by Naomi Novik
I looked at Lukas. He did not look very pleased, but he did not look very sad either. He was only giving me a considering eye. I was a pig at the market he had decided to buy. He was hoping I fattened up well and gave him many piglets before it was time to make bacon.
“Of course, your father told me about this business with the debt,” Kajus said. “But I have told him he will not have to pay any more. We will put it on my account instead, and you will work it off from there. And every week, you will come and bring him a jar of my best krupnik, so he won’t forget what his daughter looks like. To your health and happiness!” He toasted me with his glass, and moistened his lips, and my father raised his too and drank the whole thing. Kajus filled his glass back up right away.
So my father wouldn’t even get a goat for me that might make milk, or some pigs. He wouldn’t get four pennies a month. He had sold me for drink. For one jug of krupnik a week. Kajus was still smiling. He must have guessed I was being paid in money. Or he thought maybe if I was in his house, Miryem would make his debt less. And if he went and talked to Miryem’s father, he would be right. The debt would all go away. It would be a wedding present they made me. Then maybe Kajus would keep me working for them, but he would demand more and more money from them. Miryem was gone. She could not come and fight him. It was only her father and mother, and they could not fight Kajus. They could not fight anybody.
“No,” I said.
They all looked at me. My father was blinking. “What?” he said, slurring.
“No,” I said again. “I will not marry Lukas.”
Kajus had stopped smiling. “Now, Wanda,” he began, but my father was not waiting for him to say any words. He got up quickly and hit me so hard across the face I fell to the floor.
“You say no?” my father bellowed. “You say no? Who do you think is master in this house? You don’t say no to me! Shut your mouth! You will marry him today, you stupid cow!” He was taking off his belt, trying to, but he could not get the buckle undone.
“Gorek, she was only surprised,” Kajus was saying, putting out a hand, not getting up. “I’m sure she will think better of it in a moment.”
“I will teach her to think better!” my father said, and grabbed me by my hair and dragged up my head. I had a glimpse of Lukas. He had backed away towards the door. He looked scared. My father was a big man, bigger than him and Kajus. “You say no?” he was repeating, again and again, hitting my face from either side, back and forth. I tried to cover my head, but he slapped my hands away.
“Gorek, she won’t look good for her wedding like this,” Kajus said, as if he was trying to make it all a joke. His voice was a little scared in my ringing ears.
“Who cares about her face!” my father said. “He’ll have the part of a woman that matters. Don’t you put up your hands to me!” he shouted at me. “You say no?” He had given up on his belt. He threw me down hard on the hearth and grabbed the poker from next to the fireplace.
And then Stepon said, “No!” and grabbed the other end of the poker. My father stopped. Even half blind with crying I picked up my head to stare. Stepon was still only small and skinny as a year-old tree. My father could have lifted him off the ground by the other end of the poker. But Stepon still grabbed the poker with both his hands and held on to it and said, “No!” again to my father.
My father was so shocked he didn’t do anything for a moment. Then he tried to pull the poker away, but Stepon was holding on to it tight, and he just came along with it. My father grabbed him by the shoulder and started trying to push him off it, but the poker was longer than his arm, and he was too drunk to think of putting it down, so he began to shake it back and forth, just pushing Stepon stumbling all around the house with it, still hanging on to the other end. My father got angrier and angrier, and then he roared a noise that wasn’t words and threw the poker down finally and grabbed Stepon and hit him full in the face with his big fist.
Stepon fell, with blood coming from his face, still holding the poker fast, and sobbed “No!” again.
My father was so angry he couldn’t even yell anymore. He grabbed his own stool and smashed it over Stepon’s back, broke it to pieces. Stepon fell flat to the ground. My father came away with a leg of it left, and whacked Stepon’s hands with it, hard, until he cried out and finally his fingers sprang off the poker and my father seized it.
There was a hot red rage in my father’s face. His eyes were red. His lips were pulled back from his teeth. If he started to hit Stepon with the poker now, he wouldn’t stop. He would kill him. “I’ll marry Lukas!” I said. “Da, I’ll marry him!” But then I looked from my swollen face and Lukas was already gone, and Kajus was trying to creep to the door.
“Where are you going?” my father bellowed at him.
“Well, if the girl doesn’t like it, that’s the end of it!” Kajus said. “Lukas doesn’t want a girl who doesn’t want him.” What he meant was he didn’t want this in his house. He had come with his krupnik and his clever plans and got my father drunk and built this rage in him like a fire, and now it was burning everything and he wanted to run away from it.
And he could run away. He was going, and Lukas had already gone. My father could not make them do what he wanted even if he howled at them. They were rich town men who paid good taxes. If he tried to hit them, they would get the boyar to have my father whipped. My father knew it. He yelled at me, “This is because of you! What man wants a woman who doesn’t know how to obey!”
He was coming to hit me with the poker, and Kajus was pulling open the door, and Sergey was there outside. He had heard us screaming. He ran inside and caught the poker before it hit my head. My father tried to pull it away from him, but he couldn’t. Sergey held on to it. He was as tall as my father now, and he had already gotten a little more weight, eating twice a day at Miryem’s house. And my father was thin with winter and drunk. My father tried again, and then he tried to hit Sergey with one fist, and Sergey pulled the poker away and swung it and hit him with it, instead.
I think it surprised Da more than anything, to be the one getting hit. Nobody ever fought him, not even in town. He was too big. He stumbled back, and tripped over Stepon still curled on the hearth, and he went over backwards. His head banged against the edge of the pot of kasha and knocked the stick loose. He went straight down past it into the fire and the whole boiling thing came down on his face.
Kajus gasped and ran out of the house while Da was still screaming and thrashing. I burned my hands getting the pot off him and we pulled him out of the ashes, but his hair was on fire and his clothes were on fire. His whole face was blistering and his eyes were swollen like big onions under their lids. We beat out the fires with our clothes. By then he had stopped screaming and moving.
The three of us stood around him. We didn’t know what to do. He didn’t look like a person anymore. His whole head was a big white swelled-up thing except where it was red. He wasn’t saying anything or moving. “Is he dead?” Sergey said finally. Da still didn’t move or say anything, and that was how we knew he was dead.
Stepon turned and looked scared between Sergey and me. His face was still bloody and his nose was all wrong. He wanted to know what we were going to do. Sergey’s face was pale. He swallowed. “Kajus will tell everyone,” he said. “He will tell them . . .”
Kajus would tell everyone that Sergey had killed our father. The boyar’s men would come and they would take him and hang him. It would not matter that Sergey did not mean to do it. It would not matter that our father had been ready to kill us. You could not kill your father. They might take me too. Kajus would tell everyone I had refused to marry his son, and then Sergey had killed my father to stop him beating me for it. So we had done it together. Anyway, they would hang Sergey for sure. And even if they did not take me and hang me, the boyar would take the farm and give it to somebody else. Stepon was too young to farm it alone, and I was a woman.
“We have to go away,” I said.
We went to the white tr
ee. We dug up the pennies. There were only twenty-two of them, but that was all we had. We looked down at them. I knew now how much twenty-two pennies would buy. It would not buy much food or drink for three people, and we would have to go a long way to get work anywhere.
“Stepon,” I said, “you must go to Panova Mandelstam.” Stepon darted a look at me. He was scared. “You are little. No one will say you did it. She will let you stay.”
“Why will she?” Sergey said. “He can’t help her.”
“He can look after their goats,” I said. But I only said that to make Stepon and Sergey feel better. I knew Miryem’s mother would let him stay, even if he could not do anything. But he would really be a help. Stepon was very good with goats. So even if no one went out collecting money anymore, they would not go hungry. And he would be company for them, all the days Miryem did not come home. After a moment, Stepon rubbed his eyes and nodded. He understood. Sergey and I could walk fast and for a long time. We could do work to be paid for. He couldn’t yet. It would be safer for us all. But it meant saying goodbye, maybe forever. Sergey and I could not come back. And Stepon would not know where we were.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” I said to the tree. The money had made trouble after all. We should have listened to her. There was a sound of wind through the white leaves like a long deep sighing. Then the tree slowly bent three low branches down towards us, each one touching us on our shoulders. It felt like someone putting a hand on my head. And the one on Stepon’s shoulder had a single pale white fruit hanging off it, a ripe nut. He looked at it and at us.
“Take it,” I said. It was only fair. Mama had saved me once, and Sergey, and anyway we two had made this trouble. Stepon had not asked for any of it.
So Stepon picked off the nut and put it in his pocket, and then Sergey asked me, “Where will we go?”
“We will go to Vysnia first,” I said after a moment. “We can find Miryem’s grandfather. Maybe he will give us work.” I knew her grandfather’s name was Moshel, but I didn’t think we could really find Vysnia, or him. But we had to walk towards something. And I remembered that Miryem had talked of sending wool south, when the river melted. If we did that, went south on the river past Vysnia, that would be an end of people looking for us. No one would hunt for us so far away.
Sergey nodded when I told him. We went to our pen and tied up our four thin goats that we had left on a string. Stepon took them and slowly went away down the road with them, looking back at us every few steps until he was out of sight. Then we divided the pennies between us, half and half, and each put our share into our strongest pocket. We didn’t want to go into the house again, because our father was still lying there, but finally we went inside and took my father’s coat from where it hung on the wall, and the empty pot out of the ashes so we could cook. Then we went into the woods.
*
Mirnatius and I were married the morning of the third day of his visit, me in my ring and my necklace and my crown. My father had offered the jewels as my dowry, claiming they had been my mother’s. Mirnatius had perfunctorily said, “Yes, that will do,” not caring. I think he would have taken me with nothing at all, but my father was a little thrown off by the ease of his own victory, made uneasy by it; he wanted to believe he had won with his machinations. The court stared at me yearningly as I came into the church, as though I carried all the stars in the world at my throat and on my brow, but the fairy silver might have been brass as far as my bridegroom cared or noticed it. For all his insistence on speed, he said his vows as if they bored him, and afterwards he dropped my hand as quickly as if it were made of coals. I could only guess he found it delightful to have a chance of marrying for spite, a girl who didn’t want him, when all the maidens of the kingdom sighed at him and would have cut off their own toes to be his wife.
We left immediately after. My half-painted bride’s chest was packed in a mad tumble onto the back of a sleigh painted in silver and white—very freshly painted; it was the hasty gift of one of my father’s boyars, who had simply had one of his own done over—and I was packed onto the seat in my turn. There was no one coming with me. Mirnatius had told my father there was no room in his household for another old woman, so Magreta was left behind, wretched and weeping on the stoop, hidden behind all the other ladies of the household.
Mirnatius kissed my father’s cheeks, as fitted a close relative, and climbed in beside me. I was only grateful that I wasn’t shut up with him inside the closed sleigh; it wasn’t big enough for two, if one of them was the tsar of Lithvas. But our sleigh was almost too hot anyway; there were heavy furs piled over us and warmers full of hot stones at our feet and beneath the seats. He reclined back in a lithe sprawl and held out a purse to me. “Throw coins to the people as we go, my beloved, so all may share in our joy,” he drawled. “And look as happy as I know you must be. Smile at them,” he added, another command that traveled into me like the waves of heat rising from the warmers, but the ring sat beneath my gloves, and the silver cooled it out of me. I only reached out warily to take the purse, and threw out handfuls of shining kopeks and pennies over the side of the sleigh without looking; no one in the streets would notice that I didn’t smile at them when there were coins to be snatched up, and I couldn’t make myself take my eyes off him. He frowned and kept watching me, eyes hooded, and said nothing more.
The sleigh flew along the frozen river road, stopping to change horses four times, until a little while before dark we stopped for the night with Duke Azuolas. He was a wealthy landlord with vast fields, but his seat was a smaller town walled more for safety against Staryk raiders than any conquest. It was a quiet place that could not accommodate the tsar’s full retinue, and Mirnatius ordered nearly his entire train to go onward and quarter themselves with small boyars and knights along the road, to be gathered up tomorrow. I stood on the steps of the duke’s house while they left, everyone who’d seen me wed, and cold went creeping along my spine. There was room in the house for some of them at least, and a great many of the knights looked sour and indignant about being sent onward. The servants were taking my chest off the sleigh and carrying it into the house. I looked at Mirnatius. It might have been only the sunset, but his eyes looked back at me with a brief red glow.
I went in to dinner with every scrap of my silver glittering in the candlelight: I didn’t remove even the crown, and all around the table, men stared at me with their faces open like children, perplexed and at the same time envious of the tsar, without quite knowing why. I spoke to as many of those silver-dazzled men as I could. But I had barely eaten a few mouthfuls of the final course when Mirnatius made my excuses for me, and ordered me away to the waiting hands of the maidservants, with two of his guards to follow. “Keep close watch on my tsarina’s door. I don’t want her running away,” he said to them, and everyone laughed at his little joke. As I left the table, he turned abruptly and caught my hand and jerked it to his mouth and kissed it, the heat of his lips burning. “I will come for you soon,” he whispered harshly, a hot, devout promise, before he let me go.
The kiss brought a wave of color to my cheeks, and the maidservants waiting for me tittered, thinking me eager for my beautiful bridegroom. I was grateful for their mistake. As soon as the door of my bedchamber was shut, I sent them away, instead of letting them help me undress. “My lord will help me, I think,” I said, lowering my eyes demurely to keep them from seeing that it was fear and not excitement speaking. They all laughed again and slipped away without argument, leaving me alone, still dressed in my heavy gown.
Two days ago, I had said to Galina, “It’s a long, cold way driving to and from Koron, and my old furs are too small.” I knew there would be a mad scramble underway among the courtiers who had come with the tsar and my father’s own boyars and knights, trying to find wedding gifts in a frantic hurry, and I thought it likely they would consult my stepmother. So now I had a beautiful heavy set of ermine furs, splendid enough for a tsarina to wear. I’d left them heaped white and soft in t
he corner of the room, and almost as soon as the maids had closed the door, I had the fur coat on, and then the heavy cloak, and the muff. I couldn’t wear the fur hat and the crown together, but I didn’t want to leave the hat lying there, making the rest notable for their absence, so I stuffed it into my muff.
Then I went to the tall mirror that hung upon the wall and looked at myself there, standing in the whirling snow of the dark forest. I stepped up to the glass, a bitter cold radiating against my face. I shut my eyes and took a step, terrified of every outcome: to meet only hard glass against the end of my nose, and no escape, or to go through, and find myself alone in the night, in another world, where I might never be able to get back.
But no glass met my face, only winter, biting at my cheeks. I opened my eyes again. I was alone, in a forest of dark pine trees covered with snow, surrounding me endlessly in every direction. The sky was a dark grey overhead, a late-evening twilight without any gleam of stars, and it was so bitterly cold I had to hold my muff against my lips to keep my breath from freezing my face. Thin flakes of snow drifted around me, pricking my skin like tiny needles. It wasn’t merely a cold winter night, or even a blizzard; it was a gnawing, unnatural cold that tried to creep directly to my heart and lungs, that asked what I was doing here.
There was no sign of shelter anywhere—no house where I could ask for refuge. But I turned and saw that I stood on the bank of a deep river frozen almost solid, shining black as glass, and when I looked down at the surface, instead of a reflection I saw the empty room I had fled, as though I was looking in from the mirror’s other side.
The door opened as I watched, and I drew taut as a bowstring, but an instant was enough to be sure: Mirnatius did not see me. He came into the room smiling wide and hungry, and only brightened when he saw the room apparently empty. He shut the door behind him and put his back to it, leaning against it. He reached down with one hand, not even looking, and locked it deliberately, the click coming to me faintly distorted, as though I heard it from underwater. “Irina, Irina, are you hiding from me?” he said softly, hot glee in his voice as he drew out the key and put it into his pocket. “I will find you . . .”