Voices sounded in the corridor.

“I heard something.”

“You imagined it.”

A pause.

“The door is ajar.”

A creak as the door swung open. A heavy step. “There is no one here.”

“What fool left the door unlocked?”

“A thief?”

“Search the room.”

After all this? Were they to find her so, drag her up into Moscow, where Konstantin would be waiting?

No. No they would not.

A crack of thunder sounded suddenly outside, as though to give voice to her panic and her courage both. The palace shook. There came a sudden roar of rain.

The men’s torches went out. She heard them swearing.

Her hands trembled. The sounds of storm, the darkness all around, the great door opening at her touch, were like three pieces of a nightmare. Reality was shifting too fast to understand.

The men’s shock at the noise and unexpected darkness had won her a reprieve, but that was all. They would relight their torches. They would search, and find her. Could she make herself invisible this time? When they were searching for her in this small room?

She wasn’t sure. So instead Vasya clenched her fists and thought of Morozko. She thought of the sleep like death that the winter-king held in his hands. Sleep. The men would go to sleep. If she could only forget they were awake.

She did. And they did. They crumpled to the packed-dirt floor of the treasure-room. Their cries died away.

Morozko was there, between one blink and the next. She hadn’t put the men to sleep. He had. He was there, himself, real, in the treasure-room with her.

Now the winter-king was turning pale eyes on her. She stared. It was really him. Pulled to her, somehow, as she remembered his power. As though drawing him to her was easier than calling down sleep herself.

Summoned. She’d summoned the winter-king like a stray spirit.

They both realized it at the same time. The shock in his face mirrored the feeling in hers.

For an instant, they were silent.

Then he spoke. “A thunderstorm, Vasya?” he said, with effort.

Speaking between dry lips, she whispered, “It wasn’t me. It just happened.”

Morozko shook his head. “No it didn’t just happen. And now, with the rain, it is dark enough outside. He need no longer delay. Fool, I cannot keep him distracted from a cellar!” Morozko wasn’t wounded, but he looked—battered—in a way she could not define, and his eyes were wild. He looked as though he’d been fighting. He probably had been, until she pulled him away, unknowing.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said, her voice small. “I was so frightened.” Reality was rippling around her like cloth in a high wind. She wasn’t sure if he was really there or if she’d just imagined him. “I am so frightened…”

Without thinking she cupped her palms and found them suddenly full of blue flames, and she could see his face properly. Fire in her hands…It didn’t burn her. She was on the edge of mad laughter, as blind terror mingled with newfound power. “Konstantin saw me,” she said. “I ran. I was so afraid; I couldn’t stop remembering. So I called a thunderstorm. And now you’re here. Two devils and two people—” She knew she wasn’t making sense. “Where is the bridle?” She cast around, gripping the fire in her two hands as though it were an ordinary lamp.