The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy, #1)

by Katherine Arden

This oven was a massive affair built of fired clay, taller than a man and large enough that all four of Pyotr Vladimirovich’s children could have fit easily inside. The flat top served as a sleeping platform; its innards cooked their food, heated their kitchen, and made steam-baths for the sick.

In Russian, Frost was called Morozko, the demon of winter. But long ago, the people called him Karachun, the death-god. Under that name, he was king of black midwinter who came for bad children and froze them in the night.

We shall wed her to Morozko, the lord of winter. Can any maiden ask for a finer or richer bridegroom? Why, he is master of the white snow, the black firs, and the silver frost!’

a hard prince, eaten with ambition, cold and clever and grasping. He would not have survived otherwise: Moscow killed her princes quickly.

Vasya had been disappearing into the forest ever since she could walk. She would come back in time for dinner, as always, bearing a handful of pine-nuts in apology, flushed and repentant, catlike on her booted feet.

the Muscovites were fond of Byzantine cookery, and the resulting collision with Russian ingredients did his stomach no favors.

Ivan Krasnii had only one son: the small blond wildcat Dmitrii Ivanovich.

Sarai was the seat of the Khan. It was there the great merchants went, to sell marvels to a court jaded by three hundred years of plunder.

The dark-haired stranger had left, and the woman was staring in the direction he had gone, with a look of such terror and agonized longing on her pale face that Pyotr, for all his troubles, found his hand darting almost involuntarily for the sword he was not wearing.

The stranger had the oddest eyes Pyotr had ever seen, a pale, pale blue, like a clear sky on a cold day.

winter grown old and bony.

Please, she is too young—too young for sorcery or the favor of the old gods.” The man laughed. Dunya heard a grinding bitterness in the sound. “Gods? There is but one God now, child, and I am no more than a wind through bare branches.”

“I’m not sure you’d like to live in the woods,” said Olga. “Baba Yaga might eat us.” “No,” said Vasya, with perfect assurance. “There is only the one-eyed man. If we stay away from the oak-tree he will never find us.” Olya did not know what to make of this.

Such eyes as I have never seen. He will be a monk or a saint or a hero.

lest the people take his flesh for relics and make him a martyr.

The water-spirit was old as the lake itself, and sometimes she looked wonderingly on Vasya, the brash child of a newer world.

“He is full of desire. Desire and fear. He does not know what he desires, and he does not admit his fear. But he feels both, strong enough to strangle.”

When the light struck her black hair it did not gleam bronze as Marina’s had, but dark red, like garnets caught in the silky strands.

There was something feral about her, for all her neat gown and properly braided hair. She looked like a wild thing new-caught and just barely groomed into submission.

“I am only a country girl,” said Vasya. She reached again into the blackberry bush, wary of thorns. “I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God. But I think you should be careful, Batyushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before.”

It was in the sun-symbols on the nurse’s apron, in that stupid woman’s terror, in the fey, feral eyes of Pyotr’s elder daughter.

His voice was like thunder, yet he placed each syllable like Dunya setting stitches. Under his touch, the words came alive. His voice was deep as rivers in spring.

He remembered how once she had emerged out of the dusk, at home in the cold and the falling night. He himself had taken mead from her hand, not thinking beyond his gratitude that he might slake his thirst. She is not afraid, Konstantin thought dourly. She does not fear God; she fears nothing. He saw it in her silences, her fey glance, the long hours she spent in the forest. In any case, no good Christian maid ever had eyes like that, or walked with such grace in the dark.

In the house, she was grave and wary, careless and charming by turn, all eyes and bones and soundless feet. But alone, under the sky, she was beautiful as a yearling filly, or a new-flown hawk.

If my sister sees fit to geld her husband, Father, she would have reason, and I would not dissuade her.”

The stallion snorted at her and pinned his ears. “You have bad manners,” Vasya told him. “But I suppose Kyril Artamonovich drags you around by the mouth.” The colt put his ears forward. You do not look like a horse.

He looked grateful and exasperated and angry and something darker. It might have been worry.

“Have you gone mad, Vasya?” “Let me go! You heard Anna Ivanovna. I’d rather take my chances in the forest than be locked up forever.” She was shaking, wild-eyed.

People say our misfortunes are my fault. Do you think I have not heard? I will be stoned as a witch if I stay. Perhaps Father is trying to protect me. But I’d rather die in the forest than in a convent.” Her voice broke. “I will never be a nun—do you hear me? Never!”

“They were going to send me to a convent. I decided I would rather freeze in a snowbank.” Her skin shivered all over. “Well, that was before I began to freeze in a snowbank. It hurts.”

The green eyes flared up to his again, mutinous instead of tentative. “I do not like half answers.” “Stop asking half questions, then,” he said, and smiled with sudden charm.

“You are a devil!” whispered Konstantin, clenching his hands. All the shadows laughed. “As you like. But what difference is there between me and the one you call God? I too revel in deeds done in my name. I can give you glory, if you will do my bidding.”

The blood flung itself out to Vasya’s skin until she could feel every stirring in the air.

“Nothing changes, Vasya. Things are, or they are not. Magic is forgetting that something ever was other than as you willed it.”

“All my life,” she said, “I have been told ‘go’ and ‘come.’ I am told how I will live, and I am told how I must die. I must be a man’s servant and a mare for his pleasure, or I must hide myself behind walls and surrender my flesh to a cold, silent god. I would walk into the jaws of hell itself, if it were a path of my own choosing.

One instant she saw a man with twisted blue scars on his face. Next instant, arcing over her, she saw a grinning, one-eyed bear whose head and shoulders seemed to shatter the sky. Then he was nothing at all: a storm, a wind, a summer wildfire. A shadow.

And then the night seemed to reach out and catch him up, fold him inside itself, so that there was only the dark where he had been.