Voices sounded in the corridor.
“I heard something.”
“You imagined it.”
A pause.
“The door is ajar.”
A creak as the door swung open. A heavy step. “There is no one here.”
“What fool left the door unlocked?”
“A thief?”
“Search the room.”
After all this? Were they to find her so, drag her up into Moscow, where Konstantin would be waiting?
No. No they would not.
A crack of thunder sounded suddenly outside, as though to give voice to her panic and her courage both. The palace shook. There came a sudden roar of rain.
The men’s torches went out. She heard them swearing.
Her hands trembled. The sounds of storm, the darkness all around, the great door opening at her touch, were like three pieces of a nightmare. Reality was shifting too fast to understand.
The men’s shock at the noise and unexpected darkness had won her a reprieve, but that was all. They would relight their torches. They would search, and find her. Could she make herself invisible this time? When they were searching for her in this small room?
She wasn’t sure. So instead Vasya clenched her fists and thought of Morozko. She thought of the sleep like death that the winter-king held in his hands. Sleep. The men would go to sleep. If she could only forget they were awake.
She did. And they did. They crumpled to the packed-dirt floor of the treasure-room. Their cries died away.
Morozko was there, between one blink and the next. She hadn’t put the men to sleep. He had. He was there, himself, real, in the treasure-room with her.
Now the winter-king was turning pale eyes on her. She stared. It was really him. Pulled to her, somehow, as she remembered his power. As though drawing him to her was easier than calling down sleep herself.
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.