Free Prince Ivan by Peter Morwood Page B

ambitions they might entertain were unlikely to be opposed except, perhaps, by one another.
    It became plain to the people of Khorlov and to the children of its Tsar, that a storm was coming, and the only question remaining was from which direction would it strike first…?
    *
    But the storm held off, except for those two strange storms which had taken away the Tsar’s eldest daughters. Hours became days, and days became weeks, and the snows of winter began to fall, covering the grass and the flowers and the dead leaves of autumn, until all was still and silent and a shroud of white lay all across the gardens of the kremlin.
    It had been a long time since Tsarevna Yelena had walked there with her sisters, and almost as long since she began to hope that she too would find a suitor as they had done. But for all the hours and days and weeks gone by, and for all the cold and darkness of the Russian winter beyond the firelit warmth of the kremlin palace, she had never given up that hope. Her hair was always arranged correctly, her garments always rich and fine, her face always painted with that small amount of paint permitted to a maiden daughter of the Tsar.
    Prince Ivan was relieved that all the interest of marrying had settled on his sisters, and not so much on himself. He knew well enough that after Lena was wed and gone, that interest and the pressure with it would be transferred to him. He spent each day in what passed for merriment, when he wasn’t learning the lessons that a Tsar’s son must know if he was to be a wise Tsar himself. Ivan lived each of those days as though it were the last day of his freedom, aware that soon or late, it would be the truth.
    When at last it came it wasn’t a day but a night, and one when the snow-laden wind was moaning under the eaves and around the kremlin’s onion-shaped domes. Everyone was gathered in the warmth of the lesser hall, where the walls were panelled with wood and hung with tapestries so the heat from the great log fire couldn’t escape. Musicians were playing, and while the Tsaritsa and Yelena worked at their embroidery and listened to a storyteller recite the bylina called ‘ The Tale of Dobrynya Nikitych’, Ivan played his father at chess and lost as gracefully as he could. He had just begun to set the pieces up for another and hopefully more successful game—
    Snow began falling onto the board.
    Tsar Aleksandr stared at the snowflakes for a second or two before sweeping them away with the back of his hand, then looked at Ivan, and grinned in his beard as fathers will grin at their sons – especially fathers who have just beaten those same sons at chess three times in a row. “Lenochka,” he said, “do you look pretty tonight?” He was rewarded by the sound of an embroidery tambour falling over, and the swiftly stifled beginnings of the sort of oath that Princesses learn when they have a brother.
    Above their heads, as silently as the falling snow, the ceiling had split open as wide as a door and, descending through it on wings muffled by winter, came a raven black as the night beyond the candle-light. It struck once against the floor and immediately a fire sprang up, enveloping its outspread wings in leaping flames of black and silver so darkly bright they dazzled the eyes of those who watched. The raven struck again and then a third time, so that the flames leapt high and higher still.
    Then they winked out in the drawing of a breath, and the raven became a fine young man dressed all in deepest black, embroidered and brocaded all in black silk so cunningly figured with hair-fine silver thread that its brightness made the darkness darker yet, and its trimming was raven’s feathers.
    If the Falcon had seemed sharp-eyed, and the Eagle had seemed strong, then this young man seemed wise indeed. Yet for all the difference in dress and in looks he was without a doubt their brother. He looked around him with dark eyes in a pale face, and when that dark gaze fell on