Ivan dodged among the trees, taking care to put as many trunks as possible between himself and his pursuers.
"He won't get far in the woods!" shouted Dimitri. "Where are the dogs!"
The tumult continued, and Ivan heard some crashing in the underbrush far behind him, but he couldn't make out any more words.
Maybe the king would call off the search before it got too far, Ivan thought as the branches again whipped and sliced his skin. He couldn't go full speed in the woods. Worse yet, he had no idea where he was going. Katerina had not led him on a straight path coming here, and everything looked different in this direction, anyway. It was uphill, too—but Ivan was used to that on his daily runs back in Tantalus. In the future, to train for this, he'd have to run naked with two assistants alongside, whipping him with wands and switches every few seconds. He wondered if there was any chance of making that an Olympic event.
Katerina came outside the house to find the village in an uproar, everybody running toward the west, calling out that Katerina's husband was running away. Katerina did not join the general pursuit. Instead, she took a circuitous route among the houses, entering the woods well to the south of where Ivan had gone in.
Sergei watched her go, unable to keep up, and not particularly interested in trying. It was all out of his hands.
Still, he was curious, so he limped along the grassy main street until he came upon Father Lukas, who was grumpily coming the other way. "Foolish business anyway," he said. "That snot-faced little girl you call 'dewdrop' caught on that it wasn't you in the robe and wouldn't shut up about it."
"Dewdrop?" said Sergei. "Dewdrop is dead. She died when I was only nine years old."
Father Lukas glared at him for a moment; then the expression gave way to something else. Fear? Not Father Lukas, surely.
"Never mind," said Sergei. "We know the Widow uses us like sheep, shearing us or skinning us at her pleasure."
"A girl about this tall?" asked Father Lukas, still trying to make sense of things.
"Yes, yes," said Sergei. "But it wasn't her. There's been no resurrection, Father Lukas. It was the Widow, as I said."
"Making us see a little girl?"
"Why not? She showed herself as an old woman before she burned down the church this morning," said Sergei. "She wants this Ivan dead, and she's going to keep trying till he's filleted and roasted."
"Not those stories of her eating her captives again," said Father Lukas.
"They say she does."
"Who says?" said Father Lukas. "Who is it who saw her eating, but she didn't eat them!" He held out the robe and undergarment Ivan had been wearing. "Now you can have these back."
"What's Ivan wearing?" asked Sergei.
"What Adam wore in the garden," said Father Lukas. "What Noah wore when he was drunk in his tent after the flood. What David wore when he danced in triumph in the streets after his victory."
"Naked come we into the world," said Sergei, getting into the spirit of things, "and naked we go out of it."
"Well," said Father Lukas, "naked except for boots."
Sergei took the clothing. "The robe is mine, all right," he said. "But the linen is his."
"He's running at full speed through the woods," said Father Lukas. "You're welcome to follow him and return it." With that, Father Lukas passed him and headed back toward the king's house.
Father Lukas had been joking, but Sergei liked the idea better the more he thought of it. But there was no point in following Ivan—he'd be running, and dodging all pursuers. The princess, however, would be dodging no one—if a druzhinnik met her in the woods they'd do her no harm, and she was still under the protection of the spells that had counteracted Baba Yaga's curse in the first place, so she had nothing to fear from that source, either.
Sergei left the street and wandered among the houses till he found the place where Katerina had gone into the woods. It was a plain enough path; she had not departed from it. Nor was she moving all that quickly. When she stopped at the rendezvous place, Sergei wouldn't be all that far behind her.
It was near dark, and though the moon was almost full, not that much light penetrated to the lower reaches of the forest. Ivan was hopelessly lost, but it had been a couple of hours since he last heard dogs barking or men calling out to each other. So he was safe enough. Unless Baba Yaga sent the bear back for a second try. Or he fell off a cliff in the darkness. Or he sprained his ankle and died of exposure trying to crawl back to civilization.
Civilization? Yes, that's what Taina was, by contemporary standards. Men with swords who had no qualms about killing a man and expected to have no punishment for it—it was civilization in the same sense that some drug dealer's turf was civilized. What was the difference between Dimitri and some thug with an Uzi?
Not fair. Dimitri lived in a different time. If he were in the U.S. in 1992 and wanted Ivan out of the way, he'd hire a lawyer and sue. Had he been in Kiev in 1970, he'd have whispered a hint to the KGB. He wielded a sword here in Taina because that's what men used to settle quarrels.
Why am I giving the man who wants to kill me the benefit of the doubt? Screw him. Let him break his ankle and fall off a cliff and get eaten by a bear. Let him marry the princess and become the king. Come to think of it, that's probably what Dimitri had in mind. He'd make the better husband. It should have been him all along. If I died right now it would be better for everybody.
The hell it would. It would be worse for me, and selfish as it might be, I want to live. I even want to go home.
The path, such as it was, went straight, but Ivan turned to the left and slid down a rather steep slope. Why did I do that? he wondered. Why did I choose that way? It came to him that for the past hour, he had been following, not the line of least resistance, as he had before, but a fairly straight line toward...
Toward Katerina. The hairs tied around his wrist. She was calling him. He should have known that she'd anticipate his lack of skill in the woods.
It wasn't long after that before he followed his "intuition" into a wide, moon-washed clearing, perfectly round, with a pit in the middle of it, and a pedestal rising in the middle of the pit. Katerina was waiting for him in the moonlight.
Ivan looked around to see if anyone else was there.
"No one," she said. "The place is hidden from anyone but us, because the bridges are ours. Even the Widow can't see, though she put me here, and her bear to guard me. If she couldn't see here, who else would ever find me?"
Ivan hardly listened. He was trying not to be shy of his nakedness. Then he laughed at the impulse. He had nothing to hide from her now. Not only had she seen him before, she was now his wife.
He had almost reached her when he saw movement behind her, at the edge of the woods. "If this place is hidden," he said, "who's that?"
She turned, startled, afraid. "Come out!" she said. "Show yourself!"
A shadow emerged from the wood, moving with a strange, rolling gait. When it reached the moonlight, it turned into Sergei.
Ivan called out in greeting, but Katerina was annoyed. "How did you find this place?"
"I followed you," he said.
Ivan laughed. "So much for this place being hidden."
"It is. Sergei must have a right to be here."
Ivan shrugged. "I don't know how these things work."
"I'll be gone soon enough," said Sergei. "I only brought these for Ivan." He held out the wool robe and linen tunic Ivan had been wearing.
"But that's your robe," Ivan said.
"I'm not naked."