The Girl in the Tower Read online

  She did not expect his reaction. He drew himself up; his face chilled, and suddenly he was the remote winter-king again. He bowed, gracefully. “I will return at nightfall,” he said. “The fire will last the day, if you stay here.”

  She had the puzzling feeling that she had routed him, and she wondered what she had said. “I—”

  But he was already gone, on the mare’s back and away. Vasya was left blinking beside the fire, angry and a little bewildered. “A bell, perhaps,” she remarked to Solovey. “Like a sledge-horse, that we may better mark his coming.”

  The horse snorted and said, I am glad you are not dead, Vasya.

  She thought again of the frost-demon. “As am I.”

  Do you think you could make porridge? added the horse, hopefully.

  NOT FAR AWAY—OR PERHAPS very far away—depending on who did the measuring, the white mare refused to gallop any more. I do not wish to run about the world to relieve your feelings, she informed him. Get off or I will have you off.

  Morozko dismounted, in no very sweet temper, while the white mare lowered her nose and began scraping for grass beneath the snow.

  Unable to ride, he paced the winter earth, while clouds boiled up in the north and blew snow-flurries on them both. “She was supposed to go home,” he snarled to no one in particular. “She was supposed to tire of her folly, go home with her necklace, wear it, and tremble sometimes, at the memory of a frost-demon, in her impetuous youth. She was supposed to bear girl-children who might wear the necklace in turn. She was not supposed to—”

  Enchant you, finished the horse with some asperity, not raising her nose from the snow. Her tail lashed her flanks. Do not pretend otherwise. Or has she dragged you near enough to humanity that you have also become a hypocrite?

  Morozko halted and faced the horse, narrow-eyed.

  I am not blind, continued the mare. Even to things that go on two feet. You made that jewel so that you would not fade. But now it is doing too much. It is making you alive. It is making you want what you cannot have, and feel what you ought not to understand, and you are beguiled and afraid. Better to leave her to her fate, but you cannot.

  Morozko pressed his lips together. The trees sighed overhead. All at once his anger seemed to leave him. “I do not want to fade,” he said unwillingly. “But I do not want to be alive. How can a death-god be alive?” He paused, and something changed in his voice. “I could have let her die, and taken the sapphire from her and tried again, found another to remember. There are others of that bloodline.”

  The mare’s ears went forward and back.

  “I did not,” he said abruptly. “I cannot. Yet every time I go near her, the bond tightens. What immortal ever knew what it was like to number his days? Yet I can feel the hours passing when she is near.”

  The mare nosed again at the deep snow. Morozko resumed his pacing.

  Let her go, then, said the mare, quietly, from behind him. Let her find her own fate. You cannot love and be immortal. Do not let it come to that. You are not a man.

  VASYA DID NOT LEAVE the space under the spruce-tree that day, although she meant to. “I am never going home,” she said to Solovey, around a lump in her throat. “I am well. Why tarry here?”

  Because it was warm under the spruce—actually warm—with the fire snapping merrily, and all her limbs still felt slow and feeble. So Vasya stayed, and made porridge, then soup from the dried meat and salt in her saddlebag. She wished she had the energy to snare rabbits.

  The fire burned on steadily, whether or not she added wood. She wondered how the snow above it did not melt, how she was not smoked out of her place beneath the spruce.

  Magic, she thought restlessly. Perhaps I can learn magic. Then I would never go in fear of traps, or pursuit.

  When the snow was blue-hollowed with the failing day, and the fire had grown a touch brighter than the world outside, Vasya looked up to find Morozko standing just inside the ring of light.

  Vasya said, “I am not going home.”

  “That,” he returned, “is obvious, despite my best efforts. Do you mean to set off straightaway and ride through the night?”

  A chill wind shook the spruce-branches. “No,” she said.

  He nodded once, curtly, and said, “Then I will build up the fire.”

  This time she watched him carefully when he put a hand against the skin of the spruce, and bark and limb crumbled dry and dead into his waiting palm. But she still did not know exactly what he did. First there was living wood, then, between one blink and the next, it became kindling. Her eyes kept wanting to skitter away, at the strangeness of his almost-human hand, doing a thing a man could not.

  When the fire was roaring, Morozko tossed Vasya a rabbit-skin bag, then went to tend the white mare. Vasya caught the bag by reflex, staggering; it was heavier than it looked. She undid the ties and discovered apples, chestnuts, cheese, and a loaf of dark bread. She almost yelled in childlike delight.

  When Morozko slid back through the curtain of spruce, he found her smashing nuts with the flat of her belt-knife and scrabbling hungrily for the nut-meats with dirty fingers.

  “Here,” he said, a wry note in his voice.

  Her head jerked up. The carcass of a big rabbit, gutted and cleaned, hung incongruously from his elegant fingers.

  “Thank you!” Vasya gasped with bare politeness. She seized the thing at once, spitted it, and set it over the fire. Solovey put his head curiously under the spruce, eyed the roasting flesh, shot her an offended look, and disappeared again. Vasya ignored him, busy toasting her bread, while she waited for the meat. The bread browned and she gobbled it steaming, with cheese running down the sides. Earlier she had not been hungry, dying as she was, but now her body reminded her that her hot meal in Chudovo was long ago, and the hard, cold days had reduced her flesh to bone and skin and strings. She was ravenous.

  When at last Vasya came up for air, licking bread-crumbs from her fingers, the rabbit was almost done and Morozko was looking at her with a bemused expression. “The cold makes me hungry,” she explained unnecessarily, feeling more cheerful than she had in days.

  “I know,” he returned.

  “How did you take the rabbit?” she asked, turning the meat with deft, greasy hands. Nearly ready. “There was no mark on it.”

  Twin flames danced in his crystalline eyes. “I froze its heart.”

  Vasya shuddered and asked no more.

  He did not speak while she ate the meat. At last she sat back and said “Thank you,” once more, although she couldn’t help adding with some resentment, “Although if you meant to save my life you could have done it before I was dying.”

  “Do you still wish to be a traveler, Vasilisa Petrovna?” he returned, only.

  Vasya thought of the archer, the whine of his arrow, the grime on her skin, the killing cold, the terror of being ill and alone in the wilderness. She thought of sunsets and golden towers and of a world no longer bounded by village and forest.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Very well,” said Morozko, his face growing grim. “Come, are you fed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then stand up. I am going to teach you to fight with a knife.”

  She stared.

  “Did the fever take your hearing?” he demanded, waspish. “On your feet, girl. You say you mean to be a traveler; very well, better you not go defenseless. A knife cannot turn arrows, but it is a useful thing sometimes. I do not mean to be always running about the world saving you from folly.”

  She rose slowly, uncertain. He reached overhead, where a fringe of icicles drooped, and broke one off. The ice softened, shaped to his hand.

  Vasya watched, hungry-eyed, wishing she could also perform wonders.

  Under his fingers, the icicle became a long dagger, hard and perfect and finished. Its blade was of ice, its hilt of crystal: a cold, pale weapon.

  Morozko handed it to her.

  “But—I do not—” she stammered, staring down at the shinin
g thing. Girls did not touch weapons, beyond the skinning-knife in the kitchen or a little axe for chopping wood. And a knife made of ice…

  “You do now,” he said. “Traveler.” The great blue forest lay silent as a chapel beneath a risen moon, and the black trees soared impossibly, merging with the cloudy sky.

  Vasya thought of her brothers, having their first lessons in bow or sword, and felt strange in her own skin.

  “You hold it thus,” Morozko said. His fingers framed hers, setting her grip aright. His hand was bitingly cold. She flinched.

  He let her go and stepped back, expression unchanged. Frost-crystals had caught in his dark hair and a knife like hers lay loose in his hand.

  Vasya swallowed, her mouth dry. The dagger dragged her hand earthward. Nothing made of ice had a right to be so heavy.

  “Thus,” Morozko said.

  The next moment, she was spitting out snow, hand stinging, her knife nowhere to be seen.

  “Hold it like that and any child could take it from you,” the frost-demon said. “Try again.”

  She looked for the shards of her knife, sure it had fallen to pieces. But it lay whole, innocent and deadly, reflecting the firelight.

  Vasya grasped it carefully, as he had shown her, and tried again.

  She tried many times, all through that long night, and through another day, and another night that followed. He showed her how to turn another blade with hers, how to stab someone unsuspecting, in several ways.

  She was not without speed, she soon discovered, and was light on her feet, but she had not the strength of a warrior, built up from childhood. She tired quickly. Morozko was merciless; he did not seem to move so much as drift, and his blade went everywhere, silken, effortless.

  “Where did you learn it?” she gasped once, nursing her aching fingers after yet another fall. “Or did you come into the world knowing?”

  Without replying, he offered her a hand. Vasya ignored it and clambered to her feet. “Learn?” he said then. Was that bitterness in his voice? “How? I am as I was made: unchanging. Long ago, men dreamed a sword into my hand. Gods diminish, but they do not change. Now try again.”

  Vasya, wondering, hefted her knife and said nothing more.

  That first night they stopped only when Vasya’s arm shook and the blade fell from her nerveless fingers. She leaned on her thighs, panting and bruised. The forest creaked in the darkness outside their ring of firelight.

  Morozko shot the fire a glance and it leaped up, roaring. Vasya gratefully sank down onto her heap of boughs and warmed her hands.

  “Will you teach me to do magic, too?” she asked him. “To make fire with my eyes?”

  The fire flared sudden and harsh on the bones of Morozko’s face. “There is no such thing as magic.”

  “But you just—”

  “Things are or they are not, Vasya,” he interrupted. “If you want something, it means you do not have it, it means that you do not believe it is there, which means it will never be there. The fire is or it is not. That which you call magic is simply not allowing the world to be other than as you will it.”

  Her weary brain refused to comprehend. She scowled.

  “Having the world as you wish—that is not for the young,” he added. “They want too much.”

  “How do you know what I want?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “Because,” he replied between his teeth, “I am considerably older than you.”

  “You are immortal,” she ventured. “Do you not want anything?”

  He fell suddenly silent. Then he said, “Are you warm? We will try again.”

  LATE ON THE FORTH NIGHT, when Vasya sat bruised beside the fire, aching too much even to find her bedroll and solace in sleep, she said, “I have a question.”

  He had her knife over his knee, running his hands over the blade. If she caught him out of the corner of her eye, she could see frost-crystals, following the line of his fingers, smoothing the blade.

  “Speak,” he replied, not looking up. “What is it?”

  “You took my father away, didn’t you? I saw you ride off with him after the Bear—”

  Morozko’s hands stilled. His expression invited her, firmly, to be quiet and go to sleep. But she could not. She had thought of this much, through the long nights of her riding, when the cold kept her awake.

  “And you do it every time?” she pressed. “For everyone who dies in Rus’? Take them, dead, onto your saddlebow and ride away?”

  “Yes—and no.” He seemed to measure out the words. “In a way I am present, but—it’s like breathing. You breathe, but you are not aware of every breath.”

  “Were you aware of that breath,” asked Vasya acidly, “when my father died?”

  A line like spider-silk showed between his brows. “More than usual,” he replied. “But that was because I—my thinking self—was nearby, and because—”

  He fell abruptly silent.

  “What?” the girl asked.

  “Nothing. I was nearby, that’s all.”

  Vasya’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have to take him away. I could have saved him.”

  “He died to see you safe,” said Morozko. “It was what he wanted. And he was glad to go. He missed your mother. Even your brother knew that.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you at all, does it?” Vasya snapped. This was the core of it: not her father’s death, but the frost-demon’s vast indifference. “I suppose you hovered over my mother’s bed, ready to snatch her from us, and then you stole my father and rode off with him. One day it will be Alyosha slung over your saddlebow, and one day me. And it all means less to you than breathing!”

  “Are you angry with me, Vasilisa Petrovna?” His voice held only mild surprise, quiet and inevitable: snow falling in a country without spring. “Do you think that there would be no death if I weren’t there to lead people into the dark? I am old, but old as I am, the world was far older before I ever saw my first moonrise.”

  Vasya found then, to her horror, that her eyes were spilling over. She turned away and suddenly she was weeping into her hands, mourning her parents, her nurse, her home, her childhood. He had taken it all from her. Or had he? Was he the cause or merely the messenger? She hated him. She dreamed about him. None of it mattered. Might as well hate the sky—or desire it—and she hated that worst of all.

  Solovey poked his head beneath the fir-branches. You are well, Vasya? he demanded, with a crooked anxious nose.

  She tried to nod, but only made a helpless motion with her head, face buried in her hands.

  Solovey shook his mane. You did this, he said to Morozko, ears pinned. Fix her!

  She heard his sigh, heard his footsteps when he came around the fire and knelt in front of her. Vasya wouldn’t look at him. After a moment, he reached out and gently peeled her fingers from her wet face.

  Vasya tried to glare, blinking away tears. What could he say? Hers was a grief he would not understand, being a thing immortal. But—“I’m sorry,” he said, surprising her.

  She nodded, swallowed, and said, “I’m just so tired—”

  He nodded. “I know. But you are brave, Vasya.” He hesitated, then bent forward and gently kissed her on the mouth.

  She had a fleeting taste of winter: smoke and pine and deadly cold, and then there was warmth, too, and a swift, impossible sweetness.

  But the instant was over, and he drew away. For a moment, each breathed the other’s breath. “Be at peace, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said. He got up and left the ring of firelight.

  Vasya did not go after him. She was bewildered, aching, bruised all over, aflame and afraid at once. She meant to go after him, of course. She meant to go and demand what he meant by—but she fell asleep, with the knife of ice in her hand—and the last thing she remembered was the taste of pine on her lips.

  WHAT NOW? THE MARE asked Morozko when he returned late that night. They stood together near the fire under the spruce. Living embers cast a wavering light on Vasya�
�s face as she slept, curled against a dozing Solovey. The stallion had shoved his way beneath the spruce and lain down beside her like a hound.

  “I do not know,” Morozko murmured.

  The mare nudged her rider hard, for all the world like her colt. You ought to tell her, she said. Tell her the whole story: of witches and a sapphire talisman and horses by the sea. She is wise enough, and she has the right to know. Otherwise you are only playing with her; you are the winter-king of long ago, that turned girls’ hearts for his own ends.

  “Am I not still the winter-king?” Morozko asked. “That is what I meant to do: beguile her with gold and with wonders and then send her home. That is what I should still do.”

  If only you could send her away, said the mare drily. And become a fond memory. But instead you are here, interfering. If you try to send Vasya home, she will not go. You are not master in this.

  “No matter,” he said sharply. “This—it is the last time.” He did not look at Vasya again. “She has made the road her home; that is her business now, not mine. She is alive; I will leave her to wear the jewel and remember, so long as her life lasts. When she dies, I will give it to another. It is enough.”

  The mare made no answer, but she blew out a steaming breath, skeptically, into the darkness.

  9.

  Smoke

  When Vasya awoke the next morning, Morozko and the mare were gone. He might never have been there; she might have thought it all a dream, but for two sets of hoofprints, and the glittering knife beside her restored saddle, her saddlebags newly bulging. The knife-blade did not look like ice now, but like some pale metal, sheathed in leather, bound in silver. Vasya sat up and glared at it all.

  He says to practice with the knife, said Solovey, coming up to nose her hair. And that it will not stick in its sheath in the frost. And that those who carry weapons often die sooner, so please do not carry it openly.

  Vasya thought of Morozko’s hands, correcting her grip on the dagger. She thought of his mouth. Her skin colored and suddenly she was furious, that he would kiss her, give her gifts, and leave her without a word.