Suddenly, with a muffled gasp, Sergei slumped over his horse’s mane and toppled sideways. Sasha caught him; Sergei’s placid horse didn’t move, only tilted a puzzled ear. Sergei’s skin was scarlet; he’d stopped sweating.

Behind the monks, Vasya glimpsed a woman with fair skin and hair bleached white, raising a pair of cutting shears in one bone-colored hand.

Not a woman. Without thinking, Vasya leaped, caught the chyert’s wrist, forced it backward.

“I have met Lady Midnight,” said Vasya to her, not letting go. “But not her sister Poludnitsa, whose touch, they say, strikes men with heat-sickness.”

Sasha was kneeling in the dust now, holding Sergei and looking stricken. Rodion had run for water. Vasya wasn’t sure he’d find any. The wheat-field at noon was the realm of Midday, and they had stumbled into it.

“Let me go!” hissed Poludnitsa.

Vasya did not slack her grip. “Let us go,” she said. “We have no quarrel with you.”

“No quarrel?” The chyert’s white hair snapped like straw in the sultry wind. “Their bells will be the end of us. That is quarrel enough, don’t you think?”

“The bell-makers wish only to live,” said Vasya. “As we all do.”

“If they can only live by killing,” snapped Lady Midday. “Better they all die.” Rodion came back without water; Sasha had risen to his feet, a hand on the searing hilt of his sword, but he couldn’t see who Vasya was talking to.

Vasya said to Midday, “Their deaths are yours; men and chyerti are bound together for good or ill. But it can be for good. We can share this world.” To show her good intentions, Vasya reached out and bloodied her thumb on the shears. Behind her, she heard the monks gasp, and realized that the touch of her blood had allowed them to see the demon.

Midday laughed, shrill. “Are you going to save us, little mortal child? When the Bear has promised us war, and victory?”

“The Bear is a liar,” said Vasya.

Just then Sergei’s thready voice whispered behind her, “Fear and flee, unclean and accursed spirit, visible through deceit, hidden by pretense. Whether you be of the morning, noonday, midnight, or night, I expel you.”

Midday cried out, this time in real pain; she dropped her shears, fell back, vanishing, vanishing…

“No!” Vasya cried to the monks. “It’s not what you think. It’s not what they think.” She lunged and seized Midday’s wrist, keeping her from disappearing utterly.

“I see you,” she said to her, low. “Live on.”

Midday stood an instant, wounded, afraid, wondering. Then she was swept up in a whirlwind and vanished.

Morozko stepped out of the noonday glare. “Didn’t your nurse warn you about wheat-fields in summer?” he asked.

“Father!” Sasha cried, just as Vasya turned back to the monks. Sergei was breathing too fast; his pulse vibrated in his throat. Morozko might have hesitated, but, muttering something, he knelt in the dust, laid long fingers against the frantic pulse in the monk’s neck. As he did, he breathed out, his other fist clenched hard.