“You can’t light a fire under the trees,” said Vasya wisely, slurring her words around numb lips. “The snow above you will melt and put it out.”
He shot her a sardonic look, but said nothing.
She did not see what he did, whether it was with his hands or his eyes or none of these. But suddenly there was a fire where before there had not been, snapping and glimmering on the bare earth.
Vasya was vaguely disquieted, seeing the heat-shimmer rise. The warmth, she knew, would draw her from her cocoon of cold-induced indifference. Part of her wanted to stay where she was. Not fighting. Not caring. Not feeling the cold. A slow darkness gathered over her sight, and she thought she just might go to sleep…
But he stalked over to her, bent, and took her by the shoulders. His hands were gentler than his voice. “Vasya,” he said. “Look at me.”
She looked, but darkness was pulling her away.
His face hardened. “No,” he breathed into her ear. “Don’t you dare.”
“I thought I was supposed to travel alone,” she murmured. “I thought— Why are you here?”
He picked her up again; her head lolled against his arm. He did not reply but carried her nearer the fire. His own mare poked her head into the shelter beneath the spruce-boughs, with Solovey beside her, blowing anxiously. “Go away,” he told them.
He stripped off Vasya’s cloak and knelt with her beside the flames.
She licked cracked lips, tasting blood. “Am I going to die?”
“Do you think you are?” A cold hand at her neck; her breath whined in her throat, but he only lifted the silver chain and drew out the sapphire pendant.
“Of course not,” she replied with a flash of irritation. “I’m just so cold—”
“Very well, then you won’t,” he said, as though it was obvious, but again she thought that something lightened in his expression.
“How—” but then she swallowed and fell silent, for the sapphire had begun to glow. Blue light gleamed eerily over his face, and the light stirred fearful memory: the jewel burning cold while a laughing shadow crept nearer. Vasya shrank from him.
His arms tightened. “Gently, Vasya.”
His voice halted her. She had never heard that note in it before, of uncalculated tenderness.
“Gently,” he said again. “I will not hurt you.”
He said it like a promise. She looked up at him, wide-eyed, shivering, and then she forgot fear, for with the sapphire’s glow came warmth—agonizing warmth, living warmth—and in that moment she realized just how cold she had been. The stone burned hotter and hotter, until she bit her lips to keep from crying out. Then the breath rushed out of her, and a stinking sweat ran down her ribs. Her fever had broken.
Morozko laid the necklace down on her filthy shirt and settled with her onto the snow-tinted earth. The coolness of the winter night hung around his body, but his skin was warm. He wrapped them both in his blue cloak. Vasya sneezed when the fur tickled her nose.
Warmth poured from the necklace and began coiling through all her limbs. The sweat ran down her face. In silence, he took up her left hand and then her right, tracing the fingers one by one. Agony flared once more, up her arms this time, but it was a grateful agony, breaking through the numbness. Her hands prickled painfully back to life.
“Be still,” he said, catching both her hands in one of his. “Softly. Softly.” His other hand drew lines of fiery pain on her nose and ears and cheeks and lips. She shuddered but held still for it. He had healed the incipient frostbite.
At last Morozko’s hand stilled; he wrapped an arm around her waist. A cool wind came and eased the burning.
“Go to sleep, Vasya,” he murmured. “Go to sleep. Enough for one day.”
“There were men,” she said. “They wanted—”
“No one can find you here,” he returned. “Do you doubt me?”
She sighed. “No.” She was on the edge of sleep, warm and—safe. “Did you send the snowstorm?”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face, though she did not see. “Perhaps. Go to sleep.”
Her eyelids fluttered shut, and she did not hear what he added, almost to himself. “And forget,” he murmured. “Forget. It is better so.”
VASYA AWOKE TO BRIGHT MORNING—the cold smell of fir, the hot smell of fire, and sun-dappled shadows beneath the spruce. She was wrapped in her cloak and in her bedroll. A well-tended blaze chattered and danced beside her. Vasya lay still for long moments, savoring an unaccustomed feeling of security. She was warm—for what seemed like the first time in weeks—and the pain had gone from her throat and joints.
Then she remembered the night before and sat up.
Morozko sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. He held a knife and was carving a bird out of wood.
She sat up, stiffly, light and weak and empty. How long had she been asleep? The fire was good on her face. “Why carve things of wood,” she asked him, “if you can make marvelous things of ice with only your hands?”
He glanced up. “God be with you, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said, with considerable irony. “Is that not what one says in the morning? I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.”
She paused, considering this. “Did you save my life?” she asked at length. “Again?”
The most fleeting of pauses. “I did.” He did not look up from his whittling.
“Why?”
He tilted the bird-carving this way and that. “Why not?”
Vasya had only a vague memory of gentleness, of light, of fire and of pain. Her eyes met his over the shimmer of the flame. “Did you know?” she demanded. “You knew. The snowstorm. That was certainly you. Did you know the whole time? That I was being hunted, that I was sick on the road, and you only came on the third day, when I could not even drag myself to my feet…”
He waited until she trailed off. “You wanted your freedom,” he replied, insufferably. “You wanted to see the world. Now you know what it is like. Now you know what it is like to be dying. You needed to know.”
She said nothing, resentfully.
“But,” he finished, “now you know, and you are not dead. Better you return to Lesnaya Zemlya. This road is no place for you.”
“No,” she said. “I am not going back.”
He laid wood and knife aside and stood, his glance suddenly brilliant with anger. “Do you think I want to spend my days keeping you from folly?”
“I didn’t ask for your help!”
“No,” he retorted. “You were too busy dying!”
The passive peace of her waking had quite gone. Vasya was sore in every limb and vividly alive. Morozko watched her with glowing eyes, angry and intent, and in that moment he seemed as alive as she.
Vasya clambered to her feet. “How was I supposed to know that those men would find me in that town? That they would hunt me? It wasn’t my fault. I am going on.” She crossed her arms.
Morozko’s hair was tousled, and soot and wood-dust stained his fingers. He looked exasperated. “Men are both vicious and unaccountable,” he said. “I have had cause to learn it, and now so have you. You have had your fun. And nearly gotten your death out of it. Go home, Vasya.”
Since they were both standing, she could see his face without the heat-shimmer between them. Again there was that subtle—difference—in his looks. He had changed, somehow, and she couldn’t…“You know,” she said, almost to herself, “you look nearly human when you are angry. I never noticed.”
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.