Кэтрин Арден - The Girl in the Tower

At last Morozko’s hand stilled; he wrapped an arm around her waist. A cool wind came and eased the burning.

“Go to sleep, Vasya,” he murmured. “Go to sleep. Enough for one day.”

“There were men,” she said. “They wanted—”

“No one can find you here,” he returned. “Do you doubt me?”

She sighed. “No.” She was on the edge of sleep, warm and—safe. “Did you send the snowstorm?”

A ghost of a smile flitted across his face, though she did not see. “Perhaps. Go to sleep.”

Her eyelids fluttered shut, and she did not hear what he added, almost to himself. “And forget,” he murmured. “Forget. It is better so.”

VASYA AWOKE TO BRIGHT MORNING—the cold smell of fir, the hot smell of fire, and sun-dappled shadows beneath the spruce. She was wrapped in her cloak and in her bedroll. A well-tended blaze chattered and danced beside her. Vasya lay still for long moments, savoring an unaccustomed feeling of security. She was warm—for what seemed like the first time in weeks—and the pain had gone from her throat and joints.

Then she remembered the night before and sat up.

Morozko sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. He held a knife and was carving a bird out of wood.

She sat up, stiffly, light and weak and empty. How long had she been asleep? The fire was good on her face. “Why carve things of wood,” she asked him, “if you can make marvelous things of ice with only your hands?”

He glanced up. “God be with you, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said, with considerable irony. “Is that not what one says in the morning? I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.”

She paused, considering this. “Did you save my life?” she asked at length. “Again?”

The most fleeting of pauses. “I did.” He did not look up from his whittling.

“Why?”

He tilted the bird-carving this way and that. “Why not?”

Vasya had only a vague memory of gentleness, of light, of fire and of pain. Her eyes met his over the shimmer of the flame. “Did you know?” she demanded. “You knew. The snowstorm. That was certainly you. Did you know the whole time? That I was being hunted, that I was sick on the road, and you only came on the third day, when I could not even drag myself to my feet…”

He waited until she trailed off. “You wanted your freedom,” he replied, insufferably. “You wanted to see the world. Now you know what it is like. Now you know what it is like to be dying. You needed to know.”

She said nothing, resentfully.

“But,” he finished, “now you know, and you are not dead. Better you return to Lesnaya Zemlya. This road is no place for you.”

“No,” she said. “I am not going back.”

He laid wood and knife aside and stood, his glance suddenly brilliant with anger. “Do you think I want to spend my days keeping you from folly?”

“I didn’t ask for your help!”

“No,” he retorted. “You were too busy dying!”

The passive peace of her waking had quite gone. Vasya was sore in every limb and vividly alive. Morozko watched her with glowing eyes, angry and intent, and in that moment he seemed as alive as she.

Vasya clambered to her feet. “How was I supposed to know that those men would find me in that town? That they would hunt me? It wasn’t my fault. I am going on.” She crossed her arms.

Morozko’s hair was tousled, and soot and wood-dust stained his fingers. He looked exasperated. “Men are both vicious and unaccountable,” he said. “I have had cause to learn it, and now so have you. You have had your fun. And nearly gotten your death out of it. Go home, Vasya.”

Since they were both standing, she could see his face without the heat-shimmer between them. Again there was that subtle—difference—in his looks. He had changed, somehow, and she couldn’t…“You know,” she said, almost to herself, “you look nearly human when you are angry. I never noticed.”

She did not expect his reaction. He drew himself up; his face chilled, and suddenly he was the remote winter-king again. He bowed, gracefully. “I will return at nightfall,” he said. “The fire will last the day, if you stay here.”

She had the puzzling feeling that she had routed him, and she wondered what she had said. “I—”

But he was already gone, on the mare’s back and away. Vasya was left blinking beside the fire, angry and a little bewildered. “A bell, perhaps,” she remarked to Solovey. “Like a sledge-horse, that we may better mark his coming.”

The horse snorted and said, I am glad you are not dead, Vasya.

She thought again of the frost-demon. “As am I.”

Do you think you could make porridge? added the horse, hopefully.

NOT FAR AWAY—OR PERHAPS very far away—depending on who did the measuring, the white mare refused to gallop any more. I do not wish to run about the world to relieve your feelings, she informed him. Get off or I will have you off.

Morozko dismounted, in no very sweet temper, while the white mare lowered her nose and began scraping for grass beneath the snow.

Unable to ride, he paced the winter earth, while clouds boiled up in the north and blew snow-flurries on them both. “She was supposed to go home,” he snarled to no one in particular. “She was supposed to tire of her folly, go home with her necklace, wear it, and tremble sometimes, at the memory of a frost-demon, in her impetuous youth. She was supposed to bear girl-children who might wear the necklace in turn. She was not supposed to—”

Enchant you, finished the horse with some asperity, not raising her nose from the snow. Her tail lashed her flanks. Do not pretend otherwise. Or has she dragged you near enough to humanity that you have also become a hypocrite?

Morozko halted and faced the horse, narrow-eyed.

I am not blind, continued the mare. Even to things that go on two feet. You made that jewel so that you would not fade. But now it is doing too much. It is making you alive. It is making you want what you cannot have, and feel what you ought not to understand, and you are beguiled and afraid. Better to leave her to her fate, but you cannot.

Morozko pressed his lips together. The trees sighed overhead. All at once his anger seemed to leave him. “I do not want to fade,” he said unwillingly. “But I do not want to be alive. How can a death-god be alive?” He paused, and something changed in his voice. “I could have let her die, and taken the sapphire from her and tried again, found another to remember. There are others of that bloodline.”

The mare’s ears went forward and back.

“I did not,” he said abruptly. “I cannot. Yet every time I go near her, the bond tightens. What immortal ever knew what it was like to number his days? Yet I can feel the hours passing when she is near.”

The mare nosed again at the deep snow. Morozko resumed his pacing.

Let her go, then, said the mare, quietly, from behind him. Let her find her own fate. You cannot love and be immortal. Do not let it come to that. You are not a man.

VASYA DID NOT LEAVE the space under the spruce-tree that day, although she meant to. “I am never going home,” she said to Solovey, around a lump in her throat. “I am well. Why tarry here?”

Because it was warm under the spruce—actually warm—with the fire snapping merrily, and all her limbs still felt slow and feeble. So Vasya stayed, and made porridge, then soup from the dried meat and salt in her saddlebag. She wished she had the energy to snare rabbits.