The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy 3)

“I fear,” said Sergei, “that he does not care in the slightest.”

* * *

VASYA WOKE IN BRILLIANT DAYLIGHT. She leaped to her feet and lifted her face to the sun. Out of the country of Midnight, at last; and she hoped never to take that dark way again.

For a moment, she enjoyed the warmth. Then the heat began to gather, inexorable. Sweat slid between her breasts and down her spine. She was still wearing the wool shirt from the house at the edge of the lake, though now she wished for linen.

Her bare feet drank coolness from the dew-damp earth. Morozko was only a few paces off, grooming the white mare. She wondered if he’d kept near them that night, or if he’d gone wandering, touching the summer earth with strange frost. The monks still slept, in the easy way men sleep in daylight in summer.

Morozko’s fur and embroidered silk was gone, as though he could not maintain the trappings of power in the harsh light of day. He might have been any peasant, feet bare in the grass, except his steps starred the earth with frost, and the cuffs of his shirt dripped cold water. A little coolness hung about him, even in the humid morning. She breathed it in, comforted, and said, “Mother of God, the heat.”

Morozko looked grim. “That is the Bear’s work.”

“In winter, I have often wished for mornings like this,” Vasya said, to be fair. “To be warm all the way through.” She went over to stroke the white mare’s neck. “And in summer, I remember how suffocating such mornings are. Do you get hot?”

“No,” he said shortly. “But the heat tries to unmake me.”

Remorseful, she put a hand on his, where it moved on the mare’s withers. The connection between them flared to life, and his outline looked a little less vague. His hand curled around hers. She shivered, and he smiled. But his eyes were far away; he could not enjoy the reminder of his own weakness.

She dropped her hand. “Do you think the Bear knows you’re here?”

“No,” said Morozko. “I will try to keep it that way. Best we take two days on the road, and go into Moscow in bright morning.”

“Because of the dead things?” said Vasya. “The upyry? His servants?”

“They only walk at night,” he said. His colorless eye was savage. Vasya bit her lip.

An old war, Ded Grib had called it. Had she made herself a third power in it as the chyert suggested? Or merely taken the winter-king’s side? The wall of years between them suddenly seemed as insurmountable as it had been before the night in the bathhouse.

But she forced herself to say crisply, “I imagine that by the end of the day even my brother would sell his soul for cold water. Please do not bait him.”

“I was angry,” he said.

“We won’t be traveling with them for long,” she said.

“No,” he returned. “I will endure the summer as long as I can, but, Vasya, I cannot endure it forever.”

* * *

THEY ATE NOTHING; it was too hot. All of them were flushed and sweating even before they started off. They took the narrow track that wound alongside the Moskva, approaching the city from the east. Vasya’s stomach knotted with nerves. Now that they’d come to it, she did not want to go back to Moscow. She was deathly afraid. She trudged through the dust, trying to remember that she could do magic, that she had allies. But it was hard to believe, in the harsh light of day.

Morozko had let the white mare go, to graze beside the river and keep out of the sight of men. He was staying out of sight himself: little more than a cool breeze ruffling the leaves.

The sun rose higher and higher over the swooning world. Gray shadows lay like bars of iron along the trail. To their left ran the river. To their right was a vast wheat-field, red-gold as Pozhar’s coat, hissing as a hot wind flattened the stalks. The sun was like a mallet between the eyes. The path coated their feet with dust.

On and on they walked, still passing the wheat. It seemed endless. It seemed…Suddenly Vasya halted, shading her eyes with a hand, and said, “How large is this field?”

The men stopped when she did; now they looked at each other. No one could tell. The hot day seemed interminable. Morozko was nowhere to be seen. Vasya peered out over the wheat-field. A whirlwind of dust spun through the red-gold grass; the sky was dull with yellow haze, the sun overhead—still overhead…How long had it been overhead?

Now that they’d stopped, Vasya saw that the monks were all flushed and breathing fast. Faster than before? Too fast? It was so hot. “What is it?” asked Sasha, wiping the sweat from his face.

Vasya pointed to the whirlwind. “I think—”

Suddenly, with a muffled gasp, Sergei slumped over his horse’s mane and toppled sideways. Sasha caught him; Sergei’s placid horse didn’t move, only tilted a puzzled ear. Sergei’s skin was scarlet; he’d stopped sweating.

Behind the monks, Vasya glimpsed a woman with fair skin and hair bleached white, raising a pair of cutting shears in one bone-colored hand.

Not a woman. Without thinking, Vasya leaped, caught the chyert’s wrist, forced it backward.

“I have met Lady Midnight,” said Vasya to her, not letting go. “But not her sister Poludnitsa, whose touch, they say, strikes men with heat-sickness.”

Sasha was kneeling in the dust now, holding Sergei and looking stricken. Rodion had run for water. Vasya wasn’t sure he’d find any. The wheat-field at noon was the realm of Midday, and they had stumbled into it.

“Let me go!” hissed Poludnitsa.

Vasya did not slack her grip. “Let us go,” she said. “We have no quarrel with you.”

“No quarrel?” The chyert’s white hair snapped like straw in the sultry wind. “Their bells will be the end of us. That is quarrel enough, don’t you think?”

“The bell-makers wish only to live,” said Vasya. “As we all do.”

“If they can only live by killing,” snapped Lady Midday. “Better they all die.” Rodion came back without water; Sasha had risen to his feet, a hand on the searing hilt of his sword, but he couldn’t see who Vasya was talking to.

Vasya said to Midday, “Their deaths are yours; men and chyerti are bound together for good or ill. But it can be for good. We can share this world.” To show her good intentions, Vasya reached out and bloodied her thumb on the shears. Behind her, she heard the monks gasp, and realized that the touch of her blood had allowed them to see the demon.

Midday laughed, shrill. “Are you going to save us, little mortal child? When the Bear has promised us war, and victory?”