The Tatars had not, in fact, fired the city. “They conspired with a usurper, they fired my city. “The Tatars attacked me in my own palace, after I had made them welcome in good faith,” retorted Dmitrii, not troubling to keep the rage from his reply. His left arm was wrapped in linen where an arrow had gone into the muscle below the shoulder, and been dragged through and out again. Children cannot eat vengeance, Dmitrii Ivanovich.” The monk had no more slept than the Grand Prince he could not quite mask the edge in his own voice. “There are dead to mourn there are granaries lost, and animals and warehouses. “The city cannot do without you,” said the monk. “Are you going to tell me otherwise, Brother Aleksandr?” he asked, in a voice that made his attendants flinch. “Leave Moscow now, Dmitrii Ivanovich?” asked the monk, with a touch of disquiet.Ī night and a day without sleep had done nothing for Dmitrii’s temper.

“We will find the Tatars and we will kill them.” “I am going out myself, tomorrow, with all that can be spared,” the prince said.

But the monk, who knew him well, could see the exhaustion and the rage just beneath the surface. “We may have saved ourselves, but we made no answer for the treachery.” All that bitter day, the prince had reassuring words for every man who caught his eye, had calm orders for the men wrangling his surviving horses and hauling away the charred beams of the stable. “It was not enough,” said the Grand Prince. A swath of black gashed the heart of the city, as though the hand of God had fallen in the night, dripping fire from its nails. His city had nearly burned to ash only a miraculous snowstorm had saved them. The night before, the Grand Prince had come close to being deposed and murdered, though few people knew that. For, against all hope, the city was mostly intact, and still theirs. “Our skins, and a little more,” said the other man-a monk-with a touch of grim humor. He was barrel-chested, young, with the fey energy of a man who has driven himself past exhaustion to a surreal and persistent wakefulness. Weary hollows, like blue thumbprints, marred the flesh beneath his gray eyes. “We were busy saving our own skins.” A smear of soot blackened his cheek, blood crusted in his beard. “Chelubey disappeared in the confusion,” said the first man bitterly. Before them lay a charred ruin that had been a stable. Behind them lay a palace full of broken furniture, smoke-stained the screen-work smashed on the staircases.

But they were speaking intently, heads close together, and did not heed the wet. The dooryard was a snowless waste of water and trampled earth the men sank to their ankles in the muck. DUSK AT THE END OF winter, and two men crossed the dooryard of a palace scarred by fire.

The winter of the witch trilogy