Then Vasya heard a faint, familiar rumbling, as though horses were coming near at a gallop over stones. But it was not horses.

The sound decided her. She thrust her basket at Ded Grib. “Stay here, both of you,” she said to the mare and to the mushroom-spirit. Barefoot, she dashed toward the glow of the low-burning fires, raising her voice to shout through the dark, “You! The camp! Wake up! Wake up! The river is rising!”

She half-ran, half-slid down the steep sides of the gully where they had made camp. The horses were picketed and jerking at their lines; they knew what was happening. Vasya cut their pickets and the beasts bolted for higher ground.

A heavy hand fell on Vasya’s shoulder. “Horse-thieving, boy?” asked a man, his hand pinching, smelling of garlic and rotten teeth.

Vasya wrenched away. She might otherwise have been afraid of him, for the touch and the reek brought back raw memories. But now she had more pressing concerns. “Do I look like I am hiding a horse in my hat? I have saved your horses for you. Listen. The river is rising.”

The man turned his head to look, just as a wall of black water exploded from downstream, came racing past them. The hollow where the band had made camp was instantly awash. Men, half-asleep, were running everywhere in the darkness, shouting. The water was rising unnaturally fast, throwing men off their feet and frightening them by its very strangeness.

One man began calling orders. “First the silver!” he shouted. “Then the horses!”

But the water was rising faster and faster. A man was pulled down by the flood, then another. Many of the men made it to higher ground. But the one who’d been calling orders was still floundering in the wash.

As Vasya watched, the vodianoy, the river-king, shot out of the water directly in front of him.

The man couldn’t see the chyert. But he jerked back anyway, on some instinct older than sight, and nearly went under.

“Prince?” said the vodianoy. His laugh was the grinding of rocks in the flood. “I was king here when princes groveled in the mud of my river and threw in their daughters to ensure my favor. Now—drown.”

The black water surged and knocked the man off his feet.

Vasya had taken refuge in a tree, while the current raged below. Now she dove from a limb straight into the torrent. The water snatched at her with astonishing force, and she could feel the vodianoy’s rage in it.

In her veins was the same strength that had broken the bars of her cage in Moscow. She wasn’t sleepy now.

The leader of the camp came up for air, gasping. Men were shouting to him from above, cursing each other. Vasya swam three strokes, cutting across the current. The leader was a big man, but fortunately he could swim a little. She seized him under the arms, and on a last burst of strength, heaved him to shore. A stab of pain ran down her half-knitted ribs.