Whom to trust? The voices of men were growing louder. Their crunching footsteps broke into a run. Her only choices were fire or darkness or the devil in between.

“Go—go!” shouted Varvara. She placed Vasya’s bloody palm on the bark and shoved. Vasya found herself stumbling forward. The darkness loomed up, and then the Bear’s hand closed about her arm, an instant before the night swallowed her. She was spun to face him, her numb feet clumsy and scraping on the snow. “Go into the darkness,” he breathed. “And you will die.”

She had no words, no courage, no defiance left. She made no answer at all. The only thing that drove her to gather all her strength and wrench away from him, fling herself into the night, was the desire to get away, from him, from the noise, from the smell of fire.

She broke his grip and hurled herself into the dark. Instantly, the lights and the noise of Moscow were swallowed up. She was in a forest all alone, beneath an unsullied sky. She took one step forward, and then another. And then she tripped, fell to her knees, and could not muster the strength to rise. The last thing she heard was a half-familiar voice. “Dead just like that? Well, perhaps the old woman was wrong.”

Behind her, somewhere, it seemed the Bear was laughing again.

And then Vasya lay still, unconscious.

IN THE TRUE WORLD, the Bear’s breath hissed between his teeth, still with that edge of angry laughter. He said to Varvara, “Well, you have killed her. I didn’t even need to break my word to my brother. I thank you for that.”

Varvara said nothing. The Eater’s greatest power is his knowledge of the desires and weaknesses of men. Varvara’s mother had taught her much of the ways of chyerti. Varvara had tried to forget what she knew. What did it matter? She had not the eyes to see them, as her sister liked to remind her.

But now the Eater was free, and her mother and her sister were gone.

Two young men came stumbling up, drunk. In their eyes was a hungry light. “Well, you’re old and you’re ugly,” said one. “But you’ll serve.”

Without a word, Varvara kicked the first man between the legs, put a hard shoulder into the second. They fell yelping to the snow. She heard the Bear’s sigh of satisfaction. Above all, her mother had said, he is a lover of armies, of battles, and of violence.

Holding her skirts, Varvara ran, back to the lights, the chaos of the posad and thence up the hill of the kremlin. As she ran, she heard the Bear’s voice in her ears, though he had made no move to follow her. “I must thank you again, No-Eyes, that the little witch is dead, and my promise is unbroken.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Varvara whispered between clenched teeth. “Not yet.”