“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.”