It seemed a haze fell from her sight. She looked around and realized that they had met in the middle: Oleg, Vladimir, and Dmitrii, and also she, the Bear, and Morozko.

Dmitrii was half-fainting from his wounds; Vladimir supported him. Oleg looked triumphant. All around she saw only their own men. They had won.

The wind had dropped; the early snow fell steadily now. Lightly, silently, thickly, it covered dead enemies and dead friends alike.

Vasya just stared at Morozko, stupid with shock and weariness. A thin curtain of blood ran down from a scratch in the white mare’s neck. He looked as weary as she, and as sad, dirt and blood on his hands. Only Pozhar was unwounded: still as sleekly powerful as she’d been that morning.

Vasya only wished she could say the same. Her arrow-grazed arm throbbed, and that wasn’t even close to the pain in her soul.

Dmitrii had forced himself upright, deathly pale, and was walking over to her. She slid down Pozhar’s shoulder and went to meet him.

“You have won,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice.

“Where is Sasha?” said the Grand Prince of Moscow.

37.

Water of Death, Water of Life

DMITRII’S MEN CHASED THEIR FOES all the way back to Mecia—nearly fifty versts. Vladimir Andreevich, Oleg of Ryazan, and Mikhail of Tver led the rout, the princes riding side by side like brothers, and their men mingling like water, so that the eye could no longer tell who was from Moscow or Ryazan or Tver, for they were all Russians. They took the herds of Mamai’s train and killed the puppet-khan he’d brought; they sent the general himself fleeing to Caffa, not daring to go back to Sarai, where his life would be forfeit.

But neither the Grand Prince of Moscow nor Vasya took part in the rout. Instead, Dmitrii followed Vasya to a little sheltered copse not far from the river.

Sasha lay where they’d left him, wrapped in Vasya’s fur cloak, his flesh clean, inviolate.

Dmitrii half-fell, stumbling from his horse, and caught his dearest friend’s body in his arms. He did not speak.

Vasya had no comfort for him; she was weeping too.

A long silence fell in that copse, as the long day ended, and the light grew smoky and insubstantial. Snow still fell, softly, all around.

Finally, Dmitrii raised his head. “He should be taken back to the Lavra,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “To be buried with his fellows, in consecrated ground.”

“Sergei will say prayers for his soul,” said Vasya. Her voice was as rough as his, with shouting and with weeping. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “He wandered the whole of this land,” she said. “He knew it and he loved it. And now he will be bone, trapped in frozen earth.”

“But there will be songs,” said Dmitrii. “I swear it. He will not be forgotten.”

Vasya said nothing at all. She had no words. What did songs matter? They would not bring her brother back.