by Naomi Novik
Her fingers worked slightly against each other, nervous, as the chaperone pinned up the braids, and then I unwrapped the crown and carefully set it upon her head. It stood glittering beneath the light of a dozen candles, and the chaperone fell silent, her eyes wide as they rested on her charge. Irina herself slowly stood up and took a step closer to her reflection in the mirror, her hand reaching up towards the glass almost as if to touch the woman inside.
Whatever magic the silver had to enchant those around it either faded with use or couldn’t touch me any longer; I wished that it could, and that my eyes could be dazzled enough to care for nothing else. Instead I watched Irina’s face in the mirror, pale and thin and transported as she looked at herself in her crown, and I wondered if she would be glad to marry the tsar, to leave her quiet small rooms for a distant palace and a throne. As she dropped her hand and turned back into the room, our eyes met: we didn’t speak, but for a moment I felt her a sister, our lives in the hands of others. She wasn’t likely to have any more choice in the matter than I did.
Then the door opened: the duke himself come to inspect her. He paused in the doorway. Irina curtseyed to her father, then straightened again, her chin coming up a little to balance the crown; she looked like a queen already. The duke stared at her as if he could hardly recognize his own daughter; he shook himself a little, pulling free of it, before he turned to me. “Very well, Panovina,” he said, without hesitation, though I hadn’t said a word. “You will have your gold.”
He gave us a thousand gold pieces: enough to heap the Staryk’s box full again, with hundreds more left over: a fortune, for what good it would do me now. My grandfather’s servants carried the chest and the sacks home for me. He came downstairs, hearing my grandmother’s exclamations, and looked over all the treasure; then he took four gold coins out of the sacks, meant for the vault, and gave two each to the servants before he dismissed them. “Spend one and save one; you remember the wise man’s rule,” he said, and they both bowed and thanked him and dashed off to revel, elbowing each other and grinning as they went.
Then he sent my grandmother out of the room on a pretext, asking her to make her cheesecake to celebrate my good fortune; and when she was gone to the kitchens, he turned to me and said, “Now, Miryem, you’ll tell me the rest of it,” and I burst into tears.
I hadn’t told my parents, or my grandmother, but I told him: I trusted my grandfather to bear it as I hadn’t trusted them, not to break their hearts wanting to save me. I knew what my father would do, and my mother, if they found out: they would make a wall of their own bodies between me and the Staryk, and then I would see them fall cold and frozen before he took me away.
And I believed now that he would take me away. I hadn’t been able to make sense of it before: what use would a mortal woman be to an elven lord, and why should boasting make me worth marrying, even if I somehow scrabbled together six hundred pieces of gold for a dowry? But of course a Staryk king would want a queen who really could make gold out of silver, mortal or not. The Staryk always came for gold.
But my grandfather only listened as I wept it out to him, and then he said, “At least he’s not a fool, this Staryk, to want a wife for such a reason. It would make the fortune of any kingdom. What else do you know of him?” I stared at him, still wet-faced. He shrugged. “It’s not what you would have looked for, but there’s worse things in life than to be a queen.”
By speaking so, he gave me a gift: making it an ordinary match, to be discussed and considered, even if it wasn’t really. I gulped and wiped away my tears, and felt better. After all, in cold hard terms it was a catch, for a poor man’s daughter. My grandfather nodded as I calmed myself. “Good. Think on it with a clear head. Lords and kings often don’t ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners. There’s no one else, is there?”
“No,” I said, with a small shake. There wasn’t, although I’d walked back from the duke’s house at Isaac’s side, and when he had parted from me with his share, four sacks of his own full of gold, he had said to me jubilantly, “Tell your grandfather I will come and speak to him tomorrow,” meaning that he had enough money not to wait any longer to be married, and I had been so jealous of Basia I could have burst into flames. It wasn’t really Isaac, though: it was thinking of her married to a man with careful hands and dark brown eyes, and in her own home, where love could grow in earth made rich with gold my work had put there.
“You will go to your husband with wealth in your hands,” my grandfather said, with a gesture to the casket of gold, as if he knew what was in my heart. “And he is wise enough to value what you bring him, even if he doesn’t yet know the rest of your worth. That’s not nothing, to be able to hold your head up.” He cupped his hand under my chin and gripped it hard. “Hold your head up, Miryem,” and I nodded, my mouth tight over the weeping I wouldn’t let out again.
*
Mirnatius arrived in a vast closed sleigh painted in black and gold, drawn by four black horses steaming and stamping in the cold air, with soldiers hanging on the back and more of them riding in crisp martial ranks around it. There must have been other people, too, other sleighs, but it was hard to pay attention to anyone else when he flung open the door and climbed down in a gust of air that fogged in the cold. He wore black also, with delicate embroidery in gold thread gleaming all over the wool panels of his heavy coat. His black hair was long and curling, and everyone turned towards him a little, moths eager for the flame.
He greeted my father, perfunctorily, and when asked about his journey said something mildly complaining about the vigor of the winter, and how thin and weak the game was grown. The remark would have neatly diminished my father’s entertainment, if he had then spent the tsar’s visit on hunting—which of course he had intended to do, and Mirnatius plainly meant to needle him for it. But instead my father bowed and said, “Indeed, the hunting has grown sadly dull, Your Majesty, but I hope the hospitality of my hall will not disappoint you,” and the tsar paused.
I was almost entirely hidden behind a curtain, but I drew back anyway when the tsar looked up and swept his gaze across the windows of the house like a hawk going over a field, trying to flush out some prey. Fortunately he looked at the main floor of the house, and not at my high-up little window. My father had not given me new chambers. There were many guests in the tsar’s company whom he wanted to impress, and anyway he hoped I would be leaving soon.
Then Mirnatius smiled at my father, with the pleasure of a man who expects to be richly amused at someone else’s expense, and said, “I hope so as well. Tell me, Erdivilas, how are your family? Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?” It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisors knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar’s head—if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.
“They all are well, and Irina is healthy, Sire, that is all a father can ask of God,” my father said. “I would not name her a beauty to other men. But I will not lie: I think she has something in her more than most girls. You will see her while you are here, and tell me if you agree. I would welcome your counsel, for she is of an age to marry, and I would find a man worthy of her if I can arrange it.”
A blunt declaration that, almost crude by the standards of court conversation, where it was a point of honor always to speak to the side and not the heart of the thing, but it served my father’s purpose: Mirnatius lost his look of easy malice. He followed my father into the house with a thoughtful frowning look instead. He had understood the message—that my father meant seriously to offer me as a bride, despite the extremely bad politics of the match, and also was not a fool who thought to sneak an ugly girl into the tsar’s bed as a beauty with the help of dim lights and strong liquor; therefore, something unusual was in the offing.
Then they were all gone inside,
to be greeted by my stepmother and the household, out of the cold. I stood behind the curtain without moving while the rest of the tsar’s retinue were disposed of, soldiers and courtiers and servants flowing away into all the nooks and crannies of the house and stables. There was nothing more to see, and in my small crowded rooms the other women who had gone to cluster around the other window all went back to their seats and their frantic sewing, and the scullery-maids with their buckets went back to emptying out the washtubs still sitting before the fire: one to wash me and a second one just to wash my hair.
“Pardon, milady,” one of them said to me timidly, by way of asking if she could use the window I was standing by, which had a useful eave below it that would catch the runoff, so it didn’t just rain down onto the windows below. I stepped back, making room for her. My hair was still damp, draped all over my shoulders, long and loose down my back. It smelled faintly of myrtle, because Magreta had put branches of it in the water. “They say it protects against ill-wishing and sorcery,” she had said, in a businesslike tone, “but really it’s just a nice smell.”
The fire had been built up, roaring to keep the chill off me, so all the other women were sweating and red-faced while they sewed urgently. I stood apart from their excited bustle. They were all half strangers to me; I knew their faces and their names, but nothing really of them. My stepmother made it her business to hire all the women of the house and know them and speak to them, so they would do good work for her, but she had never brought me into supervising the work of the household. She might have had a daughter of her own, after all.
But she had never been unkind to me; she had even sent her own best women to help with my sewing, although she would have liked to have the tsar’s visit as an excuse for new gowns for herself. Of course, she saw the value of having me settled in such a place—if it could be managed. As the other women went back to their seats, from peeping at the tsar, they had all glanced at me and looked dubious. I wished I could have felt so, myself. But they hadn’t seen me in the necklace, the crown. Only Magreta had, and she wrung her hands when she thought I didn’t see, and gave me bright encouraging smiles when she thought I did.
The women were working on linens now. My own gowns were already finished and waiting for me, in three shades of grey, like a winter’s sky. My father had ordered them made almost without ornament, of fine silk, with only a little touch of white embroidery. I had been wearing one of them for the last fitting yesterday when the jeweler’s woman had brought me the crown; she had given it to Magreta, who had set it on my head, and in the mirror I had become a queen in a dark forest made of ice. I had reached towards the glass and felt cold biting at the tips of my fingers with sharp teeth. I wondered if I really could do it, run away into the white world in the mirror. The cold on my fingers felt like a warning; it didn’t seem to me anything mortal could live in that frozen place.
When I had turned away, longing and afraid, the jeweler’s woman—who was only my age or a bit older, although thin and hard-faced—was staring at me as if she knew what I had seen in the mirror. I would have liked to ask her a thousand questions—how the crown had been made, where the silver had come from—but why would she have known? She was only a servant. My father came in then to inspect me, and I could not have talked to her anyway. He paid her without any haggling, but then, a throne would be cheap at the price; he had not spent half of that big chest my stepmother had brought with her.
My stepmother Galina came up to the room a little while later, after the court had been disposed of. Her carefully maintained placidity was stirred from underneath like ripples from fish darting this way and that. “Such a fuss,” she said. “Piotr would not go to sleep for an hour. Is your hair dry? How long it is! I always forget when you have it up.” She plainly thought of putting out her hand and stroking my head, but instead she only smiled at me. I would have been irritated if she had done it, and yet I was half sorry she hadn’t. But what I was really sorry for was that she hadn’t done it ten years ago, when I was small and irritating and motherless, another woman’s child—the woman her husband had loved better than her, I realized, which was why she hadn’t, even though it would have been sensible.
But it was just as well she hadn’t loved me, and made me love her, because she couldn’t have done anything to help me anyway. It wasn’t that my father wouldn’t listen or believe me, if I told him the tsar was a sorcerer. Everyone knew his mother had been a witch. But my father would only tell me to hurry and bear a child before the tsar spent himself in black magic, and then I would be the mother of the next tsar. Who would be his grandson—another useful tool in his hands, and all the more so if his father conveniently died off while he was still young enough to need a regent. If it was difficult or unpleasant for me to be married to such a man, very well; it had been difficult and unpleasant for him, after all, to go to war. He had brought our family this high, and it was my duty to bring us higher, if I could; he would not hesitate to spend me as he had spent himself.
And why would Galina want to defend me against such a fate? She had spent herself so, too. She had been a widow herself, childless, who could have lived prosperous and rich alone, but instead she had brought my father that chest full of gold, so she could be a duchess. Now she might be mother-in-law to the tsar: an excellent return on her own investment.
Magreta said, “Yes, you are right, milady, Irina’s hair is dry. It is time to brush it.” She drew me to a chair in the corner, and she did lay her hands on my head. She was slow and gentle with the tangles, too, as she usually wasn’t, and she sang very softly over my hair, the song I had always loved as a child, the clever girl escaping from Baba Yaga’s house in the woods.
It took an hour for her to brush my hair as she wanted it, and then another to braid it all up, and then she wrapped the plaits around my head like a crown. My father’s steward came up and knocked on the door without coming in, carrying the jewel-box. Tonight I would only wear the ring, tomorrow add the necklace, and the third night the crown, to decide matters if they had not yet been decided. I had thought of trying to slip in a substitute; my mother had left a few small silver trinkets that Galina hadn’t bothered to claim, among them a ring. It was pretty and well-polished, but no one would look at it on my hand and think me beautiful because of it.
But my father would know the difference, and tomorrow there would be the necklace, for which I had no substitute. Tonight the tsar was only meant to look at me and frown and look again, and have me as an itch in the back of his head all the next day, like my father’s thumb running the ring around and around on his own hand. Tomorrow night, I would really be brought to market, and the third night, my father hoped, would be a joint maneuver, him and his promised son-in-law displaying me for a shared triumph.
But the truth was, I wanted the ring. I wanted to put it on my hand, and feel the cool silver against my skin, mine. I stood up and went with Magreta into my bedroom, to put on my dress. She tied on my sleeves and pulled through the big clouds of silk chemise beneath, and once I was dressed, I went back to the sitting room and called in the steward. The ring, which my father had worn on his big thick sword-hardened knuckle, slid easily to the base of my right thumb, and fit there snugly. I held my hand out before me, the cold silver shining, and the chatter of the women sitting around me fell off, or perhaps my own hearing was muted. Outside the sun was sinking quickly, and the world going to blue and grey.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday night in my grandfather’s house, my aunts with their families all came to dinner, everyone gathered round the table in a noisy crowd. My cousin Basia was there, of course, and as we all carried dishes to the table, she caught me aside and hugged me tight and whispered, “It’s all agreed! Thank you, Miryem, thank you, thank you,” in my ear, and kissed my cheek, before she went back to the kitchen. And oh, why shouldn’t Basia have been happy? But I would have preferred it if she’d slapped me across the face, and laughed at me, so I could hate her. I didn’t w
ant to be the good fairy in her story, scattering blessings on her hearth. Where did all those fairies come from, and how rich could they be in joy to spend their days flitting around to more-or-less deserving girls and bestowing wishes on them? The lonely old woman next door who died unlamented and left an empty house to rob, with a flock of chickens and a linen chest full of dresses to make over: that’s the only kind of fairy godmother I believed in. How dare Basia thank me for it, when I didn’t want to give her a thing?
At the table, I cut a big slice of the cheesecake for myself and ate it without talking, rude and starved and angry, trying to tell myself I would be glad to go away from them all and be a queen among the Staryk. I wanted to make myself cold enough to want it. But I was too much my father’s daughter. I wanted to hug Basia and rejoice with her; I wanted to run home to my mother and father and beg them to save me. The cheesecake was familiar and sweet and soft down my tight throat, and when I finished, I slipped away and went up to my grandmother’s bedroom and pressed water from the basin over my face. I held the cloth against it and breathed through the linen for a while.
Then there was a big joyful noise coming from downstairs, and when I went back down, Isaac had come with his mother and father to drink a glass of wine with us; Basia’s parents had just announced the betrothal, although everyone in the house already knew, of course. I drank their health and tried to be glad, truly, even while I heard Isaac telling my grandfather his plans, standing before him holding Basia’s hand: there was a little house that had just come for sale two doors down the street from his parents; he’d buy it outright, with that gold I’d brought to him, and in a week—a week!—they’d be married, and just so quickly as that settled; as quickly as if a magical wand had been waved over their heads.