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“Not tonight,” put in Ded Grib, in his high voice, practically. “You aren’t learning anything tonight. Go and find somewhere clean.” He fixed Morozko with a dark look. “Surely you know a good place, winter-king. Even if your realm is too cold for mushrooms.”
“I know a place,” said Morozko.
“I will see you beside the lake, in the moonlight,” said Vasya to Ded Grib and Polunochnitsa.
“We will wait for you there,” said Midnight, and then she and Ded Grib were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared.
Vasya leaned against Solovey’s shoulder and the grief and the joy bewildered her equally. Morozko cupped his hands. “Let us go,” he said. “At last.”
Without a word, she put a foot in his hands and let him boost her onto Solovey’s back. She did not know where they were going, save that it was the direction her soul told her was away. Away from the sound and the smell, the glory and the futility.
Solovey carried her gently, neck arched, and Pozhar, glowing in the darkness, shed heat upon them both.
Finally they crested a small rise. The whole blood-drenched battlefield lay clear at their feet. Vasya dismounted and went to Pozhar.
“Thank you, lady,” she said. “Will you fly free now, as you have long wished to do?”
Pozhar lifted her head, aloof, and her nostrils flared, as if to test the winds of heaven. But then she bent her golden head, delicately, and lipped Vasya’s hair. I will be at the lake when you return, she said. You may prepare a warm place for me on stormy nights, and comb my mane.
Vasya smiled. “It will be done,” she said.
Pozhar slanted her ears back a fraction. Do not neglect the lake. For it will always need a guardian.
“I will guard it,” said Vasya. “And I will watch over my family. And I will ride the world, in between times, through the farthest countries of dark and day. It is enough for one life.” She paused. “Thank you,” she added to the mare. “More than I can say.”
Then she stepped back.
The mare threw her head up, small flames licking at the edge of her mane. One ear slanted toward Solovey, perhaps with a touch of coquetry. He rumbled softly at her. Then the mare reared—up and up. Her wings flared, brighter than the pale morning sun, gilding all the snowflakes, making shadows of the whirling snow. Then the firebird soared aloft in a rush of glory. Men who watched from afar later told each other that they had seen a comet, a sign of God’s blessing, flying between heaven and earth.
Vasya watched Pozhar go, eyes fixed on the brightness, and only looked down when Solovey nudged her in the small of her back. She buried her face in her horse’s mane, breathed the reassuring smell of him. He had none of Pozhar’s alarming tang of smoke. She could even, for an instant, forget the smell of blood and filth, fire and iron.
A coolness at her back, and she lifted her head and turned.
Morozko had dirt under his nails, a streak of soot on his cheek. The white mare behind him looked as weary as he, her proud head hanging low. She nuzzled Solovey, her colt, once, lightly.
Morozko looked weary, as men are weary, at the end of long labor. His eyes searched her face.
She took his hands in hers. “Will it be thus for you,” she asked him, “so long as you live? To stand beside us, and to grieve for us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps. But—I think that I would rather feel pain than not feel anything at all. Perhaps I am grown mortal, after all.”
His tone was wry, but then his arm closed around her tightly, and she put her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his shoulder. He smelled of earth and blood and fear, of that day’s slaughter. But beneath, as always, were the scents of cold water and of pine.
She tilted her head up and pulled him down to her and kissed him fiercely, as though at last she could lose herself, forget duty and that day’s horror in the touch of his hands.
“Vasya,” he said, low, in her ear. “It is almost midnight. Where do you wish to go?” His hand was in the snarls of her hair.
“Somewhere with clean water,” she said. “I am sick to death of blood. And then? North. To tell Olya how…” She trailed off, had to steady her voice before she continued. “Perhaps—after—we may ride to the sea together, and see the light on the water.”
“Yes,” he said.
She almost smiled. “And then? Well, you have a realm in the winter forest, and I have mine, on the bow-curve of a lake. Perhaps we might forge one country in secret, a country of shadows, behind and beneath Dmitrii’s Russia. For there must always be a land for chyerti, for witches and for sorcerers, and for followers of the forest.”
“Yes,” he said again. “But for tonight, food and cool air, clean water and untainted earth. Come with me, Snegurochka. I know a house in a winter forest.”
“I know,” she said, and a thumb brushed away her tears.
She would have said she was too tired to vault to Solovey’s back, but her body did it despite her.
“What did we gain?” Vasya asked Morozko as they rode away. The snow had stopped, the sky shone clear. The season of frost had barely begun.
“A future,” returned the frost-demon. “For men will say in later years that this was the battle that made Rus’ a nation of one people. And chyerti will live on, unfaded.”
“Even for that, the price was very high,” she said.
They were riding knee to knee; he made no answer. The wild darkness of Midnight was all about them now. But somewhere ahead, a light shone through the trees.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ALMOST FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of drafting The Bear and the Nightingale, I knew I wanted to end my trilogy at the Battle of Kulikovo. This battle always seemed to me to create a natural point of reconciliation for many of the conflicts I wished to consider on the pages of these three books: the Rus’ against the Tatars, Christian against pagan, Vasya trying to balance her own desires and ambitions with the needs of her family and her nation.
The path I charted to get to the battle has varied wildly since those early days. But the destination never changed.
The Battle of Kulikovo really happened. In 1380, on the Don river, Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich acquired his historical moniker Donskoi, of the Don, by leading a combined force from several different Russian principalities against a host commanded by the Tatar temnik Mamai.
Dmitrii won. It was the first time the Russian people combined under the leadership of Moscow to defeat a foreign adversary. Some have argued that this event marks the spiritual birth of the nation of Russia. I have chosen to take it as such, although in reality, the historical significance of this battle is the subject of ongoing debate. Who, if not the novelist, has the right to cherry-pick historical interpretations that suit her best?
