The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) - Katherine Arden Page 0,127

left him and the Bear to creep unseen among the tents of Mamai, spreading terror and rot in their wake. For her part, she slipped down to the river to call the vodianoy of the Don.

“The chyerti have made an alliance with the Grand Prince of Moscow,” she told him, low. When she had related all her tale, she then persuaded him to raise the river so that the Tatars would not sleep dry.

* * *

THREE NIGHTS LATER THE TATAR army was in disarray along its length, and Vasya hated herself anyway.

“You can’t kill any of them asleep,” she told the Bear, when he sniffed, grinning, at a man who thrashed in the grip of a nightmare. “Even if they can’t see us, it’s not…” She trailed off, with no words for her revulsion. Medved surprised her by shrugging and stepping back.

“Of course not,” he said. “That is not the way. An assassin in the dark can be fought, can be found, and killed. Fear is more potent still, and people fear what they can’t see, and don’t understand. I will show you.”

God help her, he had. Like some foul apprenticeship, she walked with the Bear through the Tatar camp and together they spread terror in their wake. She set fires in wagons and tents, made men scream at half-glimpsed shadows. She terrified their horses, though it hurt her to see them wild-eyed and running.

The girl and the two chyerti traveled from one end of the spread-out force to the other. They gave Mamai and his army no rest. Horses broke their pickets and fled. When the Tatars lit fires, the flames flared up without warning, and sent sparks into unsuspecting faces. The soldiers whispered that they were haunted by a beast, by monsters that glowed, by a ghost-girl with eyes too large in the sharp planes of her face.

“Men make themselves afraid,” the Bear told her, smiling. “Imagining is worse than anything they actually see. All it takes is whispers in the dark. Come with me now, Vasilisa Petrovna.”

By the third night he was swollen with pleasure like a tick. Vasya was worn to a thread, sick for the dawn. “Enough,” she told them both, after yet another stretch roaming the camp, every sense on alert, half-frightened, half-sharing the Bear’s mad glee at the mischief.

“Enough. I am going to find a place to sleep, and then we’ll go back to my brother in the light.” She could bear no more darkness.

Ded Grib looked relieved; the Bear, merely satiated.

The air was chilly and blank with cold mist. She found a sheltered hollow in the thickest part of the wood, well away from the main body of troops. Even wrapped in her cloak, on a bed of pine-boughs, she shivered. She dared not light a fire.

The Bear was untroubled by the weather. As a beast, he’d terrorized the Tatar camp, but now, at rest, he looked like a man. He lay contentedly in the bracken, looking up into the night with his arms behind his head.

Ded Grib was hiding under a rock, his green glow faint. Spoiling the Tatars’ food had wearied and discouraged him. “They drink the milk of their horses,” he’d said. “I can’t spoil that. They won’t be too hungry.”

Vasya had no answer for Ded Grib; she was feeling sick herself. The panic of men and beasts seemed to echo in her bones, but still she didn’t know if all their efforts would be enough to turn the tide of the coming battle. “You are quite disgusting,” she told the Bear, seeing the flash of his teeth when he smiled.

He didn’t even lift his head. “Why? Because I’ve been enjoying myself?”

The glimmering gold on Vasya’s wrists reminded her, uneasily, of the covenant between them. She didn’t speak.

He rolled onto his elbow to look at her, a smile playing about his twisted mouth. “Or because you have?”

Deny it? Why? It would only give him power. “Yes,” she said. “I liked frightening them. They invaded my country, and Chelubey tortured my brother. But I am sick at myself too, and ashamed, and very tired.”

The Bear looked faintly disappointed. “You ought to flog yourself a bit more over it,” he said, and rolled onto his back once more.

That way lay madness: hiding from the worst parts of her own nature until, out of sight, they became monstrous growths to devour the rest of her. She knew that, and the Bear knew it too. “That was what Father Konstantin