A swift wind leaped up and blew wide an arrow that would have struck her, and Morozko said, “There is his standard.”
It was at the apex of a small rise, in the first line of battle; they turned thither, cutting a swath through fighting men as they did. The snow was falling thicker and thicker now. A hail of arrows was targeting Dmitrii’s position. A wedge of horsemen was pushing through, trying to get to that vulnerable banner.
The white mare and Pozhar, light on their feet, cut through the battle faster, but the Tatars were closer and it was a race between them. Ears flat to her head, Pozhar dodged and sprang and galloped, while Vasya shouted at the Tatars’ horses. A few heard her and faltered, but not enough. The ground under the enemy’s feet grew slippery with ice, but the Tatars’ horses were sturdy beasts, used to running on all surfaces, and even that didn’t sway them. Snow blew in their faces, blinding the riders, but still the skillfully timed arrows flew.
“Medved!” Vasya shouted.
The Bear appeared on her other side, still with that edge of shrieking laughter in his voice. “Such joy,” he crowed. He was a beast, bathed in men’s blood and howling with delight, stark contrast to Morozko’s gathered silence on her other side. Together the three of them made a wedge of their own, and bulled through the fighting. Vasya set fires at their feet, swiftly smothered by the wet field, the fast-falling snow. Morozko blinded them, turned their arrows with a pranking wind.
Medved simply terrified all in his path.
It was a race between them and the Tatars to see who could get to Dmitrii’s position first.
The Tatars won. Arrows flying, they slammed into Dmitrii’s standard like a wave, a few strides before Vasya and her allies. The standard fell, crumpled to mud; all around were shouts of triumph. Still those arrows fell, deadly accurate. The white mare was hanging close to Pozhar’s flank; most of Morozko’s efforts were spent to keep arrows from Vasya and the two horses.
Dmitrii’s guard was smashed apart; his horse reared and went over. Then three Tatars were on him, hacking.
Vasya shouted, and Pozhar slammed into them with brute force. Who needed a sword, riding the golden mare? Her hooves shattered them, drove off their horses; sudden fires leaped up at their feet and they were flung back. Vasya slid down the mare’s shoulder and knelt at the Grand Prince’s head.
His armor was hacked; he was bleeding from a dozen wounds. She pulled off his helmet.
But it wasn’t the Grand Prince of Moscow at all. It was a young man she didn’t know, dying.
She stared. “Where is the Grand Prince?” she whispered.
The young man could hardly speak; blood bubbled between his lips. He looked up at her with unseeing eyes. She had to bend near to catch the words. “The van,” he whispered. “The first line of battle. He gave me his armor, so the Tatars would not know him. I was honored. I was…”
The light faded from his eyes.
Vasya closed them, turned.
“The line of battle,” she said. “Go!”
* * *
TATARS EVERYWHERE, FIGHTING. Arrows flying from all sides. Morozko was riding knee to knee with Vasya, keeping arrows from her with grim tenacity. With the Bear they cut through battles when they could, bringing snow, fire, terror.
“The line is wavering,” put in the Bear conversationally. His eye still glittered, his fur spiked with blood. “Dmitrii is going to have to—”
Then she heard Dmitrii’s voice. Undimmed, hale, roaring out over all the clash of armies. “Fall back!” he cried.
“That is not ideal,” said the Bear.
“Where is he?” said Vasya. She could hardly see through the snow and the thrash of fighting men.
“There,” said Morozko.
Vasya looked. “I can’t see.”
“Come on then,” said the winter-king. Shoulder to shoulder they fought their way through the press. Now she could see Dmitrii, still mounted, dressed in the armor of an ordinary boyar, his sword in his hand. Whooping, he ran a man through, used his horse’s weight to boost another man out of his saddle. There was blood on his cheek, his arm, his saddle, and the neck of his horse. “Fall back!”
The Tatars were advancing. All around, the arrows flew. One grazed her arm; she barely felt it. “Vasya!” snapped Morozko, and she realized her upper arm was bleeding.
“The Grand Prince has to live,” said Vasya. “All this is for naught if he dies—”
And then Pozhar was level with Dmitrii’s horse, rearing, forcing another attacker back.
Dmitrii turned and saw her. His face changed. He leaned over and seized her arm, heedless of her wounds or his.
“Sasha,” he said. “Where is Sasha?”
Battle had numbed her, but at his words, the fog around her mind thinned a little—and beneath it was agony. Dmitrii saw it in her face. His own whitened. His lips firmed. Without another word to Vasya, he turned to his men again. “Fall back! Join the second line, bring them up.”
It wasn’t orderly. The Russians were breaking, fleeing, hiding themselves in the second line of battle, which was wavering badly. Now the Bear was nowhere to be seen, and—
Dmitrii said, turning back on her suddenly, “If Oleg was planning to take a hand, now is a good time.”
“I’ll go find him,” said Vasya. To Morozko, she said, “Don’t let him die.”
Morozko looked as though he wanted to swear at her; there was mud on his face too, and blood. A long scratch marred the neck of his mare. He wasn’t the aloof winter-king now. But he only nodded, turned his horse to keep up with Dmitrii.
Dmitrii said, “If Oleg hasn’t betrayed us, tell him to fall in on Mamai’s right flank,” and then he whirled away calling more orders.
Vasya turned Pozhar, trying to sink once more into invisibility, cutting through the advancing Tatar line in search of Oleg.
* * *
SHE FOUND THE MEN of Ryazan fresh, waiting on a small rise, watching.
“This,” said Vasya, riding up to him, “is not generally what is meant when you take an oath to a Grand Prince that you are going to fight.”
Oleg just smiled at her. “When one is risking everything on a hammer-stroke, one waits until the stroke does the most good.” He looked over the field. “That time is now. Ride down with me, witch-girl?”
“Hurry,” said Vasya.
He called an order; Vasya wheeled Pozhar. The mare was glowing coal-hot, but Vasya couldn’t feel it.
The men of Ryazan, shouting, raced down the rise at full stretch. Horns were blowing. Vasya fell in beside Oleg’s stirrup, going to a little trouble to hold Pozhar to the pace of the racing horses. She saw the Tatars turning in shock, to meet an attack on an unexpected quarter, and then she saw another movement from the woods on Dmitrii’s left flank—Vladimir’s cavalry coming out of the forest at last, and the Bear among them, driving their horses on with the speed of terror. She could hear his whooping laughter.
And so they caught the Tatars between them—Oleg, Vladimir, and Dmitrii—and smashed the line to pieces.
* * *
BUT STILL IT HAD to be fought out, hour by bloody hour, and she did not know how long it had been—hours? days?—when at last a voice brought her back to herself. “Vasya,” Morozko said. “It is over. They are fleeing.”
It seemed a haze fell from her sight. She looked around and realized that they had met in the middle: Oleg, Vladimir, and Dmitrii, and also she, the Bear, and Morozko.
Dmitrii was half-fainting from his wounds; Vladimir supported him. Oleg looked triumphant. All around she saw only their own men. They had won.
The wind had dropped; the early snow fell steadily now. Lightly, silently, thickly, it covered dead enemies and dead friends alike.
Vasya just stared at Morozko, stupid with shock and weariness. A thin curtain of blood ran down from a scratch in the wh
ite mare’s neck. He looked as weary as she, and as sad, dirt and blood on his hands. Only Pozhar was unwounded: still as sleekly powerful as she’d been that morning.
Vasya only wished she could say the same. Her arrow-grazed arm throbbed, and that wasn’t even close to the pain in her soul.
Dmitrii had forced himself upright, deathly pale, and was walking over to her. She slid down Pozhar’s shoulder and went to meet him.
“You have won,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice.
“Where is Sasha?” said the Grand Prince of Moscow.
37.
Water of Death, Water of Life
DMITRII’S MEN CHASED THEIR FOES all the way back to Mecia—nearly fifty versts. Vladimir Andreevich, Oleg of Ryazan, and Mikhail of Tver led the rout, the princes riding side by side like brothers, and their men mingling like water, so that the eye could no longer tell who was from Moscow or Ryazan or Tver, for they were all Russians. They took the herds of Mamai’s train and killed the puppet-khan he’d brought; they sent the general himself fleeing to Caffa, not daring to go back to Sarai, where his life would be forfeit.
But neither the Grand Prince of Moscow nor Vasya took part in the rout. Instead, Dmitrii followed Vasya to a little sheltered copse not far from the river.
Sasha lay where they’d left him, wrapped in Vasya’s fur cloak, his flesh clean, inviolate.
Dmitrii half-fell, stumbling from his horse, and caught his dearest friend’s body in his arms. He did not speak.
Vasya had no comfort for him; she was weeping too.
A long silence fell in that copse, as the long day ended, and the light grew smoky and insubstantial. Snow still fell, softly, all around.
Finally, Dmitrii raised his head. “He should be taken back to the Lavra,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “To be buried with his fellows, in consecrated ground.”
“Sergei will say prayers for his soul,” said Vasya. Her voice was as rough as his, with shouting and with weeping. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “He wandered the whole of this land,” she said. “He knew it and he loved it. And now he will be bone, trapped in frozen earth.”
“But there will be songs,” said Dmitrii. “I swear it. He will not be forgotten.”
Vasya said nothing at all. She had no words. What did songs matter? They would not bring her brother back.
It was night when the cart came to take her brother’s body away. It came rumbling out of the dark, accompanied by a spill of noise and light, and Dmitrii’s noisy attendants, all full of triumph, barely leavened by respect for the occasion. Vasya could not stand their noise, or their joy, and anyway, Sasha was gone.
She kissed her brother’s forehead, and rose, and slipped away into the dark.
* * *
SHE DID NOT KNOW when Morozko and Medved appeared. She had the sense that she’d been walking alone a long time, with no notion of where she was or where she was going. She just wanted to get away from the noise and stink, the gore and the grief, the wild triumph.
But at some point, she raised her head and found them walking beside her.
The two brothers she had met in a clearing as a child, the two that had marked her life and changed it. They were both daubed with blood, the Bear’s eyes alight with the remnants of battle-lust, Morozko grave, his face unreadable. The enmity between them was still there, but changed, somehow, transmuted.
It’s because they aren’t on opposite sides anymore, she thought, dim with exhausted grief. God help me, they are both mine.
Morozko spoke first, not to Vasya but to his brother.
“You still owe me a life,” he said.
The Bear snorted. “I have tried to pay it. I offered her hers, I offered her brother his. Is it my fault that men and women are fools?”
“Perhaps not,” said Morozko. “But you still owe me a life.”
The Bear looked surly. “Very well,” he said. “What life?”
Morozko turned to Vasya, looked a question. She only stared at him blankly. What life? Her brother was gone and the field was thick with dead. Whose life could she desire, now?
Morozko reached very carefully into his sleeve, drew out something wrapped in embroidered cloth. He unwrapped it, held it out with both hands to Vasya.
In was a dead nightingale, its body stiff and perfect, kept inviolate with the water of life. It looked like the carved one she had kept with her through all the long nights and hard days.
She stared from the bird to the winter-king, beyond speech. “Is it possible?” she whispered. Her throat was dust-dry.
“Perhaps,” said Morozko, and turned back to his brother.
* * *
SHE COULD NOT BEAR to watch. She could not bear to listen. She walked away from them, almost afraid of her hope, coming so soon after grief. She could not bear to see them succeed and she could not bear to see them fail.
Even when hoofbeats came softly up behind her, she didn’t turn. Not until a soft nose came down, lightly, on her cheek.
She turned her head.
And stared and stared and she could not believe. She couldn’t move; she couldn’t speak. It was as though speech or movement would break the illusion, shatter it and leave her desolate once more. She drank in the sight; his bay coat black in the darkness, the single star on his face, his warm dark eye. She knew him. She loved him. “Solovey,” she whispered.
I was asleep, said the horse. But those two, the Bear and the winter-king, they woke me up. I missed you.
Her heart torn with exhaustion and shocked joy, Vasya threw her arms around the bay stallion’s neck, and she wept. He was no ghost. He was warm, alive, smelling of himself, and the texture of his mane was agonizingly familiar against her cheek.
I will not leave you again, said the stallion, and put his head around to nuzzle her.
“I missed you so,” she said to the horse, hot tears sliding into his black mane.
I am sure of it, said Solovey, nosing her. He shook his mane, looking superior. But I am here now. You are the warden of the lake now? It has not had a mistress for a long time. I am glad it is you. But you should have had me. You would have done it all a great deal better if I’d been there.
“I am sure of it,” said Vasya, and she made a broken sound that was almost a laugh.
* * *
FINGERS TANGLED IN HER horse’s mane, leaning on his broad, warm shoulder, she barely heard the Bear speak. “Well, this is all touching. But I am off. I have a world to see and her promise for my freedom, brother.” This last was added warily to Morozko. Vasya saw, when she opened her eyes, that the winter-king was eyeing his twin with undimmed suspicion.
“You are still bound to me,” said Vasya to the Bear. “And to your promise. The dead will not rise.”
“Men create enough chaos without me,” said the Bear. “I am just going to enjoy it. Perhaps give a few men nightmares.”
“If you do worse,” said Vasya, “the chyerti will tell me.” She raised her golden wrists, a threat and a promise.
“I will not do worse.”
“I will call you again,” she said. “If there is need.”
“So you will,” he said. “I may even answer.” He bowed. And then he was gone, swiftly lost in the gloom.
* * *
THE BATTLEFIELD WAS EMPTY. The moon had risen, somewhere behind the clouds. The field was stiff with frost. The dead lay open-eyed, men and horses, and the living moved among them by torchlight, looking for dead friends, or stealing what they could.
Vasya looked away.
The chyerti had already slipped away, back to their forests and streams, holding Dmitrii’s promise, and Sergei’s, and Vasya’s.
We can share this land. This land that we have kept.
Three chyerti remained. One was Morozko, standing silent. The second was a woman, whose dawn-pale ha
ir slanted across the darkness of her skin. The third was a little mushroom-spirit, who glowed a sickly green in the darkness.
Vasya bowed to Ded Grib and Polunochnitsa, straight-shouldered and solemn, though she knew her face was swollen and blotched like a child’s with grief and with painful joy. “My friends,” she said. “You came back.”
“You had your victory, lady,” returned Midnight. “We are witnesses. You made your promises and you kept them. We are yours in truth, the chyerti. I came to tell you that the old woman—she is glad.”
Vasya could only nod. What care had she for promises, either kept or broken? The price had been too high. But then she licked her lips and said, “Tell—tell my great-grandmother that I will come to her, in Midnight, if she will permit. For I have much to learn. And thank you. Both of you. For your faith. And your lessons.”
“Not tonight,” put in Ded Grib, in his high voice, practically. “You aren’t learning anything tonight. Go and find somewhere clean.” He fixed Morozko with a dark look. “Surely you know a good place, winter-king. Even if your realm is too cold for mushrooms.”
“I know a place,” said Morozko.
“I will see you beside the lake, in the moonlight,” said Vasya to Ded Grib and Polunochnitsa.
“We will wait for you there,” said Midnight, and then she and Ded Grib were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared.
Vasya leaned against Solovey’s shoulder and the grief and the joy bewildered her equally. Morozko cupped his hands. “Let us go,” he said. “At last.”
Without a word, she put a foot in his hands and let him boost her onto Solovey’s back. She did not know where they were going, save that it was the direction her soul told her was away. Away from the sound and the smell, the glory and the futility.
Solovey carried her gently, neck arched, and Pozhar, glowing in the darkness, shed heat upon them both.
The Winter of the Witch Page 36
