Prince Ivan Read Free Page B

It was perhaps just as well, for the carriage arrived in the same mysterious manner as Prince Fenist and his gold, and before the happy couple were a mile from Khorlov’s gates they had vanished the same way…
    *
    The events leading up to that wedding had first begun almost half a year before, when midwinter snow still lay deep and crisp and even – that is, unsettlingly deep and broken-glass crisp and treacherously uneven – around the walls of Khorlov. It was a season of the year to be indoors, or at least under the eaves, for the wolves were howling hungrily in the distant birch-woods and Tsarevich Ivan Aleksandrovich Khorlovskiy, who was old enough to know better, was amusing himself by dropping snowballs from the ice-encrusted ramparts onto the helmet-spikes of the sentries far below.
    His lessons that morning had been political culture, social history and the theory of government for three hours, with questions at the end. One Thousand and One Things Every Tsar’s Son Should Know . Ivan had survived without actually yawning full in Dmitriy Vasil’yevich’s face, even though when acting as Royal Tutor rather than High Steward or First Minister or Court Wizard, Strel’tsin taught politics the same way as a drip of water wears away a stone. Constant repetition was the standard approach to every subject, from Low Magic to the Reading and Writing of the Court Hand, and in almost fifty years he had seen little reason to vary his theme. Sooner or later his pupils made sure to remember what they’d been told, in the hope that by getting it right they could make him move on to some other subject.
    Ivan had also received what he had come to recognize as the standard homily. “It Is Incumbent On Every Tsar’s Son to Consider the Wellbeing of the Tsardom and The Political Value of Marrying and Providing The Tsardom With an Heir…”
    Praise those who make ink and the scribes who use it , they must love him , Ivan had thought a score of times, but being wise, hadn’t voiced once. Strel’tsin always contrived to get full value from his Capital Letters; there was Greek Byzantine blood in there somewhere among the icewater. Most children were simply told the approximate details of how they’d come to be alive and breathing on the earth: he was given the full political machinations as to Why .
    But still, Providing an Heir was considered to be the best demonstration of faith that any Son and Ruler-to-Be could give to his Father and People. Hearing the same lecture for the third time in a week had raised Ivan’s suspicions that his free-and-easy life about the kremlin was about to end.
    The arrival of a servant summoning him to the Hall of Audience confirmed them.
    *
    Khorlov’s Hall of Audience had been built a hundred years before, and the principal intention of the Great Prince who had it built was that it should impress those who stepped inside. Or, in the words and delivery of First Minister Strel’tsin, “ It should Impress .”
    That meant size, and it meant grandeur, and in providing both his architects and artists had surpassed themselves. It was large enough to contain two thousand people without making them feel cramped, and patterned mosaic-work on the floor where they would stand was bright with colour and the deeds of heroes. Their gaze was then led aloft by vaulted pillars inlaid with marble and semiprecious stones, toward a ceiling whose arches were intricately painted with scenes of hunting and war.
    But all of that stony echoing space led inevitably to the one commodity Khorlov and all of Russia possessed in abundance. Cold . Only when the Hall was full of people did it seem truly warm, and even then its walls leaked a slow, soft, steady chill that not even the hottest summer could abate.
    In winter that chill could cut like a knife.
    It was cutting right now. Ivan made his bow from the doorway as quickly as he could, then moved with unseemly haste up the hall and closer to the great fires banked up on