The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3)(67)

“If you spend all your days bearing the burden of unforgotten wrongs you will only wound yourself.”

She glared at him, and he looked back, narrow-eyed. Why was he angry? Why was she? Vasya knew about marriages, carefully arranged; she knew about swains courting yellow-haired peasant girls in the midsummer twilight. She had listened to fairy tales since before she could speak. None of those prepared her for this. She had to clench her hands into fists to keep from touching him.

He drew away, jerkily, just as she took a deep, shaken breath and turned her gaze again to the water. “I am going to go to sleep in the sunshine,” she said. “Until Father Sergei is ready to go on. Will you disappear if I do?”

“No,” he said, and he sounded as if he resented it. But she was hot and sleepy and could not bring herself to care. She curled up in the grass near him. The last thing she felt was his light, cold fingers in her hair, like an apology, as she fell suddenly and completely asleep.



* * *





SASHA FOUND THEM A little while later. The frost-demon sat upright, watchful. The slanting summer light seemed to shine through him. He raised his head as Sasha approached, and Sasha was startled at the look on his face at that moment, unguarded, there and gone. Vasya stirred.

“Let her sleep, winter-king,” said Sasha.

Morozko said nothing, but one hand moved to smooth Vasya’s tousled black hair.

Watching them, Sasha said, “Why did you save Father Sergei’s life?”

Morozko said, “I am not noble, if that is what you are thinking. The Bear must be bound anew, and we cannot do it alone.”

Sasha was silent, turning that over. Then he said abruptly, “You are not a creature of God.”

“I am not.” His free hand, lying loose, had an unnatural stillness.

“Yet you saved my sister’s life. Why?”

The devil’s gaze was direct. “First for my own scheming. But later because I could not stand to see her slain.”

“Why do you ride with her now? It cannot be easy, a frost-demon at high summer.”

“She asked it of me. Why all these questions, Aleksandr Peresvet?”

The epithet was given half in earnest, half in mockery. Sasha had to swallow a surge of rage. “Because after Moscow,” he said, trying to keep his voice even, “she went to a—dark country. I was told I could not follow her there.”

“You could not.”

“And you could?”

“Yes.”

Sasha took this in. “If she goes into the darkness again—will you swear not to abandon her?”

If the demon was surprised, he gave no sign. His face remote, he said, “I will not abandon her. But one day she will go where even I cannot follow. I am immortal.”

“Then—if she asks—if there is a man who can warm her, and pray for her, and give her children—then let her go. Do not keep her in the dark.”

    “You ought to make up your mind,” said Morozko. “Swear not to abandon her or give her up to a living man? Which shall it be?”

His tone was cutting. Sasha’s hand strayed to his sword. But he did not grasp it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never protected her before; I do not know why I should be able to now.”

The demon said nothing.

Sasha said, “A convent would have broken her.” Reluctantly he added, “Even a marriage, no matter how kindly the man, how fair the house.”

Still Morozko did not speak.

“But I am afraid for her soul,” said Sasha, voice rising despite himself. “I am afraid for her alone in dark places, and I am afraid for her with you at her side. It is sin. And you are a fairy tale, a nightmare; you have no soul at all.”

“Perhaps not,” agreed the winter-king, but still the slender fingers tangled with Vasya’s hair.

Sasha ground his teeth. He wanted to demand promises, pledges, confessions, if only to delay the realization that there were some things he couldn’t change. But he bit back the words. He knew they wouldn’t do any good. She had survived the frost and the flame, had found a harbor, however brief. Perhaps that was all anyone could ask, in the world’s savage turning.

He stepped back. “I will pray for you both,” he said, voice clipped. “We are going soon.”





21.


    Enemy at the Gate




IT WAS EARLY EVENING, BRIGHT and still, the gray shadows long and softening to violet, by the time they made their way down the parched bank of the Moskva and found a ferry to take them across.

The ferryman only had eyes for the monks. Vasya kept her head down. With her cropped hair, her rough clothes, her gawkiness, she passed for a horse-boy. At first it was easy to forget where she was, as she busied herself getting the horses to stand quiet in the rocking boat. But she found her heart beating faster and faster and faster as they approached the far side of the river.

In her mind’s eye, the Moskva was sheeted with ice, red with firelight. Men and women seethed around a hastily built pyre. Perhaps even now they were floating over the very spot where the last ashes of her would have sunk into the indifferent water.

She barely made it to the side of the boat, and then she was heaving into the river. The ferryman laughed. “Poor country boy, never been on a boat before?” Father Sergei, with kindly hands, held her head as she retched. “Look at the shore,” he said, “see how still it is? Here is some clean water, drink. That’s better.”