Prince Ivan (26 page)

“A barrel floating in the Azov Sea. It was too heavy for me to drag to shore, so it floats there still. And,” he touched the spoon with one finger, “it smells like this.”

“Are you sure Vanya’s body is inside?” said Mikhail the Raven.

Fenist Sokolov looked at his brother, grim-faced. “I’m sure what’s inside the barrel was once Ivan,” he said softly, choosing his words with care, “but from the size and shape, it’s not a body any more. Koshchey the Undying is a savage enemy.”

“Enough.” Prince Mikhail the Raven pushed all his books aside except for one. “It’s as I thought. Rest a while, Fenist. You look like you need it. Then lead Vasya to the barrel. Vasiliy, do what you can: lift it from the water, or pull it to a beach. But for your stomach’s sake, don’t open it. Leave that to me.”

“Rest assured, I haven’t the slightest wish to open it,” said Vasya, and his mouth quirked at the mere thought of what must be within that barrel after days on the open sea.

“Whatever’s inside, it was once our brother Vanya,” said Fenist the Falcon sharply. “Speak with a little more respect. You should do his memory that courtesy at least.” Prince Vasiliy had the grace to look abashed, but Fenist had already turned his attention to Mikhail the Raven. “I’m assuming, from the way you give orders, that you aren’t flying with us. So where are you going, brother, and when will you return?”

Prince Mikhail lifted his book of necromancy, and put it in a pouch at his belt. “Find the barrel,” he said, “and wait beside it. You won’t wait long before I join you, though I travel by a different route. There are things I need, and I’ll only find them West of the Sun and East of the Moon.” He stood up from the table, spread out his arms, and a raven beating great wings as black as midnight hung on the air for an instant before it disappeared from sight.

*

No matter what Mikhail had told them, it was indeed a long, cold wait on the beach with only the barrel for company. Just an ordinary barrel, stained slightly with salt from the bitter waters of the Azov Sea; and yet it was company that neither Fenist nor Vasiliy wanted to share too closely. A scent hung about it as if something was leaking stealthily between the staves, and though it was faint in the sea air, it was more than enough to keep them at a distance.

Vasiliy looked at it sidelong and then, for the third time since changing back from eagle to man, he went to the water’s edge and washed his hands. Fenist the Falcon sat in the sand, chewing on a long spike of marram grass and watching his brother sardonically. “You were in bird’s shape, Vasya,” he said. “You should be washing your feet.”

Prince Vasiliy Orlov glared at him. “Shut up!” he snapped. “You didn’t have to carry it!” Then he scrubbed his hands with sand and water all over again.

Fenist gazed out across the sea with his sharp eyes hooded behind their lashes, and said nothing. Vasya wasn’t entirely correct in his accusation, for in the form of a bright falcon Fenist had settled on the barrel as it flopped ponderously through the waves, and had felt the ugly heaviness of it as it rolled beneath him. No barrel so small should have weighed so much, except for those which sailors carried on board ship and they, like this, were tightly packed with chopped, well-salted meat…

Prince Fenist Sokolov stared at the barrel for a long time. Then he spat out his piece of grass as though it had suddenly begun to taste bad, and moved further down the beach.

There was a small, discreet muttering of thunder in the far distance, and a brief flicker of lightning nearer at hand, and Mikhail Voronov the Raven stepped out of the empty air with a stone bottle in each hand.

Fenist saluted with a small wave of his hand, but Vasiliy, washing again, straightened up with a jerk – then bent again hastily to retrieve his hat, which had fallen off into the sea. “I wish,” he said irritably, “you would stop creeping about like that!”

Mikhail smiled a thin smile at his big brother, who was looking baleful as he wrung seawater out of what had been a perfectly good furred hat and now looked like a small drowned animal. “Not everyone needs to travel on the wings of storm. And at least it took your mind off what was troubling it.”

Vasiliy glanced quickly, guiltily towards the sinister small barrel, and twisted his hat still harder. He took care to make no comment either about the barrel or his feelings concerning it. Taken to task once on that account, he had no desire to repeat the experience, especially since Mikhail’s tongue and choice of words could cut like razors when he wished. For all his size and strength, Vasya was a gentle soul. He clapped the mangled hat back on his head, where it first drooped and then slowly began to drip.

“West of the Sun and East of the Moon,” said Fenist the Falcon, standing up and flinging his latest blade of grass away. “And what were you seeking there, Misha my brother?”

“These.” Mikhail held up the stone bottles. “The Water of Death and the Water of Life.”

Fenist was astonished. “How in the name of the good God did you get those?”

Mikhail looked at Vasiliy in his dripping hat, and smiled a smile even thinner than the first. “Creeping about,” he said.

Vasiliy used his finger to catch a drip running down his nose and flicked it at his youngest brother. Though he said nothing aloud, his thoughts were plain in his face. Fenist, however, laughed, then he too looked at Vasya and waved his hand in a general direction along the beach.

“Misha has things to do,” he said, “and I doubt you’d want to watch them. Certainly I don’t.” He glanced pointedly towards Mikhail and the barrel, then began striding briskly off towards the farthest dunes, well out of sight of both.

Vasiliy looked at Fenist walking away, at the dreadful barrel squatting in the place where he had dragged it with revulsion twisting at his features, and at Mikhail prying off its lid with an expression of fascinated curiosity foremost on his face. He watched Misha longest of all, until the barrel’s lid came free, and then made the mistake of looking inside. Vasya stared, eyes bulging from their sockets as he clapped one hand across his mouth, and then he sprinted for the safety of the dunes.

*

Mikhail Charodeyevich Voronov stood upright with a little grunt of effort, and braced his hands into the small of a back outraged by how long he’d been stooping. He looked down and thought that it had probably been easier for Vanya, since he couldn’t have felt a thing in sinew, muscle, or in bone. Ivan Aleksandrovich Khorlov, his sister’s brother, lay at Mikhail’s feet, his body patterned criss-cross with livid lines where Koshchey the Undying had chopped it apart.

Rearranging all the pieces had taken Mikhail five hours on his knees in wet sand, and it would have been even longer had he not finally given in to impatience and used magic to bring all the smaller rags and fragments back to where they belonged. He had thanked the good God more than once that Koshchey had been so vindictive, so determined that no part of his foe should remain on the face of Mother Earth. Otherwise Prince Ivan might have lacked a finger, or a toe – or a kidney, lung, or heart. Perhaps even his head, had Koshchey been in the habit of taking such trophies.

The stained shreds of Ivan’s clothing were piled on his chest, and the split halves of an iron collar had been restored to his neck. Mikhail had turned the pieces of the collar over and over in his hands before he replaced it, shaking his head and wishing this gallant young idiot had been less gallant, less idiotic, and had taken time to ask questions of those who could have given him sound answers.

The husbands of his sisters, for a start.

Misha dismissed those flickers of annoyance and sank to his knees, saying a small prayer that the good God would look favourably on a young man who had tried to do good even though those good deeds had brought evil. Prayers said, he opened the first of the two stone bottles and sprinkled the clear and icy Water of Death across the sadly tattered corpse. From the feet to the head he sprinkled it, and then across the shoulders, side to side.

“I wash you with the Water, I sign you with the cross,” he said as the bottle gurgled empty. “May the glory of God bring wholeness to you.”

As Mikhail Voronov held his breath, a faint silvery shimmering enveloped the body like mist at twilight. Knowing he should look away yet fascinated by the mysteries of his art, he watched the ugly crimson tracks of cutting edges fade from Tsarevich Ivan’s skin to leave it whole and unmarred. Within a few seconds even that unbroken skin had faded from sight as his clothing of wool and linen, leather, silk and fur – all once-living things – flowed together in a blur of colour to leave Vanya’s body as it had been in the instant before Koshchey the Undying struck off his head. Only the iron collar remained in pieces.

Mikhail released his held breath in a long sigh between his teeth. Thus far his hopes had become reality, and there remained only the Water of Life. The Raven held its stone bottle up to his eyes as if he could see through the hollowed basalt to the liquid it contained and read there whether he was wasting his time. There was a film of cold sweat on Misha’s forehead as he withdrew the smooth plug of solid rock that was its stopper, but the scent it released was at once a reassurance and a promise of success. Nothing smelling like summer flowers and the green spring steppe after a shower of rain could do anything but good. He signed himself with the cross once more, and with a silent prayer poured out the water.

It was black and icy cold, so cold indeed that it smoked like winter breath as each drop left the bottle. A little was sprinkled onto Ivan’s hands and a little on his feet, a little above his heart and a little between his brows, and after that the Water of Life was all gone.

And nothing happened.

Mikhail, Prince of the Dark Forests, stared at the empty bottle like a man betrayed and drew his breath to curse, for all he had was all there was.

Then Tsarevich Ivan opened his eyes, and drew in a breath so sharp and sudden that it made him cough, and sat up quickly like a man too long asleep. One hand went to his throat, and the other rubbed most carefully at the back of his head as two sheared hoops of iron clinked and shifted.

“I have the devil’s own ache in my neck,” he said hoarsely. “It goes through from one side to the other!”

Mikhail had dropped to his knees beside his brother, ready to embrace him and to reassure him after all the horrors of his death – but when he heard Ivan say that, he collapsed forward in the sands of the bitter Azov Sea and laughed until he could laugh no more…

CHAPTER EIGHT

How
Prince
Ivan
went
looking
for
a
faster
horse

“Dead,” said Ivan, “what do you mean, dead?”

Ivan had been talking for only a few minutes; mostly to Misha until the others returned, and it was plain he had no memory at all of why he should be sitting on a beach with his brothers-in-law around him. The three sorcerer Princes sat on the sand and listened to what he had to say, which was for the most part vague nonsense like a man woken suddenly from a deep and dreaming sleep.

They watched him massage his neck, every now and then they heard him complain about aches in that neck, and though for the most part they restrained their amusement to mannerly smiles, every once in a while he would say something that caused one or all of them to burst out in hastily stifled laughter. His latest comment was perhaps the worst. Now the ugly part of the business had been successfully accomplished, Fenist and Vasiliy were filled with the sort of idiotic good humour that normally comes with too much vodka.

Mikhail, for his part, sat cross-legged to one side and said very little, though he listened a great deal, and it would have seemed, had anyone been watching him, that he was as amused by the foolishness of his two brothers as they were by the innocent ignorance of Prince Ivan.

“I mean dead as in not alive any more, Vanya,” he said. “Dead as in having your head cut from your body by Koshchey the Undying.”

Ivan stared, round-eyed, his expression that of a man convinced he was the butt of some deep-laid jest. His conviction was more certain still when Vasiliy and Fenist concealed smiles behind their hands, while Mikhail’s expression didn’t change by so much as a single flicker. “Enough jokes,” he said, and laughed uncertainly. “You’re making fun of me! I was wearing an iron collar. No sword—”

“You’re still wearing that collar,” said Mikhail, sounding perhaps more impatient than he intended. “Look at it before you make yourself more foolish that you’ve done already.”

Perhaps it was the tone of Mikhail’s voice, or perhaps the invitation to inspect something far more solid than mere spoken opinions, but Ivan fell silent, and despite the times he’d already rubbed his neck and complained of aches and pains, for several seconds he became reluctant to move his hand towards it. When at last he touched the collar and felt the burred edges where Koshchey’s blade had sliced it through, he went as white as the foam on the waves breaking behind him. With both hands he moved the two halves, rotating them until the neatly bisected iron catch met underneath his ear, and that convinced him. His face had gone pale when he first reached up, but now it turned as bloodless as all his skin had been before it was touched by the Water of Life.

Ivan looked at the three Princes, seeing none of them, and struggled to his feet. He said nothing as he walked slowly away through the dunes and the rustling dry grass and, signalled to silence by Mikhail the Raven, nor did they. It was many minutes before Ivan returned, and when he did, the collar was no longer around his neck but held in one hand with the same caution as he might have held a poisonous serpent. Its two halves chimed one against the other as he walked, marking each step with a faint clangour as of a church bell knelling for a funeral – but in this funeral, the corpse had climbed from his coffin and was leaving the graveyard behind.