Olga considered her daughter, frowning. Marya hadn’t been herself since the heat gripped them. Ordinarily, Olga would have taken her family out of the city, to the rough-built town of Serpukhov proper, where they could at least hope for some quiet and cooler air.
But this year there were reports of fires to the south, and if anyone so much as put a nose out of doors, they saw a hellish white haze and breathed the smoke. Now there was plague in the posad outside the walls, and that settled it. She would keep her family where it was. But
—
“Please,” said Marya. “Everyone has to stay here. With our gates shut.”
Olga was still frowning. “I cannot keep our gates shut forever.”
“You won’t have to,” said Marya, and Olga noticed uneasily the directness of her daughter’s gaze. She was growing up too quickly.
Something about the fire and its aftermath had changed her. She saw things her mother did not. “Just until Vasya gets back.”
“Masha—” Olga began gently.
“She is coming back,” said her daughter. She did not shout it defiantly, did not weep or plead with her mother to understand. She just said it. “I know it.”
“Vasya wouldn’t dare,” said Varvara, coming in with damp cloths, a jar of wine that had been packed in straw in the cool cellar. “Even assuming she lives still, she knows what a risk it would be to all of us.” She handed the cloth to Olga, who dabbed her temples.
“Has that ever stopped Vasya?” Olga asked, taking the cup that Varvara gave her. The two women exchanged worried glances. “I will keep the servants from the cathedral, Masha,” Olga said. “Though they will not thank me for it. And—if you—hear—that Vasya has come, will you tell me?”
“Of course,” said Marya at once. “We must have supper ready for her.”
Varvara said to Olga, “I do not think she will come back. She has gone too far.”
20.
The Golden Bridle
VASYA’S HEAD WAS FULL OF winter midnights, and she was shaking with the want of light. She wasn’t sure they would ever come out at all. They rode without pause, over ridges and valleys glazed with ice, filled up with darkness as if they’d never seen day. Morozko’s presence at her back was no comfort here; he was a part of the long, lonely night, untroubled by the frost.
She tried to think of Sasha, to think of Moscow and daylight and her own life waiting for her on the other side of the darkness. But the touchstones of her life had all been thrown into disarray, and it grew harder and harder to focus her mind, as they rode through the icy night.
“Stay awake,” Morozko said in her ear. Her head was lolling on his shoulder; she jerked upright, half in a panic, so that the white mare slanted a reproving ear. “If I guide us, we will end somewhere on my own lands, in the deep of winter,” he continued. “If you still want to make it to Moscow, in summer, you must stay awake.” They were crossing a glade full of snowdrops, stars overhead and the faint sweetness of the flowers at her feet.
Hastily Vasya straightened her back, tried to refocus her mind. The darkness seemed to mock her. How could you separate the winter-king from winter? Impossible even to try. Her head swam.
“Vasya,” he said, more gently. “Come with me to my own lands.
Winter will come soon enough to Moscow. Otherwise—”
“I am not asleep yet,” she said, suddenly fierce. “You set the Bear free; you must help me bind him.”
“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.
