The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) - Katherine Arden Page 0,18

She heard the Bear’s sigh of satisfaction. Above all, her mother had said, he is a lover of armies, of battles, and of violence.

Holding her skirts, Varvara ran, back to the lights, the chaos of the posad and thence up the hill of the kremlin. As she ran, she heard the Bear’s voice in her ears, though he had made no move to follow her. “I must thank you again, No-Eyes, that the little witch is dead, and my promise is unbroken.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Varvara whispered between clenched teeth. “Not yet.”

5.

Temptation

THE CAGE COLLAPSED IN A shower of sparks, just as Sasha and Dmitrii battered through the ring of people and began to break the fire apart with their smoldering spear-hafts. The chaos rose to a fever pitch.

In the confusion, Konstantin Nikonovich slipped away, hood drawn up over the deep gold of his hair. The air was hazed with smoke; the maddened crowd jostled him, not knowing who he was. By the time the men had scattered the logs of the fire, Konstantin had passed through the posad unremarked, was making his soft-footed way back to the monastery.

She didn’t even deny her guilt, he thought, hurrying through the half-frozen slush. She had set fire to Moscow. It was the people’s righteous wrath that had swept her up. What blame could attach to him, a holy man?

She was dead. He’d taken the full measure of his vengeance.

She had been seventeen years old.

He barely made it to his cell and shut the door before he broke into a fit of sobbing laughter. He laughed at all those nodding, adoring, snarling faces out in Moscow, taking every word of his as gospel, laughed at the memory of her face, the fear in her eyes. He even laughed at the icons on the wall, their rigidity and their silence. Then he found his laughter turning to tears. Sounds of anguish tore from his throat, quite against his will, until he had to thrust a fist into his mouth to muffle the noise. She was dead. It had been easy, in the end. Perhaps the demon, the witch, the goddess had only existed in his mind.

He tried to master himself. The people had been as clay in his hands, softened as they were in the heat of Moscow’s fire. It would not always be so easy. If Dmitrii Ivanovich discovered that Konstantin had raised the mob, he would see him as a threat to his authority at least, if not the murderer of his cousin. Konstantin did not know if his new-made influence would be enough to counter the Grand Prince’s wrath.

He was so busy weeping, pacing, thinking and trying not to think, that he failed to notice the shadow on the wall, until it spoke.

“Crying like a maiden?” murmured a voice. “On tonight, of all nights? What are you doing, Konstantin Nikonovich?”

Konstantin leaped back with a sound not far from a scream. “It is you,” he said, breathing like a child afraid of the dark. And then, “No.” And finally, “Where are you?”

“Here,” said the voice.

Konstantin twisted round, but saw only his own shadow, cast by the lamp.

“No, here.” This time the voice seemed to come from his icon of the Mother of God. The woman beneath the gold icon-cover leered at him. She was not the Virgin at all, but Vasya with her red-black hair shaken loose, her face one-eyed and scarred with fire. Konstantin bit back another scream.

Then the voice said a third time, from his own cot, laughing, “No, here, poor fool.”

Konstantin looked and saw…a man.

Man? The creature on his bed looked like a man; such a man as had never before been seen in a monastery. He lounged smiling upon the bed, hair tumbled, feet incongruously bare. But his shadow—his shadow had claws.

“Who are you?” asked Konstantin, breathing fast.

“Did you never see my face before?” asked the creature. “Ah, no, at Midwinter you saw the beast and the shadow, but not the man.” He got slowly to his feet. He and Konstantin were nearly of a height. “Never mind. You know my voice.” He cast down his eyes like a girl. “Do I please you, man of God?” The unscarred side of his mouth twisted in a half-smile.

Konstantin was pressed hard against the door, his fist against his mouth. “I remember. You are the devil.”

The man—the chyert—looked up at that, single eye alight. “I? Men call me the Bear, Medved, when they call me anything at all. Have