Summoned. She’d summoned the winter-king like a stray spirit.
They both realized it at the same time. The shock in his face mirrored the feeling in hers.
For an instant, they were silent.
Then he spoke. “A thunderstorm, Vasya?” he said, with effort.
Speaking between dry lips, she whispered, “It wasn’t me. It just happened.”
Morozko shook his head. “No it didn’t just happen. And now, with the rain, it is dark enough outside. He need no longer delay. Fool, I cannot keep him distracted from a cellar!” Morozko wasn’t wounded, but he looked—battered—in a way she could not define, and his eyes were wild. He looked as though he’d been fighting. He probably had been, until she pulled him away, unknowing.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, her voice small. “I was so frightened.”
Reality was rippling around her like cloth in a high wind. She wasn’t sure if he was really there or if she’d just imagined him. “I am so frightened…”
Without thinking she cupped her palms and found them suddenly full of blue flames, and she could see his face properly. Fire in her hands…It didn’t burn her. She was on the edge of mad laughter, as blind terror mingled with newfound power. “Konstantin saw me,”
she said. “I ran. I was so afraid; I couldn’t stop remembering. So I called a thunderstorm. And now you’re here. Two devils and two
people—” She knew she wasn’t making sense. “Where is the bridle?”
She cast around, gripping the fire in her two hands as though it were an ordinary lamp.
“Vasya,” said Morozko. “Enough magic. Let it go. Enough for one day. You will bend your mind until it breaks.”
“It is not my mind bending,” she said, lifting up the fire between them. “You are here, aren’t you? It is everything else. It is the whole world bending.” She was shaking; the flames jerked back and forth.
“There is no difference between the world without and the world within,” said the winter-king. “Close your hands. Let go.” He shoved the locked door farther open to give them a little light from the passageway. Then he turned back to her, put his hands around hers, folded her fingers around the flames. They vanished, swift as they had come. “Vasya, my brother’s very presence stirs up fear, and in its wake, he brings madness. You must—”
She hardly heard him. Shaking, she looked all around her for the golden bridle. Where was Olga? What had Konstantin done? What was he doing now? She broke away from Morozko, knelt beside a great iron-bound chest. When she pushed the lid, it gave. Of course it did. There were no locks in a nightmare. This was a dream; she could do what she liked. Was she truly in a cellar, a fugitive, back in Moscow, had she summoned a death-god?
“Enough,” said Morozko from behind her. “You will drive yourself mad with impossibilities.” His cool, insubstantial hands fell on her shoulders. “Vasya listen, listen, listen to me. ”
Still she didn’t hear him; she was staring at the contents of the chest, hardly noticing the shaking of her hands.
This time, he lifted her up bodily, turned her, saw her face.
He whispered something harsh under his breath and said, “Tell me things that are true. Tell me.”
She stared at him blindly and said, beginning to laugh hysterically,
“Nothing is real. Midnight is a place and there is a storm outside from a clear evening and you were not here and now you are and I am so frightened—”
Grimly, he said, “Your name is Vasilisa Petrovna. Your father was a country lord named Pyotr Vladimirovich. As a child you stole honey-cakes—no, look at me.” He lifted her face forcibly to his, kept on with his strange litany. Telling her true things. Not part of the nightmare.
Mercilessly he went on, “And then your horse was killed by the mob.”
She jerked in his grip, denying the truth of it. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, she could make it so that Solovey had never died, here in this nightmare where anything was possible. But he shook her, lifted her chin so that she had to meet his eyes again, spoke into her ear, the voice of winter in this airless cellar, reminding her of her joys and her mistakes, her loves and her flaws, until she found herself back in her own skin, shaken but able to think.
She realized how close she had come, in that dark treasure-room, with reality collapsing like a rotten tree, to going mad. Realized, too, what had happened to Kaschei, how he had become a monster.
“Mother of God,” she breathed. “Ded Grib—he said that magic makes men mad. But I didn’t really understand…”
Morozko’s eyes searched hers, and then some indefinable tension seemed to go out of him. “Why do you think so few people do magic?” he asked, getting hold of himself, stepping back. She could still feel the impress of his fingers, realized how hard he had been gripping her. As hard as she’d held him.
“Chyerti do,” she said.
“Chyerti do tricks,” he said. “Men and women are far stronger.” He paused. “Or they go mad.” He knelt beside the chest she had opened.
“And it is easier to fall prey to fear and madness, when the Bear is abroad.”
She drew a deep breath, and knelt beside him before the open chest. In it lay the golden bridle.
Twice before she had seen it, once in daylight on Pozhar’s head and once again in a dark stable, where the gold paled to nothing beside the mare’s brilliance. But this time it lay on a fine cushion, glimmering with an unpleasant sheen.
Morozko took the thing in his hands, so that the pieces of it spilled like water across his fingers. “No chyert could have made this,” he said, turning it over. “I do not know how Kaschei did it.” He sounded torn between admiration and horror. “But it would, I think, bind anything it was put on, flesh or spirit.”
She reached down flinching hands. The gold was heavy, supple, the bit a horrible, spiked thing. Vasya shuddered in sympathy, thinking of the scars on Pozhar’s face. Hastily she undid the straps and buckles, reins and headstall, so that she was left with two golden ropes. The bit she flung to the floor. The other pieces lay in her hands like quiescent snakes. “Can you use these?” she asked, offering them to Morozko.
He put a hand to the gold, hesitated. “No,” he said. “It is a magic made by mortals, and for them.”
“All right,” said Vasya. She wound the golden ropes one about each wrist, making sure she could snap them loose quickly, at need. “Then let’s go find him.”
Outside there came another crack of thunder.
23.
Faith and Fear
