The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

“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 chance. 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.

Faintly, Vasya heard the tinkling of bells, and then a line of sleighs piled high came around a bend. Bells hung on the bright harness of horses, and lumpish strangers, bundled to the eyes, came riding or running beside them, shouting back and forth.

Vasya watched them pass, entranced. The men’s faces—what she could see of them—were red and rough, with great bristling beards. Their mittened hands lay sure on the leads of their horses. The beasts were all smaller than Solovey, stocky and coarse-maned. The caravan dazzled Vasya with its speed and its bells and the faces of strangers. She had been born in a small village, where strangers were vanishingly rare, and every soul was known to her.

Then Vasya raised her eyes, following the line of sledges. The haze of many fires showed over the trees. More fires than she had ever seen together. “Is that Moscow?” she asked Solovey, her breath coming short.

No, said the horse. Moscow is bigger.

“How do you know?”

The horse only tilted an ear in a superior fashion. Vasya sneezed. More people appeared on the sledge-road at her feet: riders this time, wearing scarlet caps, with embroidery on their boots. A great mass of smoke hung like clouds above the skeleton trees. “Let’s go closer,” Vasya said. After a week in the wilderness, she craved color and motion, the sight of faces and the sound of a human voice.

We are safer in the forest, said Solovey, but his nostril crooked uncertainly.

“I mean to see the world,” Vasya retorted. “All the world is not forest.”

The horse shivered his skin.

Her voice dropped, coaxing. “We’ll be careful. If there is trouble, you can run away. Nothing can catch you; you are the fastest horse in the world. I want to see.”

When the horse still stood, undecided, she added, ingenuously, “Or are you afraid?”

Ignoble, perhaps, but it worked. Solovey tossed his head, and in two bounds he was on the ice. His hooves made a strange dull thud as they struck.

An hour and more they traveled the sledge-road while the smoke hovered tantalizingly ahead. Vasya, despite her bravado, was a little nervous to be seen by strangers, but she found herself ignored. Men lived too near the bone in winter to bother with things that did not concern them. One merchant, half-laughing, offered to buy her fine horse, but Vasya only shook her head and nudged Solovey on.

A clear sun hung high and remote in the winter-pale sky when they came around the last bend in the river and saw the town spread out before them.

As towns go, it was not a large one. A Tatar would have laughed and called it a village; even a Muscovite would have called it provincial. But it was far larger than any place Vasya had ever seen. Its wooden wall rose twice the height of Solovey’s shoulder, and its bell-tower stood up proudly, painted blue and ringed with smoke. The great, deep tolling came clear to Vasya’s ears. “Stop a moment,” she said to Solovey. “I want to listen.” Her eyes shone. She had never heard a bell in her life.

“That is not Moscow?” she asked again. “Are you sure?” It seemed a city to swallow the world; she had not dreamed that so many people could share so little space.

No, said Solovey. It is small, I think, to the eyes of men.

Vasya could not believe it. The bells rang again. She smelled stables and wood-smoke and birds roasting, faint in the cold. “I want to go in,” she said.

The horse snorted. You have seen it. There it is. The forest is better.

“I have never seen a city before,” she retorted. “I want to see this one.”

The horse pawed the snow, irritable.

“Just a little while,” she added meekly. “Please.”

Better not, said the horse, but Vasya could tell he had weakened.

Her eyes went once more to the smoke-wreathed towers. “Perhaps you should wait for me here. You’re a walking inducement to thieves.”

Solovey huffed. Absolutely not.

“I’m in much more danger with you than without you! What if someone decides to kill me so they can steal you?”

The horse put his head around angrily, biting at her ankle. Well, that was answer enough.

“Oh, very well,” Vasya said. She thought a moment more. “Let’s go; I have an idea.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER, the captain of the small, sleepy gate-guard of the town of Chudovo saw a boy coming toward him, dressed like a merchant’s lad and leading a big-boned young stallion.

The horse wore naught but a rope halter, and despite his long-limbed beauty he came ungainly up the ice, tripping over his own hooves. “Hey, boy!” called the captain. “What are you doing with that horse?”