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Prologue

A girl rode a bay horse through a forest late at night This forest had no na—and the only sound was the snow’s silence and the rattle of frozen trees

Alht menaced by ice and storirl and her horse went on through the wood, dogged

Ice coated the fine hairs about the horse’s jaw; the snow mounded on his flanks But his eye was kind beneath his snow-covered forelock, and his ears moved cheerfully, forward and back

Their tracks stretched far into the forest, half-sed by ne

Suddenly the horse halted and raised his head Arove The firs’ feathery boughs twined together, their trunks bent like old men

The snow fell faster, catching in the girl’s eyelashes and in the gray fur of her hood There was no sound but the wind

Then—“I can’t see it,” she said to the horse

The horse slanted an ear and shook off snow

“Perhaps he is not at hoe of speech seemed to fill the darkness beneath the fir-trees

But as though her words were a su the firs—a door she hadn’t seen—opened with the crack of breaking ice A swath of firelight bloodied the virgin sno, quite plainly, a house stood in this fir-grove Long, curling eaves capped its wooden walls, and in the snow-torn firelight, the house see, crouched in the thicket

The figure of a irl stiffened

“Come in, Vasya,” the man said “It is cold”

1

The Death of the Snow-Maiden

Moscow, just past midwinter, and the haze of ten thousand fires rose to ered, but in the east the cloudswith unfallen snow

Two rivers gashed the skin of the Russian forest, and Moscow lay at their joining, atop a pine-clad hill Her squat, white walls enclosed a jumble of hovels and churches; her palaces’ ice-streaked towers splayed like desperate fingers against the sky As the daylight faded, lights kindled in the towers’ high s

A wonificently dressed, stood at one of these atching the firelight le with the stormy dusk Behind her, two other wo

“That is the third tione to thethis hour,” whispered one of the wo headdress drew the eye from boils on her nose

Waiting-wo like blossoms Slaves stood near the chilly walls, their lank hair wrapped in kerchiefs

“Well, of course, Darinka!” returned the second wo for her brother, thehas it been since Brother Aleksandr left for Sarai? My husband has been waiting for hi at herWell, good luck to her Brother Aleksandr is probably dead in a snowbank” The speaker was Eudokhia Dems; her rosebud mouth concealed the stumps of three blackened teeth She raised her voice shrilly “You will kill yourself standing in this wind, Olya If Brother Aleksandr were co, he would have been here by now”

“As you say,” Olga replied coolly frolad you are here to teach hter will learn from you how a princess behaves”