She turned abruptly. The starlight shone in her open eyes. “If I cannot be a lord, I can still be a traveler. I want to ride to the ends of the world, if Solovey will bear me. I would see the green land beyond the sunset, the island—”
“Buyan?” Morozko murmured, from behind her. “Where the waves beat upon a rocky shore, and the wind smells of cold stone and orange blossom? Ruled by a swan-maiden with sea-gray eyes? The land of the fairy tale? Is that what you want?”
The heat of the wine and the wild ride were dimming now, and all around was the deathly hush before the dawn wind rises. Vasya shivered suddenly, cloaked in wolfskin and in the skeins of her black hair. “Is that why you came?” she asked, not turning around. “To tempt me from Moscow? Or are you going to tell me that I am better off here, dressed as a girl, married? Why did the chyerti come to the feasting? Why was the gamayun waiting above—yes, I know what the bird means. What is happening?”
“Are we not permitted to feast with the people?”
She said nothing. She moved again, pacing like a cat in a cage despite the sweep of ice and forest and sky. “I want freedom,” she said at length, almost to herself. “But I also want a place and a purpose. I am not sure I can have either, let alone both. And I do not want to live a lie. I am hurting my brother and sister.” She stopped abruptly and turned. “Can you solve this riddle for me?”
Morozko raised an eyebrow. The dawn wind made eddies of the snow at the horses’ feet. “Am I an oracle?” he asked her coldly. “Can I not come to a feast, ride in the moonlight, without being called on to hear the plaints of Russian maidens? What care I for your little mysteries, or your brother’s conscience? Here is my answer: that you ought not to listen to fairy tales. I spoke truly once: Your world does not care what you want.”
Vasya pressed her lips together. “My sister said the same thing. But what about you? Do you care?”
He fell silent. Clouds were massing overhead. The mare shivered her skin all over.
“You can mock,” Vasya continued, angry now in turn, stepping closer, and closer still. “But you live forever. Perhaps you don’t want anything, or care about anything. And yet—you are here.”
He said nothing.
“Should I live out my life as a false lord, until they find me out and put me in a convent?” she demanded. “Should I run away? Go home? Never see my brothers again? Where do I belong? I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. And I have eaten in your house, and nearly died in your arms, and you rode with me tonight and—I hoped you might know.”
The word sounded foolish even as she said it. She bit her lip. The silence stretched out.
“Vasya,” he said.
“Don’t. You never mean it,” she said, drawing away. “You are immortal, and it is only a game—”
His answer was not in words, but his hands, perhaps, spoke for him when his fingertips found the pulse behind her jaw. She did not move. His eyes were cold and still: pale stars to make her lost. “Vasya,” he said again, low and—almost ragged, into her ear. “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”
“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.
“It is all I have,” he said. Then he slid his fingers through her hair and kissed her.
She made a sound like a sob, anger and wanting together. Then her arms went round him.
She had never been kissed before, not thus. Not long and—deliberately. She didn’t know how—but he taught her. Not with words, no: with his mouth, and his fingertips, and a feeling that did not have words. A touch, dark and exquisite, that breathed along her skin.
So she clung and her bones loosened and her whole body lit with cool fire. Even your brothers would call you damned now, she thought, but she utterly did not care. A light wind sent the last of the clouds scudding across the sky, and the stars shone clear on them both.
When he drew away at last, she was wide-eyed, flushed, burning. His eyes were a brilliant, perfect, flame-heart blue, and he could have been human.
He let her go abruptly.
“No,” he said.
“I do not understand.” Her hand was at her mouth, her body trembling, wary as the girl he had once thrown across his saddlebow.
“No,” he said. He dragged a hand through his dark curls. “I did not mean—”
Dawning hurt. She crossed her arms. “Did you not? Why did you come, really?”
He ground his teeth. He had turned away from her, his hands clenched hard. “Because I wanted to tell you—”
He broke off, looked into her face. “There is a shadow over Moscow,” he said. “Yet whenever I try to look deeper, I am turned aside. I do not know what is causing it. Were you not—”
“Were I not what?” Vasya asked, hating her voice as it creaked painfully from her throat.
A pause. The blue flame deepened in his eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” said Morozko. “But, Vasya—”
It seemed for a moment that he really meant to speak, that some secret would come pouring out. But he sighed and closed his lips. “Vasya, be wary,” he said in the end. “Whatever you choose, be wary.”
Vasya did not really hear him. She stood there cold and tense and burning all at once. No? Why no?
If she’d been older, she would have seen the conflict in his eyes. “I will,” she said. “Thank you for your warning.” She turned, with deliberate steps, and swung onto Solovey’s back.
She had already galloped away, and so she did not see that he stood for a long time, watching her go.
Later, much later, in the chill and bitter hour before dawn, a red light like a flash of fire streaked across the sky over Moscow. The few who saw it called it a portent. But most did not see it. They were asleep, dreaming of summer suns.
Kasyan Lutovich saw it. He smiled, and he left his room in Dmitrii’s palace to go down into the dooryard and make his final arrangements.
Morozko would have known the flash for what it was. But he did not see, for he was galloping alone, in the wild places of the world, face set and shut against the lonely night.
20.
Fire and Darkness
A fine yellowish sunlight pooled into Vasya’s little room the next day. She awakened at its coy touch and rolled to her feet. Her head throbbed, and she wished heartily that she had shouted less, run less, drunk less, and wept less the night before.
Tonight beat like a drum in her skull. She would tell Dmitrii what she knew, or suspected, of Chelubey. She would whisper her farewells to Olga and Marya, but softly, that they could not hear and call her back. Then she would go. South—south to where the air was warm and no frost-demons could trouble her nights. South. The world was wide, and her family had suffered enough.
But first—this horse-race.
Vasya dressed quickly; cloak and boots went on over her old shirt and jacket and fleece-lined leggings. Then she ran out into the sun. A little warmth breathed down from the sky when she turned her face to the light. Soon the snowdrops would bloom in the hidden places and winter would begin to end.
A flurrying snow, just at dawn, had covered the dooryard. Vasya went at once to Solovey’s paddock, boots crunching.
The stallion’s eye was bright and he breathed like a war-horse before the charge. The filly Zima stood calmly now beside him.
“Try not to win by too much,” Vasya told Solovey, seeing the wildness in him.“I don’t want to be accused of bewitching my horse.”
Solovey only shook his mane and pawed the snow.
Vasya, sighing, said, “And we are leaving tonight, when the revel is at its peak. So you must not exhaust yourself racing—we must be far away before dawn.”