Кэтрин Арден - The Winter of the Witch

“The Grand Prince has to live,” said Vasya. “All this is for naught if he dies—”

And then Pozhar was level with Dmitrii’s horse, rearing, forcing another attacker back.

Dmitrii turned and saw her. His face changed. He leaned over and seized her arm, heedless of her wounds or his.

“Sasha,” he said. “Where is Sasha?”

Battle had numbed her, but at his words, the fog around her mind thinned a little—and beneath it was agony. Dmitrii saw it in her face. His own whitened. His lips firmed. Without another word to Vasya, he turned to his men again. “Fall back! Join the second line, bring them up.”

It wasn’t orderly. The Russians were breaking, fleeing, hiding themselves in the second line of battle, which was wavering badly. Now the Bear was nowhere to be seen, and—

Dmitrii said, turning back on her suddenly, “If Oleg was planning to take a hand, now is a good time.”

“I’ll go find him,” said Vasya. To Morozko, she said, “Don’t let him die.”

Morozko looked as though he wanted to swear at her; there was mud on his face too, and blood. A long scratch marred the neck of his mare. He wasn’t the aloof winter-king now. But he only nodded, turned his horse to keep up with Dmitrii.

Dmitrii said, “If Oleg hasn’t betrayed us, tell him to fall in on Mamai’s right flank,” and then he whirled away calling more orders.

Vasya turned Pozhar, trying to sink once more into invisibility, cutting through the advancing Tatar line in search of Oleg.

SHE FOUND THE MEN of Ryazan fresh, waiting on a small rise, watching.

“This,” said Vasya, riding up to him, “is not generally what is meant when you take an oath to a Grand Prince that you are going to fight.”

Oleg just smiled at her. “When one is risking everything on a hammer-stroke, one waits until the stroke does the most good.” He looked over the field. “That time is now. Ride down with me, witch-girl?”

“Hurry,” said Vasya.

He called an order; Vasya wheeled Pozhar. The mare was glowing coal-hot, but Vasya couldn’t feel it.

The men of Ryazan, shouting, raced down the rise at full stretch. Horns were blowing. Vasya fell in beside Oleg’s stirrup, going to a little trouble to hold Pozhar to the pace of the racing horses. She saw the Tatars turning in shock, to meet an attack on an unexpected quarter, and then she saw another movement from the woods on Dmitrii’s left flank—Vladimir’s cavalry coming out of the forest at last, and the Bear among them, driving their horses on with the speed of terror. She could hear his whooping laughter.

And so they caught the Tatars between them—Oleg, Vladimir, and Dmitrii—and smashed the line to pieces.

BUT STILL IT HAD to be fought out, hour by bloody hour, and she did not know how long it had been—hours? days?—when at last a voice brought her back to herself. “Vasya,” Morozko said. “It is over. They are fleeing.”

It seemed a haze fell from her sight. She looked around and realized that they had met in the middle: Oleg, Vladimir, and Dmitrii, and also she, the Bear, and Morozko.

Dmitrii was half-fainting from his wounds; Vladimir supported him. Oleg looked triumphant. All around she saw only their own men. They had won.

The wind had dropped; the early snow fell steadily now. Lightly, silently, thickly, it covered dead enemies and dead friends alike.

Vasya just stared at Morozko, stupid with shock and weariness. A thin curtain of blood ran down from a scratch in the white mare’s neck. He looked as weary as she, and as sad, dirt and blood on his hands. Only Pozhar was unwounded: still as sleekly powerful as she’d been that morning.

Vasya only wished she could say the same. Her arrow-grazed arm throbbed, and that wasn’t even close to the pain in her soul.

Dmitrii had forced himself upright, deathly pale, and was walking over to her. She slid down Pozhar’s shoulder and went to meet him.

“You have won,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice.

“Where is Sasha?” said the Grand Prince of Moscow.

DMITRII’S MEN CHASED THEIR FOES all the way back to Mecia—nearly fifty versts. Vladimir Andreevich, Oleg of Ryazan, and Mikhail of Tver led the rout, the princes riding side by side like brothers, and their men mingling like water, so that the eye could no longer tell who was from Moscow or Ryazan or Tver, for they were all Russians. They took the herds of Mamai’s train and killed the puppet-khan he’d brought; they sent the general himself fleeing to Caffa, not daring to go back to Sarai, where his life would be forfeit.

But neither the Grand Prince of Moscow nor Vasya took part in the rout. Instead, Dmitrii followed Vasya to a little sheltered copse not far from the river.

Sasha lay where they’d left him, wrapped in Vasya’s fur cloak, his flesh clean, inviolate.

Dmitrii half-fell, stumbling from his horse, and caught his dearest friend’s body in his arms. He did not speak.

Vasya had no comfort for him; she was weeping too.

A long silence fell in that copse, as the long day ended, and the light grew smoky and insubstantial. Snow still fell, softly, all around.

Finally, Dmitrii raised his head. “He should be taken back to the Lavra,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “To be buried with his fellows, in consecrated ground.”

“Sergei will say prayers for his soul,” said Vasya. Her voice was as rough as his, with shouting and with weeping. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “He wandered the whole of this land,” she said. “He knew it and he loved it. And now he will be bone, trapped in frozen earth.”

“But there will be songs,” said Dmitrii. “I swear it. He will not be forgotten.”

Vasya said nothing at all. She had no words. What did songs matter? They would not bring her brother back.

It was night when the cart came to take her brother’s body away. It came rumbling out of the dark, accompanied by a spill of noise and light, and Dmitrii’s noisy attendants, all full of triumph, barely leavened by respect for the occasion. Vasya could not stand their noise, or their joy, and anyway, Sasha was gone.

She kissed her brother’s forehead, and rose, and slipped away into the dark.

SHE DID NOT KNOW when Morozko and Medved appeared. She had the sense that she’d been walking alone a long time, with no notion of where she was or where she was going. She just wanted to get away from the noise and stink, the gore and the grief, the wild triumph.

But at some point, she raised her head and found them walking beside her.

The two brothers she had met in a clearing as a child, the two that had marked her life and changed it. They were both daubed with blood, the Bear’s eyes alight with the remnants of battle-lust, Morozko grave, his face unreadable. The enmity between them was still there, but changed, somehow, transmuted.

It’s because they aren’t on opposite sides anymore, she thought, dim with exhausted grief. God help me, they are both mine.

Morozko spoke first, not to Vasya but to his brother.

“You still owe me a life,” he said.

The Bear snorted. “I have tried to pay it. I offered her hers, I offered her brother his. Is it my fault that men and women are fools?”

“Perhaps not,” said Morozko. “But you still owe me a life.”

The Bear looked surly. “Very well,” he said. “What life?”

Morozko turned to Vasya, looked a question. She only stared at him blankly. What life? Her brother was gone and the field was thick with dead. Whose life could she desire, now?

Morozko reached very carefully into his sleeve, drew out something wrapped in embroidered cloth. He unwrapped it, held it out with both hands to Vasya.