Prince Ivan (23 page)

“Koshchey came against us with an army. That was the only time I saw how wise my father was in all the ways of strategy and tactics – and because I understood what he was doing, I realised how well he had taught
me
. It was, he told me later, how the antique Romans fought their battles. Each regiment, each squad, each man, moved like pieces on a chess-board. Koshchey’s host was beaten and scattered, and he was taken captive. Killing him was impossible, so my father locked him in that cell and spent his last years trying to learn the source of Koshchey’s death. Instead he took his own death from a fever, and from that day onwards the cell stayed shut…”

That was when her stiff, controlled demeanour crumbled. Ivan halted his horse, and dismounted, and held Mar’ya Morevna close, stroking her hair and making soft sounds of comfort until her weeping ended. “You did what you could,” he said, “and that was little enough.”

“I kept him in the empty dark like a rat in a hole,” she sobbed, “and I hoped he would die. There was no honour in it. When none of his followers offered rescue or ransom, I should at least have let him out to see clean sunshine and breathe fresh air.”

“And what would have happened then? Only what happened when
I
released him, except much sooner.”

“But
my
hands would have been clean!”

Ivan raised one of those hands to his lips and kissed it. “They’re clean enough for me. Don’t waste your tears on Koshchey, who neither needs them nor deserves them. What was done has been done – or undone, when I laid my meddling fingers to it.”

“So now you blame yourself, to make us both feel better.” Mar’ya Morevna smiled at her husband in the wan moonlight and dashed the tears from her eyes with her sleeve. “Idiot.” Ivan raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think you deserve blame at all?”

“Because from what you said when I met you, I thought that unlocking the door and giving the water had something to do with it.”

“Idiot,” she said again, and cuffed him lightly, lovingly on one cheek with the tips of her fingers. “Unlocking the door, yes. You removed the wards of cold iron, that was your fault, and you can be as guilty over it as pleases you – but what was done has been done or undone. As for all the rest, no. You were the only person in my kremlin who knew nothing of the evil locked in that cell. The only person not familiar with the sensation of self-will being drained away. When you opened the door was there a buzzing in your ears, a heavy sound like bees swarming?” With the hackles lifting on his neck, Ivan nodded. “So then. You were doing Koshchey’s bidding from that moment onward. He released himself: you were only the means by which he did it.”

Ivan heard that, and as he listened he felt the blood of anger pulsing up into his face. That a Tsar’s son should be made use of was almost beyond bearing, and that Koshchey should then thank him for the use… Saving the presence of Mar’ya Morevna, a skilful general and leader of rough soldiers but also his beloved wife and a high-born lady, Ivan would have sworn the vicious oaths he’d heard Guard-Captain Akimov employ when the world was against him. Instead he clenched his fists and ground his teeth until the impulse subsided.

“So Koshchey’s not just a necromancer but a cheat and a liar as well.” And before Mar’ya Morevna could stop him, he shouted, “I wish he was here now, so I could tell him to his face!”

There was a sudden shrill roaring of storm winds, and a beating of hoofs that came from nowhere and everywhere, and from the midst of that sound and fury a cold, thin arm snatched Mar’ya Morevna from the saddle and the circle of her husband’s arms.

“I am here, Prince Ivan,” said a cold, thin voice. “Tell me.”

Koshchey the Undying sat astride his black horse in the meagre moonlight, with Mar’ya Morevna flung helpless across his saddle, and he was laughing. Trickles of blood glistened bright on the horse’s heaving sides where Koshchey’s whip had split its skin, and more blood gleamed around the places where the long, sharp spurs on his boots had raked and furrowed its sleek flanks. Its darkness was streaked with white foam, there was more foam around its muzzle and the jagged bronze bit, and its eyes burned red as a blacksmith’s forge.

“I warned you once, Prince Ivan,” said Koshchey the Undying. “And then I warned you again. I had not thought a third warning was needed.” He stared thoughtfully for a few seconds as he wound the lash of his whip around the stock, then in a single swift movement reversed it, swung it, and clubbed Ivan with the butt. “Consider it given.”

Ivan reeled in his saddle then crashed onto the ground. The black horse’s blood was smeared across his face, mingled with his own where the whipstock had smashed against his nose. Though he could barely see through the white pain and red rage burning in his eyes, he staggered to his feet and pulled his sabre from its scabbard.

“Why, little Prince, what will you do with so terrible a sword?” Koshchey leaned forward with his elbows on Mar’ya Morevna’s back as if resting on a table.

“I’ll lay it to your scrawny neck, you Undying bastard!” Ivan’s voice was low in his throat, for he was so far gone in fury that he was past the need to shout. “Come down off your horse and fight like a man!”

Koshchey stroked his beard and smiled, wider and wider until his teeth glistened like tombstones in the moonlight. “Why should I? You spoke the reason yourself, Prince Ivan. I am Koshchey the Undying. Men die, but I do not die. I am not a man. I need not fight like one.”

Ivan shook the pain-blindness from his eyes and leapt. His sabre was already whirring through the air as his feet left the ground, and he felt the jolt of it striking home before he came down again. The blade drove so deep that its hilt wrenched from his fingers, and though the jolt of his landing ran through all his hurt bones and sent tears from his eyes again, he knew he had struck as well as he was able.

But not well enough.

With one thin, long-fingered hand Koshchey lifted Mar’ya Morevna by the scruff of the neck and the hair of the head, and held her so she could see what Ivan had done. His sabre had hit Koshchey in the angle between neck and shoulder and sheared down almost to the middle of his chest, where its silvered hilt stuck out like a brooch. Koshchey grasped hilt and blade together with his free hand and drew it from his body as if from its proper sheath. And all that horrid while, he laughed.

“That was your last chance, Prince Ivan,” said Koshchey the Undying, throwing the unstained sabre down at Ivan’s feet. “Will you be convinced, or will you try again?”

Ivan looked at the blade, gleaming bright and bloodless in the moonlight. He looked at Mar’ya Morevna, hanging like a kitten in Koshchey’s huge grasp. And he looked at Koshchey’s body, where a dreadful wound had neither bled nor hurt and now was no more than torn cloth. And he was indeed convinced, that if he moved a single finger towards his sword he would die.

Slowly, slowly, Tsarevich Ivan sank to his knees and bowed his head.

“Good,” said Koshchey the Undying. “I have grown weary of this game. My patience is at an end, and there will be no more warnings. Go away, Prince Ivan, and forget Mar’ya Morevna – or say your prayers, make peace with your God, and look out for your head.” He flung Mar’ya Morevna back across his horse’s withers, then turned and spurred away.

Clods of earth spattered Ivan’s face, but only when the sound of hoofbeats had faded to the silence of the lonely steppe did he collapse forward onto his hands. Any who chanced by might have thought he was weeping until they looked more closely; then they would have seen a fair-haired young man with blood on his face, in grubby clothing that had once been fine and princely, rending grass and soil with both hands as if it was the flesh of his worst enemy. Had they remained, they might have seen that same young man get to his feet with a sabre in his earth-stained hand, and stare at steel that gleamed beneath the moon, and smile a smile that had no place on the face of one so young.

It was a smile more right and proper for one steeped in evil over long and cruel years, and it was the sort of smile that would make the wise and the wary sign themselves with the life-giving cross and hurry away, glad such a smile was not meant for them.

*

A soft wind sighed from the north across the wide white world, carrying the chill of Siberia over Mother Russia and with it the first breath of winter. Prince Ivan felt its icy touch even through his furs and he shivered, but otherwise he didn’t move. He was hiding where he had hidden before, snuggled into the forest shadows within easy sight of the dark kremlin that was home to Koshchey the Undying and prison to his wife Mar’ya Morevna.

He lay low and still and silent, and he watched.

All was as it had been that earlier time. Nothing moved but the wind and the grasses combed by that wind; nothing breathed but Ivan and his horse. He hadn’t seen Koshchey ride from his fortress, but neither the eyes in his head nor the eyes of his mind saw anything to suggest the necromancer was within. And if he was…

Ivan’s hand closed tightly on the hilt of his
shashka
sabre. It was the same sword that had proven so useless before, yet not the same at all, and the broad straight sword at the other side of his belt was the same one handed down through generations of the Khorlov family, yet it too was different. The blades were deadly now as they had never been before, a deadliness that could be smelt by those whose nostrils recognised such things. There was a tang of acids and aromatic spirits, a perfume of herbs and plants left well alone by the wise, a faint whiff of corruption and rot, and a little more even than that. Some spells left an aura like a snail-track on the surface of the mind, and what had been done to both swords left them supernaturally crisscrossed with glistening trails like a damp stone wall by moonlight.

Moonlight that was at the full and a little past it.

Ivan had spent much of his own private store of gold to lay those fearful charms into the blades, and it took nearly all the rest to find and buy the distillate whose evil fragrance prickled the air. Most of all, it had cost much of his dwindling honour to finally uncork the small stoneware jar and smear the lethal tarry gum within onto the enchanted steel. Once that was done it was done, but those scents hung about him as a reminder of exactly what had
been
done, so he was unable to forget it. Perhaps it was the touch of that cold Siberian wind that made him shiver.

But Ivan knew in his heart that it was something else.

The hours had flickered by as he rode Burka across the steppe, hours that neither he nor Mar’ya Morevna could spare. In those hours Ivan heard again and again the words of Koshchey the Undying:
Forget
Mar’ya
Morevna
,
or
say
your
prayers
,
and
make
peace
with
your
God
,
and
look
out
for
your
head
!

Tsarevich Ivan was many things – careless, foolish, forgetful, and desperately stubborn – but a coward frightened by words was not among them. Had there been more hours or even days before the dark of the moon he would have ridden in the other direction, searching for his brothers by marriage, Princes who were sons of a sorcerer, Princes who could have helped him. But there were no more days, no more hours and finally no more time.

All he had was his own knowledge and some amount of bravery, all bolstered by love for his lady. So Ivan said what prayers he knew, signing himself many times with the life-giving cross in the hope that this time, unlike all the other times soldiers had used it, it might protect him against edge and point. Afterwards he made confession to a confused priest in a small village, a gentle holy man who would most likely never know the reasons behind what he had heard and absolved.

Then he found a blacksmith and bought an iron collar to wear around his throat. It chafed him now as it had chafed him then, for the cold iron was a full finger thick and rested against the back of his neck like a reminder of the blade it was meant to guard against. Perhaps it would and perhaps it wouldn’t, but the blacksmith’s mother had guessed its purpose and held it in her hands and said softly, “May this protect you for your mother’s sake, as I wish it might protect my own dear son.”

So here he was, armed with poisoned steel and dark magic but guarded by cold iron and a mother’s blessing. Ivan hoped they wouldn’t cancel each other out.

Afternoon became evening and day became dusk and Ivan made his decision. If Koshchey was somewhere near his kremlin, they would fight sooner. If he was far away, they would fight later, and this time if Mar’ya Morevna reached her books of magic before Koshchey caught up with them, perhaps they might not fight at all. Whatever lay written in her father’s hand between the covers of those books had kept Koshchey secured in his chains for years and, if it had been used once, it could be used again.

Ivan rose to his feet, released Burka’s reins from the branch where he was tethered, and rode out again to save his wife.

*

The kremlin was as empty as before, save for the echoes of Burka’s unmuffled hoofs ringing from every wall and down every corridor. Ivan had guessed that if he was overheard here, it would happen no matter what he did to prevent it. So there were only shoes of good forged iron on his horse’s hoofs as he rode into the skull-cobbled courtyard of Koshchey’s kremlin. Instead of waiting in the stone-carven gloom for Mar’ya Morevna he swung down from Burka’s saddle, took mace in one hand and an envenomed sword in the other, and went searching.