The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy 3)

No, said Solovey, and stamped. The Zhar Ptitsa caused the fire, although you should have listened to me before setting her loose. She was maddened with imprisonment.

“Where did she come from?” Vasya asked. “How did Kasyan, of all people, put a bridle on a creature like that?”

Solovey looked troubled. His ears tilted forward and back, and his tail lashed his flanks. I do not know how. I remember someone shouting, and someone weeping. I remember wings, and blood in blue water. He stamped again, shaking his mane. Nothing more.

He looked so distressed that Vasya scratched the stallion’s withers and said, “Never mind. Kasyan is dead and his horse is gone.” She changed the subject. “The domovoi said Masha was here.”

Of course she’s here, returned the horse, looking superior. Even if she doesn’t know how to speak to me yet, she knows I will kick anyone who tries to hurt her.

This was not an idle threat coming from seventeen hands of stallion.

“I cannot blame her for coming to you,” Vasya said. She scratched the horse’s withers again, and the stallion’s ears flopped with delight. “When I was small, I always ran to the stable at the first sign of trouble. But this is not Lesnaya Zemlya. Olya was frightened when they found her gone. I must take her back.”

The little girl in the straw stirred and whimpered. Vasya dropped gingerly to her knees, trying not to jar her sore side, just as Marya came awake, thrashing. The child’s head butted into Vasya’s ribs, and she narrowly avoided a scream; her vision went black around the edges.

“Hush, Masha,” Vasya said, when she could speak again. “Hush. It’s me. It’s all right. You’re all right. You’re safe.”

The child subsided, rigid in the older girl’s arms. The big horse put down his head and nosed her hair. She looked up. He lipped her nose very gently, and Marya squeaked out a tiny giggle. Then she buried her face in the older girl’s shoulder and wept.

“Vasochka, Vasochka, I don’t remember anything,” she whispered between sobs. “I just remember being scared—”

Vasya remembered being scared, too. At the child’s words, images from the night before crossed her mind like flung darts. A horse of fire, rearing up. The sorcerer withering, crumpling to the floor. Marya ensorcelled, blank-faced, obedient.

And the winter-king’s voice. As I could, I loved you.

Vasya shook her head, as though motion could dispel memory. “You don’t have to remember; not yet,” she said gently to the girl. “You are safe now; it is over.”

“It doesn’t feel like it is over,” whispered the child. “I can’t remember! How do I know if it’s over or not?”

Vasya said, “Trust me, or if you will not, trust your mother or your uncle. No more harm will come to you. Now, come, we must get back to the house. Your mother is worried.”

Marya immediately wrenched away from Vasya, who had little strength to stop her, and wrapped all four limbs around Solovey’s foreleg. “No!” Marya shouted, face pressed to the horse’s coat. “You can’t make me!”

An ordinary horse would have reared at such antics, or shied, or at the very least hit Marya in the face with his knee. Solovey only stood there, looking dubious. Gingerly, he put his head down to Marya. You can stay here if you like, he said, although the child did not understand him. She was crying again: the thin exhausted wail of a child at the end of endurance.

Vasya, sick with pity and anger on the girl’s behalf, understood why Marya did not want to go back to the house. She had been taken from that house, subjected to half-remembered horrors. Solovey’s large and self-confident presence was nothing if not reassuring.

“I have been dreaming,” the little girl mumbled into the stallion’s foreleg. “I can’t remember anything—except for the dreaming. There was a skeleton that laughed at me, and I kept eating cakes—more and more—even though they made me sick. I don’t want to dream anymore. And I’m not going back to the house. I am going to live here in the stable with Solovey.” She renewed her grip on the stallion.

Vasya could see that unless she chose to pry Marya off and drag her away—a procedure that her broken rib wouldn’t bear and Solovey would heartily disapprove of—the girl wasn’t going anywhere.

Well, let someone else explain to an irascible stallion why Marya could not stay where she was. In the meantime— “Very well,” Vasya said, and made her voice cheerful, “no need to go back to the house unless you wish it. Shall I tell you a story?”

Marya’s death-grip on Solovey loosened. “What kind of story?”

“Any story you like. Ivanushka and Alenushka?” Then Vasya’s heart misgave her. Sister, dear sister Alenushka, said the little goat. Swim out, swim out to me. They are lighting the fires, boiling the pots, sharpening the knives. And I am going to die.

But his sister couldn’t help him. For she’d already been drowned herself.

“No, perhaps not that one,” said Vasya hastily and thought. “Ivan the Fool perhaps?”

The child pondered, as though the choice of tales were a momentous one that could change the history of that bitter day. For her sake, Vasya wished it were so.

“I think,” said Marya, “that I would like to hear the story of Marya Morevna.”

Vasya hesitated. As a child, she had loved the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, her own fairy-tale namesake. But the tale of Marya Morevna would cut deep—perhaps too deep—after the night before. Marya wasn’t finished though. “Tell about Ivan,” she said. “That part of the story. About the horses.”

And then Vasya understood. She smiled, and didn’t even care that smiling tugged at the burnt skin on her face.

“Very well. I will tell that part, if you will let go of Solovey’s foreleg. He is not a post.”

Marya let go of Solovey reluctantly, and the stallion lay down in the straw, so that both girls could curl against his warm side. Vasya wrapped Marya and herself in her cloak and began, stroking Marya’s hair:

“Prince Ivan tried three times to rescue his wife, Marya Morevna, from the clutches of the evil sorcerer Kaschei,” she said. “But each time he failed, for Kaschei rode the fastest horse in all the world, and moreover one who understood the speech of men. His horse could outrun Ivan’s, no matter how great his start.”

Solovey snorted out a complacent, hay-scented breath. That horse couldn’t outrun me, he said.

“At last, Ivan bid his wife Marya to ask Kaschei how he had come to ride such a matchless horse.

“ ‘There is a house on chicken legs,’ replied Kaschei. ‘Which stands upon the shore of the sea. A witch lives there: a Baba Yaga, who breeds the finest horses in all the world. You must cross a river of fire to get to her, but I have a magic kerchief that parts the flames. Once you have come to the house, you must ask to serve the Baba Yaga for three days. If you serve her well, she will give you a horse. But if you fail, she will eat you.’ ”