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“Morochka,” she says to him one night, lying piled up in snowdrift blankets while he stares into the fir bough fire, “How many girls have you loved, since the beginning of time?”
She has been in Kiev for what Morozko knows is several months, but has felt like years and like moments to him in the house in the forest that is not a house, and is only back tonight. Solovey has been teasing her, since they arrived, about the boyars in the grand duke’s city who had eaten up her time with tales of their sons. The stallion is off running now, or flying; Vasya had explained that, while they love to ride together, sometimes he wants to remember himself just as he is. Morozko and the white mare had looked at each other long when she said it, and she had faltered. “Of course,” she had said, “you both know all about that.”
Her faltering is gone now, though. She is warm and her belly is full, and if he can hear her heart beating a little more quickly than usual, Morozko blames it on the quantity of mead they’d drunk together.
She is as bold as ever, bolder, even, because she knows he likes it.
“Many girls, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he responds, glancing at her. The tips of her red-black braids are barely visible in the cocoon she has made for herself, but her green eyes are bright.
“I thought as much,” she says. And then: “I think I Solovey and I will travel to the east next. I want to see the sea.”
“Oh?” he asks. “When will you go?”
“Tomorrow,” she says. “Goodnight, demon.”
“Goodnight, witch,” he laughs, and watches as the fire dims in response to her belief.
*
When she returns from the sea, Solovey has snarls in his mane and tail, and she spends hours in front of the fire picking them out with her fingers and a long-tailed bone comb that had been a fir twig before she started using it.
“Vasilisa,” Morozko says when he comes in, partway through the process, “how many knots have you untangled in this long, unnecessary way?”
“Many knots, Morozya,” she responds, looking up at him from under her eyelashes.
“I thought as much,” he says. “Where will you go next, when you have plaited Solovey more prettily than ever?”
“We will stay here, for a while,” she tells him, face blank. He can hear her heartbeat running like a winter hare, though. “I do not have anywhere else I particularly want to be, and Solovey has been yearning for this forest.”
“I have not,” says Solovey, “I have simply mentioned that the food in all these places we go leaves much to be desired, even with the wealth of the Winter King dripping from your fingers, Vasya.”
“It is true,” she says, and the conversation is sounding very rehearsed. Morozko feels his curiosity ignite. They are going to try to convince him of something. He does not know if he should allow himself to be convinced.
“Solnyshka,” she continues after a few moments, her tone neutral, and at first he is certain she is still talking to the horse, the star on whose forehead could be a little sun if one squinted, “what kind of feast do you think we should have tonight?”
“A good question,” the bay stallion hums. Then there is some silence, during which he realises that the question – and the endearment – was directed his way. It is a step beyond the diminutives she has been using more and more recently, things no one has called him since the creation of the world.
“Oh,” he says, trying to sound bored, although his heart has leapt into his throat, “whatever you like, Vasilisa Petrovna. Some brown bread, perhaps? Some cheese?”
“Some winter pears?” Solovey adds, sounding hopeful. “They will make up for all this brushing.”
“You like it,” Vasya scolds. “But yes, Morochka, pears would be just the thing.”
*
After nearly two weeks of stories by the fire and daylong rides through his domains, Vasya mounts Solovey and heads off into the south. It is the beginning of summer, and the gold she scoops from his dwindling snowbanks looks like little flowers. “Alyosha is getting married,” she tells him, by way of explanation. “And he has been too overworked, I think, to give his new wife much in the way of gifts.”
She has been gone from home for nearly five years, but still visits at least twice a season, bringing gifts or news or stories. The winter has been a harsh one, and the fields are still not recovered from their ravaging under the Bear. She tells him this, and more, every time she returns to him, but she does not ask him to help. This is the first time she has taken some of his riches to give to her family, and he does not begrudge them.
“Be safe, witch,” he tells her.
“Do not be too lonely without me,” she responds, and then she is off, and he has to catch up his jaw where it has fallen open. She is so very bold. He thinks he likes it perhaps too much.
*
It is high summer when she returns, and his house is still all snow and trees, but it is smaller, and he is drowsy. She clucks and shakes her head, and the hearth yawns wide under her power, the table groans with cream and butter and the freshest berries.
He has let his hair grow long, and it has tangled in his blankets. He blinks up at her confused face.
“You have only seen me in the summer when I have marshalled all my strength, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he tells her. “Even demons need to rest a little.”
She brushes Solovey and plaits flowers into his mane, then sends him off to gallop and to fly in the summer forest. She comes to the snowdrift bed and curls atop the blankets beside him, her cloak and boots discarded, her green eyes soft.
“Eat, Myshonak,” she murmurs, dropping sun-sweet berries into his mouth. “Even little mice cannot sleep all their weak season away.”
He cannot summon the energy to resist her when she coaxes his head into her lap, gently running her cold fingers through his long curls. He can feel the bits of ice he has left in her skin over the years, healing one hurt or another. They wake him, even as the rhythm of her hands in his hair threatens to drown him in sleep. He lies, caught between, as she pulls her comb from a branch and begins to work through the knots as if he is Solovey.
“I have never seen your hair so long, Morozya,” she says, conversationally, but he can see the flush on her cheeks through eyes half-lidded with pleasure. “Is this what you believe summer to be like?”
“Things grow in summer, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he manages. “Why should my hair not grow as well?”
She laughs and the sound vibrates through him.
“Yes,” she says, gathering the strands into one long plait. “Why should things not grow in the summer?”
When he wakes, she has gone, but the berries and the cream are still on the long table, and the white mare is helping herself to them.
“Morozko,” she says, when she catches his eye, “You look a fool.”
He feels like one as well, but it does not matter. He has felt the fool before, many times, with many girls. It will pass. It has always passed.
*
“Zolatka,” she asks, when she returns at midwinter and his house is as big as the world, and he starts. She sounds like a lover. He had not known he craved that, but now he wants to hear the tone, the sweetness of her words, over and over again. “How many of the many girls you have loved, since the beginning of the world, have given you children?”
The moment is broken. He thinks he understands, now. This is why he is precious to her. He wants to tell her, I am not a man, to father a child, but instead he asks, “Would you like a child, Vasilisa Petrovna?”
“That is not an answer,” she says, but she flushes and cannot meet his eyes.
“No,” he sighs, “I suppose it is not.” She is too stubborn for him, even if he knows what she is really asking. The original question must be addressed before they get to what she wants from him. “None of the many, many girls I have loved, since the beginning of the world, has given me a child. What would I do with a child, Vasilisa?”
“None of them? At all?”
“That is not an answer.”
It is her turn to sigh, but instead she just rolls her green eyes at him from where she is sprawled on the oven bench. “I do not know what you would do with a child, Morochka. Nor do I know what I would do with one, because I do not want one.”
He is confused, momentarily. “Would you like there to be a child out there that is mine?”
“No,” she says, firmly. “I just wanted to know.”
*
“You are asking the wrong questions,” he hears the white mare tell her, as he stalks through the forest on his way from the thaw, snowdrops in hand, and stops immediately.
The mare sees him in the trees and gives him a long, curious stare. He shakes his head. She returns her gaze to Vasya.
“What questions are the right ones?” Vasya huffs, and he can hear the frustration, more plaintive than angry. It is not a tone he is accustomed to hearing from her.
“Why do you assume all the girls he has loved have loved him enough to want to give him a child?”
“That is not an answer,” Vasya complains.
*
It is nearly midwinter again before she returns. Solovey does not stop to be brushed, but drops her at the hearth and whirls in a flutter of brown wings to race at the horizon. The white mare looks at Vasya, worry in her eyes.
“I think we stayed away too long,” Vasya admits. “It hurt him. I am sorry.”
“He will heal,” the white mare replies. “You have come home at the right time.”
Vasya does not look surprised to hear that word, home. She even repeats it, as if it is nothing. “It is always the right time to come home.”
He sets down a steaming loaf of brown bread and the crispest winter apples at her elbow. “Eat, witch,” he tells her, and then cannot say more because her wide smile has cut off his breath.
After, when they are on the oven bench and she is telling the tale of a khan’s son who tried to outrace her and Solovey, he notices her shivering.
“Are you cold, Vasilisa?” he asks, a little concerned. Since she learned to believe a fire wherever it needed to be, she has not shivered. At least, not that he has seen – perhaps she cannot believe quite so well when she is away?
“A little,” she responds. He opens his cloak and holds it out for her, and she shuffles over to press herself against his side. He can feel the fluttering of her heartbeat.
After a time, when her heart still has not slowed, he finds himself worried again. Is she sick? Is she afraid?
“Morochka,” she whispers, breaking into his thoughts. “How many, of all the many, many girls you have loved since time began, have loved you?”
His hand, which he finds has been stroking her hair of its own volition, stills.
“That is not a very polite question, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he manages, through the dull ache that her presence usually salves. “Nor one that I can answer. Am I to know the contents of a human heart?”
She stiffens. “You could ask, Morozko. If you wanted to know.”
He does not know how to answer that. He lifts his hand to her head again, but she shakes him off, worms out from under his cloak, and goes to bed.
*
In the morning, she is still there, and he does not know why he is surprised. She is so stubborn. So bold.
“Solnyshka,” she says, when she sees that he has come in. “I am sorry that I was rude to you, last night.”
He has never heard her apologise before, not for something like this, where it is unclear if she was even in the wrong. He had been feeling apologetic himself, but now he finds himself irritable, as if his skin is too tight.
“Have done, girl,” he snaps. “What game are you playing at? What do you want from me?” He tries to let all the overlapping versions of himself fall away so that only the dark winter of death shows through, but if she sees it, her hard face gives nothing away. There is no fear in her, not for him. He has liked it in the past, but now he wants her to be afraid, a little. He wants a distance.
“Am I not allowed to be kind to you?”
She is angry, he can see, but there is a hurt there as well. Good, he thinks. It is ending before it can begin. The many, many, many girls he has loved, since the beginning of the world, have taught him that beginnings are always going to end, so it is better to get the pain out of the way and go back to his long life.
“Vasilisa –“ he begins, and sees her face twist as if she is trying not to cry, and something in him cracks, just a little. “Vasya, you do not need to be kind to Death. I am sorry I have hurt you. Better that you leave now, and forget this house. Put your sweetness in a mouth that can taste it.” He finds that where he had wanted to be imperious, he is begging.
“No,” she says. “I will not leave. I do not want to leave. I do not want to forget this house, or to be sweet at all, much less for some man out in the world. I want to be here. I want to be kind to you. I am only afraid of not coming home to you, so you can stop trying to frighten me.”
She is stubborn.
She is bold – she stalks to him, laces fingers through his black curls, wrenches his head down to meet hers. She presses their foreheads together and he stoops without thinking. Her eyes are closed. Her breath comes fast. “I will not leave you,” she repeats. “Even when I die, I will be yours, Morochka.”
The words leave her lips and he is wracked with longing, but he does not move – to touch her, to wrap her in his arms, to kiss her like he had on the night two weeks before that first midwinter when she had very nearly died. He is the Winter King, and he is frozen.
But she is bold, and the ice under her skin glides against him as she moves both hands to cup his jaw. His eyes close without his willing them to, and he feels the small, quick gusts of her breath against his lips before she kisses him herself.
And then she is gone.
And she does not come back for a long time.
*
“Vasochka,” he says, through the racing of his pulse, “you must be hungry after so long a ride. Come in, come in, sit, eat.”
If she notices the endearment, she shows no sign, but she does sit on the long bench. It is midsummer and he is using all his energy to keep the snowy fir house as big and bright as it can be. There are berries on the table, like she had made last year. She eats them without looking.
They sit in silence for hours, as she brushes Solovey, who had gone to find her after it had been clear she was not merely sulking in the forest. Morozko, watching as she plaits, is regretting the decision to not let his hair grow. It is too late, now. She will notice, and feel trapped. Like he wants something from her.
They sit by the fire and he focuses on keeping the flames leaping upright. He does not notice that his posture has sagged, a little, until she touches his arm. “If you are tired,” she says, softly, “you should sleep.”
“No,” he tells her, but feels his eyelids heavy. “I want to be kind to you. How can I do that when I am asleep?”
*
When he wakes, there is a weight on his chest. Her red-black braid has come unravelled in the night, and spills in waves over his arm and shoulder. Her hand, where it rests on his stomach, is warm and cold in pieces. Her breath is slow and even against him, and he thinks he could die here.
“Vasya,” he whispers, and “Liubimaja.” How many girls has he loved since the beginning of the world? Many, many. He has loved them, the bold ones, the brave ones, the stubborn ones, the ones who fight and who refuse to die. He has loved many, many girls, and none of them have ever come back to him after he has sent them away.
He feels her lips on his chest, then she shifts within the arm he had not realised was slung around her and presses kisses to his collarbone, his throat, his jaw.
“What are you doing?” he asks her, against his own will. He did not want to speak, to break the spell.
“Kissing you, Morochka,” she replies, matter-of-factly. “Has it been so long that you forgot what to call it?”
It has not. She had kissed him not half a year ago, and he had kissed her even before that.
“Oh,” he responds, “I had not forgotten. But I thought you were angry with me. Angry people do not normally kiss each other, Vasochka.”
She laughs. “It is true, I am angry with you. But we are not kissing each other, are we?”
It is summer. He is weak. “Would you like us to be kissing each other?”
She laughs again, and he feels like a child, which is not something he has felt often. Young. Foolish. Half mad with wanting her.
“Zolatka, I would like for you to give me real answers to some very pressing questions. And then, yes,” she shrugs, sending her hair rippling over him. “I should very much like for us to be kissing each other. But only after the questions.”
“And the answers?”
“Ba, yes, foolish demon. After the questions and the answers, only.”
It is summer, but she brings up the snow, blizzards the outside world, blazes the fire. He feels a little pride, that she can do that, that he taught her how. He likes it, he thinks, how she responded to this way of shaping the world. Perhaps more than he likes her boldness.
But she is still bold, whether he likes it or does not.
“How many girls, since the beginning of time, have made you believe that they loved you?”
“One,” he says, “I think. I hope.”
“How many girls have asked you if you loved them?”
“Since the beginning of time?”
“Yes, yes, all of these since the beginning of time, Morochka. Be sensible.”
He is not sensible. He is giddy, as he has not been since the world was new.
“None of them, Vasochka. None of the ones I loved, and none of the ones I did not.”
“How many girls have stayed with you, after you tried to send them away?”
“One. So far. Although she has gone away quite often. But not when I told her to, not yet. She is a stubborn thing.”
She hides a smile. He can hear her heartbeat, can feel the pulse in her wrist where it rests on his chest.
“If one of these girls had wanted to stay with you, if she loved you, would you have let her?”
“Vasya, the girls I have loved have been very bad at following directions. I think, if any had wanted to, it would not have been a question of my letting her.”
She is smiling fully now.
“I will stay, then,” she says. “Do you love me?”
“I will never stop,” he tells her. “Is that the last question?”
“Yes,” she says, and leans down to kiss him. Before she can, he says, “Good. I have some of my own.” She sits back up, a wry look on her face that threatens his resolve, and gestures for him to go on.
“How many, many men, since the beginning of time, have been disappointed in their hopes to have you?”
“All but one,” she replies, “I think. I hope.”
“And how many men – always since the beginning of time, little witch – have told you they loved you?”
“One. Not counting my brothers, since that is not what you mean.”
He grins at her through sharp teeth. “Clever witch. Do you love me?”
“With all of my heart,” she replies. “Will you let me kiss you now?”
“No.”
She looks taken aback, so he continues, quickly, before she can begin to fear that she has misunderstood this conversation.
“I will ask, Vasilisa, my Vasochka, that you please kiss me whenever it strikes your fancy to do so.”
*
“Morochka,” she asks him, sometime later, voice heavy with sleep and sated with pleasure, “how many girls have kissed you?”
“Several, Liubimaja. But you are the only one who has kissed me more than once.”
“Since the beginning of time?”
“Of course. I am a fearsome demon, after all.”
“Very fearsome,” she agrees. “I like it very much.”
“I know,” he tells her. “That is why I am always extra fearsome, just for you.”
“Show me,” she demands, and he does.