The Girl in the Tower (The Winternight Trilogy, #2)(19)

So the day wore on, until the winter sun tilted west.

Just at dusk, they came upon a great spruce, with snow mounded up all around its trunk. By then, the twilight had blued the snow and it was bitterly cold.

“Here?” Vasya said, sliding down from the horse’s back. Her nose and fingers ached. Standing upright, she realized how stiff she was, and how weary.

The horse twitched his ears and raised his head. It smells safe.

A childhood running wild in a country with a seven-month winter had taught Vasya how to keep herself alive in the forest. But her heart failed a little, suddenly, at the thought of this freezing night all alone and the next and the next. She blew her nose. You chose this, she reminded herself. You are a traveler now.

The shadows draped the forest like hands; the light was all blue-violet and nothing looked quite real. “We’ll stay here,” Vasya said, pulling off Solovey’s saddle, with more confidence than she felt. “I am going to make a fire. Make sure nothing comes to eat us.”

Laboring, she dug the snow away from the tree, until she had a snow-cave under the spruce-branches and a patch of bare dirt for her fire. The winter twilight ran swiftly to night, in the way of the north, and it was full dark before she had chopped enough firewood. In the starlit dark, before moonrise, she also cut fringed limbs off the spruce as her brother once showed her, and planted them in the snow, to reflect heat toward her shelter.

She had been making fires since her hands could grip the flints, but she had to take her mittens off to do it, and her hands grew very cold.

The tinder caught at last; the flames roared up. When she crawled into her new-dug shelter, she found it cold, but bearable. Water boiled with pine needles warmed her; black bread toasted with hard cheese eased her hunger. She burned her fingers, and charred her dinner, but it was done at last, and she was proud.

Afterward, heartened by the food and the warmth, Vasya dug a trench in the fire-softened earth, filled it with coals from her fire, and made a platform of pine-boughs above it. She lay down on this platform, wrapped in her cloak and rabbit-lined bedroll, and was delighted to find herself more or less warm. Solovey was dozing already, his ears turning this way and that as he listened to the nighttime forest.

Vasya’s eyelids drooped; she was young and weary. Sleep was not far off.

It was then that she heard a laugh overhead.

Solovey’s head jerked up.

Vasya floundered to her feet, groping for her belt-knife. Were those eyes, shining in the darkness?

Vasya did not call—she was no fool—but she stared up into the spruce-branches until her eyes watered. Her little knife lay cold and pitifully small in her hand.

Silence. Had she imagined it?

Then the laugh came again. Vasya backed up, noiselessly, and picked up a burning log from the fire, holding it low.

Thump, she heard. Thump again—and then a woman dropped into the snow at the foot of the fir-tree.

Or not a woman. For this creature’s hair and eyes were ghost-pale, her glossy skin the color of winter midnight. She wore a sleep-colored cloak, but her head and arms and feet were bare. The firelight played red on her strange and lovely face, and the cold did not seem to trouble her. Child? Woman? Chyert. Some night-spirit. Vasya was at once relieved and more wary still.

“Grandmother?” she said cautiously. She lowered her burning brand. “You are welcome at my fire.”

The chyert straightened up. Her eyes were remote and pale as stars, but her mouth quirked, merry as a child’s. “A courteous traveler,” she said lightly. “I should have expected it. Put the log away, child; you won’t need it. Yes, I will sit by your fire, Vasilisa Petrovna.” So saying, she dropped into the snow beside the flames and looked Vasya up and down. “Come!” she said. “I have come to visit; you could at least offer me wine.”

Vasya, after a little hesitation, handed her visitor her skin of mead. She was not foolish enough to offend a creature that seemed to have tumbled from the sky. But—“You know my name, Grandmother,” Vasya ventured. “I do not know yours.”

The expression of the smiling mouth did not change. “I am called Polunochnitsa,” she said, drinking.

Vasya jerked back in alarm. Solovey, watching, pinned his ears. Vasya’s nurse, Dunya, had told tales of two demon-sisters, Midnight and Midday, and none of those stories ended well for lonely travelers. “Why are you here?” Vasya asked, breathing fast.

Midnight laughed to herself, lounging in the snow beside the fire. “Peace, child,” she said. “You will need steadier nerves than that, if you are going to be a traveler.” Vasya saw, with disquiet, that Midnight had a great number of teeth. “I was sent to look at you.”

“Sent—?” Vasya asked. Slowly, she sank back onto her own seat beside the fire. “Who sent you?”

“The more one knows, the sooner one grows old,” Midnight returned cheerfully.

Vasya asked, hesitating, “Was it Morozko?”

Midnight snorted, to Vasya’s chagrin. “Do not give him so much credit. Poor winter-king could never command me.” Her eyes seemed to give light of themselves.

“Who, then?” asked Vasya.

The demon put a finger to her lips. “Ah, that I cannot say, for I swore not. Besides, where is the mystery there?”

Midnight had drunk her fill; now she tossed the skin to Vasya and got to her feet. The firelight shone red through her moon-white hair. “Well, I have seen you once,” she said. “Thrice, I promised, so we will have another chance. Ride far, Vasilisa Petrovna.”