

As they reached the head of the stairs, Gavril saw two of the
druzhina
had taken up positions outside a dark carved door at the end of the landing. And as they saw him, they struck their chests with their fists in salute and flung open the door for him.

“So I’m still your prisoner,” he said, his voice dry with bitterness.

“It is for your own safety, my lord,” said Kostya. “We have lost one Drakhaon through our own negligence. We must not lose another.”

As Gavril entered the room, he heard the door close behind him and a key turn in the lock.

No hope of a bath tonight. He would have to sleep as he was, dirty, stinking of travel. He sank onto the bed and started to tug off his riding boots. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as his feet emerged, the socks stiff with grime and sweat, almost glued to his feet.

He lay back on the bed, curtained by the somber brocades, dark as his own despair. Locked in, like a criminal in the cells.

“In my father’s bedchamber,” he said aloud, softly. The room betrayed little of its previous occupant. The tapestries, like all the others in the kastel, showed hunting scenes. The sheets smelled crisp and fresh, faintly perfumed with the leaves of dried summer herbs. A little fire crackled in the grate, warming the chill of the room. It could have been any wealthy landowner’s bedchamber for all that it told him of Lord Volkh Nagarian.

And then he caught, through heavy lids, the glint of firelight on a portrait on the wall.

Curiosity overcame tiredness. He forced himself from the comfort of the bed to inspect the picture—and found himself staring at his childhood self. Young Gavril. Ten or eleven years old. And the picture was so vividly painted that he knew it could only be his mother Elysia’s work.

Had she painted it because his father had requested it of her? Or had she painted it as a reminder, a poignant message to Lord Volkh saying, “Don’t forget you have a son who is fast growing up”?

All these years he had believed his father had taken no interest in him. He had even secretly wondered if his father had abandoned his mother because of him. Some men were like that, Elysia said, moving on to the next conquest when the demands of domesticity became too constricting.

Now he saw that his father had kept his picture here in his bedchamber, the first thing he saw when he awoke each morning, the last before he closed his eyes to sleep.

Tears suddenly pricked his eyes, stingingly hot.

“Father,” he whispered.

But if he had hoped to find some further connection with the father he could not remember, he had found none. There was nothing here but a void.

He must escape. As soon as it was light he would begin to make his plans, observing, watching for any weakness, no matter how small, in the defenses Kostya had set up “for his own safety.”

Gavril slowly undid the buttons on his jacket and shrugged it off, letting it lie on the floor where it fell. Then he snuffed out the oil lamp and crawled onto the bed. The flickering fireshadows gradually dimmed as the glowing coals crumbled to ash, and he slept.

The diamond-paned windows of the Drakhaon’s bedchamber looked out not over the inner courtyards of the kastel, but over swathes of moorland and brooding forest stretching far into the hazy distance where the horizon was crowned by jagged mountains, half-wreathed in swirling cloud. Beneath the fast-scudding cloud, Gavril caught a shimmer of fresh snow on the peaks.

He unhooked the catch. Opening one window, he felt the fresh air cold on his face, faintly tinged with the aromatic fragrance of oozing pine sap.

No way of escape here; there was a sheer drop of twenty feet or more to the yard below. Stories of prisoners knotting sheets together to improvise a way of escape came to mind. He might reach the ground, but at the entrance of the courtyard he could see guards patrolling the walls; he would never get past his own bodyguard.

There came a sharp rap at the door.

“Lord Gavril? Are you awake?” Bogatyr Kostya’s voice was powerful enough to carry across a parade ground. Gavril hastily closed the window.

A key turned in the lock and servants came in, bowing and murmuring greetings, one bearing a bowl of hot water, another a tray of food.

“Lord Volkh always took his first meal here,” Kostya said, “while we discussed the day’s arrangements.”

Gavril looked at the breakfast tray: a bowl of a thick porridge; a pewter mug filled with strong spiced ale; and a hunk of coarse bread with a slice of hard-rinded, pungent yellow cheese. Soldiers’ rations. He was used to croissants and a bowl of hot chocolate, with maybe a fresh apricot or two picked from the espaliered trees in the villa gardens. His stomach had still not recovered from the unfamiliar food last night. He turned away from the tray.

“I sent word to Azhgorod of your arrival last night,” said Kostya. “The lawyers are on their way here for the reading of your father’s will. As soon as you are ready, my lord, you must authorize the reopening of the Great Hall.”

The walls leading to the Great Hall were lined with hunting tapestries. Gavril saw scene after gory scene of blood and slaughter: the lolling heads of butchered stags, bears, and wolves filled each stitched canvas.

Kostya halted before a pillared doorway. The way was barred with planks of wood nailed across the doors. Two of the
druzhina
stood on guard outside.

“Open the doors,” said Kostya.

The warriors glanced at each other—the first time Gavril had seen any of the
druzhina
hesitate to execute a command—then took their axes to the planks, levering and hacking until, with a splintering crack, the wood came away and the doors swung open.

“Now the shutters,” Kostya said.

Gavril watched with a growing sense of unease. That queasy feeling of dread had returned, like a cold, sick fever. He did not want to cross the threshold. He wanted to turn and run, to find the crisp brightness of the autumn day outside.

“Come, my lord,” Kostya said, ushering him over the threshold.

No torches lit the Great Hall, guttering their smoke into the shadows. But beneath his feet Gavril saw the same black and ocher patterned tiles which, in his vision, had been slimed with blood.

He was standing only a few feet from where his father had lain dying.

If he closed his eyes, he could see again the flash of spangled light that seared the eyes, could smell again the reek of burning flesh, could feel the dying man’s last, agonized gasps as his consciousness faded. . . .

“Remember.”

He opened his eyes. Etched against the daylight a figure of shadow wavered, tall, broad-shouldered.

The air breathed cold as winter fog; there was an unpleasant, moldering taint to it, like decaying leaves and chill earth.

“
Gavril.
”

“Father?” Gavril whispered.

“My son.”
The revenant’s voice shuddered through him, each word a sliver of ice. Then the revenant suddenly crumpled to the floor, a figure sprawled in the ungainly attitude of death, dark blood leaking like ink onto the tiles from the slack mouth.

A second shadow came billowing like curling smoke from Lord Volkh’s breast until it towered above Gavril, blotting out the daylight, the shadow of a great daemon-serpent, hooked wings outspread, darker than a thundercloud.

Sick and faint, Gavril felt himself swaying, falling. . . .

Strong hands gripped his shoulders, supporting him.

“Steady, lad,” muttered Kostya’s voice in his ear.

Gavril blinked.
There’s nothing there. Look.
In the daylight, he could see that the tiles had been washed clean. But Kostya and the young guard who had let them in were staring at the same spot, transfixed.

“This is where he died, isn’t it?” Gavril said shakily.

“Aquavit for Lord Gavril!” barked Kostya, recovering. “Hurry, Michailo!”

The young guard went running out, returning with a metal flask that Kostya thrust into Gavril’s hands.

“Drink.”

Gavril put the flask to his lips and took a mouthful. The aquavit burned his throat like fire. Cleansing fire. Coughing, eyes watering, he handed the flask back to Kostya, who took a long swig himself before passing it to the young guard who had brought it.

“This is bad, very bad,” Kostya muttered. It was the first time Gavril had seen him disconcerted.

“You saw it too?”

“I saw what I saw. And you, Michailo?”

The young man started; beneath his sunburned cheeks, Gavril noticed that he had turned as pale as whey.

“I saw my lord Volkh as he was when he was alive. May the Blessed Sergius preserve me from such a sight again. The dead should not walk with the living.”

“My father’s ghost?” Gavril said softly. He did not believe in ghosts. But there had been something here in this room for which he could find no other name.

“Once a spirit-wraith has been called back into our world, it is very hard to persuade it to return,” Kostya said.

“And who could have summoned it?” said Michailo.

“I aim to find out,” Kostya said darkly.

Gavril’s eyes kept returning to the distinctive patterns on the tiles, the black serpent, wings spread against the ocher background. How could he have dreamed all this so accurately? And the painted panels and beams, the wreathing carved friezes of ivy in which bright-beaked wooden birds nested?

Why?
he silently asked his dead father.
Why have you laid this burden on me? I didn’t ask to be born your son. I didn’t ask to be Lord of Azhkendir. Why must I inherit your feuds, your hatreds, your vendettas?

The wall behind the dining table was hung with spiked oval shields, each one painted with the black and silver device Gavril had first seen darkening the barque’s mainsail: the winged serpent. And beneath the shields hung a gold-framed portrait draped with black funeral cloths and crowned with dried sprigs of rosemary and rue. No flowers for a dead Clan Lord. Only his weapons, polished to lethal brilliance, laid reverently in tribute.

“Lift the cloth,” Kostya said, gently pushing Gavril forward.

Gavril pulled the cloth to one side and, mouth dry with apprehension, gazed upward.

The portrait showed a man in the prime of life, dark-haired, dark-browed, gazing back at Gavril with eyes of the same brooding intense blue as his own. But there the resemblance ended: the Drakhaon’s long, curling hair and beard were of a black so glossily dark the painter had picked out the little highlights in cobalt, an artist’s trick Gavril had learned from Elysia. But this was not Elysia’s work. Everything about this portrait of Lord Volkh Nagarian spoke of power and control: the proud gaze, the unyielding stance, the grim, firm-set mouth. The Drakhaon was somberly dressed in black; his only concession to ornament was a blue-stoned signet ring on his gloved left hand and the embroidered device of the winged serpent in silver and sapphire threads on the left sleeve of his jacket. On his head he wore a hat trimmed with sable fur. Behind him, the artist had detailed a wintry landscape: a snow-covered vista of forests and mountains stretching into infinity, implying that the Drakhaon’s domains were too vast to portray.

“This is not the picture my mother painted,” Gavril said, unable to take his eyes from the likeness. “What happened to her portrait?”

Kostya gave a little shrug. “In an attic, a cellar . . . There was a time when your father could not bear to have anything near him that reminded him of her.”

“Are there no more recent portraits than this?”

Kostya did not reply. Gavril turned around and saw that the old man was evidently struggling to find an answer to his question.

“Well, Kostya?”

“Lord Volkh took a dislike to having his portrait painted.”

“But why?” Gavril asked, puzzled. “Was there some reason? You said there was a war, a bitter clan war. Was he scarred in the fighting? Disfigured?”

“He was . . . not the same,” Kostya said obliquely. “It . . . altered him.”

“What do you mean?”

“My lord, there are many people waiting to meet you. There will be time in plenty to talk of your father later.”

It was as blatant a change of subject as Gavril had heard since he arrived. Looking at the old warrior’s face he saw that Kostya was not going to answer his question.

“Indeed, Kostya, you are right. I have been impatiently waiting to meet you, Lord Gavril.”

A woman’s voice, sweet as lavender honey, made Gavril start.