She shook her head once. He had seen that look in warriors before, driven past exhaustion to a state of sick wakefulness. It had been the same when he killed his first man. “There is a cot for you in my own cell,” he said. “If you cannot sleep, we will give thanks to God instead, and you will tell me how you came here.”
She only nodded. Their feet groaned in the snow as they crossed the monastery side by side. Vasya seemed to be gathering her strength. “I have never been so glad in my life as when I recognized you, brother,” she managed, low, as they walked. “I am sorry I could not show it before.”
“I was glad to see you too, little frog,” he returned.
She halted as though stricken. Suddenly she threw herself at him, and he found himself holding an armful of sobbing sister. “Sasha,” she said. “Sasha, I missed you so.”
“Hush,” he said, stroking her back awkwardly. “Hush.”
After a moment, she pulled herself together.
“Not quite the behavior of your bold brother Vasilii, is it?” she said, scrubbing at her running nose. They started walking again. “Why did you never come back?”
“Never mind that,” Sasha returned. “What were you doing on the road? Where did you get that horse? Did you run away from home? From a husband? The truth now, sister.”
They had come to his own cell, squat and unlovely in the moonlight, one of a cluster of little huts. He dragged the door open and lit a candle.
Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Father is dead.”
Sasha went still, the lit candle in his hand. He had promised to go home after he became a monk, but he never had. He never had.
“You are no son of mine,” Pyotr had said in his anger, when he rode away.
Father.
“When?” Sasha demanded. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “How?”
“A bear killed him.”
He could not read her face in the darkness.
“Come inside,” Sasha told her. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”
IT WAS NOT THE truth, of course. It could not be. Much as Vasya had loved her brother, and had missed him, she did not know this broad-shouldered monk, with his tonsure and his black beard. So she told—part of the story.
She told him of the fair-haired priest who had frightened the people at Lesnaya Zemlya. She told him of the bitter winters, the fires. She told him, laughing a little, of a suitor that had come to claim her and ridden away unwed, and that their father had then wished to send her to a convent. She told him of her nurse’s death (but not of what came after), and she told him of a bear. She said that Solovey was a horse of their father’s, although she could tell he didn’t quite believe her. She did not tell him that her stepmother had sent her in search of snowdrops at midwinter, or of a house in a fir-grove, and she certainly did not tell him of a frost-demon, cold and capricious and sometimes tender.
She finished and fell silent. Sasha was frowning. She answered his look, not his words. “No, Father would not have been out looking in the forest, had I not been there,” she whispered. “I did it; it was I, brother.”
“Is that why you ran away?” Sasha asked. His voice (beloved, half-remembered) was uninflected, his face composed, so that she had no idea what he was thinking. “Because you killed Father?”
She flinched, then bowed her head. “Yes. That. And the people—the people feared I was a witch. The priest had told them to fear witches, and they listened. Father was no longer there to protect me, so I ran.”
Sasha was silent. She could not see his face, and at last she burst out, “For God’s sake, say something!”
He sighed. “Are you a witch, Vasya?”
Her tongue felt thick; the vibration of men’s deaths still rang through her body. There were no more lies left in her, and no more half-truths.
“I do not know, little brother,” she said. “I do not know what a witch is, not really. But I have never meant anyone ill.”
At length he said, “I do not think you did right, Vasya. It is sin for a woman to dress so, and it was wrong of you to defy Father.”
Then he fell silent again. Vasya wondered if he was thinking of how he, too, had defied their father.
“But,” he added slowly, “you have been brave, to get this far. I do not blame you, child. I do not.”
The tears came to her throat again, but she swallowed them back.
“Come on, then,” Sasha said, stiffly. “Try to go to sleep now, Vasya. You will come with us to Moscow. Olya will know what to do with you.”
Olya, Vasya thought, her heart lifting. She was going to see Olya again. Her earliest memories—of kind hands and of laughter—were of her sister.
Vasya was sitting opposite her brother, on a cot beside the clay stove. Sasha had built a fire, and the room was slowly warming. Suddenly all Vasya wanted was to pull the furs over her head and sleep.
But she had one last question. “Father loved you. He wished you would come home. You promised me you’d come back. Why didn’t you?”
No answer. He had busied himself with the fire; perhaps he had not heard. But to Vasya, the silence seemed to thicken suddenly with regrets that her brother would not utter.
SLEEP SHE DID: a sleep like winter, a sleep like sickness. In her sleep the men all died again, stoic or screaming, their guts like dark jewels in the snow. The black-cloaked figure stood by, calm and knowing, to mark each death.
But this time a terrible, familiar voice spoke also in her ear. “See him, poor winter-king, trying to keep order. But the battlefield is my realm, and he only comes to pick over my leavings.”
Vasya whirled to find the Bear at her shoulder, one-eyed, lazily smiling. “Hello,” he said. “Does my work please you?”
“No,” she gasped, “no—”
Then she fled, slipping frantic over the snow, tripping on nothing, falling into a pit of endless white. She did not know if she was screaming or not. “Vasya,” said a voice.
An arm caught her, stopped her fall. She knew the shape and turn of the long-fingered hand, the deft and grasping fingers. She thought, He has come for me now; it is my turn, and began to thrash in earnest.
“Vasya,” said his voice in her ear. “Vasya.” Cruelty in that voice—and winter wind and old moonlight. Even a rough note of tenderness.
No, she thought. No, you greedy thing, do not be kind to me.
But even as she thought it, all the fight went out of her. Not knowing if she were awake or still dreaming, she pressed her face into his shoulder, and broke into a storm of violent weeping.
In her dream, the arm went hesitantly round her and his hand cradled her head. Her tears lanced some of the poisoned wound of memory; at last she fell silent and looked up.
They stood together in a little moonlit space, while trees slept all around. No Bear—the Bear was bound, far away. Frost fretted the air like silver-gilt. Was she dreaming? Morozko was a part of the night, his feet incongruously bare, his pale eyes troubled. The living world of bells and icons and changing seasons seemed the dream then, and the frost-demon the only thing real.
“Am I dreaming?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you really here?”
He said nothing.
“Today—today I saw—” she stammered. “And you—”
When he sighed, the trees stirred. “I know what you saw,” he said.
Her hands clenched and unclenched. “You were there? Were you only there for the dead?”
Again he did not speak. She stepped back.
“They mean for me to come to Moscow,” she said.
“Do you wish to go to Moscow?”
She nodded. “I want to see my sister. I want to see more of my brother. But I cannot stay a boy forever, and I do not want to be a girl in Moscow. They will try to find me a husband.”
He was silent a moment, but his eyes had darkened. “Moscow is full of churches. Many churches. I cannot—chyerti are not strong in Moscow, not anymore.”
She drew back, crossing her arms over her breast. “Does that matter? I will not stay forever. I am not asking for your help.”
“No,” he agreed. “You are not.”
“The night under the spruce-tree—” she began. All around them the snow floated like mist.