“And you do it every time?” she pressed. “For everyone who dies in Rus’? Take them, dead, onto your saddlebow and ride away?”

“Yes—and no.” He seemed to measure out the words. “In a way I am present, but—it’s like breathing. You breathe, but you are not aware of every breath.”

“Were you aware of that breath,” asked Vasya acidly, “when my father died?”

A line like spider-silk showed between his brows. “More than usual,” he replied. “But that was because I—my thinking self—was nearby, and because—”

He fell abruptly silent.

“What?” the girl asked.

“Nothing. I was nearby, that’s all.”

Vasya’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have to take him away. I could have saved him.”

“He died to see you safe,” said Morozko. “It was what he wanted. And he was glad to go. He missed your mother. Even your brother knew that.”

“It doesn’t matter to you at all, does it?” Vasya snapped. This was the core of it: not her father’s death, but the frost-demon’s vast indifference. “I suppose you hovered over my mother’s bed, ready to snatch her from us, and then you stole my father and rode off with him. One day it will be Alyosha slung over your saddlebow, and one day me. And it all means less to you than breathing!”

“Are you angry with me, Vasilisa Petrovna?” His voice held only mild surprise, quiet and inevitable: snow falling in a country without spring. “Do you think that there would be no death if I weren’t there to lead people into the dark? I am old, but old as I am, the world was far older before I ever saw my first moonrise.”

Vasya found then, to her horror, that her eyes were spilling over. She turned away and suddenly she was weeping into her hands, mourning her parents, her nurse, her home, her childhood. He had taken it all from her. Or had he? Was he the cause or merely the messenger? She hated him. She dreamed about him. None of it mattered. Might as well hate the sky—or desire it—and she hated that worst of all.

Solovey poked his head beneath the fir-branches. You are well, Vasya? he demanded, with a crooked anxious nose.

She tried to nod, but only made a helpless motion with her head, face buried in her hands.

Solovey shook his mane. You did this, he said to Morozko, ears pinned. Fix her!

She heard his sigh, heard his footsteps when he came around the fire and knelt in front of her. Vasya wouldn’t look at him. After a moment, he reached out and gently peeled her fingers from her wet face.

Vasya tried to glare, blinking away tears. What could he say? Hers was a grief he would not understand, being a thing immortal. But—“I’m sorry,” he said, surprising her.

She nodded, swallowed, and said, “I’m just so tired—”

He nodded. “I know. But you are brave, Vasya.” He hesitated, then bent forward and gently kissed her on the mouth.

She had a fleeting taste of winter: smoke and pine and deadly cold, and then there was warmth, too, and a swift, impossible sweetness.

But the instant was over, and he drew away. For a moment, each breathed the other’s breath. “Be at peace, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said. He got up and left the ring of firelight.

Vasya did not go after him. She was bewildered, aching, bruised all over, aflame and afraid at once. She meant to go after him, of course. She meant to go and demand what he meant by—but she fell asleep, with the knife of ice in her hand—and the last thing she remembered was the taste of pine on her lips.

WHAT NOW? THE MARE asked Morozko when he returned late that night. They stood together near the fire under the spruce. Living embers cast a wavering light on Vasya’s face as she slept, curled against a dozing Solovey. The stallion had shoved his way beneath the spruce and lain down beside her like a hound.

“I do not know,” Morozko murmured.

The mare nudged her rider hard, for all the world like her colt. You ought to tell her, she said. Tell her the whole story: of witches and a sapphire talisman and horses by the sea. She is wise enough, and she has the right to know. Otherwise you are only playing with her; you are the winter-king of long ago, that turned girls’ hearts for his own ends.

“Am I not still the winter-king?” Morozko asked. “That is what I meant to do: beguile her with gold and with wonders and then send her home. That is what I should still do.”

If only you could send her away, said the mare drily. And become a fond memory. But instead you are here, interfering. If you try to send Vasya home, she will not go. You are not master in this.

“No matter,” he said sharply. “This—it is the last time.” He did not look at Vasya again. “She has made the road her home; that is her business now, not mine. She is alive; I will leave her to wear the jewel and remember, so long as her life lasts. When she dies, I will give it to another. It is enough.”

The mare made no answer, but she blew out a steaming breath, skeptically, into the darkness.

9.

Smoke

When Vasya awoke the next morning, Morozko and the mare were gone. He might never have been there; she might have thought it all a dream, but for two sets of hoofprints, and the glittering knife beside her restored saddle, her saddlebags newly bulging. The knife-blade did not look like ice now, but like some pale metal, sheathed in leather, bound in silver. Vasya sat up and glared at it all.

He says to practice with the knife, said Solovey, coming up to nose her hair. And that it will not stick in its sheath in the frost. And that those who carry weapons often die sooner, so please do not carry it openly.

Vasya thought of Morozko’s hands, correcting her grip on the dagger. She thought of his mouth. Her skin colored and suddenly she was furious, that he would kiss her, give her gifts, and leave her without a word.

Solovey had no sympathy for her anger; he was snorting and tossing his head, eager for the road. Scowling, Vasya found new bread and mead in her saddlebag and ate, threw snow on the fire (which went out quite meekly after lasting so long), fastened the saddlebags, and climbed into the saddle.

The versts passed untroubled, and Vasya had days of riding in which to regain her strength, to remember—and to try to forget. But one morning, when the sun was well over the treetops, Solovey threw up his head and shied.

Vasya, startled, said, “What!”—and then she saw the body.

He had been a big man, but now his beard bristled with frost, and his open eyes stared out, frozen and blank. He lay in a bloody stretch of trampled snow.

Vasya, reluctantly, slid to the ground. Swallowing back nausea, she saw what the man had died of: the stroke of a sword or an ax, in the notch where his neck met his shoulder, that had split him to the ribs. Her gorge rose; she forced it down.

Vasya touched his stiff hand. A single pair of bootprints had taken this man, running, to his end.

But where were the killers? Vasya bent to retrace the dead man’s steps. A dusting of new snow had left them blurry. Solovey followed her, blowing nervously.

Abruptly the trees ended, and they found themselves at the edge of cleared fields. In the middle of the fields lay a village, burned.

Vasya felt sick again. The burnt village was very like her own: izby and barns and bathhouses, a wooden palisade and stumpy wintertime fields. But these huts were smoldering ruins. The palisade lay on its side like a wounded deer. The smoke rolled out over the forest. Vasya bent her head to breathe through a fold of her cloak. She could hear the wailing.

Tags: Katherine Arden Winternight Trilogy Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net