The Girl in the Tower

by Katherine Arden

  She went to the stove. Morozko looked round then, and a little of the remoteness left his face.

  She flushed suddenly. Her hair was a witchy mass, her feet bare. Perhaps he saw it, for his glance withdrew abruptly. “Nightmares?” he asked.

  Vasya bristled, and shyness vanished in indignation. “No,” she replied, with dignity. “I slept perfectly well.”

  He lifted a brow.

  “Have you a comb?” she asked, to divert him.

  He looked taken aback. She supposed he wasn’t used to guests at all, much less the sort whose hair tangled, who got hungry or had bad dreams. But then he half-smiled and reached a hand for the floor.

  The floor was wood. Of course it was—wood smooth-planed and dark. But when he straightened, Morozko nonetheless held a handful of snow. He breathed on it once, and the snow became ice.

  Vasya bent nearer, fascinated. His long, thin fingers shaped the ice as though it were clay. In his face was an odd light, the joy of creation. After a few minutes, he held a comb that looked as though it had been carved from diamonds. The back of it was shaped like a horse, long mane streaming along its straining neck.

  Morozko handed it to Vasya. The coarse hair of the beast’s back, done in ice-crystals, scraped on her calloused fingertips.

  She turned the lovely thing over and over in her fingers. “Will it break?” It lay cool as stone and perfect in her hand.

  He sat back. “No.”

  Tentatively, she began to work at the snarls. The comb slid like water down the whorls of her hair, pulling them smooth. She thought he might be watching her, though whenever she looked, his glance was fixed on the fire. At the end, when her hair was smooth-plaited, wound with a little strip of leather, Vasya said, “Thank you,” and the comb melted to water in her hand.

  She was still staring at the place where it had lain when he said, “It is little enough. Eat, Vasya.”

  She had not seen his servants come, but now the table held porridge, golden with honey and yellow with butter, and a wooden bowl. She sat down, heaped the bowl with steaming porridge, and tore into it, making up for the night before.

  “Where do you mean to go?” he asked her as she ate.

  Vasya blinked. Away. She had not thought further than away.

  “South,” she said slowly. As she spoke, she knew her answer. Her heart leaped. “I wish to see the churches of Tsargrad, and look upon the sea.”

  “South, then,” he said, oddly agreeable. “It is a long way. Do not press Solovey too hard. He is stronger than a mortal horse, but he is young.”

  Vasya glanced at him in some surprise, but his face revealed nothing. She turned toward the horses. Morozko’s white mare stood composedly. Solovey had already eaten his hay, with a good measure of barley, and was now edging back to the table, one eye fixed on her porridge. She began eating rapidly, to forestall him.

  Not looking at Morozko, she asked, “Will you ride with me, a little way?” Her question came out in a rush, and she regretted it as soon as she voiced it.

  “Ride at your side, nurse you with pap, and keep the snow off at night?” he asked, sounding amused. “No. Even if I had not other things to do, I would not. Go out into the world, traveler. See what the long nights and hard days feel like, after a week of them.”

  “Perhaps I will like them,” Vasya retorted, with spirit.

  “I sincerely hope not.”

  She would not dignify that with an answer. Vasya put a little more porridge in the bowl and let Solovey lick it up.

  “You will have him fat as a broodmare at this rate,” Morozko remarked.

  Solovey’s ears eased back, but he did not relinquish the porridge.

  “He needs filling out,” Vasya protested. “Besides, he’ll work it off, on the road.”

  Morozko said, “Well, if you are set on this, then I have a gift for you.”

  She followed his glance. Two bulging saddlebags lay on the floor beneath the table. She did not reach for them. “Why? My great dowry is lying in that corner, and surely a little gold will buy all that is needful.”

  “Naturally you can use the gold of your dowry,” Morozko returned coolly. “If you intend to ride into a city you do not know, where you can purchase things you have never seen, riding your war-stallion and dressed as a Russian princess. You may wear the white furs and scarlet if you like, so that no thief in Rus’ will be the poorer.”

  Vasya lifted her chin. “I prefer green to scarlet,” she said coldly. “But perhaps you are right.” She put a hand to the saddlebags—then paused. “You saved my life in the forest,” she said. “You offered me a dowry; you came when I asked you to rid us of the priest. Now this. What do you want of me in return, Morozko?”

  He seemed to hesitate, just an instant. “Think of me sometimes,” he returned. “When the snowdrops have bloomed and the snow has melted.”

  “Is that all?” she asked, and then added, with wry honesty, “How could I forget?”

  “It is easier than you would think. Also—” He reached out.

  Startled, Vasya kept perfectly still, though her traitorous blood rushed out to her skin when his hand brushed her collarbone. A silver-backed sapphire hung round her neck; Morozko hooked a finger beneath its chain and drew it forth. This jewel had been a gift from her father, given to her by her nurse before she died. Of all Vasya’s possessions, the sapphire was her most prized.

  Morozko held the jewel up between them. It threw pale icicle-light across his fingers. “You will promise me,” he said, “to wear this always, no matter the circumstances.” He let the necklace fall.

  The brush of his hand seemed to linger, raw on her skin. Vasya ignored it angrily. He was not real, after all. He was alone, unknowable, a creature of black wood and pale sky. What had he said?

  “Why?” she asked. “My nurse gave it me. A gift from my father.”

  “It is a talisman, that thing,” Morozko said. He spoke as though he were choosing his words. “It may be some protection.”

  “Protection from what?” she asked. “And why do you care?”

  “Contrary to what you believe, I do not want to come for you, dead in some hollow,” he returned coldly. A breeze, soft and bone-chilling, filtered through the room. “Will you deny me this?”

  “No,” said Vasya. “I meant to wear it anyway.” She bit her lip and turned away a little too quickly to untie the flap of the first saddlebag.

  It held clothing: a wolfskin cloak, a leather hood, a rabbit-fur cap, felt-and-fur boots, trousers lined with fleece. The other held food: dried fish and bread baked hard, a skin of honey-wine, a knife, and a pot for water. Everything she would need for hard travel in a cold country. Vasya stared down at these things with a delight she had never felt for the gold or gems of her dowry. These things were freedom; Vasilisa Petrovna, Pyotr’s highborn daughter, would never have owned such things. They belonged to someone else, someone more capable and more strange. She looked up at Morozko, face alight. Perhaps he understood her better than she’d thought.

  “Thank you,” Vasya said. “I—thank you.”

  He inclined his head but did not speak.

  She didn’t care. With the skins came a saddle of no kind that she had ever seen before, little more than a padded cloth. Vasya leaped up eagerly, already calling to Solovey, the saddle in one hand.

  BUT SADDLING THE HORSE was not so easy. Solovey had never worn a saddle—even this skin that passed for one—and did not like it much.

  “You need it!” Vasya finally burst out, exasperated, after a good deal of fruitless sidling about the fir-grove. So much for the brave and self-sufficient wanderer, she thought. Solovey was no nearer to being saddled than when they began. Morozko was watching from the doorway. His amused glance bored into her back.

  “What will happen if we are going all day for weeks on end?” Vasya demanded of Solovey. “We’ll both be chafed raw, and besides, how will we hang the saddlebags? There is grain for you in there, too. Do you want to live on pine-ne
edles?”

  Solovey snorted and shot a covert glance at the saddlebags.

  “Fine,” Vasya said through gritted teeth. “You can just go back to wherever you came from, and I’ll walk.” She started toward the house.

  Solovey lunged and blocked her way.

  Vasya gave him a glare and a shove, which had precisely no effect on the great oak-colored bulk. She crossed her arms and scowled. “Well, then,” she said, “what do you suggest?”

  Solovey looked at her, then the saddlebags. His head drooped. Oh, very well, he said, without much grace.

  Vasya carefully did not look at Morozko as she finished making ready.

  SHE LEFT THAT SAME MORNING, under a sun that burned away the mist and set diamonds in the fresh-fallen snow. The world outside the fir-grove seemed large and formless, faintly menacing. “I don’t feel like a traveler now,” Vasya admitted, low, to Morozko. They stood together outside the fir-grove. Solovey waited, neatly saddled, with an expression caught between eagerness and irritation, disliking the saddlebags on his back.

  “Neither do travelers, often enough,” the frost-demon returned. Unexpectedly, he put both hands on her fur-clad shoulders. Their eyes met. “Stay in the forest. That is safest. Avoid the dwellings of men, and keep your fires small. If you speak to anyone, say you are a boy. The world is not kind to girls alone.”

  Vasya nodded. Words trembled on her lips. She could not read his expression.

  He sighed. “May you have joy in your wanderings. Now go, Vasya.”

  He boosted her into the saddle, and then she was looking down at him. Suddenly he seemed less a man than a man-shaped confluence of shadows. There was something in his face she did not understand.

  She opened her mouth to speak again.

  “Go!” he said, and slapped Solovey’s quarters. The horse snorted and spun and they were away over the snow.

  7.

  Traveler

  Thus Vasilisa Petrovna, murderer, savior, lost child, rode away from the house in the fir-grove. The first day ran on as an adventure might, with home behind and the whole world before them. As the hours passed, Vasya’s mood went from apprehensive to giddy, and she pushed the sour remains of loss and confusion to the back of her mind. No distance could stand before Solovey’s steady stride. Before half a day was gone, she was further from home than she’d ever been: every hollow and elm and snowy stump new to her. Vasya rode, and when she grew cold, she walked, while Solovey jogged with impatience.

  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 chanc
e. Ride far, Vasilisa Petrovna.”

  She disappeared from the sheltering fir-branches while Vasya was still asking questions. “I don’t—wait—” But the chyert was gone. Vasya could have sworn she heard a horse that was not Solovey snorting in the cold, and also the steady clop of great hooves. But she saw nothing. Then silence.

  Vasya sat by the fire until it was only hot embers, listening, but no new sound disturbed the nighttime quiet. At last she persuaded herself to lie down once more and go to sleep. She surprised herself by falling immediately and blackly unconscious, and woke only at dawn, when Solovey thrust his head into her shelter and blew snow into her face.

  Vasya smiled at the horse, rubbed her eyes, drank a little hot water, saddled him, and rode away.

  DAYS PASSED—A WEEK—ANOTHER. The road was hard, and very cold. Not all Vasya’s days—or her nights—were as well organized as the first. She saw no strangers and the midnight-demon did not come back, but she still bruised herself on branches, burned her fingers, scorched her dinner, and let herself grow chilled, so that she must huddle all night beside the fire, too cold to sleep. Then she actually caught a cold, so that she spent two days shivering and choking on her own breath.

  But the versts rushed beneath Solovey’s hooves and fell away behind them. South they went and south more, angling west, and when Vasya said, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” the horse ignored her.

  On the third day of Vasya’s cold, when she rode doggedly, head down, her nose a brilliant red, the trees ended.

  Or rather, a great river thrust its way between them. The light on a vast stretch of snow dazzled Vasya’s swollen eyes when they came to the edge of the wood and looked out. “This must be the sledge-road,” she whispered, blinking at the expanse of snow-covered ice. “The Volga,” she added, remembering her eldest brother’s stories. A sloping snowbank, with trees half-buried in the deep drifts stretched down to the sledge-tracked snow.