The expression of the smiling mouth did not change. “I am called Polunochnitsa,” she said, drinking.
Vasya jerked back in alarm. Solovey, watching, pinned his ears. Vasya’s nurse, Dunya, had told tales of two demon-sisters, Midnight and Midday, and none of those stories ended well for lonely travelers. “Why are you here?” Vasya asked, breathing fast.
Midnight laughed to herself, lounging in the snow beside the fire. “Peace, child,” she said. “You will need steadier nerves than that, if you are going to be a traveler.” Vasya saw, with disquiet, that Midnight had a great number of teeth. “I was sent to look at you.”
“Sent—？” Vasya asked. Slowly, she sank back onto her own seat beside the fire. “Who sent you?”
“The more one knows, the sooner one grows old,” Midnight returned cheerfully.
Vasya asked, hesitating, “Was it Morozko?”
Midnight snorted, to Vasya’s chagrin. “Do not give him so much credit. Poor winter-king could never command me.” Her eyes seemed to give light of themselves.
“Who, then?” asked Vasya.
The demon put a finger to her lips. “Ah, that I cannot say, for I swore not. Besides, where is the mystery there?”
Midnight had drunk her fill; now she tossed the skin to Vasya and got to her feet. The firelight shone red through her moon-white hair. “Well, I have seen you once,” she said. “Thrice, I promised, so we will have another chance. Ride far, Vasilisa Petrovna.”
She disappeared from the sheltering fir-branches while Vasya was still asking questions. “I don’t—wait—” But the chyert was gone. Vasya could have sworn she heard a horse that was not Solovey snorting in the cold, and also the steady clop of great hooves. But she saw nothing. Then silence.
Vasya sat by the fire until it was only hot embers, listening, but no new sound disturbed the nighttime quiet. At last she persuaded herself to lie down once more and go to sleep. She surprised herself by falling immediately and blackly unconscious, and woke only at dawn, when Solovey thrust his head into her shelter and blew snow into her face.
Vasya smiled at the horse, rubbed her eyes, drank a little hot water, saddled him, and rode away.
DAYS PASSED—A WEEK—ANOTHER. The road was hard, and very cold. Not all Vasya’s days—or her nights—were as well organized as the first. She saw no strangers and the midnight-demon did not come back, but she still bruised herself on branches, burned her fingers, scorched her dinner, and let herself grow chilled, so that she must huddle all night beside the fire, too cold to sleep. Then she actually caught a cold, so that she spent two days shivering and choking on her own breath.
But the versts rushed beneath Solovey’s hooves and fell away behind them. South they went and south more, angling west, and when Vasya said, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” the horse ignored her.
On the third day of Vasya’s cold, when she rode doggedly, head down, her nose a brilliant red, the trees ended.
Or rather, a great river thrust its way between them. The light on a vast stretch of snow dazzled Vasya’s swollen eyes when they came to the edge of the wood and looked out. “This must be the sledge-road,” she whispered, blinking at the expanse of snow-covered ice. “The Volga,” she added, remembering her eldest brother’s stories. A sloping snowbank, with trees half-buried in the deep drifts stretched down to the sledge-tracked snow.
Faintly, Vasya heard the tinkling of bells, and then a line of sleighs piled high came around a bend. Bells hung on the bright harness of horses, and lumpish strangers, bundled to the eyes, came riding or running beside them, shouting back and forth.
Vasya watched them pass, entranced. The men’s faces—what she could see of them—were red and rough, with great bristling beards. Their mittened hands lay sure on the leads of their horses. The beasts were all smaller than Solovey, stocky and coarse-maned. The caravan dazzled Vasya with its speed and its bells and the faces of strangers. She had been born in a small village, where strangers were vanishingly rare, and every soul was known to her.
Then Vasya raised her eyes, following the line of sledges. The haze of many fires showed over the trees. More fires than she had ever seen together. “Is that Moscow?” she asked Solovey, her breath coming short.
No, said the horse. Moscow is bigger.
“How do you know?”
The horse only tilted an ear in a superior fashion. Vasya sneezed. More people appeared on the sledge-road at her feet: riders this time, wearing scarlet caps, with embroidery on their boots. A great mass of smoke hung like clouds above the skeleton trees. “Let’s go closer,” Vasya said. After a week in the wilderness, she craved color and motion, the sight of faces and the sound of a human voice.