She seized hold of herself; would he really vanish without a word?

She didn’t know. The madness had gone from her; she was only cold now, teeth set against a rush of shame. The voices of her upbringing sounded loud in her ears, all of them accusing.

Teeth sunk into her lower lip, she went to retrieve her clothes. Damn this shame, and damn the darkness. She turned her head, and light flared all at once from the candle in the wall-niche. Lighting it shook her not at all, as though her mind had accepted at last a world where she could make things burn.

Groping, she found her shift, drew it over her head. She was standing in the doorway between rooms, undecided and chilly, when the outer door opened.

The candlelight highlighted the bones of him, and filled his face with shadows. He had the bundle of her boy’s clothes in his hands. She caught the sound of voices and crunching footsteps outside the bathhouse.

Fear filled her, unbidden. “What is happening outside?”

He looked rueful. “I think that between us we have sealed the murky reputation of bathhouses.”

Vasya said nothing. In her mind, she was hearing again the sound of the mob in Moscow.

She saw him understand. “You were alone then, Vasya,” he said. “Now you are not.” She had both hands on the inner doorframe, as if men were coming in to drag her out. “Even then, you still walked out of the fire.”

“It cost me,” she said, but the gnarled hand of fear loosened its grip on her throat.

“The village isn’t angry,” Morozko said. “They are delighted. There is power in this night.” She felt a blush creeping along her cheekbones. “Do you wish to stay? It is hard for me to linger, now.”

She paused. It must be like coming to a place that had been home, but wasn’t anymore. Like trying to fit back into a skin already shed.

“Do your lands border my great-grandmother’s?” Vasya asked him suddenly.

“They do,” said Morozko. “How do you think my table once had strawberries for you, and pears and snowdrops?”

“So you knew the story?” she pressed. “Of the witch and her twin girls? You knew Tamara was my grandmother?”

“I did,” he said. He looked wary now. “And before you ask, no, I never meant to tell you. Not until the night of the snowstorm in Moscow, and by then it was too late. The witch herself was either dead or lost in Midnight. No one knew what had become of the twins, and I could remember nothing of the sorcerer, who had made magic to set himself apart from death. All these things I learned later.”

“And you thought me only a child, a tool to your purposes.”

“Yes,” he said. Whatever he thought or felt or hoped was buried deep, and locked tight. I am not a child anymore, she might have said, but the truth of that was written in his eyes on her. “Never lie to me again,” she said instead.