Mythology & Folklore influenced Winternight trilogy

Katherine Arden lived in Moscow and read the tales in Russian, and the trilogy is built out of them rather than decorated with them. Morozko, the frost demon of the tale in which a stepmother sends her stepdaughter into the winter forest to die, is the figure the first book is named for and the one Vasya bargains with. The household spirits are the real inventory of Russian domestic belief: the domovoi behind the stove, the bannik in the bathhouse, the dvorovoi in the yard, the rusalka in the water. The historical frame is the argument: fourteenth-century Rus' as Christianity displaces the old practices, and spirits that weaken as people stop leaving food out for them.