The cold was mounting swiftly at my back. The fire was dead in the fireplace, but a smell of smoke began to rise anyway, at first like an echo in a room that hadn’t been aired in too long, and then the smell of someone burning too much dry tinder too quickly, before I heard the first heavy footsteps in the hall, running, and the door burst open. Chernobog came into the room only as a half-quenched smoldering, his eyes dark red and faint lines of crackled heat glowing through Mirnatius’s skin; but in a moment the door smashed shut behind him, and then he was roaring at me in full force, a glimpse of yellow flames igniting deep within his throat, “He is gone! He has escaped, gone free! You have broken your promise and let him flee!”
“I haven’t broken any promises,” I said. “I promised to bring him, and I did; he isn’t free by my doing, but against it. I too don’t want him loose to set winter back on Lithvas. How can he be imprisoned again, or stopped? Tell me what can be done.”
“He has fled, run away, where I cannot go! He will lock away his kingdom behind ice and snow, and keep me from my feasting!” Chernobog only crackled at me furiously; he started to roam back and forth across the floor in a slouching, writhing motion, the pacing of a flame. “He is free, and knows my name, and already once he bound me…I would have starved on cold stone, I would have fed on nothing but bone…I cannot get into his kingdom!” He stopped a moment there, trembling, and then he spat like the breaking of logs in a fire, “I have tasted him deep. He is too strong, he is grown too great. His hands are full of gold. He will smother me with winter, he will quench my flame in endless cold.”
And then he turned on me with his glowing eyes. “Irina,” he crooned, “Irina, sweet and silver-cold, you have failed me. You have not brought me my winter feast.” He took a step towards me. “So I will keep my promise, and my feast will be on you instead; on you and all your loves. If I cannot have the winter king, I will have instead your sweetness on my tongue. You will fill me up with strength!”
“Wait!” I said sharply, as he took another step towards me; I held up my hand. “Wait! If I take you into the Staryk kingdom, can you defeat him there?”
He halted, his eyes brightening like a spark fed with strands of straw. “At last will you tell me your secret, Irina?” he breathed. “Now will you show me your road? Open the way, and let me go in; what care I for a single king then? I will feast in his halls until his strength falls, and I will still have them all in the end.”
I drew a breath, looking at the dressing mirror where it stood near me, my last refuge. Once he knew, I’d never have a place of retreat again. But I had only two choices left: I could run through alone, and leave him to feast on everyone behind me, or take him through, and know he could come back for me, hungry. I held out my hand. “Come, then,” I said. “I’ll take you there.”
He reached out his hand as Mirnatius’s hand, the long fine fingers coming to clasp mine, skin warm, with the smoke gathered like a large cuff around the wrist. I turned to the dressing mirror, and when he turned his head he drew a sudden hiss of breath, and I knew he saw what I did: the winter kingdom shining in the glass, snowflakes falling thickly amid dark pine trees. I went to the mirror and drew him along after me, and we stepped through into the snow-heavy forest.
But he came through as a figure of ash and flame, red lines shining bright between his teeth and a blackened tongue behind them, as though Mirnatius were a skin that he could put off, and his whole body was a living coal wreathed in smoke. Cold came surging like a blast into my face, a blizzard wind, and next to me Chernobog gave a small shriek and was blown into dark wet coals and ash by that savage wind. But after a struggling instant, the red heat came glowing again from beneath his skin: he was burning too deep, too hot, to be put out that easily. The cold retreated from around him instead, and a widening place free of falling snow opened around us. We were standing at the back of the little house, the place I’d last left; even as I looked down at the washtub full of water, the ice in it cracked and broke into small pieces that melted swiftly.
Chernobog was drawing in great gulps of the air with a dreamy, gluttonous look in his face. “Oh, the cold,” he sighed. “Oh, the sweet draughts I will drink. What feasts await me here…Irina, Irina, let me reward you dear, before I set off on my way!”
“No,” I said, cold with contempt. He seemed to think he could make treachery over and over, and no one would notice. Mirnatius’s mother hadn’t had much good of her bargain with him, even if she’d been buried in the crown she’d bartered her child for. “I’ll still take nothing, but that you leave me and mine alone.”
He made a complaining noise again, but he was too distracted to care: the wind blew a cold shriek into his face like a knife’s edge, and he turned and sprang towards it almost as if he could grab hold of it with his hands. And maybe he could, because as he leapt, he reached out with both his arms stretched out as if to embrace the air, and the wind that came to me where I stood behind him was warm. He rushed away through the trees going towards the river, and his feet left wide-spaced sinking footprints going straight down to green fresh grass buried beneath the snow, the wet smell of spring bursting out of the ground with every step. Even after he had gone out of my sight, the melting footprints kept growing, devouring the snow between them.
Chapter 23
The Staryk lifted me in his arms, or maybe a winter wind cradled me; either way I was carried like a blown snowflake up and out of a square trapdoor onto a hillside, with the city wall not a hundred feet distant from us and the city lights aglow on the other side. Whatever was carrying me dropped me again with an ungraceful thump, and I lay gasping and throat-sore on the earth—the warm earth, lush with soft green grass, and though it silvered with frost in a circle around where the Staryk knelt, his skin shone wet and glistening everywhere, as if he were melting.
But he staggered up onto his feet, one still bare, and raised his arms with his eyes shining, and the circle of frost began to spread from around him, the blades of grass curling down and tightening as the crystals of ice covered them, the ground beneath me going hard and cold, as if now that he was free, he could summon back all the winter that had been stripped away. “Wait!” I shouted in protest, getting up on my knees indignantly.
He glanced down at me and said fiercely, “He has already drunk from my people! I will not let—”
He broke off and jerked around an instant too late; I screamed involuntarily as a sword came thrusting through him, the blade piercing him from in front beneath the ribs and coming out his back shining white with frost and breathing a cold fog into the air around it. It was one of the tsar’s guardsmen, the brave one who’d taken the rope to lead the Staryk out of my grandfather’s house. He must have been standing watch outside the tower: he was pale with horror beneath his mustache but determined, his eyes wide and his jaw clenched and both hands wrapped around the hilt of his blade.
He tried to jerk it back out of the Staryk’s body, but it wouldn’t come, and frost was racing white down towards his gloved hands. His fingers sprang away almost of their own accord as it reached them, and the Staryk fell heavily to the ground, his eyes gone clouded and white. The soldier stood staring down at him, shaking, wringing his hands; the fingers of his gauntlets were tipped with white. I was staring too, both of my hands over my mouth, holding in another cry. The sword was all the way through the Staryk’s body. I didn’t see how he could live; it almost didn’t look real, that wound, and a strange blankness filled me; I couldn’t think at all.
But the Staryk, blindly groping, reached for the hilt of the sword where it stood out of his body, and it began to go entirely white beneath his touch, layer on layer of frost building. The whole sword was being frozen. The soldier and I both lurched back into motion; he pulled out a long dagger from his belt, and I shouted, “Wait,” again, in a gasp, and struggled to my feet and grabbed his arm. “Listen to me! We have to stop the demon, not him!”
“Be silent, witch!” the soldier spat at me. “You have done this, you have let him free, to undo the work of our blessed tsarina,” and then he struck my face with his other clenched fist, a perfectly ordinary blow that rattled my teeth and shocked straight through my body. I fell down dazed and sick to my stomach, and he turned to stab the Staryk.
And then Sergey, coming out of the dark upon us, grabbed his arm and stopped him. The two of them stood over the Staryk wrestling a moment: Sergey was a tall, strong boy, and oh, I was grateful now for every glass of milk and every egg and every slice of roast chicken my mother had given him. I had grumbled over them in my head, counting pennies, and now too late I wanted to wish myself more generous: if only I hadn’t, if I’d put still more of them on his plate, urged him to eat up, maybe he’d have been strong enough now. But he wasn’t; he was still only a boy, and the soldier was a grown man, in mail, trained to kill for the tsar. He stamped on Sergey’s poor feet in their straw pattens with his heavy boot, and twisting threw him flat onto the ground, freeing the hand with the dagger.
But then the soldier stopped where he stood. A strange serene pallor came climbing out of his armor and up over his neck and his face. The sword through the Staryk’s chest had broken into rough chunks of frozen steel, scattered blue-white over the grass around him. He lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, his ice-frosted lashes against a kind of pale violet color in his cheeks, but he had reached out and caught the soldier’s leg where it was next to him. Ice was spreading from that touch; it had traveled up over the boot and the soldier’s leg and onward up his entire body, freezing him in place.
The color deepened in the soldier’s face, the skin over his cheekbones splitting and curling away black with frostbite. I hid my face in my hands and didn’t look until it was over and there was nothing left of him but shards of ice everywhere, and the short dagger dropped shining and deadly on the ground.