The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) - Katherine Arden Page 0,75

and a pack-horse. One of the men was just a dark bundle wrapped in a cloak. But the others were sitting upright beside the fire, talking, despite the late hour. One was her brother, his face thinned with days of travel, raw with sunburn. There were threads of white in his hair. The other was the holiest man in Rus’, Sergei Radonezhsky.

Sasha’s head came up, seeing the horses restless. “Something in the wood,” he said.

Vasya didn’t know how a monk—even her brother—would react to her just then, drenched as she was in magic and darkness, hand-fast with a frost-demon. But she nerved herself and stepped forward. Sasha wrenched round, and Sergei rose to his feet, spry despite his years. The third man jerked upright, blinking. Vasya recognized him: Rodion Oslyabya, a brother of the Trinity Lavra.

Three monks, dirty from days on the road, camping in a clearing in the summer night. Painfully ordinary; they made the winter midnights at her back feel like a dream.

But it wasn’t. She had brought the two worlds together.

She didn’t know what would happen.

* * *

THE FIRST BROTHER ALEKSANDR saw of his sister was a slim figure with a bruised face. He blasphemed in his mind; he sheathed his sword, offered up prayers, and ran to her.

She was so thin. Every plane of her face was blade-sharp: a skull picked out with firelight. But she returned his embrace with strength, and when he looked at her he saw her lashes wet.

Perhaps he was weeping, too. “Marya said you were alive. I—Vasya—I am sorry. Forgive me. I wanted to go find you. I—Varvara said you had gone beyond our reckoning, that you—”

She cut into this flow of words. “There is nothing to forgive.”

“The fire.”

Her face hardened. “It is over, brother. Both fires.”

“Where have you been? What happened to your face?”

She touched the scar across her cheekbone. “This is from the night the mob came for me in Moscow.”

Sasha bit his lip. Father Sergei broke in, his voice sharp. “There is a white horse there in the wood. And a—shadow.”

Sasha spun, his hand again going to the hilt of his sword. In the darkness, just touched by the edges of the firelight, stood a mare, white as the moon on a winter night.

“Yours?” Sasha said to his sister, and then he looked again. Beside the mare, the shadow was watching them.

Again, he put a hand to his sword-hilt.

“No,” said his sister. “You don’t need it, Sasha.”

The shadow, Sasha realized, was a man. A man whose eyes were two points of light, colorless as water. Not a man. A monster.

He drew his sword. “Who are you?”

* * *

MOROZKO MADE NO ANSWER, but Vasya could feel the anger in him. He and the monks were natural enemies.

Catching her brother’s eye, she saw with an unpleasant feeling that Sasha’s fury wasn’t just the impersonal disdain of a monk for a devil. “Vasya, do you know this—creature?”

Vasya opened her mouth, but Morozko stepped into the light and spoke first. “I marked her from her childhood,” he said coolly. “Took her into my own house, bound her to me with ancient magic, and put her on the road to Moscow.”

Vasya glared wordlessly at Morozko. Her brother’s disdain was obviously not one-sided. Of all the things he might have said to Sasha first.

“Vasya,” Sasha said. “Whatever he has done to you—”

Vasya cut him off. “It doesn’t matter. I have ridden across Rus’ dressed as a boy; I have walked alone into darkness and come out alive. It is too late for your scruples. Now—”

“I am your brother,” said Sasha. “It concerns me; it concerns every man in our family that this—”

“You left us when I was a child!” she interrupted. “You have given yourself first to your religion and second to your Grand Prince. My life and my fate lie beyond your judgment.”

Rodion broke in, bristling. “We are men of God,” he said. “That is a devil. Surely nothing more needs to be said?”

“I think,” said Sergei, “that a little more must be said.” He did not speak loudly, but everyone turned to him.

“My daughter,” said Sergei calmly, “we will hear your tale from the beginning.”

* * *

THEY SAT DOWN AROUND the fire. Rodion and Sasha did not sheathe their swords. Morozko did not sit at all; he paced, restless, as though he did not know which he disliked more: the monks and their hostile firelight or the hot summer darkness.

Vasya told the entire story, or the parts of it she could.