The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy 2)

But Olga had stopped listening. Blood was beating like wings in her ears, and a great sinking pain began to eat her from the inside. “Vasya,” she whispered, a hand on her belly.

Vasya saw Olga’s face, and her own face changed. “The baby?” she asked. “Now?”

Olga managed a nod. “Send for Varvara,” she whispered. She swayed, and her sister caught her.

22.

Mother

The bathhouse, where Olga was brought to labor, was hot and dark, humid as a summer night, and it smelled of fresh wood, and smoke, and sap and hot water and rot. If Olga’s women noted Vasya’s presence they did not question it. They had no breath for questioning, and no time. Vasya had strong and capable hands; she had seen childbirth before, and in the ferocious, steaming half-light, the women asked no more.

Vasya stripped down to her shift like the others, anger and uncertainty forgotten in the messy urgency of childbirth. Her sister was already naked; she squatted on a birthing-stool, black hair streaming. Vasya knelt, took her sister’s hands, and did not flinch when Olga crushed her fingers.

“You look like our mother, you know,” Olga whispered. “Vasochka. Did I ever tell you?” Her face changed as the pain came again.

Vasya held her hands. “No,” she said. “You never told me.”

Olga’s lips were pale. Shadows made her eyes bigger, and shrank the difference between them. Olga was naked, Vasya nearly so. It was as if they were small girls again, before the world came between them.

The pain came and went and Olga breathed and sweated and bit down on her screams. Vasya talked to her sister steadily, forgetting their troubles in the world outside. There was only the sweat and the labor, the pain endured and endured again. The bathhouse grew hotter; steam wreathed their sweating bodies; the women labored in the near-darkness, and still the child was not born.

“Vasya,” said Olga, leaning against her sister and panting. “Vasya, if I die—”

“You won’t,” snapped Vasya.

Olga smiled. Her eyes wandered. “I will try not,” she said. “But—you must give my love to Masha. Tell her I am sorry. She will be angry; she will not understand.” Olga broke off, as the agony came again; she still did not scream, but a sound climbed in the back of her throat, and Vasya thought her hands would break in her sister’s grip.

The room smelled of sweat and birth-water now, and black blood showed between Olga’s thighs. The women were only vague, sweating shapes in the vapor. The smell of blood stuck, chokingly, in Vasya’s throat.

“It hurts,” Olga whispered. She sat panting, limp and heavy.

“Be brave,” said the midwife. “All will turn out well.” Her voice was kind, but Vasya saw the dark look she exchanged with the woman beside her.

Vasya’s sapphire flared suddenly with cold, even in the heat of the bathhouse. Olga looked over her sister’s shoulder and her eyes widened. Vasya turned to follow her sister’s gaze. A shadow in the corner looked back at them.

Vasya let go of Olga’s hands. “No,” she said.

“I would have spared you this,” the shadow returned. She knew that voice, knew the pale, indifferent stare. She had seen it when her father died, when…

“No,” said Vasya again. “No—no, go away.”

He said nothing.

“Please,” whispered Vasya. “Please. Go away.”

They used to beg, when I walked among men, Morozko had told her once. If they saw me, they would beg. Evil came of that; better I step softly, better only the dead and the dying can see me.

Well, she was cursed with sight; he could not hide from her. Now it was her turn to beg. Behind her, the women muttered, but his eyes were the only things she could see.

She crossed the room without thinking and put a hand in the center of his chest. “Please go.” For an instant, she might have been touching a shadow, but then his flesh was real, though cold. He drew away as though her hand hurt him.

“Vasya,” he said. Was that feeling, in his indifferent face? She reached for him again, pleading. When her hands found his, he stilled, looking troubled and less like a nightmare.

“I am here,” he told her. “I do not choose.”

“You can choose,” she returned, following him when he drew back. “Leave my sister alone. Let her live.”

Death’s shadow stretched nearly to where Olga sat, spent, on the bathhouse-bench, surrounded by sweating women. Vasya did not know what the others saw, or if they thought she was speaking to the darkness.

He loved Vasya’s mother, the people had said of her father. He loved that Marina Ivanovna. She died bringing Vasilisa forth, and Pyotr Vladimirovich put half his soul in the earth when they buried her.

Her sister wailed, a thin and bone-chilling cry. “Blood,” Vasya heard, from the crowd beside. “Blood—too much blood. Get the priest.”

“Please!” Vasya cried to Morozko. “Please!”

The noise of the bathhouse faded and the walls faded with it. Vasya found herself standing in an empty wood. Black trees cast gray shadows over the white snow, and Death stood before her.

He wore black. The frost-demon had eyes of palest blue, but this—his older, stranger self—had eyes like water: colorless, or nearly. He stood taller than she had ever seen him, and stiller.

A faint, gasping cry. Vasya let go his hands and turned. Olga crouched in the snow, translucent and bloody, naked, swallowing her anguished breathing.

Vasya stooped and gathered her sister up. Where were they? Was this what lay beyond life? A forest and a single figure, waiting…Somewhere beyond the trees she could smell the hot reek of the bathhouse. Olga’s skin was warm, but the smell and the heat were fading. The forest was so cold. Vasya held her sister tightly; tried to pour all the heat she had—her burning, furious life—into Olga. Her hands felt hot enough to scorch, but the jewel hung bitterly cold between her breasts.

“You cannot be here, Vasya,” the death-god said, and a hint of surprise threaded his uninflected voice.

“Cannot?” Vasya retorted. “You cannot have my sister.” She clung to Olga, looking for a way back. The bathhouse was still there—all around them—she could smell it. But she didn’t know which steps would take them there.

Olga hung slack in Vasya’s arms, her eyes glazed and milky. She turned her head and breathed a question at the death-god. “What of my baby? What of my son? Where is he?”

“It is a daughter, Olga Petrovna,” Morozko returned. He spoke without feeling and without judgment, low and clear and cold. “You cannot both live.”

His words struck Vasya like two fists and she clutched her sister. “No.”

With a terrible effort, Olga straightened up, her face drained of color and of beauty both. She put Vasya’s arms aside. “No?” she said to the frost-demon.

Morozko bowed. “The child cannot be born alive,” he said evenly. “The women may cut it from you, or you may live and let it smother and be born dead.”

“She,” said Olga, her voice no more than a thread. Vasya tried to speak and found she could not. “She. A daughter.”

“As you say, Olga Petrovna.”