"What a shame you didn't let Dimitri kill me," said Ivan. "Having me alive is inconvenient to everyone. Me not least." He got up and left the table. No one said anything to call him back.
Katerina was so angry she could hardly eat, though the food was good and she didn't wish to offend Sophia.
Sophia, for her part, ate with gusto, while smiling in amusement at Katerina's lack of appetite. "He really makes you angry, doesn't he."
"I hate a man whose oath is worthless."
"Men and women these days break off engagements whenever they want. No one thinks of it as oath breaking."
"And you approve of this?"
"Approve or not, that's the world in which Ivan and his Ruthie agreed to marry. Either one of them is free to break the engagement, without cause. So you can give up this nonsense about despising him for breaking his engagement with her."
"So was his engagement to me just as worthless?"
"He married you, didn't he?"
"And annulled it the first chance he had."
"He offered to annul it, if that's what you wanted."
"When did he give me any choice? When a man says he wants to annul—"
"You have to understand, Katerina, customs have changed. A woman in this world is as free to make choices as a man is. So maybe when he offered to annul the marriage, he thought he was giving you what you wanted."
"Why would I want to be shamed in such a way?"
Sophia sighed. "Katerina, are you trying to be slow of understanding?"
Katerina flushed with anger, but she contained it. Sophia was the wife of a god.
"Vanya—your Ivan—is a good man," said Sophia. "And he was a good boy, when he first came here. I don't know why he was drawn to you, when even my husband couldn't enter your prison in the woods. Was it someone's plan? I don't think so. I think that the spell that bound you could only be opened by one who was... extraordinary in some way."
Since Katerina had already thought of this, she was a little resentful at the reminder. "You think I haven't tried to think of something praiseworthy about him?"
"Oh, and you're going to tell me now that you haven't ever seen anything to honor in this man?"
Katerina shook her head. "I won't tell you that. He seemed to be trying, back in Taina, to be a decent man. My father said that Ivan seemed to have a king's heart. But the moment he crossed the bridge into this place, he began acting foully. Making me wear his shirt!"
"He was correct and you were wrong."
Katerina was stunned. "You! Does the wife of Mikola—"
"No names, no names," said Sophia. "Call him Marek, now, please, as all do in this place."
"Does the wife of such a man as Marek think that it's right for a woman to wear a man's clothing?"
"No one would have mistaken you for a man. Men generally wear pants with their shirts."
"It's not about being mistaken, it's about—"
"About being decent," said Sophia. "And I tell you that decency changes from year to year, from land to land, and you have to learn the customs of the place you're in. Vanya did things for your sake that felt shameful to him—and you, for his sake, did things that were shameful to you. I think that's a good beginning to your marriage."
"Shame?"
"Bending."
"It's hardly a beginning to our marriage, is it, when he's about to annul it?"
"Do you want him to? Is there a man back in Taina that you love?"
Katerina wasn't sure what she meant. "Whom would I have loved? It was not for me to choose." She thought of Dimitri. She certainly didn't love him, nor he her.
"There you have it," said Sophia. "In Vanya's world, young people marry for their own reasons—usually for love, or desire that they think is love. The parents barely get a chance to give advice. Vanya's mother thought his engagement to Ruth was deeply wrong, but he hardly listened to her."
"So everyone marries like peasants? A wink and a nod and a hop over the broom?"
"Vanya keeps looking for a sign that you love him."
Katerina was completely flustered by this. "How would I love him? I barely know him."
"Nonsense," said Sophia. "You've had ample opportunity to see the kind of man he is. But all you ever show him is your disapproval."
"Because I disapprove of what he does!"
"Yes, you're honest enough, child. But he has, quite logically, come to the conclusion that you find him loathsome and, being a decent man, he has offered you your freedom from your marriage vow, so you don't have to be married to someone you find so distasteful."
"What does any of that matter? I married him to save my kingdom. My kingdom still needs saving."
"He thinks my husband can save it. So with that reason gone..."
It was a strange way of looking at the situation. Katerina tried to understand. "So he would give up the right to be my father's heir, because he thinks it would make me..."
"Happy? Yes."
Katerina tried to digest this thought. In all her life, she had never been aware of a man doing something solely because it would make a woman happy. Well, not true; she knew several henpecked peasants who watched every word they said, so as to avoid getting a tongue-lashing or worse from a shrewish wife. But such men were despised, and... and Ivan was nothing like them. "Why does he care whether I'm happy?"
"That's a very good question," said Sophia. "And it's one you need to answer, because he's been trying to make you happy for quite a while. From what you told me this morning, he walked naked through the woods, getting whipped by branches, because he wanted to make you happy."
Her memory of this event now looked different to her. She thought of the shrewish peasant wives and realized that this might well be the reason Ivan had complied with her. Having betrothed himself to her, he found himself subject to a woman who spoke scornfully and he meekly bowed to her will.
She was not such a woman. He was not such a man. "I don't understand it," she said. "I thought he had simply come to see what was right and wrong, and chose the right."
"Maybe that was it," said Sophia, but amusement still played around the corners of her lips. Katerina would have probed more, for the conversation was teaching her to see events in a new way, and she felt herself to be on the verge of acquiring a bit of wisdom, but at that moment the door opened and Mikola Mozhaiski—no, Marek—strode into the room, the floor booming like a drum under his bold steps.
"I'm hungry," he announced as he came into the kitchen. "What, is Vanya still asleep?"
"He isn't hungry," said Sophia dryly.
Apparently some communication passed between them without words, for now Katerina saw the same half-hidden smile lurking on Marek's face. Sophia laid a plate before him, and piled it with bread and lard, cheese and fruit. He ate with such gusto that the food seemed to melt from the plate like fog. Marek saw the wonder on her face and misunderstood her thoughts. "Of course I eat. I'm immortal, but my body still wants food. I wouldn't die if I never ate—but I'd get very, very hungry."
"What did you find on your search?" asked Sophia.
"She's here," said Marek simply.
Katerina felt her heart begin to race. "She followed us!"
"She didn't come through in the same place," he said. "If she had, I wouldn't have seen her spoor. But there was a trace of stink in the rocky hills south of the road, overlooking that Armenian fellow's farm."
"The Arkanians," said Sophia. "And his father bought the farm before he was born. You act as if he were a recent immigrant."