Vasya found herself facing a ring of frightened, furious faces. “I mean you no harm,” she said, heart hammering. “I am no raider, only a traveler, alone.”
“Where did you come from?” called one villager.
“From the forest,” said Vasya, with half-truth. “What has happened here?”
An ugly pause, full of violent grief. Then the woman with black hair spoke. “Bandits. They brought fire and arrows and steel. They came for our girls.”
“Your girls? Did they take them?” demanded Vasya. “Where?”
“They took three,” said the man bitterly. “Three little ones. It has been so since the winter started, in every village in these parts. They come, they burn what they will, and then they take their pick of the children.” He gestured vaguely at the forest. “Girls—always girls. Rada there”—he gestured toward the black-haired woman—“had her daughter stolen, and her husband slain when he fought. She has no one now.”
“They took my Katya.” Rada’s bloody hands twisted together. “I told my husband not to fight, that I could not lose them both. But when they dragged our girl away, he couldn’t bear it…” Her voice strangled and fell silent.
Words filled Vasya’s mouth, but there was not one that would serve. “I am sorry,” she said at length. “I am—” She was trembling all over. Suddenly Vasya touched Solovey’s side; the horse wheeled and galloped away. Behind her she heard cries, but she did not look back. Solovey vaulted the damaged palisade and slipped in among the trees.
The horse knew her thought before she voiced it. We aren’t going on, are we?
“No.”
I wish you’d learn how to fight properly before you start getting into them, the horse said unhappily. A white ring showed around his eye. But he made no protest when she nudged him back to where the dead man lay in the wood.
“I’m going to try to help,” said Vasya. “Bogatyry ride the world, rescuing maidens. Why not I?” She spoke with more bravado than she felt. Her ice-dagger seemed a mighty responsibility, in its sheath along her spine. She thought also of her father, her mother, her nurse: the people she had not been able to save.
The horse did not reply. The wood was perfectly still, beneath a careless sun. The horse’s breathing and hers seemed loud in the silence. “No, I don’t mean to get into a fight,” she said. “I’d be killed, and then Morozko will have been right, and I can’t allow that. Sneaking, Solovey, we will sneak, as little girls who steal honeycakes do.” She tried for a tone of careless courage, but her gut was cold and shaking.
She slid to the ground beside the dead man and began to search in earnest for tracks. But she found nothing to show where the raiders had gone.
“Bandits are not ghosts,” Vasya said to Solovey in frustration. “What manner of men do not leave tracks?”
The horse switched his tail, uneasy, but made no answer.
Vasya was thinking hard. “Come on, then,” she said. “We have to go back to the village.”
The sun had passed its zenith. The trees nearest the palisade threw long shadows onto the ruined izby and hid a little of the horror. Solovey halted at the edge of the wood. “Wait for me here,” said Vasya.“If I call, you must come for me at once. Knock people down if you have to. I am not going to die because of their fear.”
The horse dropped his nose into her palm.
The village lay in ghostly silence. Its people had all gone to the church, where a pyre was building. Vasya, clinging to the shadows, crept past the palisade and flattened herself against the wall of Rada’s house. The woman was nowhere in sight, though there were drag marks where they had taken her husband away.
Vasya firmed her lips and slipped inside the hut. A pig in one corner squealed; her heart almost stopped. “Hush,” she told it.
The creature eyed her beadily.
Vasya went to the oven. Foolish chance, this, but she could think of nothing else. She had a little cold bread in her hand. “I see you,” she said softly, into the cold oven-mouth. “I am not of your people, but I have brought you bread.”
There was a silence. The oven-mouth was still, a deadly hush lay upon that house, whose master was dead, whose child had been stolen.
Vasya ground her teeth. Why would a strange house’s domovoi come at her calling? Perhaps she was a fool.
Then movement came from deep in the oven, and a small, sooty creature, all covered in hair, poked its head out of the oven-mouth. Twiggy fingers splayed on the hearthstones, it shrilled, “Go away! This is my house.”
Vasya was glad to see this domovoi, and gladder still to see him a solid creature, unlike the cloudy bannik in that ill-fated bathhouse. She laid her bread carefully on the bricks before the oven. “A broken house now,” she said.
Sooty tears welled in the domovoi’s eyes, and it sat down in the oven-mouth with a puff of ash. “I tried to tell them,” it said. “ ‘Death,’ I cried, last night. ‘Death.’ But they only heard the wind.”
“I am going after Rada’s child,” said Vasya. “I mean to bring her back. But I do not know how to find her. There are no tracks in the snow.” She spoke with her head turned, listening hard for footsteps outside. “Master,” she said to the domovoi. “My nurse told me that if a family ever leaves its house, a domovoi may follow, if his people ask him rightly. The child cannot ask, but I am asking on her behalf. Do you know where this child has gone? Can you help me follow her?”
The domovoi said nothing, sucking its splintery fingers.
It was only a faint hope after all, Vasya thought.
“Take a coal,” said the domovoi, voice gone soft, like settling embers. “Take it, and follow the light. If you bring my Katya back, my kind will owe you a debt.”
Vasya drew a pleased breath, surprised at her success. “I will do my best.” She reached into the oven with her mittened hand and seized a lump of cold, charred wood. “There is no light,” she said, examining it doubtfully.
The domovoi said nothing; when she looked, it had disappeared back into the oven. The pig squealed again; faintly Vasya heard voices from the other end of the village, the crunch of feet in the snow. She ran to the door, stumbling on warped floorboards. Outside it was true evening now, full of concealing shadows.
On the other side of the village, the pyre caught and went up: a beacon in the fading light. The wailing rose with the smoke, as the people mourned their dead.
“God keep you all,” Vasya whispered, and then she was out the door and away, back into the clean forest, where Solovey waited beneath the trees.
The domovoi’s coal was still gray as the evening. Vasya mounted Solovey and peered down at it, dubiously. “We’ll try different directions and see what happens,” she said at length.
It was getting dark. The horse’s ears eased back in obvious disapproval of such slipshod proceedings, but he set out to circle the village.
Vasya watched the cold lump in her hand. Was that—? “Wait, Solovey.”
The horse halted. The wood in Vasya’s hand now had a faint red edge. She was sure of it. “That way,” she whispered.
Step. Another. Halt. The coal brightened, grew hotter. Vasya was glad of her heavy mitten. “Straight on,” Vasya said.
Slowly their pace increased, from walk to trot, to ground-skimming lope, as Vasya grew surer of her direction. It was a clear night, moon nearly full, but bitterly cold. Vasya refused to think of it. She blew on her hands, drew her cloak round her face, and followed the light determinedly.