The nightingale hopped into the death-god’s hand. He closed his fingers delicately about the creature, picked it up. With his other hand, he scooped up a handful of snow. The snow melted to water in his hand; it dripped upon the bird, who at once went still and stiff.

Then, at last, he raised his eyes to hers. “Vasya,” he said, in a voice she knew. “Vasya, listen to me—”

But she could not reply.

For in the true world, the crowd drew back at a word from a man’s thunderous voice, and she was wrenched back to nighttime Moscow, bleeding in the trampled snow, but alive.

Perhaps she only imagined it. But when she opened her blood-smeared eyes, the death-god’s dark figure was still beside her, fainter than a noontime shadow, eyes urgent and quite helpless. He held the stiff body of a nightingale most tenderly in one hand.

Then he was gone. He might never have been there at all. She was lying across the body of her horse, sticky with his blood. Above her stood a man with golden hair, his eyes blue as midsummer. He wore the cassock of a priest and was looking at her with an expression of cold and steady triumph.

THROUGH ALL THE LONG ROADS and the griefs of his life, Konstantin Nikonovich had one gift that had never failed him. When he spoke, crowds grew pliant at the sound of his voice.

All that night, while the midnight snowstorm raged, he’d said extreme unction for the dying and comforted the wounded.

Then, in the black hour before dawn, he spoke to the people of Moscow.

“I cannot be silent,” he said.

At first his voice was low and gentle, addressing now this person, now that. As they began to pool about him, like water in the hollow of his hand, he raised his voice. “A great wrong has been done you.”

“Done us?” asked the soot-smeared, frightened people. “What wrong has been done us?”

“This fire was God’s punishment,” said Konstantin. “But the crime was not yours.”

“Crime?” they asked, uneasy, clutching their children.

“Why do you think the city burned?” Konstantin demanded. Real sorrow thickened his voice. Children, smothered with smoke, had died in their mothers’ arms. He could grieve for that. He was not so far gone. His words were hoarse with feeling. “The fire was God’s punishment for the harboring of a witch.”

“A witch?” they asked. “Have we harbored a witch?”

Konstantin’s voice rose. “Surely you remember? The one you thought was called Vasilii Petrovich? The boy—who was in truth a girl? Remember Aleksandr Peresvet, whom all men thought so holy, tempted into sin by his own sister? Remember how she deceived the Grand Prince? That very night the city caught fire.”

As he spoke, Konstantin felt their mood shift. Their rage and grief and fright were turning outward. He encouraged them in this, deliberately, deftly, like a blacksmith putting an edge on a sword-blade.