The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy 3)

“Men make themselves afraid,” the Bear told her, smiling. “Imagining is worse than anything they actually see. All it takes is whispers in the dark. Come with me now, Vasilisa Petrovna.”

By the third night he was swollen with pleasure like a tick. Vasya was worn to a thread, sick for the dawn. “Enough,” she told them both, after yet another stretch roaming the camp, every sense on alert, half-frightened, half-sharing the Bear’s mad glee at the mischief.

“Enough. I am going to find a place to sleep, and then we’ll go back to my brother in the light.” She could bear no more darkness.

Ded Grib looked relieved; the Bear, merely satiated.

The air was chilly and blank with cold mist. She found a sheltered hollow in the thickest part of the wood, well away from the main body of troops. Even wrapped in her cloak, on a bed of pine-boughs, she shivered. She dared not light a fire.

The Bear was untroubled by the weather. As a beast, he’d terrorized the Tatar camp, but now, at rest, he looked like a man. He lay contentedly in the bracken, looking up into the night with his arms behind his head.

Ded Grib was hiding under a rock, his green glow faint. Spoiling the Tatars’ food had wearied and discouraged him. “They drink the milk of their horses,” he’d said. “I can’t spoil that. They won’t be too hungry.”

Vasya had no answer for Ded Grib; she was feeling sick herself. The panic of men and beasts seemed to echo in her bones, but still she didn’t know if all their efforts would be enough to turn the tide of the coming battle. “You are quite disgusting,” she told the Bear, seeing the flash of his teeth when he smiled.

He didn’t even lift his head. “Why? Because I’ve been enjoying myself?”

The glimmering gold on Vasya’s wrists reminded her, uneasily, of the covenant between them. She didn’t speak.

He rolled onto his elbow to look at her, a smile playing about his twisted mouth. “Or because you have?”

Deny it? Why? It would only give him power. “Yes,” she said. “I liked frightening them. They invaded my country, and Chelubey tortured my brother. But I am sick at myself too, and ashamed, and very tired.”

The Bear looked faintly disappointed. “You ought to flog yourself a bit more over it,” he said, and rolled onto his back once more.

That way lay madness: hiding from the worst parts of her own nature until, out of sight, they became monstrous growths to devour the rest of her. She knew that, and the Bear knew it too. “That was what Father Konstantin did. Look where it got him,” she said.

The Bear said nothing.

The Tatar army was out of sight, but still close enough to smell. Even bone-tired, irritable with damp, she was oppressed by the sheer weight of their numbers. She had promised Oleg magic, but she didn’t know if there was enough magic in the world to give Dmitrii his victory.

“Do you know what you are going to say to my brother, when the snow falls?” asked the Bear, still looking at the sky.

“What?” she said, jolted by the question.

“His power will be waxing now, as mine is waning. You can bind me with threats and promises, but soon”—the Bear sniffed the air—“very soon, you’re going to have to face the winter-king. Do you mean to threaten him?” The Bear smiled slowly. “I’d like to see you try. Oh, he will be so angry. I enjoy this world: the ugliness and the beauty, and meddling in the doings of men. Karachun does not.” The Bear winked at her. “For your sake he spent his strength, went into Moscow, fought me in summer, against his nature. But then you turned around and freed me. He will be very angry.”

“What I say to him is not your concern,” said Vasya coldly.

“It most certainly is,” said Medved. “But I can wait. I like surprises.”

She’d had no murmur of the winter-king since he left her in Moscow. Did Morozko know she’d set his brother free? Would he understand why? Did she? “I am going to sleep,” she said to the Bear. “You are not to betray me or draw attention to us or use someone else to draw attention to us, or awaken me, or touch me, or—”

The Bear laughed and lifted a hand. “Enough, girl, you’ve already exhausted my imagination. Go to sleep.”

She gave him one more narrow-eyed look, and then she turned over. The Bear reasonable, laughing, was much more dangerous than the beast in the clearing.

* * *

SHE WAS AWAKENED, a little before daybreak, by a scream. Heart hammering, she lurched to her feet. The Bear was peering through the trees, looking quite untroubled. “I was wondering when they were going to notice,” he said without looking round.

“Notice what?”

“That village there. I imagine most of the villagers took what they could and fled, with the army camped so close. But—someone didn’t. And your Tatars are tired of mare’s milk.”

Vasya, feeling sick, crossed to his vantage point.

It was only a tiny village, hidden in a fold of the land, sheltered by great trees. It probably would have gone unnoticed, had the Tatars not been roaming for food to fill their bellies. Even she hadn’t seen it.

She wondered if the Bear had.

But now it was afire in a dozen places.

Another scream, smaller and thinner now. “Pozhar,” said Vasya. The mare sidled up to her, huffing unhappily; for once she made no objection when Vasya vaulted to her back.

“Far be it from me,” said the Bear, “to curb your so-charming impulses, but I doubt very much you’ll like what you see.” He added, “And you could be killed.”

Vasya said, “If I can put folk to such risk, the least I can do is—”

“The Tatars put them at risk—”

But Vasya was already gone.

By the time she got to the tiny hamlet, the houses had burned almost to the ground. If there had been animals, there weren’t any now. Silence, emptiness. Unwilling hope rose in her. Perhaps all the villagers had run at the first sign of the Tatars; perhaps it was only a pig, dying, that had made a sound like a scream.

That was when she heard the small, choking moan, not quite a cry.

Pozhar’s ears swiveled; at the same time, Vasya saw a slender dark shape, huddled near a burning house.

Vasya slid down Pozhar’s shoulder, caught the woman and dragged her back from the flames. Her hand came away sticky with blood. The woman made a fainter sound of pain, but did not speak. The light of the burning houses illuminated her, pitilessly. She’d had her throat cut, but not well enough to kill her at once.

She’d also been pregnant. Laboring perhaps. That was why she’d not fled when her people did. If anyone had stayed with her, Vasya couldn’t see. There was only the woman, scrapes on her hands, where she had pushed off men, and blood—so much blood—on her skirts. Vasya laid a hand on her belly, but it didn’t stir, and there was a great, seeping wound there too…