Sasha dragged himself to his knees. There was blood on his mouth.

His lips formed a single word— Run.

She hesitated. The mare felt it and slowed.

Just then, a streak of flame shot across the heavens.

It was like a star falling: scarlet and blue and gold. The streak of flame dropped lower, lower, surged like a wave, and suddenly there was a tall golden mare, glowing in the grass, galloping alongside them.

Cries of rage and wonder from the Tatars.

“Pozhar,” Vasya whispered. The mare slanted an ear at the other horse, turned her other ear back to the men riding them down. Get on my back.

Vasya didn’t question it. She stood up, balancing on the bay mare’s back as she galloped. Pozhar had shortened her stride to pace the other horse and Vasya stepped sideways, lightly, and dropped to the mare’s golden withers. The mare’s skin was burning-hot between her knees.

A few of the oncoming men had bows; an arrow whistled past her ear. They were just inside bowshot, angling back toward the place where her brother lay. What to do? Miraculously, she had Pozhar’s speed now, but her brother was on the ground. Another arrow whistled past her cheek just as she glimpsed the Midnight-road.

An idea came to her then, so reckless her breath caught. With the rage and terror in her heart, the limits of her knowledge and her skill so miserably evident, she could think of nothing else.

“We have to get back to this same midnight. We have to come back for him,” Vasya told the mare grimly. “But we need to get help first.”

You didn’t understand, Midnight had said.

The mare set foot on the Midnight-road and they were swallowed up by the night.

THEY WOULD GET BACK to the Tatar camp on the same midnight—she would not have left otherwise. But it felt hideously like she’d abandoned her brother to die, as she galloped through the wild darkness, trees lashing at her face. She sobbed into the mare’s neck for a stride or two, in horror, in fear for Sasha, in sheer disgust at her own blundering, at the limits of her skill.

The golden mare did not move like Solovey. Solovey was round through the barrel and easy to ride. Pozhar was faster, leaner, her withers a hard ridge, her stride a great heave and surge, like riding the crest of a flood.

After a few moments, Vasya raised her head and got control of herself. Could she do it? She couldn’t even have contemplated it, were her mind not full of the sight of her brother, bloody, surrounded by enemies. She tried to think of something else.

Anything.

She couldn’t.

So she concentrated on where she wished to go. That part was easy, and quick. Her blood knew the way; she scarcely needed to think of it.

After only few minutes of galloping, they burst out of the black woods into a familiar field, hissing with wheat half-harvested. The sky was a river of stars. Vasya sat up. Pozhar slowed, dancing, wild.

A small village stood on a little rise, beyond the cleared fields. It was indistinct against the stars, but Vasya knew its every fold and curve. Longing closed her throat. It was midnight, in the village where she’d been born. Somewhere near, in his own house, was her brother Alyosha, her sister Irina.

But she wasn’t there for them. One day, she might go back—bring Marya back to meet her people, to eat good bread sitting in warm summer grass. But now she could not look for comfort here. She was on another errand.

“Pozhar,” said Vasya. “Why did you come back?”

Ded Grib, said the mare. He’s been getting news from all the mushrooms in Rus’, as self-important as you could wish, telling

everyone he is your greatest ally. Today he came to me saying youwere in danger again and that I was a great lump for not helping. Iwent to find you only to silence him, but then I saw the fires youmade. They were good fires. The mare sounded almost approving.

Besides, you don’t weigh very much. You aren’t even uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” said Vasya. “Will you carry me farther?”

That depends, said the horse. Are we going to do anything interesting?

Vasya thought of Morozko, far away in the white silence of his winter world. There was a welcome for her there, she knew. But not help. She might pull him, a shadow, out once more from winter, but to what end? He could not fight off an army of Tatars as he was, and save her brother.

She could only think of one who might be able to.

She said grimly, “More interesting than you might wish.” Once more, she wondered if she was being fatally rash.

But then she thought of Midnight. What had she meant when she said, We hoped that you were different.

Vasya thought she knew.

At her touch, Pozhar wheeled and galloped back through the trees.

29.

Between Winter and Spring

THERE IS A CLEARING ON the border between winter and spring. Once Vasya would have said that the cusp of spring was a moment. But now she knew that it was also a place, at the edge of the lands of winter.

At the center of the clearing stood an oak-tree. Its trunk was vast as a peasant’s hut, its branches spread like the roof-beams of a house, like the bars of a prison.

At the foot of the tree, leaning on the trunk, knees drawn up to his chest, sat Medved. It was still midnight. The clearing was dark; the moon had sunk below the horizon. There was only Pozhar’s light, echoed by the gleam of gold that bound the Bear’s wrists and throat.

Utter silence in the forest all around, but Vasya had the distinct impression of unseen eyes, watching.

Medved didn’t move when he saw them, except his mouth quirked in an expression very far from a smile. “Come to gloat?” he asked.

Vasya slid off the mare’s back. The demon’s nostrils flared, taking in her disheveled appearance, the cut on her temple, feet caked with mud. Pozhar backed uneasily, ears locked on the Bear, remembering perhaps the teeth of his upyry in her flank.

Vasya stepped forward.

His unscarred brow lifted. “Or are you come to seduce me?” he asked. “My brother not enough for you?”

She said nothing. He couldn’t draw back, pressed against the tree, but the single eye opened wider. He was tense, bound tight by the gold. “No?” he said, still mocking. “Then why?”

“Did you mourn the priest?” she asked.

The Bear tilted his head and surprised her by saying simply, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“He was mine. He was beautiful. He could create and destroy with a word. He put his soul in his singing, in his writing of icons. He is gone. Of course, I mourn.”