The air around us was cold and biting, not quite frozen but not warm spring, either, and when I looked behind us, we were trailing white frost over the road, and trees overhead were curling back new leaves wilted with cold. Anyone could have followed us. I feared the demon, I feared more guards, I feared even just a riot of ordinary men, desperate to slay winter. But no one came on behind us, and then instead we heard a rattling of cart wheels coming towards us from the other way; then we stopped and hurried into the trees on the side of the road to hide: not a very effective hiding, when glittering needles of frost bloomed around us like a flower, but at least it was still dark. The cart came on, and passed us, a gleam of firelight going between the trees, and then it stopped and my father called, “Miryem?” softly, into the dark.
We came out and put the Staryk into the cart. I sat beside him while Sergey and my father turned around and drove us on, the cart wheels squeaking with frost turning them white and crawling over the wooden planks. The horses twitched uneasy ears around to listen behind them and hurried their stride, but they couldn’t get away; we carried winter with us. At least the drive was very short: from what my father had said, I’d expected it to be a longer way off from Vysnia. But it felt like less than an hour before we came out of the trees to a little house inside a garden, surrounded by a low stone wall, and they pulled the horses to a halt.
Wanda came out to open the gate for us, and Sergey climbed down and went to put the horses in the small shed. I shook the Staryk awake enough to say, “The same bargain, for everyone who lives here, to help you.”
He looked at me with slitted white eyes and muttered, “Yes,” before he faded back away.
“We’ll put him in the bed?” my father asked, looking up at me from behind the cart, but I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “In the coldest place we can find: is there a cellar?”
Sergey coming back heard me asking, and shrugged and said, “We can look for one,” as if he thought one might suddenly appear unexpectedly; and then he took a lantern and went looking behind the house, and then around behind the shed, and then his voice called softly, “There’s a door here.”
My father held the lantern for him while Sergey pulled up the flat wooden door and propped it open: a cold waft of air came up to meet us, with a smell of frozen earth. We carried the Staryk down the ladder into it. It was a large open space, with walls of earth and a floor of stone still bitter cold to the touch. When we lay him down on it and took the cloak off him, the frost spread around him quickly, and now that we’d stopped moving him, it began to build up more thickly white; my father gave a small exclamation when his fingers were caught pulling back the cloak.
We stood back and stared down at the Staryk: his face was drawn and narrow with pain, and the sharp lines of his cheekbones still glistened wet for a moment, but the sheen of water hardened into ice even as we watched, and I thought he breathed a little more easily.
“Maybe some water,” I said after a moment. From outside, Wanda lowered a bucket to us with a wooden cup. I dipped it, and lifted the Staryk’s head to put it to his mouth, and he stirred and sipped a very little. The cup frosted at the touch of his lips, and a skim of ice was already forming over the surface of the water when I took it away again. I looked at his bare, burned foot: in parts misshapen like a half-melted snowman only vaguely recognizable anymore. I picked out the skim of ice from the water and put it onto the worst patch, and it sank into his flesh and lifted it out a little. I looked up at Wanda, who was still looking down at us from above. “Is there any ice anywhere? Or any part of the river still frozen?”
But she had gone to get water, earlier, and she shook her head. “It’s all melted,” she said. “The whole river is open, bank-to-bank.”
“We could pack him in straw,” my father suggested doubtfully. “Like keeping ice for summer.”
“What we need is to get him back to his kingdom,” I said. If Chernobog found us here, it wouldn’t need any help to put silver chains and a ring of fire back around the Staryk. It would do it all by itself, this time, and then perhaps it would be able to force him to give up his name and all his people. But I didn’t know what to do. His road wouldn’t run under green trees, and the only winter left in Lithvas was in our cellar. When we climbed back out, Wanda giving me her hand to help me up, the nails of the ladder and the iron rim around the door all were frosted white and painfully cold to the touch, and the grass above had all died to crisp cracklings; the earth was cold and frozen solid under our feet.
But even as I stood there in the dark staring down into the cellar at him, a pale coffin-statue lying in a ring of frost, a sudden strong gusting of warm wind came through the trees, stirring my hair, and when I looked back at the road, the trail of frost we’d left behind us on the road had already vanished like dew. And in the morning, a summer sun would rise.
I’d wanted him dead, and I wanted to still be angry at him: everything he’d done to me, and he wasn’t even really sorry that he’d done it; he was only sorry he hadn’t believed that I could make him pay. But I’d walked down that tunnel to save Rebekah, and Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, and he’d gone into the dark to do that, too. He’d laid himself out as a sacrifice for their sake; and he’d bent that iron pride of his and married a mortal, not to store up treasure for himself or to conquer, but to save his people from a terrible enemy. And now he was lying down there half dead, and the thought twisted my stomach, of watching him melt away to nothing, him and all of them gone as though they’d never won their winter kingdom from the dark.
* * *
The silver crown felt strangely warm upon my head. I held my white furs around me and watched the faint red glow of Chernobog traveling away in the distance: the fire I had unleashed upon this icy kingdom that had sheltered me. The wind blowing in my face was full of ash instead of snow, and the smell of burning wood, and I was as sorry as Miryem. But I knew I’d had to do it, and I knew what I still had to do now. I had to go back to my own kingdom, and call my father and send for the priests and blessed chains. I didn’t know how long the lives of all the Staryk would satisfy Chernobog, but whenever he was done, he would come back. And during the hours of the day, while he slept curled and replete in Mirnatius’s belly, we would put the chains on him and burn him out, breaking one fire with another.
The sooner I went, the better; we needed to be ready when he came back. But I still stood there watching the fire rise, and I said, “I’m sorry,” though no one to whom I might have apologized was there. I was alone in a garden half snow and half green grass. There was no Staryk child standing before me accusingly, and not even my own imprisoned husband; the only living creature anywhere in view was a single squirrel that had come out to paw over the crumbs I’d scattered, a few days before. And if anyone else had been there, I would have been silent. It didn’t matter that I cared, that I was sorry; what mattered was what I had done, what I would do.
“I would save your kingdom, too, if I could,” I told the squirrel, which paid me no attention: it was only interested in the crumbs, which were at least of some use to one creature, as my apologies weren’t. I went back to the tub full of water. I looked down into it and saw my bedchamber, with the dressing table before the mirror covered with the rings Mirnatius had scattered, and the fine coat he’d flung carelessly down. One deadly fire I’d stoked behind me, and another one still ahead, and I shut my eyes a moment as useless tears slid off my cheeks and dripped into the water.