The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy 3)

He lifted a brow. “I have never met a maiden who looked less like she meant to die.”

“I don’t,” said Vasya. Still short of breath, she added, “I did want a bath, though, and I am getting one; that is something.”

He laughed again, and their eyes caught.

Him too, Vasya thought. He is afraid too. For he knows no more than I where this will end.

Yet he brought me here, he stayed. He wounded me and healed me. He remembers, and he doesn’t.

Before she could lose her nerve, Vasya slipped off the bench and knelt between his knees. His skin had not warmed with the steam. Even in the smoke-smelling bathhouse, the scent of pine, of cold water hung about him. His face did not change, but his breathing quickened. Vasya realized she was trembling. Once again, she reached up, touched her palm to his face.

A second time, he caught her wrist. But this time, his mouth grazed the scar in the hollow of her hand.

They looked at each other.

Her stepmother had liked to frighten her and Irina with tales of wedding-night horrors; Dunya had assured her that it was not quite so.

It felt like the wildness would burn her up from the inside out.

He traced her lower lip with his thumb. She could not read his expression. “Please,” she said, or thought she said, just as he closed the distance between them and kissed her.

The fire was barely embers in the stove, but they didn’t need the light. His skin was cool under her hands; her sweat streaked them both. She was shivering all over; she didn’t know what to do with her hands. It was too much: skin and spirit, hunger and her desperate loneliness, and the rising tide of feeling between them.

Perhaps he felt the uncertainty beneath the desire, for he broke off, looking at her. The only sound was their breathing, his as harsh as hers.

“Afraid now?” he whispered. He had pulled her with him onto the wooden bench; she was sitting crosswise in his lap, one of his arms about her waist. His free hand drew lines of cool fire on her skin, from ear to shoulder, followed her collarbone, dipped between her breasts. She could not control her breathing.

“I’m supposed to be frightened,” Vasya snapped, sharper than was warranted because she was, in fact, frightened, and angry too because she could barely think, let alone speak, while his hand came up again, and this time slid down her spine, curved lightly around her ribs, found her breast and lingered there. “I am a maiden. And you—” She trailed off.

The light hand stilled. “Afraid I will hurt you?”

“Do you mean to?” she asked. They both heard the tremor in her voice. Naked in his arms, she was more vulnerable than she’d ever been.

But he was afraid too. She felt it in the restrained tension of his touch, could see it now in his black-shadowed eyes.

Again, they looked at each other.

Then he half-smiled, and Vasya realized suddenly what the other feeling was, beneath the fear and desire rising between them.

It was mad joy.

His hand shaped the curve of her waist. He drew her mouth down to his again. His answer was more breath than word, breathed into her ear.

“No, I will not hurt you,” he said.

* * *

“VASYA,” HE SAID INTO the darkness.

They had made it into the outer room, in the end. When he’d drawn her down to the floor, it was onto a mound of heaped blankets that smelled like the winter forest. They were beyond speech by then, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need words to call him back to her. Only the slide of her fingers, the heat of her bruised skin. His hands remembered her, when his mind did not. It was in his touch, easing over her half-healed wounds; it was in his grip, and the look in his eyes, before the candles burned low.

Afterward, lying half-drowsing in the dark, she could still feel the pulse of his body in hers, and taste the pine on her lips.

Then she jerked upright. “Is it still—?”

“Midnight,” he said. He sounded weary. “Yes, it is midnight. I will not let you lose it.”

His voice had changed. He’d said her name.

She rose on one elbow, felt herself blushing. “You remembered.”

He said nothing.

“You set the Bear loose to save my life. Why?”

Still he said nothing.

“I came to find you,” she said. “I learned to do magic. I got the help of the firebird, you didn’t kill me—stop looking at me like that.”

“I did not mean—” he began, and just like that she was angry, to mask a gathering hurt.

He sat up, drew away from her, the line of his spine stiff in the near-dark.

“I wanted it,” she said to his back, trying not to think of every notion of decency she had ever been taught. Chastity, patience, lie with men only for the bearing of children, and above all do not enjoy it. “I thought—I thought you did too. And you—” She couldn’t say it; instead she said, “You remembered. A small enough price, for that.” It didn’t feel small.

He turned so she could see his face; he didn’t look as though he believed her. Vasya wished now she were not sitting naked, a handsbreadth away from him.

He said, “I thank you.”

Thank you? The words struck coldly, after the last hours’ heat. Maybe you wish you did not remember, she thought. Part of you was happy here, feared and beloved, in this prison. She didn’t say it.

“The Bear is free in Rus’,” said Vasya instead. “He has set the dead to walking. We must help my cousin, help my brother. I came to get your help.”

Still Morozko said nothing. He had not drawn further away from her, but his glance had turned inward, remote, unreadable.

She added with sudden anger, “You owe us your help; you are the reason that the Bear is free in the first place. You didn’t need to bargain with him. I walked out of the pyre myself.”

A little light came into his face. “I wondered if you would. But it was still worth it. When you drew me back to Moscow, I knew then.”

“Knew what?”

“That you could be a bridge between men and chyerti. Keep us from fading, keep men from forgetting. That we weren’t doomed after all, if you lived, if you came into your power. And I had no other way to save you. I—deemed it worth the risk, whatever came after.”

“You might have trusted me to save myself.”

“You meant to die. I saw it in you.”

She flinched. “Yes,” she said softly. “I suppose I did mean to die. Solovey had fallen; he died under my hands, and—” She broke off. “But my horse would have called me foolish to give up. So, I changed my mind.”