The green eyes flared up to his again, mutinous instead of tentative. “I do not like half answers.”
“Stop asking half questions, then,” he said, and smiled with sudden charm. She flushed. The stallion thrust his great head closer. She winced when the horse lipped her injured fingers.
“Ah,” Morozko said. “I forgot. Does it hurt?”
“Only a little.” But she would not meet his eyes.
He made his way around the table and knelt so their faces were on a level. “May I?”
She swallowed. He took her chin in one hand and turned her face to the firelight. There were black marks on her cheek where he had touched her in the forest. The tips of her fingers and toes were white. He examined her hands, drew a fingertip along her frozen foot. “Don’t move,” he said.
“Why would—” But then he laid his palm flat against her jaw. His fingers were suddenly hot, impossibly hot, so that she expected to smell her own flesh scorching. She tried to pull away, but his other hand came up behind her head, digging into her hair, holding her. Her breath trembled and rasped in her throat. His hand slid down to her throat, and if anything the burning grew. She was too shocked to scream. Just when she thought she could not endure it another instant, he let go. She slumped against the bay stallion. The horse blew comfortingly into her hair.
“Forgive me,” Morozko said. The air around him was cold, despite the heat in his hands. Vasya realized she was shivering. She touched her damaged skin. It was smooth and warm, unmarked.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore.” She forced her voice to calm.
“No,” he said. “Some things I can heal. But I cannot heal gently.”
She looked down at her toes, at her ruined fingertips. “Better than being crippled.”
“As you say.”
But when he touched her feet, she could not keep the tears from her eyes.
“Will you give me your hands?” he said. She hesitated. Her fingertips were frostbitten, and one hand was crudely wrapped in a length of linen to shield the ragged hole in the palm from the night the upyr had come for Konstantin. The memory of pain thundered at her. He did not wait for her to speak. It took all her strength, but she swallowed back her cry while the flesh of her fingertips grew warm and pink.
Last, he took up her left hand and began to unwind the linen.
“It was you who hurt me,” said Vasya, trying to distract herself. “The night the upyr came.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“So that you would see me,” he said. “So that you would remember.”
“I had seen you before. I had not forgotten.”
His head was bent over his work. But she saw the curve of his mouth, wry and a little bitter. “But you doubted. You would not have believed your own senses after I had gone. I am little more than a shadow now, in the houses of men. Once I was a guest.”
“Who is the one-eyed man?”
“My brother,” he said shortly. “My enemy. But that is a long tale and not for tonight.” He laid the linen bandage aside. Vasya fought the urge to curl her hand into a fist. “This will be harder to heal than frostbite.”
“I kept reopening it,” Vasya said. “It seemed to help ward the house.”
“It would,” said Morozko. “There is virtue in your blood.” He touched the wounded place. Vasya flinched. “But only a little, for you are young. Vasya, I can heal this, but you will carry the mark.”
“Do it, then,” she said, failing to keep the tremor out of her voice.
“Very well.” He reached to the floor and scooped up a handful of snow. Vasya was for a moment disoriented; she saw the fir-grove, the snow on the ground, blue with dusk, red with firelight. But then the house re-formed around her and Morozko pressed the snow into the wound on her palm. Her whole body went rigid, and then the pain came, worse than before. She bit back a scream and managed to keep still. The pain rose past bearing, so that she sobbed once before she could stop herself.
Abruptly it died away. He let go her hand, and she almost fell off her stool. The bay stallion saved her; she fell against his warm bulk and caught herself by seizing his mane. The stallion put his head around to lip at her trembling hand.
Vasya pushed him aside and looked. The wound was gone. There was only a cold, pale mark, perfectly round, in the middle of her palm. When she turned it in the firelight, it seemed to catch the light, as though a sliver of ice was buried under the skin. No, she was imagining things.
“Thank you.” She pressed both hands into her lap to hide their trembling.
Morozko stood and drew away, looking down at her. “You’ll heal,” he said. “Rest. You are my guest. As for your questions—there will be answers. In time.”
Vasya nodded, staring still at her hand. When she looked up again, he had disappeared.
Chapter 24: I Have Seen Your Heart’s Desire
“Find her!” Konstantin snapped. “Bring her back!”
But the men would not go into the forest. They followed Vasya to the brink and balked, muttering of wolves and demons. Of the bitter cold.
“God will judge her now, Batyushka,” said Timofei’s father, and Oleg nodded in agreement. Konstantin hesitated, caught. The darkness beneath the trees seemed absolute.
“As you say, my children,” he said heavily. “God will judge her. God be with you.” He made the sign of the cross.
The men tramped away through the village muttering with their heads together. Konstantin went to his cold, bare cell. His dinner porridge lay heavy in his stomach. He lit a candle before the Mother of God, and a hundred shadows sprang furiously to life along the walls.
“Wicked servant,” snarled the voice. “Why is the witch-girl free in the forest? When I told you she must be contained? That she must go to a convent? I am displeased, my servant. I am most displeased.”
Konstantin fell to his knees, cowering. “We tried our best,” he pleaded. “She is a demon.”
“That demon is with my brother, and if he has the wit to see her strength…”
The candle guttered. The priest, huddled on the floor, went very still. “Your brother?” Konstantin whispered. “But you…” Then the candle went out, and there was only the breathing darkness. “Who are you?”
A long, slow silence, and then the voice laughed. Konstantin wasn’t sure he heard it; he might only have seen it, in the quiver of the shadows on the wall.
“The bringer of storms,” murmured the voice with a certain satisfaction. “For once you so summoned me. But long ago men called me the Bear—Medved.”
“You are a devil!” whispered Konstantin, clenching his hands.
All the shadows laughed. “As you like. But what difference is there between me and the one you call God? I too revel in deeds done in my name. I can give you glory, if you will do my bidding.”
“You,” whispered Konstantin. “But I thought…” He had thought himself exalted, set apart. But he was only a poor dupe, and he had done a demon’s bidding. Vasya…His throat closed. Somewhere in his soul, there was a proud girl riding a horse in the summer daylight. Laughing with her brother on her stool by the oven. “She will die.” He pressed his fists to his eyes. “I did it in your service.” Even as he spoke, he was thinking, they must never know.
“She ought to have gone to a convent. Or come to me,” said the voice matter-of-factly, with just a faint seething undercurrent of anger. “But now she is with my brother. With Death, but not dead.”