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
KONSTANTIN FINISHED QUIETING THE CROWD at the Grand Prince of Moscow’s gates. The Princess of Serpukhov’s carriage was being unharnessed; the woman herself had already disappeared, with her attendant, up the terem-steps.
One day, Konstantin thought grimly, he wasn’t going to soothe the people of Moscow anymore but rouse them to savagery once again. He remembered the power of that night: all those thousands receptive to his softest word.
He craved that power.
Soon the devil had promised. Soon. But now he must go back to the Grand Prince, and make sure that Dmitrii gave no hearing to Aleksandr Peresvet.
He turned to cross the dooryard, and saw a little, wispy creature blocking his way.
“Poor dupe,” said Olga’s dvorovoi.
Konstantin ignored him, lips set thin, and strode across the dooryard.
“He lied to you, you know. She’s not dead.”
Despite himself, Konstantin’s steps slowed; he turned his head. “She?”
“She,” said the dvorovoi. “Go into the terem now, and see for yourself. The Bear betrays all who follow him.”
“He wouldn’t betray me,” said Konstantin, eyeing the dvorovoi with disgust. “He needs me.”
“See for yourself,” whispered the dvorovoi again. “And remember—you are stronger than he.”
“I am only a man; he is a demon.”
“And subject to your blood,” whi
spered the dvorovoi. “When the time comes, remember that.” With a slow smile, he pointed up the terem-steps.
Konstantin hesitated. But then he turned toward the terem.
He hardly knew what he said to the attendant. But it must have worked, for he stepped through the door, and stood a moment, blinking in the dimness. The Princess of Serpukhov, without once glancing his way, swooned. Konstantin felt an instant’s disgust. Only a woman, come to visit her fellows.
Then a servant ran for the door, and he recognized her.
Vasilisa Petrovna.
She was alive.
For a long, electric moment he stared. A scar on her face, her black hair cropped short, but it was her.
Then she bolted and he shouted, hardly knowing what he said. He followed her, blindly, casting around to see where she’d gone—only to see the Bear in the dooryard.
Medved was dragging a man in his wake. Or—not a man. Another devil. The second devil had colorless, watchful eyes, and was strangely familiar. The edges of him seemed to bleed into the shadows of the failing day.
“She is here,” said Konstantin raggedly to the Bear. “Vasilisa Petrovna.”
For an instant it seemed the second devil smiled. The Bear spun and struck him across the face. “What are you planning, brother?” he said. “I see it in your eyes. There is something. Why have you let her come back here? What is she doing?”
The devil said nothing. The Bear turned back to Konstantin. “Summon men; go and get her, man of God.”
Konstantin didn’t move. “You knew,” he said. “You knew she was alive. You lied.”
“I knew,” said the devil, impatient. “But what difference does it make? She’s going to die now. We’ll both make sure of it.”
Konstantin had no words. Vasya had lived. She’d beaten him after all. Even his own monster had been on her side. Had kept her secret. Could it be that everyone was against him? Not only God, but the devil too? What had it all been for: the suffering and the dead, the glory and the ashes, the heat and the shame of that summer?
The Bear had filled the gaping hole of his faith with his sheer electrifying presence, and Konstantin had come, as though despite himself, to believe in something new. Not in faith, but in the reality of power. In his alliance with his monster.
Now the belief shattered at his feet.
“You lied to me,” he said again.
“I do lie,” said the Bear, but he was frowning now.
The second devil raised his head and looked between them. “I could have warned you, brother,” he said, his voice dry and exhausted. “Against lying.”
In that moment two things happened.
The second devil suddenly disappeared, as though he’d never been there at all. The Bear was left gaping at his empty hand.
And Konstantin, rather than go out and join the palace guard in searching for Vasya, plunged back into the terem without a sound, his soul aflame with desperate purpose.
* * *
THE WILD-EYED DOMOVOI MET Vasya and Morozko just outside the treasure-room. Vasya said, “What is happening?”
“It is dark now; the Bear is going to let them in!” cried the domovoi, every hair standing on end. “The dvorovoi can’t hold the gates, and I don’t think I can keep the house.”
Another crack of thunder sounded. “My brother is done with subtleties,” said Morozko.
“Come on,” said Vasya.
They burst out of the palace, onto a landing, and looked down at a landscape transformed. It was raining, hard and steadily, lit by intermittent flashes of lightning. The dooryard was swimming in mud already, but in the center was a knot of men, strangely still.
Guards, Vasya saw, squinting through the rain. Olga’s guards, and Dmitrii’s, standing bewildered.
The knot of them broke apart. Vasya glimpsed Konstantin Nikonovich, his golden head rain-wet in the middle of the dooryard.
He was holding her sister Olga by the arm.
He had a knife to the princess’s throat.
His beautiful voice was shouting Vasya’s name.
The guards, Vasya could see, were torn between fear for the princess and bewildered submission to the holy madman. They stood still; if any remonstrated with Konstantin it was lost in the noise of falling water. If a guard moved nearer, Konstantin backed up, holding the knife right against Olga’s throat.
“Come out!” he roared. “Witch! Come out or I’ll kill her.”
Vasya’s first, overwhelming instinct was to sprint down to her sister, but she forced herself to pause and think. Would revealing herself win Olga any respite? Perhaps, if Olga disavowed her. Yet Vasya hesitated. The Bear was standing behind the priest. But Medved wasn’t really watching Konstantin. His gaze was turned out into the rain-soaked darkness. “Calling the dead,” said Morozko, his eyes on his brother. “You must get your sister out of the dooryard.”
That settled it. “Come with me,” she said, gathered her courage and stepped bareheaded out into the rain. The guards might not have recognized her in the stormy dusk: a girl who was supposed to be dead. But Konstantin’s eyes locked on her the instant she stepped into the dooryard and he fell utterly silent, watching her come toward him.
First one guard’s head turned, then another. She heard their voices: “Is that—?”
“No, it can’t be.”
“It is. The holy father knew.”
“A ghost?”
“A woman.”
“A witch.”
Now their drawn weapons were turning toward her. But she ignored them. The Bear, the priest, her sister—those were the only things she could see.
Such a current of rage and bitter memory ran between her and Konstantin that even the guards must have felt it, for they made a path for her. But they closed ranks again at her back, swords in their hands.
Stark in Vasya’s mind was the last time she’d faced Konstantin Nikonovich. Her horse’s blood lay between them, and her own life.
Now it was Olga who was caught up in their hatred; Vasya thought of a cage of fire, and she was deathly afraid.
But her voice didn’t shake.
“I am here,” said Vasya. “Let my sister go.”
* * *
KONSTANTIN DIDN’T SPEAK IMMEDIATELY. The Bear did. Was it her imagination or did his face show an instant of unease? “Still in your right mind?” the Bear said to Vasya. “A pity. Well met again, brother,” he added to Morozko. “What magic pulled you from my grip before—?” He broke off, looking between Vasya and the winter-king.
“Ah,” he said, softly. “Stronger than I would have guessed: her power and your bond both. Well it is no matter. Hoping to be beaten again?”
Morozko made no answer at all. His eyes were on the gate as though he could see beyond the bronze-studded wood. “Hurry, Vasya,” he said.
“You can’t stop it,” said Medved.
Konstantin flinched at the sound of the Bear’s voice. His knife was fraying the cloth of the veil about Olga’s face. As though she were speaking to a frightened horse, Vasya said to Konstantin, “What do you want, Batyushka?”
Konstantin didn’t answer; she could see he didn’t really know. All his prayers had earned him only silence from God. Yielding up his soul to the Bear had won him neither that creature’s honesty nor his loyalty. In the stinging grip of his own self-hatred, he wanted to hurt her by any means, and had not thought beyond.
His hands shook. Only Olga’s headdress and veil were keeping her from being cut by accident. The Bear cast a benign eye over the scene, drinking up the raw emotion of it, but most of his attention was still on the world outside Dmitrii’s walls.
Olga was white to the lips but dignified still. Her eyes met Vasya’s without a tremor. With trust.
Vasya said to Konstantin, showing him her open palms, “I will yield myself
up to you, Batyushka. But you must let my sister go up into the terem, let her go back to the women.”
“Trick me, witch?” Konstantin’s voice had lost none of its beauty, but the control was gone; it boomed and cracked. “You yielded to the fire too; but it was all a trick. Am I to be taken in again? You and your devils. Bind her hands,” he added to the guard. “Bind her hands and feet. I will keep her in a chapel where devils cannot get in uninvited, and she cannot trick me again.”
The guards stirred uneasily, but none of them made a decisive movement forward.
“Now!” screamed Konstantin, stamping his foot. “Lest her devils come for us all!” His glance went with horror from Morozko at Vasya’s shoulder, to the Bear at his own side, to the house-chyerti gathered in the yard, watching—
Not watching the drama in the dooryard. Watching the gate. Despite the rain, Vasya caught a whiff of rot. A little curl of triumph was playing about the Bear’s lips. There was no time. She must get Olya away…
A new voice fell into the tense silence. “Holy Father, what is this?”
Dmitrii Ivanovich strode into the dooryard. Attendants scurried, disregarded, at his back; his long yellow hair was dark with water, curling up under his cap. The guards parted to let the Grand Prince through. He halted in the center of the ring, looked directly at Vasya. In his face was wonder. But not, Vasya noted, surprise. She met Dmitrii’s eyes with sudden hope.
“See?” snapped Konstantin, not slacking his grip on Olga. He had regained some control of his voice; the word snapped out like a fist. “There is the witch that set fire to Moscow. She was, we thought, justly punished. But through black magic, here she stands.” This time the guards growled agreement. A dozen blades were pointed at Vasya’s breast.
“Hold them a few moments longer,” said the Bear to Konstantin. “And we will have victory.”
A spasm of rage crossed Konstantin’s face.
“Vasya, tell Dmitrii you must pull back,” said Morozko. “There is no time.”
The Winter of the Witch Page 23
