by Kim Wilkins
In an instant, it stopped. Stillness, heavier than before. The air around her tightened, froze. The temperature dropped and the sky snapped and popped.
“Where is the gold?”
Em turned. Behind her stood a man, and the shock of his sudden, unperceived presence was equalled only by the shock of his appearance.
He was a head taller than her, with dark curling hair and a strong, almost hooked nose. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was intensely attractive, with cool blue eyes and a wide mouth. He was almost naked. A skirt of feathers and furs was wrapped low on his hips, exposing a body as hard and smooth and perfectly proportioned as a sculpture. A double arch of feathers curved above his shoulders.
He stood very still and regarded her, as she regarded him.
“The gold,” he said.
She held out the ring on her opened palm. “Take it,” she said.
“Place it on the ground. It is best if I do not touch you.”
Em did as he asked, and he bent to pick the ring up, revealing a pair of enormous wings—white and spotted black like the wings of a snow owl—which sprouted between his muscular shoulder blades.
He stood and caught her staring at him. “My appearance makes you curious?”
“You must be cold,” she said with a smile, glancing at his bare feet.
“There is nobody colder than me.” He appraised the ring. “Mir gold, it’s very beautiful.”
“It’s yours if you help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you.” He smiled, but the deep arch of his dark brows rendered the smile menacing. He slipped the ring onto his pinky finger. “My name is Morozko.”
“And what are you?”
Morozko shook his head. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’m a Mir woman, Bolotnik was a vodyanoy, Vikhor was a leshii. What are you?”
“I’m Morozko. There’s only one of me.” He flexed and the wings opened. They were easily ten feet across, dazzling as snow, and an icy chill radiated from them, frosting her skin beneath her clothes. He folded them again. “I am the father of frost.”
Em took a deep breath. “Morozko, I thank you for your help. I’m on a journey, but my travelling companion has been stolen by russalki. I think I know where he is. I just have to know how to get him back safely.”
Morozko listened, blinking slowly. Em found herself wishing he would stand a little further off. “Mir woman,” he said carefully, “this is not your greatest problem.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Continuing your journey, rescuing your companion. They are small problems. You have a far greater one of which you are unaware.”
A twinge of dread touched her heart. “What do you mean?”
He nodded towards her wrist. “That poison is killing you.”
Em turned her wrist over and inched back her sleeve gingerly. The wound was still raw. It ached and seeped, but Em had been heartened by the fact that it had grown no worse. She had even started to think it would slowly heal by itself. “Really?”
“Who struck you this blow? A swamp spirit?” His lip curled. “They are the foulest of creatures, their poison is as slow and deadly as stagnant slime. You will die from this wound. It will be agonising and unpleasant. Your companion, if rescued, will have to go on alone.”
Em stared at her cut wrist, a rush of surreal dread momentarily taking her breath.
“Unless…” he began.
“Unless what?” she said, returning her attention to him.
“I could freeze it. Frozen poison doesn’t travel.”
She held out her wrist. “Go on.”
“Are you certain?”
“Certain that I don’t want to die from swamp poison? Yes.”
“I must warn you, though, that once I’ve touched you, I will always be able to find you.” His smile softened the portent of the words. “It’s nothing you need to fear, because I have no cruel intent towards you. I am not a flesh-eater like the others. Those who bear my mark…I always own a little piece of them.”
Em offered her wrist again. “At least I’ll be alive for you to find.”
“What is your name?” he asked.
Em hesitated. “Em,” she said.
“I am cold, Em. If you allow me to touch you, you will be cold too. From here on, cold will live inside you.”
Em hesitated, understanding that this decision was not to be made lightly. The alternative was to die slowly of blood poisoning. She nodded. “I want you to freeze it,” she said. “I’m not ready to die yet.”
“Hold very still,” he said.
Em clenched her fist and held her arm perfectly steady. Morozko took a step closer, and she felt the cold exuding from his hard body and shivering across her skin. He reached out, extending his index finger. He touched the very tip of it to the edge of the wound, and Em jumped. Freezing electricity.
“Still,” he said again, soothingly.
She took a breath and focused her mind. It would hurt, but then it would be over. The needlepoint of icy pain returned as he ran the tip of his finger across the cut. Her body shuddered, her organs shivered inside her, her jaw trembled. The searing cold drew up her wrist, then stopped when he took his hand away. She looked closely at the wound. It was white and sealed over. Frozen.
“Can it thaw?” she said. “In front of a fire?”
“No. Never. It’s for always.”
Em realised that, despite the withdrawal of his icy touch, she was still very cold. “What about the rest of me? If I sit in the sun, will I feel more comfortable?”
“No, but now cold can never hurt you. You can’t die of it, or freeze off your toes. You needn’t fear the cold.” He tilted his head almost imperceptibly. “Nor will you ever feel warm again.”
Despite what he had said, she pulled her cloak around her tighter, as though it could help. “Maybe I will if I get back to Mir. Maybe enchantments can’t cross the veil.”
“I cannot answer with any certainty. Nobody I’ve touched has ever returned to Mir.” He nodded once, his black curls falling forward. “It’s time for me to go.”
“Wait! What about Daniel? The russalki?”
“You already have your gold’s worth of help. I don’t like to interfere with the russalki.”
“How can I help him?”
“Can you swim?”
She nodded.
“You needn’t be afraid of the icy depths of the river now. Just go and take him. They’re weak and stupid.” He extended his wings behind him. They beat slowly, sending a blast of cold air over her. “Goodbye. Until I see you again.” The wings flapped and he extended his arms along them. He coiled into a half-crouching position, then with a grunt launched himself upwards. It was an incredibly athletic movement, muscles and sinews flexing and contracting under his pale skin: a man’s movement, not a bird’s. Then the wings caught the air, they beat and he rose and flew up into the treetops, briefly blocking the sun, disappearing beyond her sight.
Em had the odd, unfamiliar sensation that she had lost something.
She pulled up her sleeve, looked at the wound again, touched it with her finger. Frozen solid. A cold ache drew down inside her, and she longed to sit in the sun and find a little warmth and comfort.
But that was gone forever.
Em returned to the campsite and kicked over the fire. She stripped off her cloak and left it behind. It made no difference to her body temperature, so she may as well be without it weighing her down. It was odd, the coldness inside her. As though she had swallowed a handful of snow, its chill prickles spreading out into her blood. Rather than her body regaining its heat with time, the twitch of cold lingered. She unconsciously pressed her shoulder blades towards each other, and a shiver fluttered through her again. Along with warmth, she had lost stillness.
She dived into the water and surfaced, breaststroking her way across to the other side. The current pulled her slowly off course, and she reached the opposite bank about twenty feet do
wnstream of Daniel’s fur cloak. She returned by foot, picked up the cloak and folded it over her arm. He would need it, when she found him.
Daniel had indicated that the russalki didn’t like to be too far from the water, so it was reasonable to assume that sticking to the bank of the river was her best option for finding him. But should she move upstream, back to where they had passed through the colony of russalki the previous day? Or downstream, in the direction they had brought him to remove his cloak? They were already three hours ahead of her, so she had to make the right decision.
Em searched the muddy ground. Footprints led back into the water. They had swum with him, but in which direction?
She looked left, right, at the ground again. Had no idea which way to go.
Downstream.
The word popped into her head with a cold hiss. It reminded her of the noise of car tyres driving through a freezing puddle. The frozen line on her wrist tingled, and she felt again the echo of Morozko’s touch.
“Downstream?” she whispered to the dawn. There was no reply.
She turned and headed downstream.
An hour’s journey away, she found the rest of Daniel’s clothes, cast haphazardly along the bank. She bent to pick them up. The sling lay amongst it all, empty. So the russalki had the bear. She tried to make sense of the prints in the mud, but they were chaotic and illegible.
Em straightened, hooking Daniel’s clothes over her frozen forearm. She gazed off down the river. Quiet trees hung over it, the odd silver-violet of the sky lending their green leaves a bruised lustre. A misty haze hung over the river, obscuring the bends in the distance. How far had the russalki taken Daniel, and were they still on the move? If they were swimming with the current, they could be miles ahead of her. She could be following them for days before she caught up with them. The further south she went, the further she moved off the path to the Snow Witch.
“Damn Daniel,” she muttered, then remembered it was her fault that the russalki had his name to bind him. She shivered, wishing the sunlight slanting through the trees could penetrate her skin. Her best hope was that the russalki would take Daniel to a fixed location, home in a pond or a cave. If they stopped, even for half a day, that would give Em a chance to catch up.
Her stomach growled, her heart was cold and her body ached. But Em kept moving. Downstream, as Morozko had instructed.
As the dream continued, Daniel began to forget about Before. Life above the water had been cruel, intractable. Now Lobasta had helped him cross into a violet- and green-dappled world buzzing with pleasures. Beyond the surface, the sun had risen, and the light pierced the water and refracted into daydreaming shards which quivered around him. The russalki swam with him downstream, passing his pliant body from one set of arms to another. Their hair trailed in his mouth, their soft breasts crushed against his back, and their lips pressed into his lips every few seconds, pushing sweet breath into his lungs and sending tiny bubbles fizzing around his face. With their breath came more than air to keep his lungs moving, but a forgetting mist, erasing his thoughts of how he came to be here, or whether he should try to escape, even of who he was. If they didn’t repeat his name over and over, he would have forgotten it by now.
Eventually—hours or moments later—they dragged him onto the bank again. They rolled his body between theirs, laughing and singing his name, playing with him the way kittens play with a ball of wool. Sensual pleasures embraced him, and more time passed without him knowing. The sky grew dim, the last of the daylight was vanishing. Lobasta took his hand and walked him to the water’s edge.
“What is it?” she asked him.
He regarded her dumbly, no understanding of what she meant.
“Down there.” She pointed to the water. He saw only dim currents.
“Ah,” she said, then passed her fingers over his eyes. “You need a second sight.”
It was like a dark cloud breaking open onto blue sky. Now he could see into the water, as though it was lit by phosphorescence. A carved figure rested on a rock beneath the surface, between billowing weed and darting fish. It was a golden bear.
“I don’t know,” he said, but couldn’t feel the words pass his lips.
Lobasta understood him all the same.
“Think harder,” she said.
“A bear,” he replied, then time grew elastic again and it was deep in the night. The girls all around him were sleeping, their soft white limbs flung out casually. He lay tight between them, naked, but not cold. Their combined body heat kept him warm. The river flowed past, midges settled their delicate feet over his torso. He felt no stinging pain, as though his skin was now only alive to pleasure.
The vision of the bear niggled at the back of his mind. Something important…he couldn’t quite catch it. A sinuous arm wound about his throat, dragging him up into a warm lap. It was Lobasta.
“You’re awake,” she said, delighted.
He tried to speak, but no words emerged, and soon his mouth was filled again with warm wet kisses.
It was close to dawn when the thought came to him again. The bear, which Lobasta had stored down in the rock pool, who was she?
She.
Somebody had given him to her. A beautiful face crossed his mind, but melded in his imagination with Lobasta’s face.
“Who are you thinking of?” Lobasta said, her eyebrows twitching with anger.
He shook his head, realised his skin was prickling with cold.
“The bear,” Lobasta said. “Where did you find her?”
A word insinuated itself into his mind. Rose?
“What’s he doing?”
“Why does he twitch so?”
“He’s cold. Is our spell broken?”
At once the word was on his tongue, and for the first time since this sensuous dream began, he heard his own voice. “Rosa!” It was a hoarse, desperate cry, and it frightened him. The dream shattered, he was freezing and wet.
“Throw him in the water!”
“He has betrayed us!”
Lobasta was sobbing. Daniel tried to climb to his feet, but his body was too weak.
Insistent hands closed on him, dragged him roughly. He hit the water with a splash, and began to sink. A spark of instinct made him move his legs and arms, propel himself to the surface.
Then Lobasta was there again, her lips closing onto his. He expected the sweet breath that he had grown used to since they took him, opened his mouth willingly.
But instead of pleasant air, a pall of black fog poured into him. A harpy’s shriek sounded in his ears, and he fell: under water, under consciousness.
As the sun climbed high in the violet sky and sent trembling shafts of light across the river, Em kept moving. She followed the bank past rock pools and shallow cliffs, and then down into flat muddy fields and through trees and rotting undergrowth. She was hungry, but didn’t stop to forage for food. Anyway, the cold inside her made the hunger mild by comparison. Here and there she would see signs that the russalki had passed this way. A long silken hair caught on a branch and glinting in the sun, or skidding footprints in and out of the water. Once she thought she heard laughter, far ahead of her.
With determination, Em closed the distance. As the day bloomed and then faded, she moved and didn’t rest. Even though she had walked for hours and sometimes she had run, her body temperature had not risen even a fraction. Frost lived under her skin, the marrow in her bones was iced over.
The irony was not lost on her: people had always said she was cold.
The wound, however, had started to heal. It itched, didn’t appear so red and raw, and the pain had withdrawn. The yellow substance had frozen to white and, while taking a brief rest, Em had picked up a pointed twig and scraped some of the poison out. When the skin healed up, she didn’t want the poison trapped inside. Hope still lived in her: one day, she might be back home. Perhaps then she could thaw.
The shadows grew long and the sun sank in a splash of golds and greens. Voices were carried up th
e river to her, and she knew she was close. Perhaps they would stop and camp for the night. She moved slower now, trying to be quiet. Dusk had settled, night was a shade away. Laughter ahead, female voices, not Daniel’s.
Em clung to the shadows of the trees. The bank of the river sloped away onto a little flat outcrop, perhaps a hundred feet distant. Grass grew down to the edge of the rocks, and below them was a still pool, six feet across. This is where the russalki had stopped.
At first Em couldn’t see Daniel. Daylight had fled, and branches and bushes blocked her sightline. She counted three or four girls, though. They moved about, fussing and giggling. She inched a little closer, crouched beside a fallen tree, and peered over. No, there were only three: one pale blonde, one with streaming ginger hair, and a third who appeared almost green. Lying between them, looking as though he was already dead, was Daniel.
No, not dead. His head lolled to the side and his eyes were glassy, but he was alive, his gaze tracking one of the girls.
All of them were completely naked, but didn’t appear to be suffering from the evening cold.
The redhead moved, sat on the outcrop and dangled her feet in the water. She called something back to the others, and there were more giggles. Daniel had closed his eyes.
Em placed Daniel’s clothes on the ground, sat on them and watched for a while. How could she get near enough to take Daniel away from them when they were all crowded so close? Morozko had said they weren’t strong, but they outnumbered her and, besides, Daniel would resist going.
“Think, Em, think,” she muttered. A net? Rope? She had neither of those things. She had only her hands and her brain.
Of course. Just wait until they slept.
She relaxed against the log, turning her back and gazing at the first pale stars glimmering above. The russalki had probably stopped to rest for the night. Once they were sleeping, Em would steal down there and drag Daniel away. But if they woke…
Daniel, if he wasn’t under their spell, could help himself. He was only vulnerable to his name, so Em would have to ensure he couldn’t hear them say it. She picked up the edge of his woollen scarf, and unpicked a thread. Earplugs, then. Maybe even some mud to clap over his ears. The activity would keep her busy.