Vasilisa!” The sharp, stern voice of the elderly woman cut through the quiet noise of the outdoors.
Indeed, so commanding was the voice of Nyanya Mariana that even the birds seemed to halt their singing for fear of inciting her matronly wrath.
Vasilisa of Belnopyl gave a frown as she looked away from her window to the door, where the wrinkled visage of Mariana observed her with disapproval - a look the princess was more than familiar with. In fact, she often wondered if perhaps the elderly Mariana came into the world with that expression already etched into her face by the gods.
The mental image of a wrinkly, sour-faced baby brought a small smile to Vasilisa’s face, prompting a scowl from the Nyanya. “What are you laughing about now, girl? The Horde’s posol will be arriving at any moment and you are dreaming of boys and laughing!”
“And why does it matter to me, nyanya?” said Vasilisa, her voice trailing off as the hunched Mariana opened the door to her chambers fully and entered. Behind the matron trailed five handmaidens - the servants of Vasilisa’s mother - each of them bearing a variety of deep-blue, white, and red dresses whose cloth-of-gold embroidery shimmered in the light of the early afternoon.
“I thought Father would be holding court without me again!” Vasilisa exclaimed, her words seeming to fall on deaf ears as Mariana began to order the handmaidens about.
The posol, the ambassador of the Great Khormchak Horde, seemed almost more of a primordial concept than an actual person in her mind. A dark reminder of the nomad yoke who arrived every few years to demand tributes of gold in exchange for a new Charter - permission graciously bestowed by the Horde to let the Prince of Belnopyl rule as a humble deputy to the Great Khan. Her father - perhaps rightfully terrified the Khormchak ambassador might take a liking to his only child and daughter or demand her as a hostage - had always seen fit to keep Vasilisa as far away from the envoy and his guards as possible. Try as she might over the years, she had never been able to sneak more than a single, hazy glance of the posol’s entourage last time he had come - already a half-remembered image in her mind.
Though the last time the ambassador had visited, Vasilisa was just barely tall enough to climb up onto the stone windowsill in her room. Now she was a grown woman of twenty summers - and already well into marriageable age, as her father constantly bemoaned.
Suddenly, the arrival of Mariana and her beautiful dresses grew an uncomfortable pit of dread in Vasilisa’s gut.
“Well, this time you finally get to see the envoy yourself!” sighed Mariana as she stood Vasilisa up. Vasilisa towered over the older woman, who gave a disapproving tsk as she studied the princess. “Your shoulders - they are like a man’s! And by the gods, of course you had to inherit great knyaz Igor’s height…”
With a click of her fingers and a grimace from Mariana, the exhausting round-and-round of dress fittings commenced.
The silken red-and-gold? “No, too short.”
The white-and-red? “Too tight, you’ll embarrass her before the posol!”
Blue with the golden flowers? “If Vasya’s shoulders weren’t like a bull’s, maybe.”
Eventually, Mariana’s discerning eye finally settled on an emerald green dress, embroidered with birds-of-paradise and belted tightly as humanly possible around the waist. On top, a purple brocade kaftan trimmed in gold and bearing her father’s symbol - a white bear beneath the ancestral Elder Oak Tree - on each sleeve.
Vasilisa tried to probe Mariana as she silently worked to restitch the dress, but the focused nyanya paid her ward no mind. Every question was rebuffed either with silence or a warning of, “Stop moving or you’ll be pricked!”
The careful, measured silence of Mariana’s work grew from minutes to what seemed like hours, and was only interrupted by the sound of labored, jingling footsteps followed by a heavy knock on the door. Chainmail, heavyset frame. Ilya.
The booming voice of one of her father’s druzhinniks - his bodyguards - sounded muffled through the heavy oak door. “My good lady Vasilisa, your father requests your presence in court soon.”
“In a moment!” called Mariana as she drew her bony hands into a jewelry chest and withdrew the final piece to the royal, imperial even, figure that Vasilisa of Belnoypl had been transformed into: a jeweled garland bought from a merchant in the distant southern city-state of Rondelle, set with fine emeralds and rubies unearthed from the frigid, unforgiving mountains of Svistovia.
The garland weighed heavily on Vasilisa’s head, its glittering gemstones and silver filigree advertising both wealth and maidenhood to suitors - and Vasilisa’s unease only grew worse. Mariana’s firm grasp on her wrist as she led her out of her room felt like an iron manacle - her mother’s handmaidens her watchful, silk-clad wardens. She felt her skin begin to crawl, her heart thumping so anxiously in her chest she suddenly felt the urge to vomit on the stone floors of her room. Seriously, is this it? Is this how my life is going to be from now on? Is it all over, so fast?
Ilya’s armored form awaited them at the doorway. Her father’s closest bodyguard looked almost comical with his oversized chest and short legs, but few dared to laugh at a man whose favorite pastime was ripping tree trunks in half, and who in his glory days was fabled to have killed a Khormchak’s steed with a single punch. Ilya’s long, drooping whiskers twitched up as he gave Vasilisa a grandfatherly smile, beckoning her to follow him through the manor whilst Mariana made herself scarce.
Ilya didn’t take her hand, but it only made the sense of looming dread even worse as she walked down the hall with him - the only noise to fill the screaming silence the sound of Ilya’s labored breathing and the jingling of chainmail rings. At least there was some sense of futility, of being forcefully guided against her will when Mariana had been holding her wrist in her iron grip. But now her mind was racing at a thousand thoughts a second while she alone walked behind Ilya, her every step guiding her closer and closer to seeming oblivion even as her mind screamed to stop, halt, run, go anywhere but here.
Is this how it happens? A wife to some nomad? A life in the steppes, wallowing in filth, drinking horse’s milk, and scheming against a hundred other wives? She tried to silence the thoughts, silence her mind, but the immutable tide of thoughts just kept on coming, kept on rising…until she felt as though she would drown entirely under the dark weight of it all. But it might not be all bad - mother lived and breathed such a life before she married father. Idiot! She was a khan’s daughter, and unmarried. You’ll be someone’s - another wife to be hidden behind veils and in tents like how Ilya said. Ilya…
“Ilya?” Her voice suddenly sounded so small. She set aside the deafening thoughts, then spoke more firmly, “Ilya, what do you know about this posol? I’ve heard much about him, but I’ve never seen him, much less met him.”
Her father’s man grunted, one gloved hand clenching into a fist near the size of Vasilisa’s head. “That wretch- I mean, the honorable ambassador normally comes and goes within the day. Your father and I usually have his money all ready to go so he, busy man that he is, can depart as quickly as possible.”
“Is that not the case this time?”
“No, unfortunately,” muttered Ilya darkly as he rubbed the back of his neck, adjusted his gilded helmet. “This envoy ah, he and his men are planning to stay as our guests in this manor for a while. Your father’s told me to say little else on the matter, my lady.”
“I see.”
“Indeed.”
And just like that, the screaming silence resumed. As she tried to think of something, anything else to say or ask - even just to fill the silence and distract her from thoughts of her future as a steppe wife - they had already arrived at the doors to the great hall.
The two guards flanking the entrance gave a curt nod to Ilya, and a deep, reverent bow to Vasilisa as they opened the doors. She knew the guards - Stavr and Pyotr -, grew up playing with them on the banks of the Cherech river near the city. Whenever she passed by she’d usually hear the hasty tail end of some crass joke between the two, or an argument about who owes whom money from dice games. There was brotherly warmth in their eyes, then. Now, they looked upon her as if she were already some foreign princess - as if the days when the two boys wrestled in the mud trying to impress her had just been a figment of her imagination. She felt alien - home suddenly no longer felt like home, but instead a crushing, suffocating temple of stone and wood, filled with half-familiar faces that blurred before her mind.
The doors shut behind them with a muted slam.
The great hall where her father usually heard the complaints and concerns of the city’s foremost merchants and landowners was transformed into a great, nauseating spectacle. Colorful streamers danced across the wooden rafters, great crimson carpets cut along the stone floors and, standing like watchful sentries above it all, the towering idols of the gods.
Mokosh, Mother of the Earth. Guide my destiny. But the Earth-Mother’s serene face, carved from wood and decorated with silver flowers, offered no words of wisdom.
Perun, Lord of Lightning and Heaven. Steel my will. But the Lightning-Lord’s divine visage, cast in gold with a silver mustache, offered no words of comfort nor inspiration. Only the cold certainty of metal.
Igor of Belnopyl stood at the raised platform bearing his and his wife’s thrones, her father’s graying mustache hopping up and down as he barked orders at the servants. Behind her father stood an artisan working on a long vertical board, and Vasilisa’s heart sank as she spotted his subject: a life-size painting of herself, dressed in maiden-whites with two drilled holes in place of her eyes. Satisfied with the artisan’s work, her father beckoned forth two servants who lifted the board and slotted into place over a recessed alcove in the wall nearby her parents’ thrones.
Igor’s stern gaze broke into a warm smile as he spotted Vasilisa approaching. His heeled boots clacked loudly on the stone floors as he drew forth to take Vasilisa’s hands into his own.
“Ah, Vasilisa…you look as beautiful as ever,” he said as he gave her a hasty look over, his eyes never meeting hers. Indeed, beautiful enough for the posol? Beautiful enough for whatever khan you’d have your only daughter marry?
Though he normally stood a few inches taller than Vasilisa, the Prince of Belnopyl seemed to have deflated today, his hunched, defeated posture bringing him level with his daughter’s face as she studied him in turn. Her father looked drained, his skin an unhealthy-looking gray, his face beset with deep worry lines and an old jagged scar along his jaw where a Khormchak’s saber nearly severed his head in twain.
Does it hurt, Father? Giving your daughter as a bride to your old foes? Vasilisa bit down the urge to yell at her father. They take your gold for tribute, your people as slaves, and now your only child and daughter for a bride.
“Where is mother? Will she be with us in court?” At the very least, perhaps her mother might be willing to say the hard words Igor seemed unwilling to say.
Her father’s shoulders slumped. Ah, perhaps there is at least one who disapproves of this match.
Vasilisa’s mother - Cirina - hailed from the distant Hungry Steppes to the east. The daughter of the Quanli tribe’s khan, her mother was cut from a different, rougher cloth than most other princes’ wives. Mariana would scowl in disapproval whenever Vasilisa asked her to repeat stories of how her mother rode at the Quanli vanguard with her ten brothers, and how she led her own mounted archers in the field against the dreaded Qarakesek before marrying into the Belnopyl nobility.
Even in wedded life, Vasilisa’s mother held little patience for courtly life: preferring to ride out across the steppes and falcon-hunt over tending to the household and ordering servants about. When Vasilisa expressed an interest in her mother’s old life as a Khormchak Noyan, Cirina had excitedly taught her daughter to wield the dagger and saber - to protect her womanly honor, and to avenge her future husband should he ever fall in battle.
If her honor must ever be defended we have guards and Ilya for that! She recalled her father blustering to her mother when he heard of Vasilisa’s short-lived swordplay training.
And what if there should be a time when there are no guards? Her mother had replied. You cannot keep her under lock and key forever. What will she do when there are no guards; scream and cry whilst brigands have their way with her? No, my daughter will fight - both for her honor, and the honor of her family, including you, husband.
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It was a slim prospect - it seemed as though her destiny was already set out - but perhaps she could convince her mother to speak some sense into her father. Her father would yell and thrust his chest out as he always did, but more often than not he caved to her whims - always keeping in mind his wife’s brothers and father who still reigned at the head of a savage steppe army.
But then again, what would she do if even her mother were to be resigned to this wretched union? Or worse still, as a quiet voice in the back of her mind whispered, what if this whole idea was her mother’s to begin with? Cirina of Belnopyl was as ruthless and seasoned in politics as in battle - a clever advisor to her brash father who thought only with the mind of a warrior - but Vasilisa had always occupied a special place in her heart that even Cirina’s husband only fleetingly shared - a place of true, affectionate love. It was never Cirina who had pressed Vasilisa into courting the sons of powerful princes, nor Cirina who drove her to practice at weaving and the harp.
Vasilisa’s expression hardened with her resolve to seek out her mother.
To her question, her father sighed, “Your mother will be here shortly, she has been busy organizing the festivities for the posol and his…merry band. But never you mind! When he arrives, you are to be nothing but the finest example of womanly virtue in his presence - you are no longer a child, and the posol is a discerning type.”
As he spoke, her father’s tired expression grew more and more grim with every mention of the posol - as if merely speaking the very title itself was like a bitter poison he had to endure.
“You’re slouching. Straighten yourself.” Her father pushed her shoulders back with his hands as he too proudly rose to his full height. “Turn around. Yes, good, Mariana’s needle-hand remains fine as always. You look-”
“Regal.” Cirina’s voice floated across the great hall from the archway where she stood, light as a feather but with a commanding presence and tinge of danger that demanded the attention of every person in the room. Unlike the rest of the Belnopyl nobility, today her mother wore the clothes of the Khormchak aristocracy - a brilliant-blue silk vest, a pale-gray skirt bearing golden embroidery, and a jade charm hanging from her belt. Where Vasilisa inherited her father’s height and complexion, she inherited her mother’s hazel eyes and black hair which was tied into two long braids that fell around her waist. “You are a vision, Vasilisa. A vision of beauty, and tempered with strength. I could not ask for more from the gods.”
“She could stand to show some refinement, as her mother.” said Igor, tucking his thumb into his belt as he beheld his wife. “But of course, she still has much to learn.”
Cirina moved across the hall with the grace of a dancer, taking her husband’s hand into her own as the two of them looked over Vasilisa. For a moment, all thoughts of being carried off to the steppe left Vasilisa’s mind.
Then, her mother looked to her father. “I think it is best I speak with Vasilisa privately, my love.”
Igor gave a nod, then stepped away to speak with a small gathering of long-bearded merchants that had slowly made their way into the great hall. Following her mother, Vasilisa stepped through the archway where Cirina had appeared, finding herself inside a small alcove where courtiers might speak without drawing unwanted ears.
For a brief moment, there was nothing but silence. Then, her mother spoke, her gaze hardened, her expression serious. “You know your father and I love you more than anything else in the whole world.”
“Then why are we doing this? Why are you presenting me before the posol?”
“It is a test, Vas’ka. The posol will want to see the heiress to Belnopyl - will want to see who will reign once your father and I are gone.”
The scratching anxiety building within Vasilisa’s chest took on a new focus. “What do you mean? Surely my husband will be the one to take over - Father’s always been pushing for marriage. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
Her mother’s brow furrowed, whether in confusion or upset at Vasilisa’s comment, she could not guess. But before she could respond, the sound of the heralds’ cry and the noise of approaching procession broke the still silence of the alcove. Her mother took her hand, held it tight.
“I need you to be strong, Vasilisa. There will come a time when you will be without us, and I need you to be strong in our stead, in our name, and for your own honor.” Suddenly, there was something cold in Vasilisa’s hands. As her mother let go, she uncurled her fingers to find a piece of black crystal in her palm. It was about the size of her thumb, and its jagged edges so sharp they threatened to cut into the skin of her hand with even the slightest errant movement.
But the strangest thing wasn’t the sharpness of the crystal. In the afternoon sun that filtered through a thin slit in the alcove wall, the crystal seemed to swallow all light around it: a void of darkness given form. She found herself staring deep into the darkness of the crystal - within it lay no beginning, and no end. Only the great, bleak, nothing.
A second blast from distant horns marked the posol’s procession drawing ever closer to her father’s manor, snapping Vasilisa from her reverie. Her mother, still standing in the archway, cocked her head towards the great hall which had begun to fill with courtiers, servants, and the city’s foremost merchants, all gathered to bow before the Great Khormchak Horde’s envoy.
“What does this mean? Where did you get this?” blurted Vasilisa as she gingerly nudged aside her kaftan and placed the terrifying crystal into a small pouch tied at her belt.
“When the posol arrives, you will know. You, your father, and I have much to speak of, my little sun. But know this: the Khormchaks are allies on this day, and the days to come. Not our foes.”
With that, her mother disappeared around the archway, silent as the breeze.
A third blast from the horns, this time from the inner walls of the city. The procession drew ever closer. Vasilisa re-adjusted her kaftan and hurried out into the great hall, carefully flitting past the great hall’s many guests and slipping past behind her parents’ thrones. If not to give her away for marriage, then why all this preparation? And why did her mother, normally disdainful of the evasive language of her husband’s courtiers, now speak to confuse her own daughter?
Vasilisa stepped carefully into a small doorway adjacent to the wooden wall behind her, and then into the alcove covered by her painted portrait. Within the alcove, the noisy whispers and chattering of the gathered crowd became muted. She could barely even make out the rumblings of her father who sat a few meters away, stroking his mustache anxiously.
“The Qarakesek…they were the enemies of your people, weren’t they?”
Her mother responded, “Once, perhaps. But did your father and his father before him not war with the princes of Gatchisk and Pemil? And yet, the three of them took to the field as allies against Tsagaandai-khan-”
“Those were extraordinary circumstances - back then, your people and others driven from the steppes made it sound like the end of the world.” Igor huffed, shifting in his seat and leaning closer to Cirina.
“Who’s to say these ‘extraordinary circumstances’ are only to happen once?” her mother responded, and Vasilisa strained her ears to listen as Cirina leaned closer towards her husband. “But this time is different. It’s not just a matter of a khan needing reassurances from his vassals…”
And Vasilisa could hear no more. She wanted to stomp her feet in frustration. What is this game of cat-and-mouse? Why was her mother toying with her? She felt her cheeks flush with anger.
But then, all thoughts of frustration with her mother evaporated as the fourth blast from the heralds sounded, and the heavy doors to the great hall opened with a groan.
Vasilisa squinted her eyes, watching with bated breath as the heralds quietly entered the hall and scurried off to the sides. The ambassador of the Khormchak Horde stepped into view.
The posol seemed to stand a head taller than every other man in the room, yet he walked with such grace he seemed to almost float across the floor of the great hall, his head lowered. His skin was a light copper color, sharply contrasted against his long pitch-black robe that dragged on the carpet as he walked, concealing everything but his face. What caught Vasilisa’s attention the most, however, was how long his hair was: men from Klyazma rarely kept their hair longer than the shoulders - any longer was deemed too feminine. But the envoy's hair, raven-black and streaked with white, reached well past his waist and looked lovingly cared for.
The posol drew closer, and behind him followed his three guards: figures clad in the same dark robes as their master, faces obscured by beautiful masked helmets depicting a harsh, demonic visage, and bearing silver-chased sabers that dangled from their belts. The first thing that struck Vasilisa was how young the envoy seemed - he could be no older than thirty. From what talk she was able to wrestle from Ilya in years past, she had been expecting a decrepit little man old enough to be her grandfather - for the same envoy had been collecting tributes from Belnopyl and the rest of the border cities since Vasilisa was just a child, no older than three. The posol and his guards’ style of dress struck her as strange as well - despite Mariana’s stories of the Khormchaks wearing the severed heads of animals and cladding themselves in the flayed skins of their enemies, Vasilisa always looked to her mother for an inkling of how Khormchak nobility dressed. The clothes of the posol and his entourage seemed too foreign, too simple.
She cast her eyes away from the foreigner to look at her parents, and her blood ran cold as she saw their own confusion. Her father was sat up straight, one hand clenched tightly around the armrest of his throne. Her mother’s expression was cold as ice, but Vasilisa could see the unmistakable hints of fear playing across her face. It wasn’t just her parents - with her gaze torn away from the majestic and terrible ambassador, Vasilisa realized how the entire great hall seemed to fall unnervingly quiet. Merchants, courtiers, and even guards’ heads turned to follow the walking posol in silent, paralyzed awe.
As if put under a spell. Vasilisa thought. Gods, what kind of terrifying being did we invite into our home?
The posol walked silently to the end of the great hall and lowered himself to one knee before Igor and Cirina. His robes pooled unnaturally on the floor, seeming more liquid than any cloth - like dark ink slowly spreading across the bright crimson carpet.
Her father was the first to speak, bolting up from his throne as he swept his ermine cape to the side to reveal a straight sword tucked into his belt. “You are not the Great Khan's envoy! Who are you, and how did my guards allow you to enter?”
As he spoke, her father gestured to the guardsmen standing at the far sides of the great hall. But no tide of ringing armor and gleaming halberds descended on the foreigners - the guardsmen continued to stand deathly still at their posts, as they had when the black-clothed man and his guards had first arrived. It was then that Vasilisa realized that not a single one of the guests nor guards had so much as uttered a whisper, nor even shifted slightly in the last minute. They seemed truly frozen - the only movement in the hall came from the streamers that drifted lazily in the breeze.
“Move!” roared her father at the stone-still guards, his bull-like neck swelling and turning red with the effort. “Seize them, you damn dogs-”
“Chirlan.”
Vasilisa’s mother spoke, her voice just barely loud enough to hear.
The foreigner’s bowed head slowly rose to look up at Cirina. He bore a twisted smile on his lips that seemed to sit wrong on his face - as if he were some creature merely wearing the skin of a handsome man. As he glanced up towards her mother, Vasilisa saw his eyes glimmer in the light of the sun: two pools of molten gold with black pinpoints in their center that seemed to hold all the dark knowledge and secrets of the world, secrets which he delighted in withholding from them all.
“Khariija.” responded Chirlan, his voice high and soft like a singer’s. “You have changed so little.”
“Call me Cirina. It is the name I chose.” her mother interjected, her voice now sharp as a knife and dripping with malice like Vasilisa had never known her mother to hold. Something seemed to have taken control of her mother - something dangerous and vast that caused even Igor to shrink slightly.
From within the alcove, Vasilisa stood as still as death - afraid to even breathe, afraid a single false move might cause the tension that hung in the air like a taut, creaking rope to snap.
“What do I care? You are you - whether Khariija or Cirina - and you have not changed one bit,” chuckled Chirlan. “How long have we not seen each other? It's scary to even think…”
“I had hoped to never see you again.”
“But I was looking for you…”
“And I was not.” Cirina breathed, and suddenly a Khormchak knife - long and broad at the hilt, but needle-like at its curved tip - was in her mother’s hands. “So leave. Or do you need another gift to send you off for good?”
Her grip on the knife was firm, trained, confident. Igor’s own sword - a wonderful gold and ivory-decorated blade bearing the symbols of the seven gods - gave a soft metallic hiss as it left his sheath and her father stood firm.
Even in their middle age, both her mother and father were some of the greatest warriors Vasilisa had ever seen. Each of them was able to humiliate any three guardsmen in her father’s druzhina who dared to try their hand at sparring their liege lord or lady in swordplay. So then why did this unarmed foreigner, this Chirlan, seem to loom so large over both of her parents that Vasilisa felt as though they were all but sheep staring down a starving wolf, defiant in the face of utter despair?
“Ah, but there is just one gift I want, Cirina, and then I shall be gone forevermore.” Chirlan slowly rose to his feet, and the long sleeves of his robe seemed to fall away to reveal arms wrapped in twisted golden jewelry, and a pair of fine gauntlets cast from golden filigree whose fingers ended in pointed, curved talons like those of a steppe eagle.
Suddenly, those golden eyes pierced straight past Vasilisa’s mother, past the wooden wall behind the thrones, and straight into Vasilisa’s soul. Chirlan's piercing stare twisted through her mind like a knife. Vasilisa felt the floor suddenly begin to shift beneath her feet, and she struggled to brace herself against the painted board. Her heart hammered deafeningly in her chest as she fell forward, out of the alcove and into the throne room.
What’s happening? She wondered, her mind seeming to take flight from her heavy, weary body. What’s happening? Where are you taking me?
“Home. Where you have always belonged,” said Chirlan as he spread his taloned fingers wide and drew closer.
The soft crimson carpets rushed up to catch her. She could hear her mother and father shouting something and tried to cry out to them, but her voice was failing, choking in her throat.
The last thought that burned through the mind of Vasilisa of Belnopyl was of the birdsong she had heard in the early morning, already an eternity past.
Now I will never hear it again.