by Naomi Novik
But when the door opened, there was no betrothal waiting for me, no one who could even have been the agent of a potential husband; only two Jews, a man and a woman, thin and brown and dark-eyed, and the man was holding a box full of winter. I forgot to think of anything else, to think at all: the necklace blazed cold silver at me out of black velvet, and I was at the window in the garden again with the breath of winter on my cheeks and frost creeping over a windowsill beneath my fingers, yearning at something out of reach.
I almost went towards it with my hands stretched out; I clutched them into my grey wool skirts and curtseyed with an effort, forcing my eyes low for a moment, but when I stood again, I looked again. I still wasn’t thinking; even as my father went and took the necklace from the box I wasn’t thinking, and when he brought it over to me, I looked up at him only in blank surprise: it was all wrong. He couldn’t mean to give such a thing to me. But he gestured with impatience, and after a moment I slowly turned my back, and bent my head to let him put it around my neck.
The room was warm, warmer by far than my narrow rooms upstairs, with a healthy fire crackling. But the metal felt cold against my skin, cold and wonderful, refreshing as putting wet hands on your cheeks on a hot day. I lifted my head and turned, and my father was looking at me. All of them were looking at me, staring. “Ah, Irinushka,” Magreta murmured tenderly. I put my fingers up to brush over the fine links. Even lying on my skin, it still felt cool to the touch, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, in the glass I was not standing in my father’s study. I was in a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky, and I could almost feel the snow falling onto my skin.
I stayed there for a long timeless moment, breathing in deep sweet cold air that filled my lungs, full of freshly cut pine branches and heavy snow and deep woods wide around me. And then distantly I heard my father promise the Jews that he would give them a thousand pieces in gold, if they would make a crown to be my dowry, so I had been right: he did have a betrothal in mind, and the arrangements were most urgent indeed.
He did not let me keep the necklace, of course. After the Jews left, he beckoned me over, and though he paused a moment, staring at me again, he reached back around my neck and took the necklace off and laid it back into the box. He looked at me afterwards hard, as if he had to remind himself what I really was without it, and then he shook his head and said to me crisply, “The tsar will be here the week after next. Practice your dancing. You will dine with me every night until then. See to her clothes,” he added to Magreta. “She must have three new dresses.”
I curtseyed and went back upstairs with Magreta hovering, like a cloud of anxious birds that go bursting out and fly madly before they settle back into the tree. “I must get some of the maids to help me,” she said, swooping to snatch up her knitting, to have something to close her hands around. “So much to be done! Nothing is ready. Your chest is not half full! And three dresses to be made!”
“Yes,” I said. “You should speak to the housekeeper at once,” and Magreta said, “Yes, yes,” and flew out of the room again and left me alone at last, to sit down by the fire with my own sewing, a white nightgown being elaborated with embroidery for a wedding-bed.
I had met the tsar once before, seven years ago, when his father and brother had just died; my father had come to Koron for the coronation, to do homage to the new tsar or more accurately to the new regent, Archduke Dmitir. I saw Mirnatius first in the church, while the priest was droning through the ceremony, but I didn’t pay him very much attention then; I was so bored that I was nodding on the seat beside Galina in my hot and stiff clothing, until I jerked awake and jumped to my feet when they finally crowned him, with a feeling like being jabbed hard with a needle, a moment even before everyone else was rising so we could acclaim him.
No one else paid very much attention to him afterwards. The great lords dined and talked together at the tsar’s table, paying court to Dmitir, and Mirnatius came out alone into the gardens behind the palace, where I was also playing, of no importance myself. He had a small bow and arrow, and shot squirrels, and when he hit them, he came and looked at their little dead bodies with pleasure. Not in the ordinary way of a boy proud of being a good hunter: he would take hold of the arrows and jiggle them, to make the bodies twitch and jerk if he could, staring down with a wide blank fascination in his eyes.
He caught me staring at him indignantly. I was too young to have learned to be cautious. “Why are you staring so?” he said. “It’s only a little life still left in them. It’s not witchcraft.”
He might well have known the difference: his mother had been a witch, who seduced the tsar after his first tsarina died. Nobody approved of the marriage, of course, and after only a few years she was put to death by flame when she was caught trying to have the first tsarina’s son killed, to make her own son the heir. But now the tsar and the eldest prince had died of fever, and so the witch’s son had become tsar anyway, which, as Magreta used to say, was a lesson to everyone that being a witch was not the same thing as being wise.
I too was not wise at the time, although I had the excuse of being a young girl. Even though he was the tsar, I said, “You’ve already killed them. Why can’t you leave them alone?” Which was not very coherent, but I knew what I meant: I didn’t like him mauling the little bodies around, making them flinch for his pleasure.
His beautiful green eyes narrowed pig-small and angry, and he raised the bow and aimed an arrow at me. I was old enough to understand that was death looking at me. I wanted to run, but instead I simply froze, my whole body stopped in place and my heart with it, and then he laughed and lowered the bow and said mockingly, “All hail the defender of dead squirrels!” and made me a great formal bow like at a wedding before he strolled away. All the rest of that week, whenever I played in the garden, I was sure to come across a dead squirrel—always tucked away somewhere out of the gardeners’ sight, and yet my ball would roll to it, or if I ran to hide and seek with Magreta, I would crouch into a bush only to find one cut open, lying there in wait for me.
I thought of telling on him: I was sure everyone would have believed me, because Mirnatius was so beautiful, and because of his mother. People even whispered about him already. But I told Magreta first, and when she got the whole story out of me, she told me that trouble came to those who made it, as the squirrels should have shown me, and I wasn’t to stir up any more. And then she kept me indoors in our room, spinning yarn all the rest of our visit, except for hasty meals.
We’d never spoken of it since, but I knew Magreta hadn’t forgotten any more than I had. We had gone back to Koron, four years ago, for Archduke Dmitir’s lavish funeral. Mirnatius had commanded the attendance of most of the nobility, presumably to make clear that he no longer had nor required a regent, and he’d made them all swear fealty over again to him personally. We’d been there for two weeks. Magreta kept me very close throughout, and never let me leave my rooms without my veil over my face, even though I wasn’t a woman yet, and she brought me all my meals from the kitchens with her own hands. Mirnatius had stood as chief mourner: he’d been sixteen then, tall and full-grown and even more beautiful, with his black hair and light eyes that looked like jewels shining out of his Tatar-dark skin, and his mouth full of even white teeth, and with the crown and his golden robes he might have been a statue, or a saint. I watched him through the faint haze of my fine veil, until his head turned in my direction, and then I quickly dropped my eyes and made sure I was small and insignificant in the third row of princesses and dukes’ daughters.
But in two weeks’ time, he would come to my father’s house, and there would be no camouflage. My father would not give him three good dinners and take him boar hunting in the dark woods and minimize his expense. Instead he would make an extravagant feasting that would last all three days, with jugglers and magicians and dancers to keep the tsar and his court entertained indoors, and he would give me three new dresses after all, and make an offering of me. It s
eemed my father did mean to try and catch the tsar for his daughter, with a ring and a necklace and a crown of magic silver to bait his trap.
I looked at my face in the window’s reflection and wondered what my father’s hard eyes had seen, with that necklace around my throat, to make him think it a chance worth taking. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see my own face when I wore it. But I didn’t have the comfort of thinking him a fool.
I was still standing by the window, my hands resting on the cold stone and my sewing abandoned, when Magreta came back to the room still twittering, to press a cup of hot sweet tea into my hands. She had even brought up a thick slice of my favorite poppy-seed cake, which she must have coaxed out of the cook; I did not get such treats every day. A maid was trailing her with a few extra logs for the fire. I let her draw me back to the hearth, grateful for what she was trying to do, and I didn’t tell her that it was all wrong. What I really wanted was the silver necklace, cold around my neck, even though it was bringing my doom; I wanted to put it on and find a long mirror and slip away into a wide dark winter wood.
*
It was Saturday night after sundown when I climbed back into Oleg’s sledge. I had put twenty gold pieces more into my grandfather’s vault, and I carried the Staryk’s swollen white purse with me, the leather straining with the weight of the gold. My shoulders tightened as we plunged into the forest, and I wondered with every moment when and if the Staryk would come upon me once more, until somewhere deep in the woods, the sledge began to slow and came to a stop under the dark boughs. I went rabbit-still, looking around for any signs of him, but I didn’t see anything; the horse stamped and snorted her warm breath, and Oleg didn’t slump over, but hung his reins on the footboard.
“Did you hear something?” I said, my voice hushed, and then he climbed down and took out a knife from under his coat as he came towards me, and I realized I’d forgotten to worry about anything else but magic. I shoved the heaped blankets and straw towards him as a too-fragile barricade as I scrambled out the other side of the sledge. “Don’t,” I blurted. “Oleg, don’t,” my heavy skirts dragging in the snow as he came around for me. “Oleg, please,” but his face was clenched down, cold deeper than any winter. “It’s not my gold!” I cried in desperation, holding the purse out between us. “It’s not mine, I have to pay it back—”
He didn’t stop. “None of it’s yours,” he snarled. “None of it’s yours, little grubbing vulture, taking money out of the hands of honest working men,” every word out of his mouth familiar as a knife: it was the story again, only a little different; a story Oleg had found to persuade himself he wasn’t doing wrong, that he had a right to what he’d take or cheat, and I knew he wouldn’t listen to me. He would leave my body for the wolves, and go home with the gold hidden under his coat, and say I had been lost in the woods.
I dropped the purse and gripped two big handfuls of my skirts and struggled back, floundering through the deep snow, higher than my thighs. He lunged, and I flung myself away, falling backwards. The crust atop the snow gave beneath my weight, and branches out of the underbrush clawed my cheek. I couldn’t get up. He was standing over me, his knife in one hand and the other reaching down to grab me, and then he halted; his arms sank down to his sides.
He wasn’t showing me mercy. A deeper cold was coming into his face, stealing blue over his lips, and white frost was climbing over his thick brown beard. I struggled back to my feet, shivering. The Staryk was standing behind him, a hand laid upon the back of his neck like a master taking hold of a dog.
After a moment he dropped his hand. Oleg stood blank between us, bloodless as frostbite. He turned and slowly went back to the sledge and climbed into the driver’s seat. The Staryk didn’t watch him go, as if he cared nothing for what he had done; he only looked at me with his eyes as gleaming as Oleg’s blade. I was shaking and queasy. There were tears freezing on my eyelashes, making them stick together. I blinked my eyes open and held my hands tight until they stopped trembling, and then I bent down and picked up the purse out of the deep snow, and held it out.
The Staryk came closer and took it from me. He didn’t pour the purse out: it was too full for that. Instead he dipped his hand inside and lifted out a handful of gold to tumble ringing back into the bag through his fingers, until there was only one last coin held between his white-gloved fingers, shining like sunlight. He frowned at it, and me.
“It’s there, all sixty,” I said. My heart had slowed, because I suppose it was that or burst.
“As it must be,” he said. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go, though my hand and crown you shall win if you succeed.” He said it as if he meant it, and also angrily, although he had set the terms himself: I felt he would almost have preferred to freeze me than get his gold. “Now go home, mortal maiden, until I call on you again.”
I looked over helplessly at the sledge: Oleg was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring with his frozen face out into the winter, and the last thing I wanted was to get in with him. But I couldn’t walk home from here, or even to some village where I could hire another driver. Oleg had turned off the road to bring us here: I had no idea where we were. I turned to argue, but the Staryk was already gone. I stood alone under pine boughs heavy with snow, with only silence and footprints around me, and the deep crushed hollow where I had fallen, the shape of a girl outlined in the drift, like a child playing might have made.
It began to snow even while I stood there, a thick steady snow that forced my hand. I picked my way gingerly to the sledge and climbed back inside. Oleg shook the reins silently, and the mare started trotting again. He turned her head towards the trees, away from the road, and drove deeper into the forest. I tried to decide whether I was more afraid to call out to him and be answered, or to get no reply, and if I should try to jump from the sledge. And then suddenly we came through a narrow gap between trees onto a different road: a road whose surface was pale and smooth as a sheet of ice, gleaming white. The rails of the sledge rattled once, coming onto the road, and then fell perfectly silent. The horse’s heavy-shod hooves went quickly on the ice, the sledge skating along behind her. Around us, trees stretched tall and birch-white, full of rustling leaves; trees that didn’t grow in our forest, and should have been bare with winter. I saw white birds and white squirrels darting between the branches, and the sleigh bells made a strange kind of music, high and bright and cold.
I didn’t look behind me, to see where the road came from. I huddled back into the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut and kept them so, until suddenly there was a crunching of snow beneath us again, and the sledge was already standing outside the gate of my own yard. I all but leapt out, and darted through the gate and all the way to my door before I glanced around. But I needn’t have run. Oleg drove away without ever looking back at me.
CHAPTER 8
“Wanda,” Miryem said to me, the morning after she came back, “will you take this to Oleg’s house? I forgave him a kopek for waiting for me, in Vysnia.” She gave me a written receipt, but she didn’t meet my eyes as she asked. There were red scratches across the back of her jaw and cheek, as though a branch had caught her there, or something with claws.
I said, “Yes, I will go.” I put on my shawl and took the note, but when I came to Oleg’s house, down the lane and around a corner, I stopped across the street and stood watching. Two men were carrying away his body to the church. I saw his face for a moment. His eyes were open and staring, and his mouth was blue. His wife was sitting huddled near the stables. The neighbors were converging on the house with covered dishes. One of them stopped in front of me. I had met Varda: she had still owed a small sum when I had started collecting, and she had paid the balance off with three young, laying chickens. She said to me sharply, “Well? What do you want in this house? The flesh of the dead?”
Kajus was coming to the house too with his wife and son, carrying a big steaming jug of krupnik. “Come now, Panova Kubilius, it is Sunday. Surely Wanda is not collecting,” he
said.
“He earned a kopek off his debt for driving Miryem to Vysnia,” I answered. “I came to bring the receipt.”
“There, you see,” Kajus said to Varda, who scowled back at him and me both.
“A kopek!” she said. “One less for his poor wife to take out of her children’s mouths to fatten the Jew’s purse. Give it to me! I will take it to her, not you.”
“All right, Panova,” I said, and gave her the paper. Then I went back to Miryem and told her that Oleg was dead, outside his own stables, found lying frozen and staring blindly upwards, his horse and sledge put away.
She heard me out silently, and said nothing. I stood with her a few moments, and then because I could think of nothing else to do, I said, “I will go and feed the goats,” and she nodded.
The next day I was collecting out of town, down the east road. Everyone had heard by then. They asked me if it was true and were sorry when I said it was. Oleg had been a big cheerful man who would buy beer and vodka for friends in the roundhouse during winter, and he would bring a widow a load of firewood when he was driving one for himself. Even my father, when I came home and told him, exclaimed in regret. When they buried him on Tuesday, his widow was the only one of the mourners who came back from the churchyard with dry eyes.
Everyone spoke of it, but not as a thing that the Staryk had done. His heart had burst, they said, shaking their heads. It was sad when such a thing happened to a strong man, a big healthy man. But it was not strange to anyone that he had frozen to a block during a deep winter night.