The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2)(27)

She did not expect his reaction. He drew himself up; his face chilled, and suddenly he was the remote winter-king again. He bowed, gracefully. “I will return at nightfall,” he said. “The fire will last the day, if you stay here.”

She had the puzzling feeling that she had routed him, and she wondered what she had said. “I—”

But he was already gone, on the mare’s back and away. Vasya was left blinking beside the fire, angry and a little bewildered. “A bell, perhaps,” she remarked to Solovey. “Like a sledge-horse, that we may better mark his coming.”

The horse snorted and said, I am glad you are not dead, Vasya.

She thought again of the frost-demon. “As am I.”

Do you think you could make porridge? added the horse, hopefully.



NOT FAR AWAY—OR PERHAPS very far away—depending on who did the measuring, the white mare refused to gallop any more. I do not wish to run about the world to relieve your feelings, she informed him. Get off or I will have you off.

Morozko dismounted, in no very sweet temper, while the white mare lowered her nose and began scraping for grass beneath the snow.

Unable to ride, he paced the winter earth, while clouds boiled up in the north and blew snow-flurries on them both. “She was supposed to go home,” he snarled to no one in particular. “She was supposed to tire of her folly, go home with her necklace, wear it, and tremble sometimes, at the memory of a frost-demon, in her impetuous youth. She was supposed to bear girl-children who might wear the necklace in turn. She was not supposed to—”

Enchant you, finished the horse with some asperity, not raising her nose from the snow. Her tail lashed her flanks. Do not pretend otherwise. Or has she dragged you near enough to humanity that you have also become a hypocrite?

Morozko halted and faced the horse, narrow-eyed.

I am not blind, continued the mare. Even to things that go on two feet. You made that jewel so that you would not fade. But now it is doing too much. It is making you alive. It is making you want what you cannot have, and feel what you ought not to understand, and you are beguiled and afraid. Better to leave her to her fate, but you cannot.

Morozko pressed his lips together. The trees sighed overhead. All at once his anger seemed to leave him. “I do not want to fade,” he said unwillingly. “But I do not want to be alive. How can a death-god be alive?” He paused, and something changed in his voice. “I could have let her die, and taken the sapphire from her and tried again, found another to remember. There are others of that bloodline.”

The mare’s ears went forward and back.

“I did not,” he said abruptly. “I cannot. Yet every time I go near her, the bond tightens. What immortal ever knew what it was like to number his days? Yet I can feel the hours passing when she is near.”

The mare nosed again at the deep snow. Morozko resumed his pacing.

Let her go, then, said the mare, quietly, from behind him. Let her find her own fate. You cannot love and be immortal. Do not let it come to that. You are not a man.



VASYA DID NOT LEAVE the space under the spruce-tree that day, although she meant to. “I am never going home,” she said to Solovey, around a lump in her throat. “I am well. Why tarry here?”

Because it was warm under the spruce—actually warm—with the fire snapping merrily, and all her limbs still felt slow and feeble. So Vasya stayed, and made porridge, then soup from the dried meat and salt in her saddlebag. She wished she had the energy to snare rabbits.

The fire burned on steadily, whether or not she added wood. She wondered how the snow above it did not melt, how she was not smoked out of her place beneath the spruce.

Magic, she thought restlessly. Perhaps I can learn magic. Then I would never go in fear of traps, or pursuit.

When the snow was blue-hollowed with the failing day, and the fire had grown a touch brighter than the world outside, Vasya looked up to find Morozko standing just inside the ring of light.

Vasya said, “I am not going home.”

“That,” he returned, “is obvious, despite my best efforts. Do you mean to set off straightaway and ride through the night?”

A chill wind shook the spruce-branches. “No,” she said.

He nodded once, curtly, and said, “Then I will build up the fire.”

This time she watched him carefully when he put a hand against the skin of the spruce, and bark and limb crumbled dry and dead into his waiting palm. But she still did not know exactly what he did. First there was living wood, then, between one blink and the next, it became kindling. Her eyes kept wanting to skitter away, at the strangeness of his almost-human hand, doing a thing a man could not.

When the fire was roaring, Morozko tossed Vasya a rabbit-skin bag, then went to tend the white mare. Vasya caught the bag by reflex, staggering; it was heavier than it looked. She undid the ties and discovered apples, chestnuts, cheese, and a loaf of dark bread. She almost yelled in childlike delight.

When Morozko slid back through the curtain of spruce, he found her smashing nuts with the flat of her belt-knife and scrabbling hungrily for the nut-meats with dirty fingers.

“Here,” he said, a wry note in his voice.

Her head jerked up. The carcass of a big rabbit, gutted and cleaned, hung incongruously from his elegant fingers.

“Thank you!” Vasya gasped with bare politeness. She seized the thing at once, spitted it, and set it over the fire. Solovey put his head curiously under the spruce, eyed the roasting flesh, shot her an offended look, and disappeared again. Vasya ignored him, busy toasting her bread, while she waited for the meat. The bread browned and she gobbled it steaming, with cheese running down the sides. Earlier she had not been hungry, dying as she was, but now her body reminded her that her hot meal in Chudovo was long ago, and the hard, cold days had reduced her flesh to bone and skin and strings. She was ravenous.