Vasya watched Pozhar go, eyes fixed on the brightness, and only looked down when Solovey nudged her in the small of her back. She buried her face in her horse’s mane, breathed the reassuring smell of him. He had none of Pozhar’s alarming tang of smoke. She could even, for an instant, forget the smell of blood and filth, fire and iron.

A coolness at her back, and she lifted her head and turned.

Morozko had dirt under his nails, a streak of soot on his cheek. The white mare behind him looked as weary as he, her proud head hanging low. She nuzzled Solovey, her colt, once, lightly.

Morozko looked weary, as men are weary, at the end of long labor. His eyes searched her face.

She took his hands in hers. “Will it be thus for you,” she asked him, “so long as you live? To stand beside us, and to grieve for us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps. But—I think that I would rather feel pain than not feel anything at all. Perhaps I am grown mortal, after all.”

His tone was wry, but then his arm closed around her tightly, and she put her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his shoulder. He smelled of earth and blood and fear, of that day’s slaughter. But beneath, as always, were the scents of cold water and of pine.

She tilted her head up and pulled him down to her and kissed him fiercely, as though at last she could lose herself, forget duty and that day’s horror in the touch of his hands.

“Vasya,” he said, low, in her ear. “It is almost midnight. Where do you wish to go?” His hand was in the snarls of her hair.

“Somewhere with clean water,” she said. “I am sick to death of blood. And then? North. To tell Olya how…” She trailed off, had to steady her voice before she continued. “Perhaps—after—we may ride to the sea together, and see the light on the water.”

“Yes,” he said.

She almost smiled. “And then? Well, you have a realm in the winter forest, and I have mine, on the bow-curve of a lake. Perhaps we might forge one country in secret, a country of shadows, behind and beneath Dmitrii’s Russia. For there must always be a land for chyerti, for witches and for sorcerers, and for followers of the forest.”

“Yes,” he said again. “But for tonight, food and cool air, clean water and untainted earth. Come with me, Snegurochka. I know a house in a winter forest.”

“I know,” she said, and a thumb brushed away her tears.

She would have said she was too tired to vault to Solovey’s back, but her body did it despite her.

“What did we gain?” Vasya asked Morozko as they rode away. The snow had stopped, the sky shone clear. The season of frost had barely begun.

“A future,” returned the frost-demon. “For men will say in later years that this was the battle that made Rus’ a nation of one people. And chyerti will live on, unfaded.”