The Dreaming Land I: The Challenge Read online

  It was not yet noon when I got there, which was early for frequenting taverns, but I thought it best to spend a few hours sitting in a dark corner and listening to what everyone there had to say. And already I could see I was in luck, for a trio of young noblemen with the look of the Krasna about them were approaching the inn as I drew near. I stopped to let them enter before me. The first two went in and the third paused to hold the door open for me, so I stepped up to follow them in.

  Instead of us all walking inside, however, we jammed up in the door, and I could hear a serving girl remonstrating with the young man in the lead.

  “Irina Vlasiyevna told you not to come back without an escort, Aleksey Aleksandrovich,” she was saying. “After the trouble you and your friends caused the last time! I can’t let you in on your own, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, I can’t.”

  “Oh please, Ksyusha, call for Irina Vlasiyevna,” said the young man in the front. “I’m sure she’ll see reason if you only let me talk to her.”

  “She’s out, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, and it’s more than my job’s worth to let you in unescorted. Please, Aleksey Aleksandrovich, don’t cause any more trouble.”

  I perked up at the news that Irina Vlasiyevna, the innkeeper, was out, which boded well for my anonymity on this visit.

  “We’ll be as quiet as mice, Ksyusha, we promise,” Aleksey Aleksandrovich was saying in a wheedling tone that was already beginning to irritate me. I could tell without even meeting him face-to-face that he was the kind of young nobleman who was used to getting his way in everything, and to whom it never even occurred that he should not get his way, or that he might be inconveniencing other people, or that inconveniencing other people was a problem. If I had come here as myself, I would most likely have been unable to resist putting him in his place, but it would be inappropriate for a simple traveler to dare to give lessons to a prince, so I held my tongue. “…but we have to come in,” he went on. “Ivan Marinovich is here in Krasnograd for the first time and we promised we’d bring him to the finest tavern in town. You wouldn’t want us to send Princess Velikokrasnova’s only son away disappointed, now, would you, Ksyusha? Just for a bit, Ksyusha, and Irina Vlasiyevna need never know.”

  The young man holding the door, who so far had been standing with his back to me, turned and smiled apologetically, and I saw that he was, indeed, Ivan Marinovich Velikokrasnov, the very prince I was supposed to be courting. I had seen him only a time or two, and then when he was still a child, but his even features were still recognizable.

  “They’re with me,” I said, pushing my way through the trio and stepping into the tavern. “I will vouch for them, Ksyusha. I promised to show them a good time in Krasnograd, and I promised their mothers they would get up to no trouble. If you would let us in, Ksyusha, we would be greatly obliged.”

  Ksyusha, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, looked me up and down doubtfully. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Nadezhda Marislavovna,” I said with a smile. Already I could feel the stories welling up inside of me. “Princess Velikokrasnova’s trusted servant.”

  “You look like a steppe woman,” said Ksyusha, with annoying perspicacity.

  “Princess Velikokrasnova knew that she would be best served by a steppe woman to keep her son from harm—and out of trouble. They will not step out of line while I’m with them, you have my word.”

  “Oh, very well,” said Ksyusha, still radiating doubt but stepping back slightly to allow us to pass inside the tavern. “But no trouble, do you understand, Aleksey Aleksandrovich? And no vodka for you, only beer.”

  “Beer will be lovely on such a hot day as this,” I said. “Bring us four mugs of it, if you please, Ksyusha.” I slipped enough coin in her hand to cover at least ten mugs, even at outrageous Krasnograd prices, and she led us to a table in the far corner and withdrew to the kitchen, looking slightly less put out.

  “Thanks, but you can go now,” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich.

  “No I can’t,” I told him. “I need to be here with you so that Ksyusha doesn’t just throw you right back out again.”

  “Oh, do you really think she’d do that?” asked Aleksey Aleksandrovich.

  “Yes,” I said. “Because if you cause any trouble, I’ll help.”

  “And do you really think you can throw us out, what did you say your name was? Nadezhda Marislavovna? All three of us?”

  I looked him up and down. “Yes,” I said.

  Aleksey Aleksandrovich flushed and opened his mouth to say something in reply, probably something unprincely.

  “Stop teasing her and behave, Alyosha,” said Ivan Marinovich. “She did us a great favor, and we don’t want to be kicked out, do we? Or have word of a disturbance reach your mother.” He turned to me. “Thank you again, Nadezhda Marislavovna,” he said courteously. “And you must let us pay you back for the beer.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” I said. “It’s not often that I get to treat young princes newly arrived in Krasnograd.”

  “You’re very fair-spoken for a serving woman, Nadezhda Marislavovna,” said Ivan Marinovich, a slight frown creasing his forehead. It was a handsome forehead, and I had to resist the urge to tell him not to risk ruining it by creasing it. While he was not shockingly beautiful the way some men are, his features were pleasant and even without being overly delicate, and his brown eyes were honest and friendly. It was not what I would have expected from Princess Velikokrasnova’s son, but there it was.

  “I’m an Imperial messenger.” I tried to spare a thought for how I was going to get out of this mess when I was officially introduced to him, which would be—oh, by all the gods!—this evening, but I decided to deal with that when the time came. Revealing myself now would shut them up for sure, and I wanted them to talk. “Many of us are of noble birth and upbringing.”

  “And are you really from the steppe? I’ve never met a steppe woman.”

  “I am,” I told him. “You should visit it sometime. You might like it.” Now where had that come from? It was as if I were already courting him, instead of eavesdropping for information.

  “I’m sure I would, Nadezhda Marislavovna,” he said. The other two princes snickered into their beer.

  “You know your mother would have fits if you ever ventured onto the steppe, Vanya,” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “Besides, she’s going to marry you off to a nice black earth princess, and you’ll stay with the rest of us in the bosom of the Mother Krasna.” There was some insincere and slightly off-color toasting to the bosom of the Mother Krasna.

  “Are you betrothed, then, Ivan Marinovich?” I asked, when the toasting had subsided.

  “No, but Alyosha—Aleksey Aleksandrovich—is, and so is Denis Praskovyevich,” said Ivan Marinovich.

  “Vanya is the last of us to hold out,” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich. Judging by his speech, the half a mug of beer he had already consumed had gone to his head. I perked up even more. There was nothing like drink to loosen tongues, and the inside gossip on the betrothals of the Krasna princes was certainly something worth hearing straight from their own mouths.

  “Is your intended fair to look upon?” I asked Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “I hear that black earth princesses can be wondrous fair, and so delicate too. Is it true?”

  He snorted, while the other two looked caught between amusement and embarrassment. “I suppose, if a girl of twelve could be said to be fair to look upon,” he said, trying to make a brave face of it but looking rather chagrined nonetheless.

  “Twelve is young for a betrothal,” I remarked.

  “She was eleven when the match was made,” he told me, more and more bitterness creeping into his voice. He downed the rest of his beer, and the other two quickly followed suit. Ksyusha was hovering nearby, probably in case we started to damage anything, and I caught her eye and nodded at the empty mugs. She made a face, but she disappeared into the kitchen to fetch more beer for us.

  “On the steppe we do not wed so young,” I said. “Is it commo
n on the Krasna?”

  “Only when your mother is trying to make an alliance,” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “And who said anything about wedding, anyway? I said we were betrothed. The wedding won’t take place until she turns twenty and can give her own consent. We don’t have arranged marriages anymore, haven’t you heard? We just agree to our mothers’ decisions of our own free will. Which my betrothed will be sure to do, the day she comes of age.”

  “At which point Alyosha will be over thirty,” said Ivan Marinovich with a smile. “An old man, practically, is that not so, Alyosha?” He said it good-naturedly, but Aleksey Aleksandrovich responded with a sullen glower, and an uncomfortable pause fell over the table, which was fortunately broken by the arrival of Ksyusha with four more mugs of beer.

  “It’s better that way anyway,” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich, once Ksyusha had handed round the beer and he had taken another generous swallow. Even in the dim light of the tavern I could see the flush of his cheeks.

  “…I’ll be done with everything I wanted to do by then,” Aleksey Aleksandrovich was saying. “I might as well be tied down to a marriage.”

  “Svetlana Yevpraksiyevna is a nice girl,” Denis Praskovyevich told him. I could already tell that he was the peacemaker of the group, the one who tagged along but also the one who stood between Aleksey Aleksandrovich’s self-regard and Ivan Marinovich’s firm principles, which were already peeking out through his speech. I also thought that perhaps Denis, unlike the other two, was not actually a prince. He was fair-spoken but did not have the manners of someone whose every whim had been catered to from birth. Also, he took care not to spill his beer or to soil his shirt, which was fine enough, but to the observant eye showed signs that the seams had been let out and the fabric turned. Someone who only had one good summer shirt, and was unwilling to spoil it before washday.

  “Her mother wanted to take Alyosha into her household,” said Ivan Marinovich. He was still speaking with a smile, but I could start to see an edge to it. Perhaps Sera’s reports of his temper were correct after all. “To make sure he didn’t get into any mischief in the intervening nine years between their betrothal and the wedding.”

  “But I put my foot down and said no!” cried Aleksey Aleksandrovich, raising his mug in the air in a sloppy salute. “Bad enough that I’ll have to live with them when the time comes. I’m not sacrificing my freedom a moment earlier than I have to!”

  “Is her mother a tyrant, then?” I asked.

  “Yes! After she caught me with…”

  “Alyosha!” said Denis Praskovyevich.

  “What, you think our little steppe woman is going to tattle on us?” He turned to focus on me, his eyes already bleary after one and a half mugs of beer. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, little steppe woman?”

  “Messengers know how to keep their mouths shut,” I told him.

  “And she wouldn’t believe you anyway, even if you did go tattling to her,” he said, giving me a mean look that, on the one hand, made me dislike him even more than I already did, but on the other, promised all sorts of revelations, should I have the steadiness of nerve not to give myself away. Which I did. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed this kind of thing, and how calm it made me feel.

  And I was amply rewarded for my pleasure, for by the time the next round of beer had been consumed, the story of Aleksey Aleksandrovich’s betrothal to a girl still not even approaching womanhood, and the story of his liaison with her older sister, had all come pouring out. It seemed that her older sister, the heir to the richest of Princess Srednekrasnova’s noblewomen, had been married off to a much older man in her youth, and had taken to amusing herself by dallying with whatever young man currently held her fancy. For the past year that young man had been Aleksey Aleksandrovich Srednekrasnov.

  Should the connection be revealed to Princess Srednekrasnova, of course, a great scandal would arise, as she would not take the sullying of her son’s virtue lightly. However, the family of both Aleksey Aleksandrovich’s lover and his intended was very wealthy and had important trade connections with the Eastern mountains, the ones that stood between Zem’ and the great flat plains where the Hordes lived. Princess Srednekrasnova was very keen to gain access to that trade, and marrying her son into the Kuznetsova family seemed to her to be the simplest and most direct way of going about that. They would hardly dare refuse their sovereign princess.

  She had first, at Aleksey Aleksandrovich’s request, suggested that the older sister set aside her husband in favor of Aleksey Aleksandrovich, but that had proven to be impossible, since this tedious older husband was the brother of the mistress of the biggest caravan company that crossed the Eastern mountains every year. And it seemed that the older sister was in fact not so tired of her husband as she had claimed, or at least not so willing as Aleksey Aleksandrovich had expected to give him up and bind herself to Aleksey Aleksandrovich instead. So, much to Aleksey Aleksandrovich’s horror, a betrothal had been arranged between him and the younger daughter, who had not yet turned twelve.

  At this the other two princes commiserated with him and his unhappy status of lover to a woman who seemed only too happy to see him married to another, as long as she could have him whenever the mood struck her, which I had to admit was a harsh fate, even for someone such as Aleksey Aleksandrovich. As I ordered another round of beer, the talk turned to Denis Praskovyevich’s betrothal, which had just been finalized last week, to a younger daughter of the Malokrasnova family.

  “Mother’s ecstatic,” he said glumly. “And I suppose Alla—my intended—is pretty enough, and it’s a much better match than I could have expected to make, but I don’t know…”

  “You deserve a princess as much as the rest of us, Denya,” said Ivan Marinovich warmly. “More, in fact, since you’re by far the best-spirited. Denya’s family are merchants,” he added, turning to me. “Silk traders, actually. Princess Srednekrasnova liked their silk so much that she took on Denya as her ward.”

  “That was very kind of her,” I said.

  “No it wasn’t,” Aleksey Aleksandrovich contradicted me. “She told them she wanted to foster him in exchange for the pick of their silks every year, and of course they didn’t dare refuse, even though they never got a grosh out of it. And he took his lessons with me, but he had to live in the servants’ quarters until I insisted he come up and share my chambers.”

  “I see,” I said. Well, that explained the shirt. “But soon you will be married, Denis Praskovyevich, with a household of your own.”

  “And I’ll come live with him!” cried Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “Anything to get away from home!” This led to a great deal of talk about Princess Srednekrasnova’s parsimony and highhandedness, which, even though it was coming from such questionable lips, I thought was probably on the balance accurate.

  Eventually—after yet another round of beer, when the afternoon was getting well on towards evening, even though at this time of year the sun was still high in the sky—talk came round yet again to marriage alliances, and there was a good deal of drunken ribbing of Ivan Marinovich, as the only one still not betrothed.

  “But that won’t last long,” slurred Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “My mother has her sights set on him.”

  “For herself?” I asked.

  “By all the gods, no!” shouted Aleksey Aleksandrovich, while Denis Praskovyevich and Ivan Marinovich both shuddered violently at the thought. “For my younger sister.”

  “Is your younger sister to inherit Srednekrasnovskoye?” I asked.

  “No, no, nothing like that. My older sister is.”

  “I would hold out for the heir, if I were you,” I advised Ivan Marinovich.

  “Oh, well…let’s be frank, what chance has he of getting an heir for a wife? At least the heir to a princess. Now, if things stood differently with his paternity…But as it is, Vanya, I’m afraid it’s younger daughters all the way for you, just like the rest of us.”

  “You might be surprised,” I found myself telling h
im. “Do you really wish to marry the Srednekrasnova younger daughter?”

  Ivan Marinovich shrugged awkwardly and gave an uncomfortable glance at Aleksey Aleksandrovich.

  “That’s all right, Vanya, don’t worry about sparing my feelings. We all know what she’s like.”

  “Mariya Aleksandrovna is an excellent young woman…” began Ivan Marinovich hesitantly.

  “With a tongue like a viper and a face like curdled milk,” put in Aleksey Aleksandrovich. “Trust me, Vanya, you don’t want to find yourself harnessed to something like her. But maybe you won’t have to, anyway. Maybe that Eastern connection will come through, and you’ll be spared.”

  “Is Princess Velikokrasnova considering making an alliance with one of the mountain princesses?” I asked.

  Aleksey Aleksandrovich snorted. “If you could call them princesses,” he said. “Upjumped merchants—no offense, Denya—who’ve scratched out holdings on the farthest edge of the empire are not my idea of a princess. But no, Princess Velikokrasnova has something more exciting in mind for her only son.”

  “Oh?” I said, and raised a brow in my best imitation of Sera.

  “I’d really rather not talk about it, Alyosha,” said Ivan Marinovich, squirming. “And we shouldn’t be talking about such things anyway. And it must be late. We should return home in order to refresh ourselves for the feast.”

  “Sober up, you mean?” said Aleksey Aleksandrovich, in the voice of a man who was in grave need of some sobering up. “You have a point, Vanya.” He stood up and wavered against the edge of the table. “I’m not sure I’ll make it home, let alone to the feast.”

  “I can escort you,” I offered, but Ivan Marinovich and Denis Praskovyevich, who, while not exactly sober, were in better shape than Aleksey Aleksandrovich, insisted that they could manage getting all three of them back to the Srednekrasnova house, and so, after I had slipped a few more coins into Ksyusha’s disapproving hand, we went out onto the street and parted ways, the three men to try by whatever means they could to sober up, and me back to the kremlin to share what I had learned with Sera.