“Hush, Masha,” Vasya said, when she could speak again. “Hush. It’s me. It’s all right. You’re all right. You’re safe.”

The child subsided, rigid in the older girl’s arms. The big horse put down his head and nosed her hair. She looked up. He lipped her nose very gently, and Marya squeaked out a tiny giggle. Then she buried her face in the older girl’s shoulder and wept.

“Vasochka, Vasochka, I don’t remember anything,” she whispered between sobs. “I just remember being scared—”

Vasya remembered being scared, too. At the child’s words, images from the night before crossed her mind like flung darts. A horse of fire, rearing up. The sorcerer withering, crumpling to the floor. Marya ensorcelled, blank-faced, obedient.

And the winter-king’s voice. As I could, I loved you.

Vasya shook her head, as though motion could dispel memory. “You don’t have to remember; not yet,” she said gently to the girl. “You are safe now; it is over.”

“It doesn’t feel like it is over,” whispered the child. “I can’t remember! How do I know if it’s over or not?”

Vasya said, “Trust me, or if you will not, trust your mother or your uncle. No more harm will come to you. Now, come, we must get back to the house. Your mother is worried.”

Marya immediately wrenched away from Vasya, who had little strength to stop her, and wrapped all four limbs around Solovey’s foreleg. “No!” Marya shouted, face pressed to the horse’s coat. “You can’t make me!”

An ordinary horse would have reared at such antics, or shied, or at the very least hit Marya in the face with his knee. Solovey only stood there, looking dubious. Gingerly, he put his head down to Marya. You can stay here if you like, he said, although the child did not understand him. She was crying again: the thin exhausted wail of a child at the end of endurance.

Vasya, sick with pity and anger on the girl’s behalf, understood why Marya did not want to go back to the house. She had been taken from that house, subjected to half-remembered horrors. Solovey’s large and self-confident presence was nothing if not reassuring.

“I have been dreaming,” the little girl mumbled into the stallion’s foreleg. “I can’t remember anything—except for the dreaming. There was a skeleton that laughed at me, and I kept eating cakes—more and more—even though they made me sick. I don’t want to dream anymore. And I’m not going back to the house. I am going to live here in the stable with Solovey.” She renewed her grip on the stallion.

Vasya could see that unless she chose to pry Marya off and drag her away—a procedure that her broken rib wouldn’t bear and Solovey would heartily disapprove of—the girl wasn’t going anywhere.

Well, let someone else explain to an irascible stallion why Marya could not stay where she was. In the meantime— “Very well,” Vasya said, and made her voice cheerful, “no need to go back to the house unless you wish it. Shall I tell you a story?”