He tried to jerk it back out of the Staryk’s body, but it wouldn’t come, and frost was racing white down towards his gloved hands. His fingers sprang away almost of their own accord as it reached them, and the Staryk fell heavily to the ground, his eyes gone clouded and white. The soldier stood staring down at him, shaking, wringing his hands; the fingers of his gauntlets were tipped with white. I was staring too, both of my hands over my mouth, holding in another cry. The sword was all the way through the Staryk’s body. I didn’t see how he could live; it almost didn’t look real, that wound, and a strange blankness filled me; I couldn’t think at all.
But the Staryk, blindly groping, reached for the hilt of the sword where it stood out of his body, and it began to go entirely white beneath his touch, layer on layer of frost building. The whole sword was being frozen. The soldier and I both lurched back into motion; he pulled out a long dagger from his belt, and I shouted, “Wait,” again, in a gasp, and struggled to my feet and grabbed his arm. “Listen to me! We have to stop the demon, not him!”
“Be silent, witch!” the soldier spat at me. “You have done this, you have let him free, to undo the work of our blessed tsarina,” and then he struck my face with his other clenched fist, a perfectly ordinary blow that rattled my teeth and shocked straight through my body. I fell down dazed and sick to my stomach, and he turned to stab the Staryk.
And then Sergey, coming out of the dark upon us, grabbed his arm and stopped him. The two of them stood over the Staryk wrestling a moment: Sergey was a tall, strong boy, and oh, I was grateful now for every glass of milk and every egg and every slice of roast chicken my mother had given him. I had grumbled over them in my head, counting pennies, and now too late I wanted to wish myself more generous: if only I hadn’t, if I’d put still more of them on his plate, urged him to eat up, maybe he’d have been strong enough now. But he wasn’t; he was still only a boy, and the soldier was a grown man, in mail, trained to kill for the tsar. He stamped on Sergey’s poor feet in their straw pattens with his heavy boot, and twisting threw him flat onto the ground, freeing the hand with the dagger.
But then the soldier stopped where he stood. A strange serene pallor came climbing out of his armor and up over his neck and his face. The sword through the Staryk’s chest had broken into rough chunks of frozen steel, scattered blue-white over the grass around him. He lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, his ice-frosted lashes against a kind of pale violet color in his cheeks, but he had reached out and caught the soldier’s leg where it was next to him. Ice was spreading from that touch; it had traveled up over the boot and the soldier’s leg and onward up his entire body, freezing him in place.
The color deepened in the soldier’s face, the skin over his cheekbones splitting and curling away black with frostbite. I hid my face in my hands and didn’t look until it was over and there was nothing left of him but shards of ice everywhere, and the short dagger dropped shining and deadly on the ground.
I crawled back onto my knees, my face aching and tender to the touch. Sergey had sat up wincing also, touching his feet with his hands. The Staryk lay on the ground still glistening. Frost ringed him in a widening circle, delicate feathery patterns climbing over the blades of grass, and he was breathing; the place where the sword had pierced him was covered over thickly with a lump of white-frosted ice, as though he’d packed it hard with snow. But he didn’t sit up. Sergey stared at him and looked at me. “What do we do?” he asked me, in little more than a whisper, and I stared back at him. I had no idea; what was I to do with him lying on the ground, spreading winter around him like ink through water?
I bent over him, and he opened his eyes and looked at me as vague as fog. “Can you call your road?” I asked him. “Your sleigh? Have them come to take you back?”
“Too far,” he whispered. “Too far. My road cannot run beneath green trees.” And then he shut his eyes again and lay there still, helpless and wounded and maybe even dying, now just when I’d stopped wanting him to die. So he was determined to remain exactly the same amount of use he’d been to me all along. I wanted to shake him, to make him get up, only I was afraid he’d shatter into pieces along the fracture line where the sword had gone through him. Sergey was still looking at me, and I said grimly, “We’ll have to carry him.”
Sergey wouldn’t touch him directly, and I couldn’t really blame him. I took off my wet and ash-stained cloak and laid it on the ground, and carefully one after another lifted the Staryk’s legs onto it, and then his shoulders, and then heaved him the rest of the way onto it from underneath his middle. He didn’t even twitch. “All right,” I said. “Take the top, and I’ll take the bottom,” and then the Staryk stirred, when Sergey went to take the top of the cloak, and tried weakly to lash out at him.
Sergey scrambled back in terror, and I dropped my end of the cloak with a thump. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
He turned his head towards me and whispered, “He comes to my aid unasked, unwanted! Am I to permit this cowering wight, this slinking thief, to put me under an obligation without end, so he may ask whatever he likes of me?”
I could have picked up the dagger and stabbed him myself. “Chernobog still sits in that castle ready to devour all of us, you’re half dead on the ground, and you’d still lie here thinking first of your pride. Be proud after he’s gone!”
But he only looked at me reproachfully. “Lady, I will be proud then,” he said, “and before also; I set no limits on my pride.”
I ground my teeth, and then I told Sergey, “Ask him for something!” Sergey stared at me as if he thought I’d gone mad. “What would you have him give you for your help? And don’t bargain short,” I added vengefully, “since he’s so eager to be proud.”
Sergey said after a moment, very slowly, as if he didn’t entirely trust me, “For—for my crops never to be blighted by frost?” I nodded, and the Staryk didn’t immediately start trying to kill him again, so he took courage and added, “And none of my herds ever lost in a blizzard? And—” I was still beckoning him on, “to hunt even the white animals in the forest?”
The Staryk scowled a little bit there, so Sergey stopped hurriedly, but I felt that was about right anyway. “There!” I said to him. “Will that do? Will you make that bargain, for the help to get you to safety? Or will you lie here until spring rains melt you entirely?”
“He bargains high, for a low thief,” the Staryk muttered. “But fortune smiles on him; very well, I agree,” and then he let his head sink back against the cloak, and was gone limp. Sergey very slowly edged towards the ends of the cloak and even more slowly reached for them again, his eyes on the Staryk all the while. “It’s all right,” I told him. “He’s said yes,” but Sergey only darted one quick look at me as though to say he’d take his time anyway, thank you.
We finally heaved him up and staggered away with his weight swinging between us in the hammock of the cloak. He made an awkward bundle to carry, and after we walked ten minutes without him summoning a blizzard or trying another murder, or even sitting up to say a word, Sergey said to me low, “Wait. I’ll take him on my shoulders.” We propped him on his feet, and I helped Sergey tip him across his shoulders, still keeping the cloak wrapped around him. Sergey staggered a bit under the weight, and shivered, but after that we went more quickly.