Кэтрин Арден - The Girl in the Tower

Then she couldn’t run anymore. She fell into the slush. Blackness gathered before her eyes…

Moscow disappeared. She was in a nighttime forest: stars and trees, grayness and bitter dark.

Death stood before her.

“I found you,” she said, forcing the words past lips gone numb. She was kneeling there in the snow, in the forest beyond life, and found that she could not rise.

His mouth twisted. “You are dying.” His step did not mark the snow; the light, cold wind did not stir his hair. “You are a fool, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he added.

“Moscow is burning,” she whispered. Her lips and tongue would barely obey her. “It was my fault. I freed the firebird. But Midnight—Midnight said you could put the fire out.”

“Not any longer. I put too much of myself in the jewel, and that is destroyed.” He said this in a voice without feeling. But he drew her standing, roughly. Somewhere around her she sensed the fire; knew her skin was blistering, that she was nearly smothered from the smoke.

“Vasya,” he said. Was that despair in his voice? “This is foolish. I can do nothing. You must go back. You cannot be here. Go back. Run. Live.”

She could barely hear him. “Not alone,” she managed. “If I go back, you are coming with me. You are going to put the fire out.”

“Impossible,” she thought he said.

She wasn’t listening. Her strength was nearly gone. The heat, the burning city, were nearly gone. She was, she realized, about to die.

How had she dragged Olga back from this place? Love, rage, determination.

She wound both her bloody, weakening hands in his robe, breathing the smell of cold water and pine. Of freedom in the trackless moonlight. She thought of her father, whom she had not saved. She thought of others, whom she still could. “Midnight—” she began. She had to gasp between words. “Midnight said you loved me.”

“Love?” he retorted. “How? I am a demon and a nightmare; I die every spring, and I will live forever.”

She waited.

“But yes,” he said wearily. “As I could, I loved you. Now will you go? Live.”

“I, too,” she said. “In a childish way, as girls love heroes that come in the night, I loved you. So come back with me now, and end this.” She seized his hands and pulled with her last remaining strength—with all the passion and anger and love she had—and dragged them both back into the inferno that was Moscow.

They lay tangled on the ground in slush growing hot, and the fire was almost upon them. He blinked in the red light, perfectly still. In his face was pure shock.

“Call the snow,” Vasya shouted into his ear, over the roar. “You are here. Moscow is burning. Call the snow.”

He seemed hardly to hear her. He raised his eyes to the world about them, with wonder and a touch of fear. His hands were still on hers; they were colder than any living man’s.

Vasya wanted to scream, with fear and with urgency. She struck him hard across the face. “Hear me! You are the winter-king. Call the snow! ” She reached a hand behind his head and kissed him, bit his lip, smeared her blood on his face, willing him to be real and alive and strong enough for magic.

“If these were ever your people , ” she breathed into his ear, “save them.”

His eyes found hers and a little awareness came back into his face. He got to his feet, but slowly, as though moving underwater. He was holding tight to her hand. She had the idea that her grip was the only thing keeping him there.

The fire seemed to fill the world. The air was burning up, leaving only poison behind. She couldn’t breathe. “Please,” she whispered.

Morozko drew breath, harshly, as though the smoke hurt him, too. But when he breathed out, the wind rose. A wind like water, a wind of winter at her back, so strong that she staggered. But he caught her before she fell.

The wind rose and rose, pushing the flames away from them—driving the fire back on itself.

“Close your eyes,” he said into her ear. “Come with me.”

She did so, and suddenly she saw what he saw. She was the wind, the clouds gathering in the smoky sky, the thick snow of deep winter. She was nothing. She was everything.

The power gathered somewhere in the space between them, between her flickers of awareness. There is no magic. Things are. Or they are not. She was beyond wanting anything. She didn’t care whether she lived or died. She could only feel; the gathering storm, the breath of the wind. Morozko there beside her.

Was that a flake? Another? She could not tell snow from ash, but some quality had changed in the fire’s noise. No—that was snow, and suddenly it was falling as thick as the fiercest of winter blizzards. Faster and faster it fell until all she could see was white, overhead and all around. The flakes cooled her blistered face. Smothered the flames.

She opened her eyes and found herself back in her own skin.

Morozko’s arms fell away from her. The snow blurred his features, but she thought he looked—tentative now, his face full of fearful wonder.

She found she had no words.

So instead she simply leaned back against him, and watched the snow fall. Her scorched throat ached. He did not speak. But he stood still, as though he understood.

For a long time they stood, as the snow fell and fell. Vasya watched the mad beauty of the snowstorm, the dying fire, and Morozko stood as silent as she, as though he was waiting.

“I am sorry,” she said at length, though she didn’t know, quite, what she was sorry for.

“Why, Vasya?” He stirred then, behind her, and one fingertip just touched the base of her throat, where the talisman had lain. “For that? Better the jewel was destroyed. Frost-demons are not meant to live, and the time of my power is over.”

The snow was thinning. She found, when she turned to look at him, that she could see him clearly. “Did you make the jewel, just as Kaschei did?” she asked. “To put your life in mine?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you wanted me to love you?” she asked. “So that my love would help you live?”

“Yes,” he said. “That love of maidens for monsters, that does not fade with time.” He looked weary. “But the rest—I did not count on that.”

“Count on what?”

The pale eyes found hers, inscrutable. “I think you know.”

They measured each other in wary silence. Then Vasya said, “What do you know of Kasyan and of Tamara?”

He sighed a little. “Kasyan was the prince of a far country, gifted with sight, who wished to shape the world to his will. But there were some things even he could not control. He loved a woman, and when she died—he begged me for her life.” Morozko paused, and in the instant of chill silence, Vasya knew what had happened to Kasyan next. She felt unwilling pity.

“That was long ago,” Morozko went on. “I do not know what happened then, for he found a way to set his life apart from his flesh, to keep my hand from him. Forgot—somehow—that he could die, and so did not. Tamara lived with her mother, alone. It is said that Kasyan came to her house one day to buy a horse. Kasyan and Tamara fell in love and fled together. Then they disappeared. Until Tamara appeared alone in Moscow.”

“Where did Tamara come from?” Vasya asked urgently. “Who is she?”

He meant to answer. She could see it in his face. She often wondered, afterward, how her path might have been different, if he had. But at that moment, the monastery bell rang.

The sound seemed to strike Morozko like fists, as though they would break him into snowflakes and send him whirling away. He shook; he did not answer.

“What is happening?” Vasya asked.

The talisman is destroyed, he might have told her. And frost-demons are not meant to love. But he did not say that. “Dawn,” Morozko managed. “I cannot exist anymore under the sun, in Moscow, not after midwinter, when the bells are ringing. Vasya, Tamara—”