The ghost glanced at Vasya, urgently, and then moved toward Kasyan, drawing his eyes.
“Are you afraid?” the ghost whispered, a parody of intimacy. “You were always afraid. You feared my mother’s horses. I had to catch yours for you—put your bridle on the mare’s head—do you remember? I loved you in those days; I would do just as you said.”
“Be silent!” he hissed. “You should not be here. You cannot be here. I set you apart from me.”
Ghost and sorcerer were staring at each other with mingled rage and hunger and bitter loss. “No,” breathed the ghost. “That is not how it was. You wanted to keep me. I fled. I came to Moscow and went into Ivan’s tower, where you could not follow.” One bony hand went to her throat. “Even then, I could never be free of you. But my daughter—she died free. Beloved. I won that much.”
Tamara, Vasya thought.
Grandmother.
While the ghost whispered, Vasya had crept to where Marya sat silent beside the stove, still eating, not looking up. Tears had made tracks in the child’s dirty face. Vasya tried pulling her toward the door. But Marya only sat stiff, dull-eyed. Vasya’s cracked ribs burned with the effort.
A heavy step and a whiff of perfumed oil warned her, but she did not turn in time. Kasyan seized Vasya from behind and wrenched her arm up, so that she choked back a scream. The sorcerer spoke into her ear. “You think you can trick me?” he hissed. “A girl, a ghost, and a child? I don’t care what witch bore you all; I am master.”
“Marya Vladimirovna,” said the ghost in her strange, blurred voice. “Look at me.”
Marya’s head slowly rose, her eyes slowly opened.
She saw the ghost.
She screamed, a raw, child’s wail of terror. Kasyan’s gaze shifted toward the girl for just a moment and Vasya reached back, ribs aching, and seized Kasyan’s knife—her knife, where it hung from his belt. She tried to stab him. He recoiled, and she missed, but his grip on her arm weakened.
Vasya hurled herself forward and rolled. She came up holding the knife. Armed now, at least, and on her feet, but it hurt to breathe, and Kasyan was between her and Marya.
Kasyan drew his sword and bared his teeth. “I am going to kill you.”
Vasya had no hope; a half-trained girl against an armed man. Kasyan’s blade came slicing down and Vasya just managed to turn it with her dagger. Masha sat swaying like a sleepwalker. “Masha!” Vasya shouted frantically. “Get up! Get to the door! Go, child!” She kicked a table at Kasyan and backed up, sobbing for breath.
Kasyan cut sideways and Vasya ducked. Now it seemed that a black-cloaked figure waited in the corner. For me, she thought. He is here for me, for the last time. The sword came whistling across to cut her in two. She jumped back, barely.
For an instant, Vasya’s gaze flew again to the ghost. Tamara, behind Kasyan, had put a hand to her own throat, at the place where once a talisman had hung around Vasya’s neck. A talisman that bound her…Then Tamara’s frantic eyes shot to the child, and Vasya understood.
She dodged Kasyan’s sword, dodged again. Every strike fell closer; Vasya could barely draw breath. There was Marya, sitting stiff. In the instant before the sword fell a final time, Vasya reached for Marya and found a red-gold thing, heavy and cold beneath the child’s blouse. Vasya broke it off with a wrench—so that the metal cut into her palm and bloodied the child’s throat—and in the same motion, she whirled and flung it at the sorcerer’s face. It struck him with a splatter of gold and red light, and then fell, broken, to the floor.
Kasyan stared from it to Vasya, shock in his eyes.
Then he staggered back. His face began to change. Years seemed to rush in, as though a dam had broken. Suddenly he was transformed into an old man, skeletal, red-eyed. They stood in a room that was no magic sorcerer’s lair, but only the empty tower workroom of the Grand Princess of Moscow, dusty and smelling of wet wool and women, its inner door barred.
“Bitch!” Kasyan roared. “Bitch! You dare?” He advanced again, but now he was stumbling. His guard dropped, and Vasya had not forgotten her days under the tree with Morozko. She dodged his wavering arm, came up inside his guard, and drove the knife between his ribs.
Kasyan grunted. It was the ghost who screamed. The sorcerer bled not at all, but Tamara’s side was bleeding in the place where Vasya had stabbed Kasyan.
The ghost doubled over and crumpled to the floor.
Kasyan straightened, unwounded, and advanced again, teeth bared, ancient, unkillable. Vasya had dragged Marya bodily upright and now she backed toward the door. Marya went with her, trembling, life in her steps once more, though she uttered no sound, her eyes the eyes of a girl in a nightmare. Vasya’s ribs felt as though they would pierce through her skin with each step. Kasyan still had his sword…
“There is nowhere to go,” Kasyan whispered. “You cannot kill me. Besides, the city is on fire, you murderess. You will stay here in the tower, while your family burns.”
He saw her face and burst out laughing. The empty pit of his mouth gaped wide. “You didn’t know! Fool, not to know what happens when you release a firebird.”
Then Vasya heard the vast low roar outside, a sound like the end of the world. She thought of the flight of a firebird, unleashed on a wooden city at night.
I must kill him, she thought, if it is the last thing I do. Kasyan advanced once more, sword high. Vasya hurled Marya away from her and dodged the sweeping blade.
The words of Dunya’s fairy tale ran ridiculously through her mind: Kaschei the Deathless keeps his life inside a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare—
But that was only a story. There was no needle here, no egg…
Vasya’s thoughts seemed to swerve to a halt. There was only herself. And her niece. And her grandmother.
Witches, Vasya thought. We can see things that others cannot, and make faded things real.
Then Vasya understood.
She did not give herself pause to think. She hurled herself at the ghost. One hand reached out and plucked the thing she knew must be there, hanging from the gray creature’s throat. It was a jewel—or had been—it felt in her hand a little like Marya’s necklace, but fragile as an eggshell, as though years and grief had eaten it away from within.
The ghost whimpered, as though caught between agony and relief.
Then Vasya came up kneeling, holding the necklace in her hand, facing the sorcerer. Her ribs—nothing had ever hurt so much. She fought down the pain.
“Let that go,” said Kasyan. His voice had changed: gone flat and thin. He had his sword to Marya’s throat, his hand fisted in her hair. “Put it down, girl. Or the child dies.”
But behind her the ghost sighed, just the tiniest bit. “Poor immortal,” said Morozko’s voice, softer and colder and fainter than she’d ever heard it.
Vasya let out a breath of rage and relief. She had not seen him come, but now he stood, little more than a thickening of shadow, beside the ghost. He did not look at her.
“Did you think I was ever far from you?” the death-god murmured to Kasyan. “I was always a breath away: a heartbeat.”
The sorcerer tightened his grip on the sword, on Marya’s hair. He was looking at Morozko with terror and a thread of agonized longing. “What care I for you, old nightmare?” he spat. “Kill me, and the child dies first.”
“Why not go with him?” Vasya asked Kasyan softly, not taking her eyes from the blade of his sword. The tarnished necklace was warm in her hand, beating like a tiny heart. So fragile. “You put your life in Tamara. So neither of you could properly die. You could only rot. But that is finished. Better to go now, and find peace.”
“Never!” snapped Kasyan. His sword-hand was trembling. “Tamara,” he said, feverishly. “Tamara—”
A red light was trickling in from the window now, brighter and brighter. Not daylight.
Tamara stepped toward him. “Kasyan,” she said. “I loved you once. Come with me now, and be at peace.”