"Nobody was shouting at me, I figure, so I didn't care," said Ivan. "Still don't."
"Well, you will," said Sophia.
"No he won't," said Katerina. "He never cared about anything. Long ago he wished he had never fought the bear and kissed me awake."
Well, that was true enough. Though there had also been moments where he was glad of it, too. No need to mention that right now, however.
"That business with the bear," said Sophia. "We always wondered how that happened, and we weren't about to ask."
"What happened?"
"How Bear lost his eye, of course. Never would have imagined it was our little Vanya."
"That bear is still around?"
"He's not laying for you, if that's what you're wondering. He stays well to the north and east of here these last few centuries. It's Moscow where he has his den, where the winter still is his. But he mostly lies low. Came out to give a hard blow to Napoleon, and again to stop Hitler. Armies wake him up, but otherwise, he doesn't much care about the doings of human beings."
"So her bear is still alive," said Ivan. "Does that mean she is, too?"
"Thank you for not saying her name in this house," said Sophia. "And I have no idea where the old bat might be. Not a trace of her in many a year. But my husband has some idea that she might have followed you here. That's why he's out looking over the land."
"Did he do that when I disappeared?" asked Ivan.
"He knew where you were going—into the enchanted place where he couldn't see."
Ivan snorted. "Are all the immortals around here half-blind?"
Sophia looked at him sharply. Katerina seemed not to breathe.
"Oh, I see, now that I know who he really is, I can't tease."
Sophia laughed. "Marek sees as well as ever. But into a strange place like that, no one sees."
"Except me."
"You walked in there."
"So what stops him?"
"He can't, that's all. He walks straight toward it, then finds he's walked past it, and his path was straight, but still it bent."
Ivan shook his head. "And yet I walked in as easy as could be."
"You walked in because wherever you ran, it was always nearby," said Sophia. "It was calling to you."
"It," echoed Ivan. "What is the it that was calling me?"
"The place."
"Someone made the place. Or made it what it is. Didn't they?"
Katerina spoke up. "Maybe no one made the place, Ivan. It follows no plan. The enemy cursed me to die; my aunts cast spells to leave me somewhere short of death, and set rules by which I could be saved again, but where the place was, they couldn't choose and didn't know."
"And the Widow, she didn't choose, either?"
"Maybe she did," said Sophia. "But she didn't make the place. She only used it."
"So who made the chasm? Who built the bridges?"
"The chasm is how the Widow's curse expressed itself," said Sophia. "Bear ended up trapped in it, because it was by his power that her original curse of killing was made. By her plan, Bear was supposed to appear and tear Katerina cruelly apart. But instead he went round and round under the leaves. Katerina and Marek and I talked this out this morning, before you were awake."
"I see I wasn't important enough to include," said Ivan, unable to keep a nasty edge out of his voice.
"What did you know about it?" asked Katerina. Perhaps she meant no insult by it, but all he heard was scorn.
"We're including you now," said Sophia, soothingly.
"Look, I've never had any power," said Ivan, "so I don't even want to know. Cousin Marek can fix things now, have it out with the old witch. Then Katerina can have the marriage annulled and go back and marry somebody appropriate. And I can go home and marry Ruthie."
It was Katerina's turn to recoil as if slapped. "You repudiate me?"
"We aren't really married," said Ivan. "You never wanted me, and I'm engaged to someone else, so it'll all work out nicely for everyone."
Katerina looked to Sophia, but the older woman simply looked away. She was not going to be part of this.
So Katerina looked at Ivan. For a long time she looked, till he squirmed like a first-grader caught in a lie. "There is no divorce in Christ," she finally said.
"There's no marriage until I've bedded you," he answered, using a harsh proto-Slavonic term for it.
"Aren't we the polite one," said Sophia.
"Did I use too crude a word?" asked Ivan. "It's the one used by the men out in the practice field."
"It's not the word," said Sophia, "it's the heartlessness of what you said."
"Heartless?" said Ivan. "My supposed wife has never felt anything but contempt for me. How tender am I supposed to feel in return? My supposed father-in-law plotted to kill me. Exactly how seriously should I take their religion?"
"He didn't plot," said Katerina.
"You said yourself that Dimitri would never have attempted my murder if he didn't have your father's consent."
"If he didn't think he had my father's—"
"Don't hurt each other any more, children," said Sophia.
"How could I hurt her?" said Ivan. "She'd have to love me before I could do that. All I am to her or anybody in Taina is either a tool or an obstacle. I was the tool that woke her from her enchantment and got her home safely. Of course, I can't claim credit for that, either, since you tell me I was forced into it."
"Led up to it." Then Sophia switched to modern Ukrainian. "Don't you love her? This beauty, this bright and powerful woman?"
"She understands Ukrainian well enough," said Ivan, "so this won't let us have a private conversation in front of her."
True enough, Katerina was blushing at Sophia's praise—or perhaps at the bluntness of her question.
"What does it matter what language I speak, then?" said Sophia. "Everybody understands everything, and nobody understands anything."
"I think it's all very clear," said Ivan.
"So do I," said Katerina. She looked Ivan in the eye. "I release you now. We'll get the annulment. You were already betrothed to another woman, so you could not enter into the vow."
"He wasn't engaged to anyone," said Sophia. "He married you a thousand years before he ever met Ruthie."
"It's his own life that he'll be judged by, and, in his life, before he said he'd marry me, he said he'd marry her." Katerina looked at Ivan scornfully. "Not much of a king you'd make after all, to be so easily forsworn."
"It was agree to marry you or get killed by a bear," said Ivan.
"I'd rather die than break an oath."
"That always seems to be my choice," said Ivan, "but where would you be if I had chosen your way?"
"Still enchanted," she said, "waiting for a man of honor."
"Stop it!" shouted Sophia. "Enough, you two! These are terrible things that you'll be a long time wishing you could unsay."
She was right. Ivan already wished it. When he offered to annul the marriage, he realized now, he had been half-hoping that she'd refuse, that she'd insist that she wanted to be his wife. That she loved him, or might love him, or wanted to love him. Instead, he had provoked this outburst, in which she had exposed the full measure of her contempt for him. Because of his engagement to Ruthie, Katerina didn't even regard herself as sworn to him now. So his last hope with her was gone—if there had ever been a hope.