The season will turn, the domovaya had said. What did that mean? Could she risk it? Should she? She looked up at the gathering dark, and knew she couldn’t make it back before nightfall.

Stay then, she decided. And she would take the bagiennik’s poisonous advice, and use the last of the light to gather firewood. Whatever dangers haunted this place, better to meet them with a good fire, and a full belly.

She set about gathering firewood, angry at her own credulity. The forest of Lesnaya Zemlya had been kind to her, and that trust was still there, though this place had no cause for kindness. A brilliant sunset reddened the water; the wind whistled through the pines. The lake was perfectly still, golden with sunset.

Ded Grib reappeared as she was chopping up a deadfall. “Don’t you know you mustn’t pass the night beside the lake in a new season?” he asked. “Or you will never get the old season back. If you go back to the house by the oak-tree tomorrow, it will be summer and no spring at all for you.”

“The bagiennik kept me in the lake,” Vasya said grimly. The girl was recalling white, sparkling days in Morozko’s house in the fir-grove. You will return on the same night you left, he had told her. She had, even though she spent days—weeks—in his house. She had. And now—would the moon wax and wane in the wider world, while she passed a single night in this summer country? If you could spend a day in the lake in minutes, then what else was possible? The thought frightened her, as even the bagiennik’s threats had not. The patterns of day and dark, summer and winter, were as much a part of her as her own breath. Was there no pattern here at all?

“I didn’t think you’d come out of the lake at all,” the chyert confided. “I knew the great ones were planning something for you. Besides, the bagiennik hates people.”

Vasya had an armful of firewood; she flung it down in fury. “You might have told me!”

“Why?” asked Ded Grib. “I can’t interfere with the great ones’ plans. Besides, you let one of the horses die, didn’t you? Maybe it would have been justice, if the bagiennik had killed you, for he loves them.”

“Justice?” she demanded. All the rage and guilt and trapped helplessness of the last few days seemed to spill out. “Have I not had enough justice these last days? I only came here for food; I have done nothing to you, nothing to your forest. And still you—all of you—”

Words failed her. In bitter anger, she seized a stick and flung it down on the head of the little mushroom.

She wasn’t prepared for his reaction. The cloudy flesh of his head and shoulder sheared away. The chyert crumpled with a shriek of pain, and Vasya was left standing, appalled, while Ded Grib went bloodlessly from white to gray to brown. Like a mushroom kicked over by a careless child.