by Naomi Novik
I did not say anything about it to anyone, except to Sergey, when we stood in the road together, with the woods silent and bright in moonlight. He was on his way to stay the night again. Miryem hadn’t told him to stop coming, even though he couldn’t do anything to stop the Staryk. She hadn’t stopped paying us our pennies, either. Most of the time we were able to forget, to convince ourselves he was only coming to look after the goats. So he kept going, and ate two meals a day in their house, and we buried the pennies by the white tree on our way home.
“Do you remember?” I asked him, and he went still. We had never spoken of what had happened to him in the wood, never.
He did not want to talk of it, I could tell, but I stood with him, my silence asking for me, and at last he said, “I was cleaning a rabbit. He rode out of the trees. He told me the woods were his and I was a thief. Then he said . . .” Sergey stopped, gone strange and hollow-faced, and shook his head. He did not remember, and he did not want to remember.
“Did he ride a thing with claws on its hooves? And wear shoes with a long toe?” I asked, and Sergey nodded once.
So it was the same one: not only a Staryk, but a Staryk lord, and if he had not lied, he was lord of the whole forest. I had heard people say in the market that it went all the way to the shores of the northern sea. A great lord of the Staryk was coming to Miryem for gold, and if she could not give it to him, I knew we would find her dead in her yard, with curled-toe boot prints around her.
And then there would be no more debt to pay. As soon as he heard she was dead, my father would tell me I was done with payments. He would be ready to shout away Miryem’s father, but he wouldn’t even have to. Her mother would have eyes red with weeping, but even in her grief she would think of me. The next time I came, she would tell me that the debt was paid, that I had done enough. To keep working, I would have to tell my father they were paying me, and then he would take the coin. Every day he would come home from town drunk, and take my penny, and hit me to go and get his dinner. And it would be like that every day after, forever.
“We could tell him we were being paid, but less,” I said to Sergey, but he looked doubtful, and I understood. Our father suspected nothing now. Why would anyone pay us, when he was sending us for free, and they did not have to? But if we told him we were being paid, so he would let us keep going, then he would become suspicious. He would go and demand of Miryem’s father how much we were being paid, and Panov Mandelstam would answer him honestly. We could not ask him to lie for us. He would only look at us with distress, that we wanted to lie to our father, and be sorry he could not help us.
And once our father knew we had lied about how much we were being paid, then he would ask how much we had been paid. And then he would know that there was money somewhere, that we had hidden. And for hiding money from him, he would not beat us with the belt or his big hand, he would beat us with the poker, and he might not even stop once we told him where it was.
*
The church bells ringing for Oleg, when they buried him three days later, sounded like his sleigh bells, ringing too high in a forest of white trees. They would find me frozen just like him, if I didn’t give the Staryk his gold, but I equally had to fear what would happen if I did. Would he put me on his white stag behind him, and carry me away to that cold white forest, to live there alone forever with a crown of fairy silver of my own? I had never felt sorry for the miller’s daughter before, in the story the villagers told; I’d been sorry for my father, and myself, and angry. But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who’d as cheerfully have cut off your head if you didn’t spin his straw into gold? I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his slave, or frozen into ice.
I couldn’t forget him anymore. He was in the corner of my mind all the time now, creeping farther over it every day, a little more like frost on a windowpane. I started up in my bed, gasping every night, shivering with a chill inside me that my mother’s arms couldn’t drive away, and the memory of his silver eyes.
“Can you get him the gold?” Wanda asked me that morning, as abruptly as before.
I did not need to ask whom she meant. We were tending the goats, and my mother was in the yard, only a few feet away, so I couldn’t burst into tears even if I had wanted to; she and my father were already suspicious, watching me with a puzzled and worried look. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to keep my noise of protest in. “Yes,” I said shortly. “Yes, I can get the gold.”
Wanda didn’t say anything, only stared at me with her mouth a straight hard line, and my throat tightened. “If,” I said to her, “if something should take me from home for a time—you’ll stay on and help my father? He’ll keep paying you. He’ll make it double,” I added, desperate suddenly. I thought of my mother and my father alone in the village without me, but with all the anger I had brewed in every house turned against them. For a moment I was in the clearing again, floundering in the snow with Oleg’s twisted face above me, not frozen but flushed and red and hateful.
Wanda didn’t answer me for a moment, and then she said slowly, “My father will want to keep me home.” She raised her head from the trough and looked at me sideways. I stared at her in surprise, but I understood, of course. She was not giving her father the money; he would never want her to stay home if she was bringing him a penny a day. She was keeping it herself.
I kept brushing the goat, thinking this over. All this time I had thought I was bargaining with her father, not her, and all I needed to do was give him a little bit of money, more than he could get from a daughter’s work on the farm. It had not occurred to me that she would want the money herself. “Do you want it for a dowry?” I asked her.
“No!” she said, very fiercely.
I couldn’t understand, otherwise, why she would want to keep the money hidden. I had paid her already twelve pennies, for her and her brother, and she still wore her old ragged dress, and her basket-woven shoes, and when I had gone to Gorek’s house, that first time, collecting, the whole farm had looked as poor as dirt. They could have spent twelve pennies ten times over. Slowly I asked, “What did your father do with the six kopeks he borrowed?”
So she told me. Knowing didn’t help much, of course. He was her father. He had the right to borrow money from someone who would lend it to him, and the right to spend it as stupidly as he wanted, and the right to put his daughter to work to pay off his debt, and the right to take any money she earned. If she didn’t want to marry, there was nothing she could do to be free of him. She didn’t say what she had been doing with the money, but she couldn’t have been doing anything with it, except piling it up like a dragon-hoard somewhere. He would have caught her by now, if she had spent it on anything: that was why she hadn’t bought a decent dress, or boots. She was lucky her father hadn’t come to town much lately: if he’d ever said anything to me, if he’d talked loudly of how we were taking advantage of a poor man, I would have answered him in heat, without ever thinking, and he’d have found out then. I didn’t like to think what would have happened. It seemed to me, the kind of man who would gamble away and drink up four kopeks he had no hope of repaying was also the kind of man who would beat his daughter bloody, without ever thinking of the money she’d bring him if he kept her working.
“You can tell him I’ve gone to be married to a rich man,” I told her. It would be true, after all. “Tell him as soon as I come home, I’ll check all the books again.” And that would be true, too. “And . . . and when the debt’s paid, you can tell him that we offer to pay him a penny a week in hard coin, for the two of you to keep coming. To be paid once a month. And then give him the four pennies right away. Once he’s spent them, he’s back in debt, and he can’t refuse to send you. And the next month, do it again.”
Wanda gave me a nod, a single jerk. I put out my hand to her suddenly without thinking, and felt foolish with it hanging in the air between us as she stared at it, but just before I would have let it
drop, she reached back and took it in her own, big and square with red rough fingers. She gripped my hand a little too tightly, but I didn’t mind.
“I’ll go back to Vysnia tomorrow,” I said, calmer. I didn’t think the city walls would keep out the Staryk, but I might as well try. At least I wouldn’t be at home. He wouldn’t leave prints all over my parents’ yard, for the rest of the village to make a vicious story of. “I’ll need to be there, anyway, when he comes,” and I told Wanda about Isaac, and how I was getting the Staryk his gold.
I didn’t tell my mother about it, though; I didn’t remind her of the Staryk at all, even when she said, “You’re going back again so soon?” I was glad she didn’t remember, to be puzzled instead of afraid for me.
“I want to bring back some more aprons,” I said. That afternoon, I made sure the ledger was in good order, and when I finished, I went outside and looked at our house, snug now behind shutters the carpenter had put up for me, with the small flock of chickens and our handful of goats making a clattering mess in the yard, and then I took my basket and walked slowly through town. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a market day, and Wanda had done the rounds. I had nothing to do in town, and nothing had changed, except everyone scowled at me now when I passed, instead of smirking the way they had back in the days when the sight of me in my patched shoes and ragged clothes had been a pleasant reminder of the money in their pockets that they never meant to pay back.
That was why I did it, maybe: I walked all the way to the other end of town and back and when I came home again, I wasn’t sorry to be leaving them. I loved nothing about the town or any of them, even now when it was at least familiar ground. I wasn’t sorry they didn’t like me, I wasn’t sorry I had been hard to them. I was glad, fiercely glad. They had wanted me to bury my mother and leave my father behind to die alone. They had wanted me to go be a beggar in my grandfather’s house, and live the rest of my days a quiet mouse in the kitchen. They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn’t pretend to be a neighbor.
There wasn’t Oleg to hire anymore, so the next morning I went and stood on the market road. When a likely carter came driving past with a big sledge laden with barrels of salt herring from the sea, I waved him down, and offered him five pennies if he would take me all the way to Vysnia. I could have paid more, but I had learned my lesson. This time I had waited for an older man in an older cart, and my good dress with its fur collar and cuffs was hidden: I had put on my father’s old worn-out woolen overcoat, which I had meant to use for rags now that I had bought him a good new one made of fur.
The old carter talked to me as we drove of his granddaughters, and wanted to know my age; he was pleased that his girl a year younger than I was already married when I wasn’t, and asked me if I was going to town to get a husband. “We’ll see,” I said, and then I laughed aloud in sudden real relief, because it was so ridiculous. Me sitting in a fish cart with my muddy boots, scarecrow in my father’s patched overcoat: what would a Staryk lord want with me? I wasn’t a princess, or even a golden-haired peasant girl. I suppose it wouldn’t make any difference to him that I was a Jew, but I was short and bony and sallow, and my nose was humped in the middle and too big for my face. In fact I wasn’t married yet on purpose: my grandfather had told me judiciously to wait another two years to go to the matchmaker, so I would grow a bit fatter, and meanwhile my dowry would plump up alongside me, to help bring me a husband with the good sense to want a wife who brought more to the marriage than beauty, but not so greedy he didn’t care for her appearance at all.
That was the kind of man for me, a clear-eyed sensible man who could want me honestly; I was no prize for an elven lord. Surely the Staryk had only said it as a joke, because he didn’t think I could manage his task at all. He couldn’t mean to marry me really. When I gave him his third sack of gold, he would only stamp himself through the ground in anger—or more likely, I thought, sobering again, he would turn me to ice anyway, for spite that I’d proved him wrong. I rubbed my arms and looked over through the woods: there was no sign of the Staryk road today, only the dark trees and the white snow and the solid ice of the river gliding away under the runners.
I came to my grandfather’s house late, just before sunset. My grandmother said three times how nice it was to see me back again, so soon, and asked a little anxiously after my mother’s health, and whether I had already sold all of my goods. My grandfather didn’t ask any questions at all. He looked at me hard from under his eyebrows and only said, “Well, enough noise. It’s almost time for dinner.”
I put my things away and talked over dinner about the aprons I had sold, and the load of wool that would go with my grandfather’s barge, when the river at last melted: thirty bales, not an enormous amount, but something to make a start with. I was glad to have the brick walls of my grandfather’s house around us, solid and prosaic like our conversation. But that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother in the cozy sitting room, behind us the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and though the noise was loud, my grandmother didn’t lift her head at all. I slowly put aside my own work and got up and went to the door. I pulled it open and flinched back: there was no narrow alleyway behind the Staryk, no brick wall of the house next door, and no hardened slush beneath his feet. He stood outside in a clearing ringed with pale-limbed trees, and behind him the white ice-road ran away into the distance under a grey sky washed with clear cold light, as if one step across the threshold would carry me out of all the world.
There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a small chest made of pale white wood bleached as bone, bound around with thick straps of white leather and hinged and clasped with silver. I knelt and opened it. “Seven days this time I’ll grant you, to return my silver changed for gold,” the Staryk said in his voice like singing, as I stared at the heap of coins inside. Silver enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars, and I didn’t doubt for a moment that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.
The Staryk was looking down at me with his sharp silver eyes, eager and vicious as a hawk. “Did you think mortal roads could run away from me, or mortal walls keep me out?” he said, and I hadn’t really, after all. “Think not to escape from me, girl, for in seven days I will come for you, wherever you have fled.”
He said it smiling down at me, cruel and satisfied, as though he was sure he had set me an impossible task, and it made me angry. I stood up and raised my chin and said, coolly, “I will be here, with your gold.”
His face lost its smile, which was satisfying, but I paid for it; he said in answer, “And if you do as you have said, I will take you away with me, and make you my queen,” and it didn’t seem like a joke here, with the stone of my grandfather’s threshold patterned white with frost that crept lacelike out of his grove, and the cold silver light shining out of the chest.
“Wait!” I said, as he began to turn away. “Why would you take me? You must know I have no magic, not really: I can’t change silver to gold for you in your kingdom, if you take me away.”
“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he stepped forward and the heavy door swung shut in my face, leaving me with a casket full of silver coins and a belly full of dismay.
*
Isaac made the crown in that one feverish week, laboring upon it in his stall in the marketplace. He dipped out cupfuls of silver and hammered out great thin sheets to make the fan-shaped crown, tall enough to double the height of a head, and then with painstaking care added droplets of melted silver in mimic of pearls, laying them in graceful spiraling patterns that turned upon themselves and vined away again. He borrowed molds from every other jeweler in the market and poured tiny flattened links by the hundreds, then hung glittering chains of them linked from one sid
e of the crown to the other, and fringed along the rest of the wide fan’s bottom edge. By the second day, men and women were coming just to watch him work. I sat by, silent and unhappy, and kept them off. Each night he took the work home with him, and I took back the lightened casket, my grandfather’s two manservants carrying it for me. No one troubled us. Even the little pickpockets, with ambitions to slip a single thin silver coin off the table, were caught by the winter light; when they drifted too close their mouths softened into parted wonder, their eyes puzzled, and when I looked at them, they startled and melted away into the crowds.
By the end of the fifth day, the casket was empty and the crown was finished; when Isaac had assembled the whole, he turned and said, “Come here,” and set it upon my head to see whether it was well-balanced. The crown felt cool and light as a dusting of snow upon my forehead. In his bronze mirror, I looked like a strange deep-water reflection of myself, silver stars at midnight above my brow, and all the marketplace went quiet in a rippling wave around me, silent like the clearing with the Staryk standing in it. I wanted to burst into tears, or run away; instead I took the crown off my head and put it back into Isaac’s hands, and when he’d carefully swathed it with linen and black velvet, the crowds finally drifted away, murmuring to each other.
My grandfather’s manservants guarded us all the way to the duke’s palace. We found it full of bustle and the noise of preparations: the tsar was arriving in two days’ time, and all the household was full of suppressed excitement; they all knew something of the duke’s plans, and the servants’ eyes followed the swathed shape of the crown as Isaac carried it through the corridors. We were put into a better antechamber to wait this time, and then the chaperone came to fetch me. “Bring it with you. The men stay here,” she said, with a sharp suspicious glare at them.
She took me upstairs to a small pair of rooms, not nearly so grand as the ones below: I suppose a plain daughter hadn’t merited better before now. Irina was sitting stiff as a rake handle before a mirror made of glass. She wore a silver-grey silk dress over pure white skirts, the bodice cut much lower this time to make a frame around the necklace. Her long beautiful hair had been braided into several thick ropes, ready to be put up, and her hands were gripped tightly around themselves in front of her.