But it wasn’t torches, she realized, squinting. It was the golden mare, alone. Her glow from the night before had dimmed; she was stumbling on a bad foreleg, her breast spattered with foam. Vasya thought she heard whispers in the wood beyond the horse. A foul smell gusted on the wind.

Swiftly, Vasya threw wood onto her little campfire. “Here,” she called.

The mare tried to run, tripped over nothing, turned her steps to Vasya. Her head hung low. In the newborn firelight, a gash in her foreleg was clearly visible.

Vasya picked up her ax and a flaming log. She couldn’t see what pursued the mare, though the smell of it thickened all around them, rotten-ripe, like carrion in the heat. Holding her pitiful weapons, she backed toward the water. Vasya had no love for the living spark that ignited Moscow. But—she had failed her own horse. She would not fail this one. “This way,” she said.

The mare had no words in reply, nothing but terror, communicated with her whole body. Still she came toward Vasya.

“Ded Grib,” Vasya called.

A patch of mushrooms, glowing sickly green in the darkness, quivered. “You had better survive this. What good will my being first be, otherwise? Everyone is watching.”

“What—?”

But if he answered she did not hear, for the Bear stepped softly out of the trees, into the moonlight beside the water.

IN MOSCOW, HE HAD looked like a man. He still did, but it was a man with sharp teeth, and wildness in his single eye; she could see the beast in him stretching out like a shadow at his back. He seemed stranger, older: at home in this impossible forest.

“I suppose this is why the bagiennik wanted me to spend the night in the forest,” she said, standing tense. Hoarse, snarling breaths sounded from the undergrowth. “He did want me dead, after all.”

The unscarred corner of the Bear’s mouth curled. “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Stop puffing up like a cat. I didn’t come to kill you.”

The burning log had begun to scorch her hand. She flung it onto the ground in between them. “Hunting the firebird then?”

“Not even that. But my creatures will have their sport.” He hissed at the mare, grinning, and she shied back, her hind feet in the water.

“Leave her be!” Vasya snapped.

“Very well,” said the Bear, unexpectedly. He seated himself on a log beside her fire. “Won’t you sit with me?”

She didn’t move. His dog-teeth gleamed sharp and white in the gloom when he smiled. “Truly, I do not desire your life, Vasilisa Petrovna.” He opened his empty hands. “I wish to make you an offer.”

That surprised her. “You have already offered me my life. I didn’t take it; I saved myself. Why would I take anything less from you?”

The Bear did not answer directly. Instead, he looked up at the tree-fringed starlight, breathed deep of the summer night. She could see the stars reflected in his eye, as though he were drinking the sky after long darkness. She did not want to understand that joy. “I passed uncounted lives of men bound to a clearing at the edge of my brother’s lands,” said the Bear. “Do you think he was a good steward of the world while I slept?”