The Girl in the Tower characters

Also known as Vasya

Appears from the start

Pyotr Vladimirovich's youngest daughter, on the road since the winter that killed her father. She rides a stallion who chose her and wears a blue jewel the winter-king made for her, and she can see the chyerti, the spirits of house, water and forest that most of Rus' has stopped believing in. She refused both the marriage and the convent that were the only futures her world allowed a woman, and left to see the world instead. What she has not yet worked out is how a girl travels alone through Rus' in winter without being robbed, married off or killed.

Appears from the start

The bay stallion out of the winter-king's herd who carries Vasya. He talks, in his fashion, and understands her; he will take no saddle, no bridle and no other rider. His name means nightingale, and he is the fastest horse anyone in Rus' has ever seen.

Also known as Frost, the winter-king, Karachun

Appears from the start

The winter-king of the old tales: frost, and also death, the one who comes for people who die in the cold. He keeps finding Vasya on the road and insists this is coincidence. His existence runs on being remembered, and Rus' is forgetting him; he is bound to Vasya by the jewel he made her, which cost him a great deal of his own strength. He would prefer she were somewhere safe and dull, and has no useful suggestions about where that might be.

Also known as Sasha, Brother Aleksandr

First appears in chapter 2

Vasya's brother: a monk of the Trinity monastery under the holy man Sergei, and a considerable figure in his own right, a fighting monk who rides with his cousin the Grand Prince and is trusted by church and court alike. He has had no reliable word from home in years. When news reaches the monastery that villages in the north are being burned and their girls carried off, he rides to Moscow to make somebody act.

First appears in chapter 3

The Grand Prince of Moscow: young, energetic, impulsive and genuinely fond of his cousin Sasha. He is trying to hold together a Rus' that pays tribute to the Horde and quarrels constantly with itself. He is quick to like anyone brave, and quicker to feel betrayed.

First appears in chapter 3

Prince of Serpukhov, Olga's husband and Dmitrii's cousin: a steady, decent man, often away on the Grand Prince's business and not much involved in what happens inside his own women's quarters.

First appears in chapter 3

The priest who went north to Lesnaya Zemlya and left it in ruins, now back in Moscow and much in demand: a preacher crowds gather for, and a painter of icons that people say work miracles. He has not recovered from what he learned in the forest, he has told nobody the truth of it, and he has never stopped thinking about Pyotr Vladimirovich's youngest daughter.

First appears in chapter 4

A rich lord out of the north, master of a fortress called the Tower of Bones, who arrives at Dmitrii's court with splendid horses and better manners than most and is made welcome. He is handsome, amused, generous and oddly hard to place, and he takes an immediate and close interest in the Grand Prince's affairs, and in one young rider in particular.

First appears in chapter 14

Vasya's elder sister, now Princess of Serpukhov, with a household and children of her own in Moscow and another child on the way. She has built exactly the life she always wanted, inside the walls of a terem where highborn women live apart from men, and she has a great deal to lose. She loves her sister and is not at all sure she can afford her.

Also known as Masha

First appears in chapter 14

Olga's small daughter: sharp, stubborn, endlessly curious, and prone to talking to things in the corners of her mother's house that nobody else will admit are there. Her mother is trying very hard to raise her into a well-behaved girl of the terem, and it is not going smoothly.

First appears in chapter 14

Olga's servant: blunt to the point of rudeness, completely trusted, and in the household longer than anyone else in it. She takes very little at face value and volunteers nothing about herself.

First appears in chapter 16

A lord out of Sarai who comes to Moscow as an envoy of the Horde: a superb horseman, courteous, watchful and plainly a good deal more than a messenger. Moscow's tribute and Moscow's obedience are both on his agenda.

First appears in chapter 25

The ghost in the upper rooms of Olga's house, visible only to those who can see: a woman in a shift, mute with grief and rage, who cannot leave. She was a girl with the sight in her own generation and a relation of Vasya's own blood, taken and kept by a sorcerer who never let her go, and she has been in that tower a very long time.