Slowly, her eyes focused on his face.

“Beg for your life,” he said. “Beg, and perhaps I will grant it you.”

She shook her head slowly, her eyes dazed and wandering.

He felt a surge of hatred; he bent his lips to her ear and whispered in a voice even he hardly recognized, “You will die in the fire, Vasilisa Petrovna. And you will scream for me, before the end.” He kissed her once, hard as a blow, holding her jaw in a vise-grip and tasting the blood on her split lip.

She bit him, bloodying his mouth in turn. He recoiled, and then they were staring at each other, with the hatred of each mirrored in the other’s eyes.

“God go with you,” she whispered, in bitter mockery.

“Go to the devil,” he said, and left her.

SILENCE FELL IN THE DUSTY CHAPEL, after Konstantin left. Perhaps they were building a pyre, perhaps they were readying something worse. Perhaps her brother would come at last, and this nightmare would be over. Vasya didn’t care. What had she to fear, in dying? Perhaps, beyond life, she would find her father again, her mother, her beloved nurse Dunya.

Solovey.

But then she thought of fire, of whips and knives and fists. She was not dead yet; she was terrified. Perhaps she could just—step away—walk into the gray forest beyond life and be gone. Death was someone she knew.

“Morozko,” Vasya whispered, and then his older name, the name of the death-god, “Karachun.”

No answer. Winter was over; he had faded away from the world of men. Shivering, she sank to the floor, leaned against the iconostasis. Outside people shouted, laughed, swore. But in that chapel, there was only the silence of the saints in the icon-screen, staring steadily down. Vasya could not bring herself to pray. Instead she tipped her aching head back and shut her eyes, measuring out her life in heartbeats.

She could not have slept, not there. Yet somehow the world faded away and she found herself walking once more in the black forest beneath a starry sky. She knew a dim, shocked relief. It was over. God had heard her plea; this was what she longed for. She stumbled forward, calling.

“Father,” she cried. “Mother. Dunya. Solovey. Solovey!” Surely he would be here. Surely he had waited for her. If he could.

Morozko would know. But Morozko wasn’t there; only silence met her cry. She struggled on, scrabbling, but her limbs were so heavy, and her ribs hurt worse and worse with every breath.

“Vasya.” He called her name twice before she heard. “Vasya.”

She tripped and fell before she could turn, found herself kneeling in the snow without the strength to rise. The sky was a river of stars, but she didn’t look up. The death-god was the only thing she could see. He was little more than a confluence of light and dark, wispy as cloud across the moon. But she knew his eyes. He was waiting for her, in the gray forest. She was not alone.