Free Prince Ivan by Peter Morwood

in the past had lost their tempers in a violent and fatal way with sons who had annoyed them, and though the chronicles had always said they’d been sorry afterwards, it hadn’t done the sons a lot of good. “They may have been my friends, majesty, but you would not have cared for any of them as a son-in-law.”
    “It wasn’t your friends who concerned me, blockhead – though why they were invited to a formal banquet in the first place is beyond my comprehension. It was the other guests, and the way your stupid comments set my daughters to think critically of every prince, every boyar, every potential husband in the entire palace.” Tsar Aleksandr paused beside the throne, drumming his fingers on its high back, then sat down hard and noisily on its velvet cushions. He was toying with his long, spike-tipped sceptre in a way that made Ivan keep his distance.
    “‘Prince Oleg Vladislav?’ I asked them. ‘Too fat,’ they said. ‘Prince Aleksandr Yaroslavich?’ ‘Too thin,’ they said. Konstantin bogatyr was too tall, and Mstislav Mikhailovich was too short. They thought that Boris Rostislavl should have had a smooth face instead of that fine red beard of his, though everyone knows he’d sooner die than suffer the shame of shaving it – but they also thought Ryurik Gyorg’yevich the boyar’s son would have looked better with whiskers, though he’s two years younger than you are and can’t grow more than fluff on his chin.”
    Ivan felt himself blushing steadily redder throughout his father’s recitation, until he felt certain that his ears glowed red enough to light the room. He felt just as certain that if he said the wrong thing he would live to regret it, though perhaps not long enough to set it right. “Then you must make the choice for them,” he said carefully, one eye constantly on the four-inch spike that capped his father’s sceptre. “And for me, too.”
    “So your only advice is that I break my sworn word to my own children?”
    “‘ If the need requires it , do what is needed ,’” Ivan was hoping that surely, surely, the Tsar wouldn’t take exception to hearing his own words quoted back at him, but even so, when the sceptre’s spike grated on the tiles of the floor, he was already tensed to duck or dodge or run.
    “Just so,” said Tsar Aleksandr. His face showed he had reached and passed the peak of his anger, and now it was tapering down to mere annoyance – though a Tsar’s annoyance was still something that the wise preferred to avoid, often by moving far enough that a steppe or two lay between them and harm’s way. “It may come to that.” He sat back and stroked his moustaches between finger and thumb for a few minutes until they ceased to droop and returned to their customary handsome sweep of silver across his upper lip. “Besides criticizing some of our guests, Prince Ivan, did you happen to notice any of the others? Those here through politeness or invitation, rather than hoping to get a Tsar’s daughter for their wife?”
    “Rich merchants,” said Ivan after a moment’s thought, “and wealthy traders. Also certain crook-legged Tatars wearing dead men’s finery. Two, no, three men claiming to be lords or princes, even though nobody – not even Strel’tsin – could find where they were supposed to rule. And of course the genuine princes who were too much of this and not enough of that…”
    “Carefully, my son.” The Tsar glowered at him from beneath heavy brows, and Ivan subsided at once. “Carefully. You’ll know when you’ve been forgiven enough to make idiotic jokes, and by Saint Basil, that time hasn’t come yet.” Aleksandr Andreyevich rattled another brief tattoo with his fingers on one arm of the throne. “But you saw enough. Merchants and traders indeed. Even though they weren’t from the Caliphate or from Khazar.”
    “Then where…?”
    “You said it yourself, before. Kiev and Novgorod. Or Novgorod and Kiev. They’d come to see how we