The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3)(62)

“With pleasure. In winter,” he said. “It is only a breath of time, Vasya; what are two seasons?”

“Little to you, perhaps, but a great deal for me and mine,” she said.

He did not argue again.

She was thinking of that forgetfulness, the strange slip of reality that made fire from nothing, or kept the eyes of all Moscow from seeing her. Impossible that the winter-king should walk abroad in summer. Impossible, impossible.

She clenched her fists. No, she thought. It isn’t.

“A little farther,” she said, and wordless, the white mare cantered on.

At last, when Vasya’s concentration was wavering like a flame in a high wind, when exhaustion ate at her, and his arm about her waist was the only thing keeping her upright, the cold grew a little less fierce. Then mud showed under the snow. Then they were in a world of rustling leaves. The white mare’s hooves rimed the leaves with frost where they fell, and still Vasya hung on.

Finally, she and Morozko and the two horses stepped between one night and the next, and she saw a campfire nestled in the bend of a river.

In the same instant, the full weight of summer’s heat fell on her body like a hand, and the last trace of winter fell away behind them.

Morozko sagged weightless against her back. She was alarmed to see his hand growing fainter and fainter, as frost dissolves at the touch of warm water.

Vasya half-turned and caught hold of his hands. “Look at me,” she snapped. “Look at me.”

He raised absolutely colorless eyes to hers, set in a face equally colorless, without depth, the way light flattens in a snowstorm. “You promised not to leave me,” Vasya said. “You are not alone, you said. Are you so easily forsworn, winter-king?” Her hands crushed his.

He straightened up. He was still there, though faint. “I am here,” he said, and the ice of his breathing stirred, impossibly, the leaves of a summertime wood. A note of wry humor entered his voice. “More or less.” But he was shaking.

    You are back in your own midnight now, Pozhar informed them, indifferent to impossibilities. I am going. My debt is paid.

Vasya cautiously let go of Morozko’s hands. He did not immediately vanish, and so she slid down the white mare’s shoulder. “Thank you,” Vasya said to the golden mare. “More than I can say.”

Pozhar flicked an ear, spun, and trotted off without another word.

Vasya watched the mare go, a little forlorn, trying, yet again, not to think of Solovey. The campfire by the river glimmered bright in the darkness. “Traveling by midnight is all very well,” Vasya muttered. “But it involves far too much creeping up on folk in the dark. Who do you suppose that is?”

“I have no notion,” said Morozko shortly. “I can’t see.” He said it matter-of-factly, but he looked shaken. In winter, his senses stretched far.

They crept nearer, and halted outside the firelight. A gray mare stood without hobbles on the other side of the flames. She raised her head uneasily, listening to the night.

Vasya knew her. “Tuman,” she breathed, and then she saw three men camped beyond the mare, sleeping rough. Three fine horses and a pack-horse. One of the men was just a dark bundle wrapped in a cloak. But the others were sitting upright beside the fire, talking, despite the late hour. One was her brother, his face thinned with days of travel, raw with sunburn. There were threads of white in his hair. The other was the holiest man in Rus’, Sergei Radonezhsky.

Sasha’s head came up, seeing the horses restless. “Something in the wood,” he said.

Vasya didn’t know how a monk—even her brother—would react to her just then, drenched as she was in magic and darkness, hand-fast with a frost-demon. But she nerved herself and stepped forward. Sasha wrenched round, and Sergei rose to his feet, spry despite his years. The third man jerked upright, blinking. Vasya recognized him: Rodion Oslyabya, a brother of the Trinity Lavra.

    Three monks, dirty from days on the road, camping in a clearing in the summer night. Painfully ordinary; they made the winter midnights at her back feel like a dream.

But it wasn’t. She had brought the two worlds together.

She didn’t know what would happen.



* * *





THE FIRST BROTHER ALEKSANDR saw of his sister was a slim figure with a bruised face. He blasphemed in his mind; he sheathed his sword, offered up prayers, and ran to her.

She was so thin. Every plane of her face was blade-sharp: a skull picked out with firelight. But she returned his embrace with strength, and when he looked at her he saw her lashes wet.

Perhaps he was weeping, too. “Marya said you were alive. I—Vasya—I am sorry. Forgive me. I wanted to go find you. I—Varvara said you had gone beyond our reckoning, that you—”

She cut into this flow of words. “There is nothing to forgive.”

“The fire.”

Her face hardened. “It is over, brother. Both fires.”

“Where have you been? What happened to your face?”

She touched the scar across her cheekbone. “This is from the night the mob came for me in Moscow.”

Sasha bit his lip. Father Sergei broke in, his voice sharp. “There is a white horse there in the wood. And a—shadow.”

Sasha spun, his hand again going to the hilt of his sword. In the darkness, just touched by the edges of the firelight, stood a mare, white as the moon on a winter night.