Hastily Vasya straightened her back, tried to refocus her mind. The darkness seemed to mock her. How could you separate the winter-king from winter? Impossible even to try. Her head swam.

“Vasya,” he said, more gently. “Come with me to my own lands. Winter will come soon enough to Moscow. Otherwise—”

“I am not asleep yet,” she said, suddenly fierce. “You set the Bear free; you must help me bind him.”

“With pleasure. In winter,” he said. “It is only a breath of time, Vasya; what are two seasons?”

“Little to you, perhaps, but a great deal for me and mine,” she said.

He did not argue again.

She was thinking of that forgetfulness, the strange slip of reality that made fire from nothing, or kept the eyes of all Moscow from seeing her. Impossible that the winter-king should walk abroad in summer. Impossible, impossible.

She clenched her fists. No, she thought. It isn’t.

“A little farther,” she said, and wordless, the white mare cantered on.

At last, when Vasya’s concentration was wavering like a flame in a high wind, when exhaustion ate at her, and his arm about her waist was the only thing keeping her upright, the cold grew a little less fierce. Then mud showed under the snow. Then they were in a world of rustling leaves. The white mare’s hooves rimed the leaves with frost where they fell, and still Vasya hung on.

Finally, she and Morozko and the two horses stepped between one night and the next, and she saw a campfire nestled in the bend of a river.

In the same instant, the full weight of summer’s heat fell on her body like a hand, and the last trace of winter fell away behind them.

Morozko sagged weightless against her back. She was alarmed to see his hand growing fainter and fainter, as frost dissolves at the touch of warm water.

Vasya half-turned and caught hold of his hands. “Look at me,” she snapped. “Look at me.”

He raised absolutely colorless eyes to hers, set in a face equally colorless, without depth, the way light flattens in a snowstorm. “You promised not to leave me,” Vasya said. “You are not alone, you said. Are you so easily forsworn, winter-king?” Her hands crushed his.

He straightened up. He was still there, though faint. “I am here,” he said, and the ice of his breathing stirred, impossibly, the leaves of a summertime wood. A note of wry humor entered his voice. “More or less.” But he was shaking.

You are back in your own midnight now, Pozhar informed them, indifferent to impossibilities. I am going. My debt is paid.

Vasya cautiously let go of Morozko’s hands. He did not immediately vanish, and so she slid down the white mare’s shoulder. “Thank you,” Vasya said to the golden mare. “More than I can say.”

Pozhar flicked an ear, spun, and trotted off without another word.

Vasya watched the mare go, a little forlorn, trying, yet again, not to think of Solovey. The campfire by the river glimmered bright in the darkness. “Traveling by midnight is all very well,” Vasya muttered. “But it involves far too much creeping up on folk in the dark. Who do you suppose that is?”