“How?” I said, but he closed his eyes and said nothing, and I sat blankly.
Then my father said, “Miryem,” slowly. I looked around to him in desperation. “It is the wrong month, but the trees have not been in bloom before, and the fruit is not grown. We can say the blessing.” He looked at Stepon, and at Wanda and Sergey, and added gently, “Some even say it helps those whose souls have returned to the world in fruit or trees, to move onward.”
He held his hand out to me, and his other hand to my mother. We stood up the way we always did in spring in front of the one little apple tree in our yard, and we said it together, “Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, shelo hasair b’olamo kloom, ubara bo briyot tovot v’ilanot tovot, leihanot bahem b’nai adam,” the blessing for fruit trees in bloom. I had always loved saying it: it meant hope, a deep breath of relief; it meant that winter was over, that soon there would be fruit to eat and the world full of plenty. As a little girl, in the early days of spring I’d go into the yard every morning and look over the branches for the first sign of flowering, to run and tell my father when we could say it. But this time I said it more fiercely than ever, trying to hold every word of it tight in my head, imagining them written in letters of silver that turned to gold as I spoke them aloud.
When we finished, we all stood in silence. Nothing happened at first, as far as we saw. But then Stepon suddenly gave a cry and ran away from us towards the gate of the house, waving his hands to chase away a small bird that had just landed on the ground there to peck. He stood staring down with his hands clenched until Wanda and Sergey and then all of us went and joined him. A small white seedling was coming out of the earth, a little soft squirming worm just poking up.
We stared at it. I’d seen seeds pop before, beans come out of the dirt, but this one came quicker, an entire spring going before our eyes in moments: it straightened into a thin white seedling tree and began to lurch up like someone trying to climb a rope, stopping every so often to catch their breath before pulling themselves up a little farther. A crown of tiny white leaves unfurled like flags at the top, ghostly pale, and they began to flap and stretch themselves urgently, pushing upwards. When it was as tall as my knee, it began to put out thin branches that sprang open from its sides like tiny whips, and more of the white leaves opened. We had to back away to give it room, and it was still growing; smoothly now, steadily and rising.
I turned and ran back to the Staryk. He didn’t wake or move; he lay against the house gone very thin and deep blue, as if some core of him were emerging from a shell of ice, and when I touched him my hands were wet, but Wanda came and helped me. Together we pulled him over to the tree, and lay him down beneath it, and suddenly crackling frost was climbing all over the ground beneath him and up the white bark and over his own skin, the deep blue vanishing again under that frozen layer. He breathed out winter air and opened his eyes and looked up at the spreading boughs of the tree, and he wept, although I almost couldn’t tell, because his tears froze into his face at once and there was only a shining coming out of him.
He stood up, and as he stood the tree was tall enough for him to stand beneath it, although it hadn’t seemed quite that large yet a moment before, and when he put both his hands on its trunk, it burst into flowers of silver shot through with gold. He reached up and touched a blossom with his fingertips, looking at it bemused.
“It grew, it grew,” Stepon was saying; he was gulping with sobs himself, crying as if he didn’t know whether he was happy or sad, with my mother kneeling with her arms wrapped around his thin shoulders, stroking his head.
And then the Staryk turned away from it and put his hand on the gate, and when he swung it open, on the other side of it a white road was standing, a white road lined with other white trees, but it didn’t run on forever into winter anymore: there was a darkness at the other end, a cloud of smoke and burning. He looked at it with his face set, and then he stepped through and walked a little way down the road, and a white stag came bounding out of the trees. We had followed him to the gate, but my family all drew back away into the yard when it leapt out. For a moment I saw it with their eyes, the sharp claws and monstrous fangs hanging over its top lip and the red tongue, but it was only one of the deer for me, now. He went towards it, and as he mounted, his foot was no longer bare; a silver boot closed round it, and then he was all in silver, in armor and white fur, looking down.
Then he held his hand out to me, and said, “Chernobog is in my kingdom. As I have promised, so will I do: if he is cast out, and my people made safe, I will not bring back the winter. You asked for alliance to see it done: will you still come and lend your aid, though he is no more in your own world?”
I stared up at him, and wanted to demand, half indignant, what good he thought I would do against a demon of flame in outright battle. There was dirt under my fingernails; my face ached and my cheek was still swollen and red where the soldier had struck me, and I was tired and only a mortal girl who’d bragged too much in his hearing. But I looked at the white tree standing next to me, with its branches high and covered with flowers, and I knew there was no use asking him. He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll come, and do what I can—if you’ll bring me back after!”
“My road still does not run under green trees, lady,” he said, “and you have already made me promise to lift the winter, if we are victorious. But summer will not last forever, even if I lift my hand, and this I much can offer you: on the first day the next snow falls, I will open my road hence, and return you to your family’s home.”
I turned back: my mother and father were standing in the yard, and they weren’t alone. Wanda and Sergey and Stepon were with them, and the house behind them with plenty of room, now. They would be safe, they would all be safe, even if I never came back after a wild leap down a winter road; they had each other to love and live for, and to grieve with, and to help each other on their way.
They seemed somehow far away from me already, a few steps removed, and their faces looked almost dreamlike when they gazed at me. But I ran to them quickly, and kissed them all, and I whispered to my mother, “Look for me on the first day of winter,” and her fingers trailed out of mine as I turned back and went through the gate, and took the Staryk king’s hand, for him to pull me up onto the back of his stag behind him.
Chapter 24
We rode down the white road with snow and ash blowing together in our faces. The hot flecks stung on my arms, but we were going quickly; the road was blurring silver beneath us with every leap of the stag, going as fast as the Staryk wanted to go, as fast as it could, and with one more leap we were under pine trees burning, a terrible red roaring flame all above our heads, and with another leap after that the road burst out from beneath them and was running next to the river.
But a river in spring, roaring, full of cracked chunks of ice bobbing and smashing against one another as they swept past us downstream. Scattered silver coins were gleaming among them, and the Staryk gave a cry of horror as he saw ahead the waterfall alive again: a roaring torrent, bursting from the side of the mountain and crashing down in clouds of steam. At the base of it, Chernobog danced and twirled with his arms in the air shrieking in delight. He wasn’t burning all over anymore. He’d swelled out of human size and become monstrously large, a towering figure of charcoal covered thickly with ash, laced with deep cracks where glowing red veins of heat showed through, open flames only flaring here and there from his body. He put his face into the falling water and drank in enormous thirsty gulps and grew a little more, as if he were somehow making more of himself to burn. Coins of Staryk silver were shining like a carapace over his face and shoulders, scattered on him by the falls.
He wasn’t standing there alone: a knot of Staryk knights were trying to fight him, flinging silver spears at him from the shore of the spreading waterfall pool, but they couldn’t get close. There was a forest of spears floating on the water, scattered and scorched, and he wasn’t bothering to turn away from his gluttonous drinking. The Staryk king leapt off the stag and cried to me, “The mountain must be held against him, do whatever you can!” and then he drew a silver sword and ran to the pool and put his foot out onto the surface. Where he stepped, ice grew solid underneath him, and he ran straight at the demon on a shining white road. In his ecstatic hunger, Chernobog didn’t see him coming; the Staryk swung the sword into his monstrous leg, carving deep, and Chernobog roared in fury as ice spread in a crackling wave over the surface.
I ran up the road to the tall silver doors in the mountainside and pounded on them. They had been shut and barred. “Let me in!” I shouted, and abruptly there was a grinding on the other side, and Shofer was there, heaving up a great crossbeam of silver that had blocked the door, and pushing it open just enough for me to squeeze inside. A gust of cold air blew out, escaping, cold enough to make me realize how warm it already was outside, and even only standing in the cracked opening, Shofer’s face instantly began to shine with ice-melt. He dragged the door shut again behind me, and lowered the bar back into place, and sagged away, pale.
“Shofer!” I said, trying to hold him up. He wasn’t there alone; behind him, guarding the door, was a whole company of Staryk knights or lords, all of them holding tall shields of clear blue ice bounded in silver, overlapping one another like a wall. They’d retreated well back from the opened door, but once it was shut, they rushed forward again, and there were hands reaching to help us back behind the ice wall of shields. Behind that shelter, Shofer wiped the wet from his face and struggled back onto his feet.
I caught his arm urgently. “Shofer, the mountain—where the mountain is broken, where the waterfall comes out. Do you know where it is? Can you take me there?”
He stared at me wet and cloudy, but he nodded. Together we ran up the road into the heart of the mountain, slipping a little with almost every step; the surface had gone slick, and there were tiny trickles of water running along the surface in places. When we came out finally into the great vaulted space, it already felt somehow smaller overhead, as if the ceiling had drawn in closer on us, and the grove was full of Staryk women huddling close together beneath the white trees, making a smaller citadel of themselves. I saw between their bodies the deep blue cores of children being sheltered from the growing warmth. They looked up as I ran past with Shofer, with desperation on their faces; the ground was softening underfoot, and the limbs of the white trees were drooping. The narrow stream was gurgling up out of its wellspring and running away through the grove, into the mountain walls.