Before it could fall, Sasha heaved himself sideways, tackled the Tatar, threw him to the ground.

“Sasha!” she screamed. The mare’s pace freshened at once, the weight off her back, but Vasya was already wheeling the horse round. Her brother and Chelubey were fighting on the ground, but the Tatar had the upper hand. His fist snapped Sasha’s head back; she saw a glitter of blood in the fire. Then he was rising to his feet, leaving her brother where he lay. Chelubey called his horse, shouting at the other riders.

Sasha dragged himself to his knees. There was blood on his mouth. His lips formed a single word—Run.

She hesitated. The mare felt it and slowed.

Just then, a streak of flame shot across the heavens.

It was like a star falling: scarlet and blue and gold. The streak of flame dropped lower, lower, surged like a wave, and suddenly there was a tall golden mare, glowing in the grass, galloping alongside them.

Cries of rage and wonder from the Tatars.

“Pozhar,” Vasya whispered. The mare slanted an ear at the other horse, turned her other ear back to the men riding them down. Get on my back.

Vasya didn’t question it. She stood up, balancing on the bay mare’s back as she galloped. Pozhar had shortened her stride to pace the other horse and Vasya stepped sideways, lightly, and dropped to the mare’s golden withers. The mare’s skin was burning-hot between her knees.

A few of the oncoming men had bows; an arrow whistled past her ear. They were just inside bowshot, angling back toward the place where her brother lay. What to do? Miraculously, she had Pozhar’s speed now, but her brother was on the ground. Another arrow whistled past her cheek just as she glimpsed the Midnight-road.

An idea came to her then, so reckless her breath caught. With the rage and terror in her heart, the limits of her knowledge and her skill so miserably evident, she could think of nothing else.

“We have to get back to this same midnight. We have to come back for him,” Vasya told the mare grimly. “But we need to get help first.”

You didn’t understand, Midnight had said.

The mare set foot on the Midnight-road and they were swallowed up by the night.

THEY WOULD GET BACK to the Tatar camp on the same midnight—she would not have left otherwise. But it felt hideously like she’d abandoned her brother to die, as she galloped through the wild darkness, trees lashing at her face. She sobbed into the mare’s neck for a stride or two, in horror, in fear for Sasha, in sheer disgust at her own blundering, at the limits of her skill.

The golden mare did not move like Solovey. Solovey was round through the barrel and easy to ride. Pozhar was faster, leaner, her withers a hard ridge, her stride a great heave and surge, like riding the crest of a flood.