I crawled back onto my knees, my face aching and tender to the touch. Sergey had sat up wincing also, touching his feet with his hands. The Staryk lay on the ground still glistening. Frost ringed him in a widening circle, delicate feathery patterns climbing over the blades of grass, and he was breathing; the place where the sword had pierced him was covered over thickly with a lump of white-frosted ice, as though he’d packed it hard with snow. But he didn’t sit up. Sergey stared at him and looked at me. “What do we do?” he asked me, in little more than a whisper, and I stared back at him. I had no idea; what was I to do with him lying on the ground, spreading winter around him like ink through water?
I bent over him, and he opened his eyes and looked at me as vague as fog. “Can you call your road?” I asked him. “Your sleigh? Have them come to take you back?”
“Too far,” he whispered. “Too far. My road cannot run beneath green trees.” And then he shut his eyes again and lay there still, helpless and wounded and maybe even dying, now just when I’d stopped wanting him to die. So he was determined to remain exactly the same amount of use he’d been to me all along. I wanted to shake him, to make him get up, only I was afraid he’d shatter into pieces along the fracture line where the sword had gone through him. Sergey was still looking at me, and I said grimly, “We’ll have to carry him.”
Sergey wouldn’t touch him directly, and I couldn’t really blame him. I took off my wet and ash-stained cloak and laid it on the ground, and carefully one after another lifted the Staryk’s legs onto it, and then his shoulders, and then heaved him the rest of the way onto it from underneath his middle. He didn’t even twitch. “All right,” I said. “Take the top, and I’ll take the bottom,” and then the Staryk stirred, when Sergey went to take the top of the cloak, and tried weakly to lash out at him.
Sergey scrambled back in terror, and I dropped my end of the cloak with a thump. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
He turned his head towards me and whispered, “He comes to my aid unasked, unwanted! Am I to permit this cowering wight, this slinking thief, to put me under an obligation without end, so he may ask whatever he likes of me?”
I could have picked up the dagger and stabbed him myself. “Chernobog still sits in that castle ready to devour all of us, you’re half dead on the ground, and you’d still lie here thinking first of your pride. Be proud after he’s gone!”
But he only looked at me reproachfully. “Lady, I will be proud then,” he said, “and before also; I set no limits on my pride.”
I ground my teeth, and then I told Sergey, “Ask him for something!” Sergey stared at me as if he thought I’d gone mad. “What would you have him give you for your help? And don’t bargain short,” I added vengefully, “since he’s so eager to be proud.”
Sergey said after a moment, very slowly, as if he didn’t entirely trust me, “For—for my crops never to be blighted by frost?” I nodded, and the Staryk didn’t immediately start trying to kill him again, so he took courage and added, “And none of my herds ever lost in a blizzard? And—” I was still beckoning him on, “to hunt even the white animals in the forest?”
The Staryk scowled a little bit there, so Sergey stopped hurriedly, but I felt that was about right anyway. “There!” I said to him. “Will that do? Will you make that bargain, for the help to get you to safety? Or will you lie here until spring rains melt you entirely?”
“He bargains high, for a low thief,” the Staryk muttered. “But fortune smiles on him; very well, I agree,” and then he let his head sink back against the cloak, and was gone limp. Sergey very slowly edged towards the ends of the cloak and even more slowly reached for them again, his eyes on the Staryk all the while. “It’s all right,” I told him. “He’s said yes,” but Sergey only darted one quick look at me as though to say he’d take his time anyway, thank you.
We finally heaved him up and staggered away with his weight swinging between us in the hammock of the cloak. He made an awkward bundle to carry, and after we walked ten minutes without him summoning a blizzard or trying another murder, or even sitting up to say a word, Sergey said to me low, “Wait. I’ll take him on my shoulders.” We propped him on his feet, and I helped Sergey tip him across his shoulders, still keeping the cloak wrapped around him. Sergey staggered a bit under the weight, and shivered, but after that we went more quickly.
The air around us was cold and biting, not quite frozen but not warm spring, either, and when I looked behind us, we were trailing white frost over the road, and trees overhead were curling back new leaves wilted with cold. Anyone could have followed us. I feared the demon, I feared more guards, I feared even just a riot of ordinary men, desperate to slay winter. But no one came on behind us, and then instead we heard a rattling of cart wheels coming towards us from the other way; then we stopped and hurried into the trees on the side of the road to hide: not a very effective hiding, when glittering needles of frost bloomed around us like a flower, but at least it was still dark. The cart came on, and passed us, a gleam of firelight going between the trees, and then it stopped and my father called, “Miryem?” softly, into the dark.
We came out and put the Staryk into the cart. I sat beside him while Sergey and my father turned around and drove us on, the cart wheels squeaking with frost turning them white and crawling over the wooden planks. The horses twitched uneasy ears around to listen behind them and hurried their stride, but they couldn’t get away; we carried winter with us. At least the drive was very short: from what my father had said, I’d expected it to be a longer way off from Vysnia. But it felt like less than an hour before we came out of the trees to a little house inside a garden, surrounded by a low stone wall, and they pulled the horses to a halt.
Wanda came out to open the gate for us, and Sergey climbed down and went to put the horses in the small shed. I shook the Staryk awake enough to say, “The same bargain, for everyone who lives here, to help you.”
He looked at me with slitted white eyes and muttered, “Yes,” before he faded back away.
“We’ll put him in the bed?” my father asked, looking up at me from behind the cart, but I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “In the coldest place we can find: is there a cellar?”
Sergey coming back heard me asking, and shrugged and said, “We can look for one,” as if he thought one might suddenly appear unexpectedly; and then he took a lantern and went looking behind the house, and then around behind the shed, and then his voice called softly, “There’s a door here.”
My father held the lantern for him while Sergey pulled up the flat wooden door and propped it open: a cold waft of air came up to meet us, with a smell of frozen earth. We carried the Staryk down the ladder into it. It was a large open space, with walls of earth and a floor of stone still bitter cold to the touch. When we lay him down on it and took the cloak off him, the frost spread around him quickly, and now that we’d stopped moving him, it began to build up more thickly white; my father gave a small exclamation when his fingers were caught pulling back the cloak.
We stood back and stared down at the Staryk: his face was drawn and narrow with pain, and the sharp lines of his cheekbones still glistened wet for a moment, but the sheen of water hardened into ice even as we watched, and I thought he breathed a little more easily.
“Maybe some water,” I said after a moment. From outside, Wanda lowered a bucket to us with a wooden cup. I dipped it, and lifted the Staryk’s head to put it to his mouth, and he stirred and sipped a very little. The cup frosted at the touch of his lips, and a skim of ice was already forming over the surface of the water when I took it away again. I looked at his bare, burned foot: in parts misshapen like a half-melted snowman only vaguely recognizable anymore. I picked out the skim of ice from the water and put it onto the worst patch, and it sank into his flesh and lifted it out a little. I looked up at Wanda, who was still looking down at us from above. “Is there any ice anywhere? Or any part of the river still frozen?”
But she had gone to get water, earlier, and she shook her head. “It’s all melted,” she said. “The whole river is open, bank-to-bank.”
“We could pack him in straw,” my father suggested doubtfully. “Like keeping ice for summer.”
“What we need is to get him back to his kingdom,” I said. If Chernobog found us here, it wouldn’t need any help to put silver chains and a ring of fire back around the Staryk. It would do it all by itself, this time, and then perhaps it would be able to force him to give up his name and all his people. But I didn’t know what to do. His road wouldn’t run under green trees, and the only winter left in Lithvas was in our cellar. When we climbed back out, Wanda giving me her hand to help me up, the nails of the ladder and the iron rim around the door all were frosted white and painfully cold to the touch, and the grass above had all died to crisp cracklings; the earth was cold and frozen solid under our feet.
But even as I stood there in the dark staring down into the cellar at him, a pale coffin-statue lying in a ring of frost, a sudden strong gusting of warm wind came through the trees, stirring my hair, and when I looked back at the road, the trail of frost we’d left behind us on the road had already vanished like dew. And in the morning, a summer sun would rise.
I’d wanted him dead, and I wanted to still be angry at him: everything he’d done to me, and he wasn’t even really sorry that he’d done it; he was only sorry he hadn’t believed that I could make him pay. But I’d walked down that tunnel to save Rebekah, and Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, and he’d gone into the dark to do that, too. He’d laid himself out as a sacrifice for their sake; and he’d bent that iron pride of his and married a mortal, not to store up treasure for himself or to conquer, but to save his people from a terrible enemy. And now he was lying down there half dead, and the thought twisted my stomach, of watching him melt away to nothing, him and all of them gone as though they’d never won their winter kingdom from the dark.