The heat of the wine and the wild ride were dimming now, and all around was the deathly hush before the dawn wind rises. Vasya shivered suddenly, cloaked in wolfskin and in the skeins of her black hair. “Is that why you came?” she asked, not turning around. “To tempt me from Moscow? Or are you going to tell me that I am better off here, dressed as a girl, married? Why did the chyerti come to the feasting? Why was the gamayun waiting above—yes, I know what the bird means. What is happening?”
“Are we not permitted to feast with the people?”
She said nothing. She moved again, pacing like a cat in a cage despite the sweep of ice and forest and sky. “I want freedom,” she said at length, almost to herself. “But I also want a place and a purpose. I am not sure I can have either, let alone both. And I do not want to live a lie. I am hurting my brother and sister.” She stopped abruptly and turned. “Can you solve this riddle for me?”
Morozko raised an eyebrow. The dawn wind made eddies of the snow at the horses’ feet. “Am I an oracle?” he asked her coldly. “Can I not come to a feast, ride in the moonlight, without being called on to hear the plaints of Russian maidens? What care I for your little mysteries, or your brother’s conscience? Here is my answer: that you ought not to listen to fairy tales. I spoke truly once: Your world does not care what you want.”
Vasya pressed her lips together. “My sister said the same thing. But what about you? Do you care?”
He fell silent. Clouds were massing overhead. The mare shivered her skin all over.
“You can mock,” Vasya continued, angry now in turn, stepping closer, and closer still. “But you live forever. Perhaps you don’t want anything, or care about anything. And yet—you are here.”
He said nothing.
“Should I live out my life as a false lord, until they find me out and put me in a convent?” she demanded. “Should I run away? Go home? Never see my brothers again? Where do I belong? I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. And I have eaten in your house, and nearly died in your arms, and you rode with me tonight and—I hoped you might know.”
The word sounded foolish even as she said it. She bit her lip. The silence stretched out.
“Vasya,” he said.
“Don’t. You never mean it,” she said, drawing away. “You are immortal, and it is only a game—”
His answer was not in words, but his hands, perhaps, spoke for him when his fingertips found the pulse behind her jaw. She did not move. His eyes were cold and still: pale stars to make her lost. “Vasya,” he said again, low and—almost ragged, into her ear. “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”
“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.
“It is all I have,” he said. Then he slid his fingers through her hair and kissed her.
She made a sound like a sob, anger and wanting together. Then her arms went round him.
She had never been kissed before, not thus. Not long and—deliberately. She didn’t know how—but he taught her. Not with words, no: with his mouth, and his fingertips, and a feeling that did not have words. A touch, dark and exquisite, that breathed along her skin.
So she clung and her bones loosened and her whole body lit with cool fire. Even your brothers would call you damned now, she thought, but she utterly did not care. A light wind sent the last of the clouds scudding across the sky, and the stars shone clear on them both.
When he drew away at last, she was wide-eyed, flushed, burning. His eyes were a brilliant, perfect, flame-heart blue, and he could have been human.
He let her go abruptly.
“No,” he said.
“I do not understand.” Her hand was at her mouth, her body trembling, wary as the girl he had once thrown across his saddlebow.
“No,” he said. He dragged a hand through his dark curls. “I did not mean—”
Dawning hurt. She crossed her arms. “Did you not? Why did you come, really?”
He ground his teeth. He had turned away from her, his hands clenched hard. “Because I wanted to tell you—”
He broke off, looked into her face. “There is a shadow over Moscow,” he said. “Yet whenever I try to look deeper, I am turned aside. I do not know what is causing it. Were you not—”