The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) - Katherine Arden Page 0,13

stack of logs, illuminated on all sides with torches. A pyre, hastily constructed. And atop it, stark against the sky, the cage of the condemned, lashed down with many ropes. The crowd made a low, continuous sound now, like the growl of an animal rising.

“Forget the cage,” Vasya said to Konstantin. “These people will tear me to pieces before I get there.”

The look he gave her was almost pitying, and she suddenly understood why he walked beside her, why also he prayed with that calculated grace. This was Lesnaya Zemlya writ large; he had gathered them up in their grief and terror, gathered them into his hand with his golden voice and his golden hair, so that they became a weapon in his grip, a tool of vengeance, and a sop to his pride. They would not attack while he was with her, and he wanted to see her burn. He had been cheated of it, after all, the night before. Always, always she had underestimated the priest.

“Monster,” she said, and he almost smiled.

Then they were down on the ice itself. A shriek went up like a dozen dying rabbits. The people were pressing close about her now, spitting and striking. Her guards could barely keep them back. A stone came whistling through and cut her cheek, gashed it deep. She put a hand to her face and blood spilled through her fingers.

Dazed now, she twisted her head one more time to look at Moscow. No sign of her brother. But she saw the devils, despite the dark. They were silhouetted atop roofs and walls: domoviye and dvoroviye and banniki, the faint house-spirits of Moscow. They were there, but what could they do but watch? Chyerti are formed of the currents of human life; they ride them, but they do not interfere.

Except two. But one was her enemy, the other was far away, made nearly powerless by spring and by her own hand. The most she could hope for from him was a death without agony. She held that hope in a desperate grip as they prodded and shouted and chivied her toward the pyre. Across the ice, through a narrow corridor in the throng. Tears poured down her face now, from her own helplessness, and an involuntary reaction against their hatred.

Perhaps there was some justice in it. Again and again, she saw folk limping, burned, with bandages on their arms or faces. But I did not mean to free the firebird, she thought. I did not know what would happen. I did not know.

The ice was still hard, as thick as a man was tall, shining in spots where wind or sledges had swept away the snow. It would be a long time still until the river released its bonds. Will I live to see it? Vasya wondered. Will I feel sun on my skin again? I think not, I think—

The crowd ebbed and surged around the pyre. Konstantin’s golden hair turned gray-silver in the torchlight, his face a maelstrom of triumph, anguish, lust. His voice and his presence were undiminished, but now his power was divorced from the restraining impulses of religion. Vasya wished suddenly that she could warn her brother, warn Dmitrii. Sasha, you know what he did to Marya. Do not trust him, do not—

Then she thought: Sasha, where are you?

But her brother was not there, and Konstantin Nikonovich was bending his eyes down to hers for the last time. He had won.

“What will you say to the God you despise,” Vasya whispered, breathing short and thin with fear, “when you go into the darkness? All men must die.”

Konstantin only smiled at her again, lifted his hand to make the sign of the cross, raised his deep voice to intone a prayer. The crowd fell silent to hear him. Then he bent forward to whisper in her ear. “There is no God.”

Then they were dragging her up, and she was struggling like a wild thing in a trap: pure instinct, but the man was stronger than she was, and her arms were bound, the blood ran down her fingertips where the ropes bit into her thrashing wrists. They forced her up, and Vasya thought, Mother of God it is happening.

Dying, she thought, ought to bring some sense of completion, of a journey ended. But this was just being caught out of life, as she was, with all her sweat and tears and terrors, her wishes and regrets.

The cage was small enough that she would

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