“Da. But I would appreciate a swift ceremony. The essential steps. Nothing more.” I let the pause do its work.“You understand.”
He nodded. His eyes had gone slightly unfocused—the look of a man mentally working through an ancient rite and deciding what he could quietly omit without it constituting a theological offence. Given that he conducted his ministry in the shadow of my compound, I trusted he would find a workable answer.
I turned back toward the nave.
The men were distributed throughout—Bogdan near the door, Tikhon further back, others stationed at intervals with the practised stillness of people armed and waiting. My father stood with Konstantin and my uncle near the front. Ruslan and Valentin further along. The Kozlov family had not yet arrived, which was either poor timekeeping or something else.
Then one of the great doors slammed open.
Half the men moved. Hands dropped to holsters, bodies turned—the automatic response of people who had learned that loud, unexpected sounds were rarely good news.
Iskra stood in the doorway.
The winter came in with her. A cold draught swept down the nave, guttering the nearest candles and carrying the smell of frozen stone and outside air. She stood in it for a moment—framed by the doorway, the pale winter light behind her, the cathedral stretching ahead—and then she walked in as though she had been the one waiting for us.
My eyes went immediately to either side of her.
Radovan. Spartak. Herbyki, holding the back of her dress. Not howbykihold a door or clear a room—the way choirboys carry a hymnal. Carefully. Reverently. Both of them dropped the fabric the instant they registered my expression and straightened into something approximating their actual function.
I looked behind them.
No family.
She walked the length of the nave alone. Head up, shoulders back, the beadwork catching candlelight as she moved so that she arrived in fragments of gold and white, the veil shimmering against the icon screen behind her. The dress that had been chosen to contain her was not containing her. She moved inside it as though she had decided, somewhere between the car and these doors, that it belonged to her now.
My father appeared at my shoulder.
“Leonid is on his way,” he said, low and tight.“Sort that girl out. This does not bode well.”
“She seems eager,” I said, watching her close the remaining distance.“And I want to be finished here. My work is waiting.”
He said nothing to that.
Father Dmitri gathered himself as Iskra came to stand before the Holy Table. Whatever he had been flustered about a moment ago, he set it aside with the practised composure of a man who had learned that in Chernograd, the safest response to the unexpected was to proceed as though it had been planned.
The candles were placed in our hands first—tall white tapers, the wax warm within seconds. Then the stefana. The crowns were old, heavy metalwork, linked by a ribbon of white silk. Father Dmitri placed them with the careful deliberateness of the rite, his voice finding its register as the words of the ceremony began to fill the cold air, rise toward the vaulted ceiling, and disperse there, absorbed by the stone.
At some point her family joined us, but when I glanced sideways at her, she was looking at the back wall. Not at the iconostasis, not at the priest, not at me. At the wall. As though she had identified a fixed point on the far side of this event and intended to keep her eyes on it until she reached it.
She never flinched.
She never looked away.
The crowns meant we were bound. The ribbon meant we were one. Father Dmitri led us three times around the Holy Table—the steps slow and ceremonial on cold stone, the candles held, the crowns catching the candlelight—and she completed each circuit without faltering, without softening, without once acknowledging that any of this had anything to do with her.
I had expected fear, or performance, or the brittle composure of a woman holding herself together with great effort.
What I got was absence.
She had gone somewhere inside herself and left a body behind to complete the ceremony. A body that stood straight, held its candle, and moved when directed and said what was required.
It was, I thought, a more sophisticated response than I had anticipated.
The shared cup came last. The wine was dark, and the cup was passed between us, and she drank without hesitation, which was either courage or indifference, and I found I couldn’t determine which.
Father Dmitri pronounced the words that made it binding under God, in this city where God and I had reached our own accommodation long ago.
It was done.
