"You'd be surprised."
"Unless your land is underground," said Sergei.
Ivan laughed. "No, Sergei, I'm not from hell."
"Then from where? Heaven?"
"I'm no angel, either."
"I wondered. Your skin is so smooth. You have hands like a baby."
Ivan looked at his hands as if for the first time. "I wish I could fly, though. That would be convenient."
"You're not a saint, either?"
Ivan rolled his eyes.
Sergei realized something, having seen Ivan look at his smooth hands. "You've never even helped with a harvest, have you?"
"No. In my land we... we have... I don't know the words. But very, very few people help with the harvest."
"It must take them forever to scythe the grain."
"No, no, you see, the scythes run by themselves."
"So you're a sorcerer!"
"No, it's not sorcery at all, it's more like... when you pull a cart, you don't have to pull each wheel, you pull the whole cart and the wheels come with it. We just have better carts. They pull themselves."
Sergei had to laugh. "Now you're just lying to me to make fun of me."
"No," said Ivan. "My land is strange, though, compared to here. But another way of looking at it is, Taina is strange to me. All the years I was growing up, it never occurred to me that there might come a day when my life might depend on how I handled a broadsword or a battleaxe."
"We're alike, though," said Sergei. "I'm a terrible soldier. All I'm good for is reading and writing. And washing up."
"And I can't even do that."
"You can, though. Write all you want."
"No," said Ivan. "I make my letters wrong."
"I saw you make some letters I'd never seen before. Like this one."
With his finger, Sergei drew the letter III on the table. At once Ivan seized his hands and held them tightly.
"Don't ever make that letter again," he said.
"How could I? I don't even know how it sounds."
"Just don't use it. You shouldn't. It would change everything. It would make the record unclean. Forget it. Put it out of your mind."
Sergei nodded his understanding. So... he had inadvertently learned a powerful rune from a land of sorcery. He would have to keep this in mind. Someday he might have to use this rune. For despite Ivan's warning, Sergei was not about to forget something that was so dangerous and disturbing. In all his life, Sergei had never known how to do anything that would frighten anyone. It was an interesting feeling. He liked it.
For a while, Katerina was able to fool herself into believing that things were going well—that Ivan was earning the respect of the knights and other men by his hard work on the practice field, and that Ivan's obvious decency and concern for others, as exemplified by saving Lybed from choking, had won the hearts, or at least the patience, of the women of Taina. But gradually she realized that the absence of negative comment about Ivan did not mean there was approval or even tolerance. Instead, it meant that no one was talking to her about Ivan. It was a bad sign, not a good one. People had never shut her out before. She had assumed that she could bring him into the community; instead, he might well be dragging her out.
But what point was there in discussing this with Ivan? She couldn't think of a thing he could do more than he was already doing. She knew he didn't want to become a Christian, but he was preparing to do it. She knew he had no interest in being king, let alone soldiering, but he was working hard at it every day. If she told him her fears, it would only discourage him, and she'd have to listen to more insistence that she take him back to the enchanted place and lead him across the bridge so he could go home.
She tried to imagine what it would be like to be in his place, cut off from family, trapped in a situation not of her devising. In fact, that's precisely what had happened to her when she was chased by the bear and ensorceled into sleeping for however many months or centuries it was. But of course she had slept through it, while Ivan had to be awake through his time of estrangement. And her exile had ended with return. Would his?
It was to avoid such a conversation with him that she found herself avoiding any conversation with him apart from dinnertime, when nothing private could be discussed. But this silence between them could not go on forever, she knew; she was not surprised when, one afternoon in her father's house, she heard him in the great room, asking a slave which bedchamber was hers.
The slave was no doubt trying to guess which would cause more trouble, to tell or not to tell, and then would have to decide whether to make trouble or not, which was probably the more difficult decision. Slaves were so untrustworthy. And yet life would be impossible if you had to do all that work yourself. When would she have time to look after the people, if she had to spend her time down at the river, washing clothes, or out in the kitchen, preparing dinner?
Anyway, she spared the slave the burden of making a choice. "In here," she called out to Ivan.
He actually stopped to thank the slave, as if the girl had done anything or even meant to do anything to help him. He was still a stranger, would always be a stranger.
Whatever it was he wanted to talk about, she knew she didn't want to discuss it with him. So she preempted him by leaping to a conclusion she knew was false. "I hope you're not thinking of claiming some privilege of intimacy because we're betrothed."
He did not rise to the bait. "Your purity is safe. I only came to ask how I could get some parchment."
Why would he come to her for a parchment? Did he think she had a secret hoard of lambskins and kidskins? "Why would you ask me? Father Lukas asks for the skin of a lamb when he needs something to write on. If he doesn't claim the skin, then it's used by others."
"I know that," said Ivan. "Sergei explained that."
"Then why did you come to me?"
"So you could tell me how I could go about getting a parchment. Or tell me who could teach me how to make parchment out of lambskin."
"And why would you waste time on something like that?" It would hardly raise the knights' opinion of him, if he spent hours parching lambskin.
"Because there's something I want to write down."
Was he serious? "Do you have any idea what you're talking about?" she asked.
"I know how to read and write, if that's what you mean."
"You weren't brought here to be a cleric! Father Lukas will find his own young men and teach them. Like Sergei, who has no other usefulness. But you... to spend your hours writing or making parchment..."
He had been ingratiating up to now, but his temper had apparently been stretched too thin. "What am I supposed to do, then?" he demanded. "Spend all day in the practice field, hearing Dimitri taunt me and watching all the others snicker behind their hands?"
"It takes time, I know."
"It takes years to put on that kind of muscle. I ache all over, and while I'm getting better, I'm a long way from good. It won't hurt anybody if I spend a little time doing things that I'm actually good at."
"But you aren't good at making parchment, if you don't even know how."
"I want to write something."
"Use birchbark. You just peel it off the trees and soak it and press it flat."
"Birchbark doesn't last."
"Neither will you, and neither will Taina, if you don't work at soldiering."
"I know how long it takes to train my body. I've been running all my life, but I was training for the decathlon—"
"The what?"
"A contest. Running, jumping, throwing the... spear. The discus. The... stone. It took years of training until I was competitive. Someday, a few years from now, I might be good enough with the sword to hold my own with the best of them. But not next week or next month."