“Marya Vladimirovna,” said the ghost in her strange, blurred voice. “Look at me.”
Marya’s head slowly rose, her eyes slowly opened.
She saw the ghost.
She screamed, a raw, child’s wail of terror. Kasyan’s gaze shifted toward the girl for just a moment and Vasya reached back, ribs aching, and seized Kasyan’s knife—her knife, where it hung from his belt. She tried to stab him. He recoiled, and she missed, but his grip on her arm weakened.
Vasya hurled herself forward and rolled. She came up holding the knife. Armed now, at least, and on her feet, but it hurt to breathe, and Kasyan was between her and Marya.
Kasyan drew his sword and bared his teeth. “I am going to kill you.”
Vasya had no hope; a half-trained girl against an armed man. Kasyan’s blade came slicing down and Vasya just managed to turn it with her dagger. Masha sat swaying like a sleepwalker. “Masha!” Vasya shouted frantically. “Get up! Get to the door! Go, child!” She kicked a table at Kasyan and backed up, sobbing for breath.
Kasyan cut sideways and Vasya ducked. Now it seemed that a black-cloaked figure waited in the corner. For me, she thought. He is here for me, for the last time. The sword came whistling across to cut her in two. She jumped back, barely.
For an instant, Vasya’s gaze flew again to the ghost. Tamara, behind Kasyan, had put a hand to her own throat, at the place where once a talisman had hung around Vasya’s neck. A talisman that bound her…Then Tamara’s frantic eyes shot to the child, and Vasya understood.
She dodged Kasyan’s sword, dodged again. Every strike fell closer; Vasya could barely draw breath. There was Marya, sitting stiff. In the instant before the sword fell a final time, Vasya reached for Marya and found a red-gold thing, heavy and cold beneath the child’s blouse. Vasya broke it off with a wrench—so that the metal cut into her palm and bloodied the child’s throat—and in the same motion, she whirled and flung it at the sorcerer’s face. It struck him with a splatter of gold and red light, and then fell, broken, to the floor.
Kasyan stared from it to Vasya, shock in his eyes.
Then he staggered back. His face began to change. Years seemed to rush in, as though a dam had broken. Suddenly he was transformed into an old man, skeletal, red-eyed. They stood in a room that was no magic sorcerer’s lair, but only the empty tower workroom of the Grand Princess of Moscow, dusty and smelling of wet wool and women, its inner door barred.
“Bitch!” Kasyan roared. “Bitch! You dare?” He advanced again, but now he was stumbling. His guard dropped, and Vasya had not forgotten her days under the tree with Morozko. She dodged his wavering arm, came up inside his guard, and drove the knife between his ribs.
Kasyan grunted. It was the ghost who screamed. The sorcerer bled not at all, but Tamara’s side was bleeding in the place where Vasya had stabbed Kasyan.
The ghost doubled over and crumpled to the floor.
Kasyan straightened, unwounded, and advanced again, teeth bared, ancient, unkillable. Vasya had dragged Marya bodily upright and now she backed toward the door. Marya went with her, trembling, life in her steps once more, though she uttered no sound, her eyes the eyes of a girl in a nightmare. Vasya’s ribs felt as though they would pierce through her skin with each step. Kasyan still had his sword…
“There is nowhere to go,” Kasyan whispered. “You cannot kill me. Besides, the city is on fire, you murderess. You will stay here in the tower, while your family burns.”
He saw her face and burst out laughing. The empty pit of his mouth gaped wide. “You didn’t know! Fool, not to know what happens when you release a firebird.”
Then Vasya heard the vast low roar outside, a sound like the end of the world. She thought of the flight of a firebird, unleashed on a wooden city at night.
I must kill him, she thought, if it is the last thing I do. Kasyan advanced once more, sword high. Vasya hurled Marya away from her and dodged the sweeping blade.
The words of Dunya’s fairy tale ran ridiculously through her mind: Kaschei the Deathless keeps his life inside a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare—
But that was only a story. There was no needle here, no egg…
Vasya’s thoughts seemed to swerve to a halt. There was only herself. And her niece. And her grandmother.
Witches, Vasya thought. We can see things that others cannot, and make faded things real.
Then Vasya understood.
She did not give herself pause to think. She hurled herself at the ghost. One hand reached out and plucked the thing she knew must be there, hanging from the gray creature’s throat. It was a jewel—or had been—it felt in her hand a little like Marya’s necklace, but fragile as an eggshell, as though years and grief had eaten it away from within.