The storm rustles the rotten thatch.

The girl went on through the wood, dogged.

The snow mounded on the horse’s flanks.

The clouds mounded up, buckling with unfallen snow.

Slaves stood with their lank hair wrapped in kerchiefs

She was waiting for the madcap monk.

Olga made the faintest noise of derision.

The fire warmed the room and willed it with a mellow glow.

“Be sure that Darinka gets a draught and a priest.”

The nurse’s stertorous breathing retreated, indignantly, down the hall.

The child had a fey gaiety that belied her pallor.

Marya had already overset three stools and a wine-cup and run to her uncle.

“Wretch, I was afraid for you.”

The monk had his black hair tonsured.

Olga’s women stared surreptitiously.

The priest stared up blankly at the rafters.

Sasha’s hands flexed against his bowl, sloshing soup.

The Grand Prince was resplendent in sable and saffron wool.

Dmitrii was a man of ferocious good humor, wanton and kind.

Brigands burned down several villages.

The women’s din might have disturbed a saint.

The women crowded and gawped.

Father Andrei was the hegumen of the monastery.

“I am sorry to hear about the burning, but this news has come betimes”.

Dmitrii had his faults, but indolence was not one of them.

There were robbers and fires in lost hamlets.

Sasha curbed his mare with steady hands.

The monk’s stolid face broke into a smile.

An interloper in a house that was not there.

The question was half gibe, half invitation, and full of a tender mockery.

Morozko’s stare swept her from tousled hair to booted feet.

The sunlight was slanting in and stippling the floor.

She began eating rapidly, to forestall him.

“Do you want me to ride at your side, nurse you with pap, and keep the snow off at night?”

Vasya’s mood went from apprehensive to giddy.

The smell of blood and beasts, offal and worse things, made her eyes water.

Beggars and prelates and artisans passed under her delighted gaze.

Her face had a rose’s sere beauty, when it is past its best and the petals are yellowing.

A flake of hay.

She had the puzzling feeling that she had routed him.

“Why tarry here?”

The line of the woman’s hair, black as gall against a slender back, caught at Vasya’s memory.

A mare neighed. The stallion rumbled back.

A man got near enough to lay a hand on the horse’s neck, but he sidled away.

The other girls, emboldened, crept out of the moonlight.

“Ride straight until dawn, always into the west. There you will find succor.”

Dmitrii was still snarled from sleep.

His sister made a convincing boy, with none of a woman’s diffidence.

Solovey went sideways instead of walking, almost cantering in place.

Vasya curried her horse.

Outside, people dotted the snow: villagers left destitute, hurled in the mercy of God.

Goaded, she dared to do dreaming what she would not awake.

Dmitrii snorted and quaffed his beer.

The monk’s voice raised in plainchant.

Vasya had kept Solovey near the back of the cavalcade.

His bemused but determined effort to keep her safe eased her loneliness.

She fought down a blush, though she had never been a girl for simpering.

Behind them lay sprawling palaces: towers and walkways, haphazardly painted.

Solovey turned a mollified ear; he was fond of compliments.

“Better a paddock for the horse now.”

“You might have pleaded sickness instead of agreeing to sup with Dmitrii.”

The Grand Prince is surrounded by men all vying for his favor.
Vasya shook away her misgivings and followed her brother.

She was tired of her mother’s fussing.

The tumult would turn the women’s attention away from the ravings of a handsome priest.

Sasha realized with some discomfiture that those were Sergei’s questions.

The monastery had grown rich with the trade of wax and furs and potash.

“Let’s talk in the cloister.”

A stallion bay in color.

She tried to speak proudly, but she knew he heard the hitch in her voice.

She felt naked, sure that at least one among all the throng must guffaw and say to his fellow, “Look! A
woman dressed as a boy!”

Kasyan came forward, spruce and calm.

“It might be a luster.”

“I may grovel all I like, but it won’t grow my coffers a jot.”

Her kaftan felt gaudy, ill-made thing against all this elegance.

“You have not said whence came your horse.”

“You are my ugly aunt Vasilisa,” she added, with a fair attempt at insouciance.

Vasya’s eye found the bakery unerringly.

He minced over to the fence.

A mare bugled at the stallion.

She was a chestnut, jauntly stockinged and taller than the other horses.

The horses stood still, swishing their tails, fetlock-deep in the snow.

Chelubey talked in his execrable Russian.

The sun sank in a panoply of purple and scarlet.

Vasya, half-smothered in the scrum of Dmitrii’s boyars, watch with curiosity.

Vasya did not know whether to laugh or be vexed.

Vasya, surfeited with beauty, was glad to go.

The grandchild of a morganatic marriage.

He was looking at her with a frank and unhappy bewilderment that smote her heart.

He was flinging bits of gristle to the dogs at his feet.

Suddenly Moscow stifled her.

Vasya shivered suddenly, cloaked in wolfskin and in the skeins of her black hair.
They shouted their ribald jokes.

One asked him how it would feel to be beaten by that stripling boy.

The ones who’d been about to leave sat back with suspicious alacrity.

She went to the antechamber to be doused in cold water, dried, salved, and dressed.

“I will not be taken from my children. I will denounce you first.”

She ensnared even holy Aleksandr Peresvet with her wiles.

She wed Ivan without demur, though she wept before her wedding night.

The wind shrieked and gibbered all around them.

Jagged, incoherent prayers rose to Sasha’s lips and broke off again, half-voiced.

In his eyes was a flash that would have had the prudent Andrei back to treble-bolt the door.

The bannik snorted and hurled a ladleful of scalding water.

The strong limbs were concealed beneath her encumbering dress.

There was another boon from that footrace, and she must use it.

He wore a bridle and his forefeet were hobbled.

Could Kasyan call fiends from Hell and make them answer?

The scanty hair of the ghost streamed.