Her legs shook, her stomach was full of acid. In an instant like a lightning-strike, they both stood frozen, staring at each other.
Then she turned and ran. It wasn’t anything so noble as running to find the bridle, to put an end to all this. No, she was fleeing for her life.
Behind her, she heard the terem-door slam open, heard his rich voice raised, shouting. But she’d already ducked into the nearest door, passed a room full of weavers like a wraith, gone back outside again, descending. All the quivering panic of the last hours had broken open; all she wanted to do was run.
She slipped through another doorway, found the room empty, and with a wrench of desperate effort, paused and forced herself to think.
The bridle. She must get the bridle. Before dusk. If she could only keep everyone safe until midnight, perhaps the Midnight-road could save them. Perhaps.
Or perhaps she’d die, screaming.
Voices sounded just outside the outer door. There was a second door, leading farther into Dmitrii’s palace; she fled through. The place was a warren. Low-ceilinged, dim rooms, many of them full of goods: skins and barrels of flour and silk-figured carpets. Other rooms housed workshops for weaving and carpentry, the souter, the bootmaker.
Vasya, still running, came to a room full of bales of wool and hid herself behind the biggest. Kneeling, she drew her little belt-knife and, with shaking fingers, cut her hand, and turned her palm so that the drops pattered onto the floor.
“Master,” she said to the air, in a voice that cracked, “will you help me? I mean this house no harm.”
Below her, in the dooryard, Vasya heard curses, the shouts of men, the screams of women. A servant came running through the room of bales. “They are saying there is someone in the palace.”
“A witch!”
“A ghost!”
Dmitrii’s faded domovoi stepped out from behind one of the bales of wool. He whispered, “You are in danger here. The priest will kill you for hatred, and the Bear to spite his brother.”
“I don’t care what happens to me,” said Vasya, her bravado belied by her shallow-breathed voice, “so long as my sister and brother live.
Where is the treasure-room?”
“Follow me,” said the domovoi, and Vasya drew a deep breath and followed. She was grateful suddenly for every scrap of bread she’d ever given a household-spirit, for now all those homely tributes, bread and blood, quickened the domovoi’s feet, as he led her deep into the mad jumble of Dmitrii’s palace.
Down, and down again, to an earth-smelling passage and a great, iron-bound door. Vasya thought of caves and traps. She was still breathing faster than the exertion called for.
“Here,” said the domovoi. “Hurry.” Next moment, Vasya heard the sound of heavy feet, tramping. Shadows moved on the walls; she had only a moment.
Seized again by terror, she forgot she could be invisible; she forgot to ask the domovoi to open the door. Instead she lurched forward, driven by the sound of feet above, and put a hand on the treasure-room door. Reality twisted; the door gave. With a gasp, she tumbled inside and scrambled into a corner behind some bronze-chased shields.
Voices sounded in the corridor.
“I heard something.”
“You imagined it.”
A pause.
“The door is ajar.”
A creak as the door swung open. A heavy step. “There is no one here.”
“What fool left the door unlocked?”
“A thief?”
“Search the room.”
After all this? Were they to find her so, drag her up into Moscow, where Konstantin would be waiting?
No. No they would not.
A crack of thunder sounded suddenly outside, as though to give voice to her panic and her courage both. The palace shook. There came a sudden roar of rain.
The men’s torches went out. She heard them swearing.
Her hands trembled. The sounds of storm, the darkness all around, the great door opening at her touch, were like three pieces of a nightmare. Reality was shifting too fast to understand.
The men’s shock at the noise and unexpected darkness had won her a reprieve, but that was all. They would relight their torches.
They would search, and find her. Could she make herself invisible this time? When they were searching for her in this small room?
She wasn’t sure. So instead Vasya clenched her fists and thought of Morozko. She thought of the sleep like death that the winter-king
held in his hands. Sleep. The men would go to sleep. If she could only forget they were awake.
She did. And they did. They crumpled to the packed-dirt floor of the treasure-room. Their cries died away.
Morozko was there, between one blink and the next. She hadn’t put the men to sleep. He had. He was there, himself, real, in the treasure-room with her.
Now the winter-king was turning pale eyes on her. She stared. It was really him. Pulled to her, somehow, as she remembered his power. As though drawing him to her was easier than calling down sleep herself.
