hands upon my sister. If you had told me she was choking, I would have saved her."
Oh, sure, I'll bet you would, the Heimlich maneuver was done all the time in the ninth century or whenever this is.
But Ivan decided that it was best to pretend to accept the apology and avoid antagonizing this man any further. "Sir, I would have told you, but I'm a stranger here and I don't speak your language very well. I did not know how to say that she was choking. I only learned the word when it was said just now. So instead of speaking, as I should have, I thought it was better to act."
"Of course it was better," said King Matfei. "And you were fast - over the tables and across the room faster than a stooping hawk." He turned and addressed the whole company. "Have you ever seen a man bound over a table like that? By the Bear, if I only had a hound that could leap like you!" Then the king realized what he had said. "That is, not by the Bear, of course, but by the Lord's wounds."
"Amen," said a few of the more pious.
Katerina approached now, holding the robe she had picked up from where it fell. Not taking her eyes from Ivan's face until she moved behind him, she placed the robe onto his shoulders. Gratefully he gathered the cloth around his waist. Katerina took her place beside him. "Do you see what a man the Lord has brought to me? Two women he has saved this day, Lybed and me, but I am the fortunate one who will have him as my husband."
The hall rang with cheering.
"Lucky for you the princess got your promise first," said Dimitri's sister, Lybed, her eyes alight with something more than mead. "For I'm a widow, and I would gladly have thanked you well enough to wear you down to a stump."
The company whooped at the ribald boast, King Matfei among them. Even Katerina smiled.
But Dimitri did not smile. Instead he took his sister by the arm and pulled her away. "We've eaten enough," he said. "I'm taking you back to your children before you're too drunk to walk."
"I'm not drunk," Lybed protested, but allowed herself to be led away.
"Well, now," said the king. "We've seen with our own eyes that you're a worthy champion, even if you do seem a mere lad. What you lack in strength you'll make up for in liveliness, I'll swear! So come back to table and have whatever you want!"
Ivan saw the opportunity and took it. "King Matfei, forgive me, but what I want most is a bed. I ran with a bear all morning."
The king could take a hint. "What kind of host am I! The man rescues my daughter and brings her home, my kingdom will be saved from the great Bitch, he even saves the sister of my master-at-arms, and I don't even think to give the man a bed! In fact, I'll give him my bed!"
"No, no, please!" Ivan protested. "How could I sleep, lying in the bed of a king?"
King Matfei laughed. "So what? When you marry my daughter, you'll be sleeping in the bed of a princess."
Ivan glanced at Katerina. She showed no sign of noticing her father's reference to the presumed consummation of their marriage. But this was a woman who knew how to speak her mind. About the marriage, she had nothing to say. She would do her duty, but she didn't have to relish it.
He had always thought that he would marry for love. Instead, it looked like his bride was going to take him out of grim duty.
Please, yes, let me go to bed. If I sleep, perhaps I'll wake up back in Cousin Marek's house, or in Kiev, or back in Tantalus in my own room. That's how these mad dreams end, isn't it?
The bed, when they led him there, offered no redolence of home. It was clearly a place of honor, a bedstead a full three feet off the ground. But the mattress was straw in a tick, the room was cold and stank of old sweat and urine, and it wouldn't get him any closer to home. There might be magic in this world, but none of it was in this room, and none of it was Ivan's to command.
It took Esther a day of shopping, but she found it in a mall in Syracuse: a clay basin, made in