The Winter of the Witch Page 5

  “You—were bound,” Vasya whispered, in the voice of a girl in a nightmare. It could have been a nightmare. The Bear had haunted her dreams since her father died, and now they stood face-to-face in a storm of smoke and red light. “You cannot be here.”

  “Bound?” said the Bear. In the single gray eye flashed a memory of fury; his snarling shadow was not the shadow of a man. “Oh, yes,” he added, with irony. “You and your father bound me, with the help of my skulking twin.” He bared his teeth. “Aren’t you fortunate that I am free? I am going to save your life.”

  She stared. Reality wavered like the air around the fire.

  “Perhaps I am not the savior you want,” added the Bear, sly now, “but my noble brother could not come himself. You shattered his power when you shattered his blue jewel; and then spring came. He is less than a ghost. So he freed me and sent me. Went to a lot of trouble, really.” The single eye slid over her skin, and he pursed his lips. “No accounting for taste.”

  “No,” was all she could manage. “He would not.” She was going to be sick, from terror and shock, from the animal-stink of the half-seen crowd, concealed by smoke.

  The chyert reached into his ragged sleeve. With a look of distaste, he thrust a palm-sized wooden bird into her hand. “He gave me this to give you. A token. He traded his freedom for your life. Now we must go.”

  The words seemed to run together in her mind; she couldn’t make sense of them. The wooden bird was carved, agonizingly, to look like a nightingale. She had seen the winter-king, the Bear’s brother, carving a bird once, beneath a spruce tree in the snow. Her hand closed about the carving even as she said, “You’re lying. You didn’t save my life.” She wished for a drink of water. She wished she could wake up.

  “Not yet,” the Bear said and glanced up at the burning cage. The mockery vanished from his face. “But you will not escape the city, unless you come with me.” He caught her hand suddenly, grip sure. “The bargain was for your life. I have sworn it, Vasilisa Petrovna. Come. Now.”

  Not a dream. Not a dream. He killed my father. She licked her lips, forced her voice to work. “If you are free, what will you do after you save my life?”

  His scarred mouth quirked. “Stay with me and find out.”

  “Never.”

  “Very well. Then I will see you safe, as I promised, and the rest doesn’t concern you.”

  He was a monster. But she didn’t think he was lying. Why would the winter-king do such a thing? Was she now to owe this monster her life? What would that make him? What would that make her?

  With death all around her, Vasya hesitated. Shrieks rose suddenly from the crowd and she flinched, but they were not screaming at her. A mass of horsemen was beating a way through the mob. Eyes turned from the fire to the riders; even Medved glanced up.

  Vasya jerked herself away and ran. She didn’t look back, for if she did, she would stop, would yield in her despair to her enemy’s promises or to the death still beating at her back. As she ran, she tried to be like a ghost, like a chyert herself. Magic is forgetting the world was ever other than as you willed it. And perhaps it worked. No one called out; no one so much as glanced in her direction.

  “Fool,” said the Bear. His voice was in her ear, though a whole mass of people stood between them. His weary amusement was worse than rage. “I am telling you the truth. That is what frightens you.” Still she darted through the crowd, a fire-smelling ghost, trying not to hear that dry, metallic voice. “I will let them kill you,” said the Bear. “You can leave here with me, or you will not leave at all.”

  That she believed. Still she ran, sinking herself deeper in the crowd, sick with terror, sick at the stink, expecting every instant to be seen, to be seized. The carved nightingale felt cold and solid in her sweaty fist: a promise she didn’t understand.

  And then the Bear’s voice was raised up again, not directed at her. “Look! Look—what is that? A ghost—no—it is she the witch; she has escaped the fire! Magic! Black sorcery! She is there! She is there!”

  Vasya realized with horror that the crowd could hear him. A head turned. Then another. They could see her. A woman screamed, just as a hand closed on Vasya’s arm. She pulled away, thrashing, but the hand only tightened its grip. Then a cloak was flung over her shoulders, concealing her blackened shift. A familiar voice spoke in her ear, even as the hand dragged her deeper into the crowd. “This way,” it said.

  Vasya’s savior yanked the hood over the girl’s charred hair, hiding everything except her feet. The crush of people hid them; most people were trying not to be trampled. It was too dark to see her red footprints. Behind her the Bear’s voice rose, savage now: “There! There!”

  But even he could not guide a crowd in such confusion. Sasha and Dmitrii and the Grand Prince’s riders had finally arrived, had won their way through to the pyre, shouting. They tore the burning logs away, swearing as they scorched their hands; one man caught fire and shrieked. All around Vasya, people were surging, fleeing, crying out that they had seen the witch’s ghost, that they had seen the witch herself, escaped from the fire. No one remarked a skinny girl, stumbling in a cloak.

  Her brother’s voice soared over the din; she thought she heard the strident tones of Dmitrii Ivanovich. The crowd surged backward from the riders. I must go to my brother, Vasya thought. But she could not bring herself to turn; her every sense was bent on escape, and somewhere at her back was the Bear…

  The hand on her arm continued to drag her along. “Come,” said that familiar voice. “Hurry.”

  Vasya lifted her head, stared uncomprehending into Varvara’s grim, bruised face.

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  “A message,” said Varvara jerkily, still dragging her.

  She didn’t understand. “Marya,” Vasya managed. “Are Olga and Marya—”

  “Alive,” said Varvara, and Vasya sagged in gratitude. “Unhurt. Come.” She pulled Vasya on, half-carrying her through the retreating crowd. “You have to leave the city.”

  “Leave?” Vasya whispered. “How? I have—I have not…”

  Solovey. She could not form the word; grief would take the last of her strength.

  “You do not need the horse,” said Varvara, voice hard. “Come.”

  Vasya said nothing more; she was fighting a desperate battle to stay conscious. The ends of her ribs ground together. Her bare feet didn’t hurt anymore, numbed on the ice. But they didn’t work very well either, and so she stumbled and stumbled again, until Varvara’s arm was the only thing keeping her from falling.

  The crowd churned behind them, scattering under the whips of Dmitrii’s men-at-arms. A voice called to Varvara, asking if the girl was sick, and Vasya felt a new bolt of terror.

  Varvara returned a cool explanation, of a niece who’d fainted with the bloodletting, and all the while her hand made more bruises on Vasya’s arm as she dragged her up from the riverbank and into the darkness of the sapling woods that grew beside the posad. Vasya tried to understand what was happening.

  Varvara halted abruptly near an oak-sapling, bare with the end of winter. “Polunochnitsa,” she said to the dark.

  Vasya knew a person—a devil—called Polunochnitsa, Lady Midnight. But what could her sister’s body-servant know of—

  The Bear loomed out of the shadows, firelight striping his face. Vasya wrenched back. Varvara followed her gaze, her eyes darting into the dark like a blind woman’s. “Do you think I’d lose you in this?” the Bear demanded, half-angry, half-amused. “You reek of terror. I could follow that anywhere.”

  Varvara could not see him, but her hand tightened convulsively on Vasya’s arm. Vasya realized that she had heard him. “Eater,” Varvara breathed. “Here? Midnight.” The voices of the dispersing mob filtered up from the river below.

  The Bear shot Varvara a speculative look. “You’re the other one, a
ren’t you? I forgot the old woman had twins. How did you contrive to live so long?”

  Vasya thought the words should make some kind of sense, but understanding slipped away before she could seize it. To Vasya, the Bear added, “She means to send you through Midnight. I wouldn’t, if I were you. You will die there, just as surely as in the fire.”

  The voices of the crowd came closer as the people cut through the woods back to the posad. In moments, someone would see them, and then…Torches threw flickers of light through the scraggly trees. A man caught sight of the two women. “What are you doing, skulking there?”

  “Girls!” said another voice. “Look at them, all alone. I could have a girl, after watching that…”

  “You can die at their hands or you can come with me now,” the Bear said to Vasya. “It is all one to me; I will not ask again.”

  One of Vasya’s eyes was swollen shut, the other blurred; perhaps that had made her slow to pick out a fourth person, watching from the shadows. This person had skin that was violet-black, and her hair was pale, blowing white across eyes like two stars. She was looking from the women to the Bear and said not a word.

  This was the demon called Midnight.

  “I do not understand,” Vasya whispered. She stood frozen between Varvara, who had kept secrets, and the Bear, who offered poisonous safety.

  Beyond them, silent, stood Lady Midnight. At the demon’s back, the woods seemed to have changed. They grew thicker, wilder, darker.

  Varvara said, low and fierce in Vasya’s ear, “What do you see?”

  “The Bear,” Vasya breathed. “And the demon called Midnight. And—a darkness. There is darkness behind her, such darkness.” She was shaking from head to foot.

  “Run into the dark,” Varvara whispered to Vasya. “That was the message I had, and the promise. Touch the oak-sapling and run into the dark. That is the road, from here to the oak-tree by the lake. The road through Midnight opens every night to those with eyes to see. There will be refuge for you by the lake. Hold it in your mind; a stretch of water, shining, with a great oak that grows at the bow-curve of its shore. Run into the dark, and be brave.”

  Whom to trust? The voices of men were growing louder. Their crunching footsteps broke into a run. Her only choices were fire or darkness or the devil in between.

  “Go—go!” shouted Varvara. She placed Vasya’s bloody palm on the bark and shoved. Vasya found herself stumbling forward. The darkness loomed up, and then the Bear’s hand closed about her arm, an instant before the night swallowed her. She was spun to face him, her numb feet clumsy and scraping on the snow. “Go into the darkness,” he breathed. “And you will die.”

  She had no words, no courage, no defiance left. She made no answer at all. The only thing that drove her to gather all her strength and wrench away from him, fling herself into the night, was the desire to get away, from him, from the noise, from the smell of fire.

  She broke his grip and hurled herself into the dark. Instantly, the lights and the noise of Moscow were swallowed up. She was in a forest all alone, beneath an unsullied sky. She took one step forward, and then another. And then she tripped, fell to her knees, and could not muster the strength to rise. The last thing she heard was a half-familiar voice. “Dead just like that? Well, perhaps the old woman was wrong.”

  Behind her, somewhere, it seemed the Bear was laughing again.

  And then Vasya lay still, unconscious.

  * * *

  IN THE TRUE WORLD, the Bear’s breath hissed between his teeth, still with that edge of angry laughter. He said to Varvara, “Well, you have killed her. I didn’t even need to break my word to my brother. I thank you for that.”

  Varvara said nothing. The Eater’s greatest power is his knowledge of the desires and weaknesses of men. Varvara’s mother had taught her much of the ways of chyerti. Varvara had tried to forget what she knew. What did it matter? She had not the eyes to see them, as her sister liked to remind her.

  But now the Eater was free, and her mother and her sister were gone.

  Two young men came stumbling up, drunk. In their eyes was a hungry light. “Well, you’re old and you’re ugly,” said one. “But you’ll serve.”

  Without a word, Varvara kicked the first man between the legs, put a hard shoulder into the second. They fell yelping to the snow. She heard the Bear’s sigh of satisfaction. Above all, her mother had said, he is a lover of armies, of battles, and of violence.

  Holding her skirts, Varvara ran, back to the lights, the chaos of the posad and thence up the hill of the kremlin. As she ran, she heard the Bear’s voice in her ears, though he had made no move to follow her. “I must thank you again, No-Eyes, that the little witch is dead, and my promise is unbroken.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Varvara whispered between clenched teeth. “Not yet.”

  5.

  Temptation

  THE CAGE COLLAPSED IN A shower of sparks, just as Sasha and Dmitrii battered through the ring of people and began to break the fire apart with their smoldering spear-hafts. The chaos rose to a fever pitch.

  In the confusion, Konstantin Nikonovich slipped away, hood drawn up over the deep gold of his hair. The air was hazed with smoke; the maddened crowd jostled him, not knowing who he was. By the time the men had scattered the logs of the fire, Konstantin had passed through the posad unremarked, was making his soft-footed way back to the monastery.

  She didn’t even deny her guilt, he thought, hurrying through the half-frozen slush. She had set fire to Moscow. It was the people’s righteous wrath that had swept her up. What blame could attach to him, a holy man?

  She was dead. He’d taken the full measure of his vengeance.

  She had been seventeen years old.

  He barely made it to his cell and shut the door before he broke into a fit of sobbing laughter. He laughed at all those nodding, adoring, snarling faces out in Moscow, taking every word of his as gospel, laughed at the memory of her face, the fear in her eyes. He even laughed at the icons on the wall, their rigidity and their silence. Then he found his laughter turning to tears. Sounds of anguish tore from his throat, quite against his will, until he had to thrust a fist into his mouth to muffle the noise. She was dead. It had been easy, in the end. Perhaps the demon, the witch, the goddess had only existed in his mind.

  He tried to master himself. The people had been as clay in his hands, softened as they were in the heat of Moscow’s fire. It would not always be so easy. If Dmitrii Ivanovich discovered that Konstantin had raised the mob, he would see him as a threat to his authority at least, if not the murderer of his cousin. Konstantin did not know if his new-made influence would be enough to counter the Grand Prince’s wrath.

  He was so busy weeping, pacing, thinking and trying not to think, that he failed to notice the shadow on the wall, until it spoke.

  “Crying like a maiden?” murmured a voice. “On tonight, of all nights? What are you doing, Konstantin Nikonovich?”

  Konstantin leaped back with a sound not far from a scream. “It is you,” he said, breathing like a child afraid of the dark. And then, “No.” And finally, “Where are you?”

  “Here,” said the voice.

  Konstantin twisted round, but saw only his own shadow, cast by the lamp.

  “No, here.” This time the voice seemed to come from his icon of the Mother of God. The woman beneath the gold icon-cover leered at him. She was not the Virgin at all, but Vasya with her red-black hair shaken loose, her face one-eyed and scarred with fire. Konstantin bit back another scream.

  Then the voice said a third time, from his own cot, laughing, “No, here, poor fool.”

  Konstantin looked and saw…a man.

  Man? The creature on his bed looked like a man; such a man as had never before been seen in a monastery. He lounged smiling upon the bed, hair tumbled, feet incongruously bare. But his shadow—his shadow had c
laws.

  “Who are you?” asked Konstantin, breathing fast.

  “Did you never see my face before?” asked the creature. “Ah, no, at Midwinter you saw the beast and the shadow, but not the man.” He got slowly to his feet. He and Konstantin were nearly of a height. “Never mind. You know my voice.” He cast down his eyes like a girl. “Do I please you, man of God?” The unscarred side of his mouth twisted in a half-smile.

  Konstantin was pressed hard against the door, his fist against his mouth. “I remember. You are the devil.”

  The man—the chyert—looked up at that, single eye alight. “I? Men call me the Bear, Medved, when they call me anything at all. Have you never thought that heaven and hell are both nearer you than you like to believe?”

  “Heaven? Nearer?” said Konstantin. He could feel every ridge of the wooden wall pressed against his back. “God abandoned me. He gave me over to devils. There is no heaven. There is only this world of clay.”

  “Exactly,” said the demon. He spread his arms wide. “To mold to your liking. What do you desire of this world, little father?”

  Konstantin was shaking in every limb. “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I need you. I am in need of a man.”

  “For what?”

  Medved shrugged. “Men do the work of devils, do they not? It has always been so.”

  “I am not your servant.” His voice shook.

  “Nay—who wants a servant?” said the Bear. He stepped closer and closer still, voice dropping. “Enemy, lover, passionate slave you may choose, but servant—no.” His red tongue just touched his upper lip. “See, I am generous in my bargains.”

  Konstantin swallowed, his mouth dry. His breath came short, with eagerness and despair; it felt as though the walls of his cell were closing in. “What would I get in return for my—allegiance?”