She shivered at the memory and pushed it away too. They had stolen those hours in Midnight; now they must think only of outmaneuvering a clever and implacable enemy.

But— For distraction, she forced herself to ask a question whose answer she feared. “To bind the Bear—must I sacrifice myself as my father did?”

Morozko did not immediately say no. Vasya began to feel a little sick to her stomach. The mare set off lightly through the snow; more snow drifted down from the sky. Vasya wondered if he called it down in his distress, if it were involuntary, like the beat of a heart. “You promised you’d not lie to me again,” said Vasya.

“I will not,” said Morozko. “It is not so simple as exchanging your life for his binding, the two things interchangeable. Your life is not tied to the Bear’s liberty; you are not just a—token in our war.”

She waited.

“But I gave him power over me,” said Morozko, “when I yielded up my freedom. My twin and I will not be equals in a fight, now.” The words came out gratingly. “Summer is his season. I do not know how to bind him, except with the power of a life freely given, or a trick—”

Pozhar said suddenly, What about the golden thing? The mare had drifted close enough to catch their conversation.

Vasya blinked. “What golden thing?”

The mare threw her head up and down. The golden thing the sorcerer made! When I wore it, I couldn’t fly. I had to do what he said. It is powerful, that thing.

Vasya and Morozko looked at each other. “Kaschei’s golden bridle,” said Vasya, slowly. “If it bound her—might it bind your brother?”

“Perhaps,” said the winter-king, brows drawn together.

“It was in Moscow,” said Vasya, speaking faster and faster in her excitement. “In the stable, Dmitrii Ivanovich’s stable. I pulled it off her head and threw it down, the night Moscow burned. Is it still in the palace? Perhaps it melted in the fire.”

“It would not have melted,” Morozko said. “There is a chance.” She could not see his face, but his hand on his knee closed slowly into a fist.

Vasya, without thinking, leaned over and scratched Pozhar’s neck with delight. “Thank you,” she said. The mare tolerated it a moment before she sidled away.

19.

Allies

SUMMER CAME WITH UNNATURAL SUDDENNESS, fell on Moscow like a conquering army. Fires broke out in the forest, so that the city was palled with smoke and no one could see the sun. Folk went mad from the heat; drowned themselves in the river seeking coolness, or simply dropped where they stood, scarlet-faced, bodies dewed with clammy sweat.

The rats came with the warmth, creeping out of the merchant-boats while men unloaded silver and cloth and forged iron for the sticky, sweltering markets of Moscow. They thrived in the smother, drawn to the reek of Moscow’s middens.

The first folk to fall sick lived in the posad: the airless, crowded huts by the river. They began to cough, to sweat, and then to shiver. Then the smooth swellings showed, at throat and groin, and then black spots.

Plague. The word rippled through the city. Moscow had seen plague before. Dmitrii’s uncle Semyon had died of it, with his wife and his sons in one terrible summer.

“Close up the houses of the sick,” said Dmitrii to the captain of his guard. “They are not to go out—no, not even to go to church. If a priest can be found to bless them, let the priest go in, but that is all. Tell the guards at the city-gate; anyone who seems ill is not allowed within the walls.” Folk still whispered in hushed tones of the death of Dmitrii’s uncle: dying swollen like a tick, black-spotted, his own attendants afraid to come near him.

The man nodded, but he was frowning. “What?” Dmitrii demanded. The night of the Tatar attack had decimated Dmitrii’s city guard. In the aftermath of the riot and Vasya’s burning, he’d built it up again, larger than before, but they were still inexperienced.

“This sickness is the curse of God, Gosudar,” said the captain. “Surely it is only right that men be allowed to go and pray? All the people’s prayers together may yet reach the ears of the Almighty.”

“It is a curse that flies from man to man,” said Dmitrii. “What are the walls of Moscow for if not to keep out evil?”

One of his boyars there in his anteroom said, “Forgive me, Gosudar, but—”

Dmitrii turned, scowling. “Can I not give orders without debate from half the city?” Ordinarily he humored his boyars. They were mostly older than he, and had ensured that he had a throne to inherit when he came of age. But the shocking heat sapped his strength and brought on a sick, weary anger. He’d had no word from either of his cousins. The Prince of Serpukhov had taken all the silver Muscovy could muster, and had gone south to plead their case before the temnik Mamai. Sasha was supposed to be bringing back Father Sergei. But Sasha had not returned, and reports came out of the south that Mamai was still gathering up his ulus, as though he’d never heard Vladimir’s message at all.

“The people are afraid,” said the boyar carefully. “Thrice have the dead come walking since the season turned. Now this? If you shut the gates of Moscow and deny church to the sick, I do not know what they will do. Already there is much talk that the city is cursed.”

Dmitrii understood war, and the managing of men, but curses were outside his experience. “I will take thought for the comfort of the city,” he said. “But we are not cursed.” In his own heart, though, Dmitrii wasn’t sure. He wanted Father Sergei’s advice, but the old monk was not there. So instead, grudgingly, the Grand Prince turned to his steward. “Send for Father Konstantin.”

* * *

“THE FAIR-HAIRED PRINCE IS no fool,” said the Bear. “But he is young. He has sent a messenger for you. When you go to him, you must convince him to let you give service in the cathedral. Call the people together and pray for rain or salvation or whatever it is men ask of their gods in this age. But call them together.”

Konstantin was alone in the scriptorium of the Archangel, wearing only the lightest of cassocks; sweat dewed his forehead, his upper lip. “I am painting,” he said. He turned a pot of color in the light. His colors lay before him like a string of jewels—some were actually made from precious stones. At Lesnaya Zemlya, he had made his colors from bark and berries and leaves. Now anxious boyars showered him with lapis for his blues and jasper for his reds. They paid the finest silversmiths in Moscow to make icon-covers for him, of hammered silver, studded with pearls.

The third time dead things came whispering through the streets, it had taken the whole night to drive them off: first one, then another, and finally a third. “It cannot seem to be too easy,” the Bear had told him afterward, when Konstantin had wakened screaming from a dream of dead faces. “Do you think the defeat of a single child-upyr would have been enough to win over all Moscow, peasant and boyar? Drink wine, man of God, and do not fear the darkness. Have I not done all I promised?”

Tags: Katherine Arden Winternight Trilogy Fantasy
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