The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) - Katherine Arden Page 0,8

in a shower of splinters. And behind her, Solovey burst the stable door and came galloping through it.

3.

Nightingale

THEY WERE NEARER HER THAN Solovey, but nothing was faster than the bay stallion. He was coming for her at full gallop. Vasya saw a final chance. Goad the mob into pursuit; lead it away from her sister’s door. And so, as Solovey flew past her, she timed his stride, running alongside him, and then leaped to his back.

Pain, weakness disappeared in the urgency of the moment. Solovey was charging straight toward the smashed gate. Vasya shouted as they went, drawing the mob’s eyes from the tower. Solovey lashed out with all of a war-stallion’s viciousness, tearing through the crowd. People clawed at them, only to be flung back and away.

Near the gate now. Her whole being was bent on escape. On open ground, nothing could outrace the bay stallion. She could draw them off, buy time, come back with Sasha, with Dmitrii’s guards.

Nothing could outrun Solovey.

Nothing.

She never saw what hit them. It might have been only a log meant for someone’s fireplace. All she heard was the hiss as it swung, and then she felt the shock, vibrating through the stallion’s flesh, as the blow landed. Solovey’s leg went sideways. He fell, a stride before the ruined gate.

The crowd shrieked. Vasya felt the crack like a wound herself. Instinct rolled her clear, then she was kneeling at the horse’s head.

“Solovey,” she whispered. “Solovey, get up.”

People pressed nearer; a hand seized her hair. She whipped round and bit it; the owner swore and fell back. The stallion struggled, kicking, but his hind leg lay at a terrible angle.

“Solovey,” Vasya whispered. “Solovey, please.”

The stallion breathed a soft, hay-scented breath into her face. He seemed to shudder, and the mane pouring over her hands felt spiky as feathers. As though his other, stranger nature, the bird she’d never seen, was going to fight free at last and take wing.

Then a blade came down.

It bit into the horse just where his head met his body. A howl went up.

Vasya felt the blade go through the stallion just as though it had cut her own throat, and she did not know she was screaming as she whirled like a wolf protecting her cub.

“Kill her!” cried someone in the crowd. “There she is—the unnatural bitch. Kill her.”

Vasya launched herself at them, heedless of anything, careless of her own life. Then a man’s fist fell on her, and another, until she could not feel them at all.

* * *

SHE WAS KNEELING IN a starlit forest. The world was black and white and quite still. A brown bird fluttered in the snow just out of reach. A figure, black-haired and bone-pale, knelt beside it, extending a cupped hand toward the creature.

She knew that hand; knew this place. She thought she could even see feeling behind the ancient indifference in the death-god’s eyes. But he was looking at the bird, not at her, and she could not be sure. He was stranger and farther away than he had ever been, his whole attention fixed on the nightingale in the snow.

“Take us together,” she whispered.

He did not turn.

“Let me come with you,” she tried again. “Let me not lose my horse.” Far away, she could feel the blows on her body.

The nightingale hopped into the death-god’s hand. He closed his fingers delicately about the creature, picked it up. With his other hand, he scooped up a handful of snow. The snow melted to water in his hand; it dripped upon the bird, who at once went still and stiff.

Then, at last, he raised his eyes to hers. “Vasya,” he said, in a voice she knew. “Vasya, listen to me—”

But she could not reply.

For in the true world, the crowd drew back at a word from a man’s thunderous voice, and she was wrenched back to nighttime Moscow, bleeding in the trampled snow, but alive.

Perhaps she only imagined it. But when she opened her blood-smeared eyes, the death-god’s dark figure was still beside her, fainter than a noontime shadow, eyes urgent and quite helpless. He held the stiff body of a nightingale most tenderly in one hand.

Then he was gone. He might never have been there at all. She was lying across the body of her horse, sticky with his blood. Above her stood a man with golden hair, his eyes blue as midsummer. He wore the cassock of a priest and was looking at her with an expression of cold