by Naomi Novik
But when the king turned to me, with the crown in his hands and his face cold with discontent, I reached out boldly and took hold of it with him before he could simply plunk it on my head. He glared at me over it, startled at least into some kind of expression, and I glared determination back at him. The old anger was rising in me, but here I didn’t feel cold with it; I felt hot enough for steam to rise from my cheeks, to glow through my palms. Where my hands touched the crown, it began to warm, and all around me the blade-sharp smiles began to melt away as thin lines of gold crept from beneath my fingers and went running through the silver, widening, curling over every fragile twist of lacework, every separate link.
The Staryk king stood unmoving, his mouth a straight line as he watched the silver change, until between our hands the whole crown shone gold as sunrise, strange and vivid beneath that overcast sky. All the crowd sighed together when it was done, a soft whispering noise. He held it in place another moment longer, but then together we put it on my head.
It was far heavier than the silver crown had been; I felt its weight on my neck and in my shoulders, trying to bend me. And I remembered, belatedly, that this was the very power he’d come seeking from me, what he’d wanted me for all along, and now I’d shown them all that I really had it. Surely there was no chance he’d ever let me go now. But I kept my head high and turned back to face all of them. There were no smiles among them now, and the disapproval had gone to wariness. I looked them in their cold faces and I decided I wouldn’t be sorry, all over again.
We didn’t exchange any vows, and there was no feasting and certainly no congratulations. A few cut-glass faces and sidelong eyes glanced at me, but mostly they all just turned and glided away out of the grove from all around us, leaving us there alone at the mound. Even the servant bowed himself away and vanished, and when they were gone, the Staryk king stood there another moment before he turned abruptly and walked away, too, along the glassy polished-mirror of the tiny frozen stream.
I followed him. What else was I to do? As we neared the shining glass wall of that vaulted space, I saw other Staryk stepping into openings, doorways and tunnel mouths, as if they lived within the crystal walls like houses around a meadow. The ice stream widened steadily as we walked alongside it; near the end of the vaulted grove, where we came to the shining wall, the frozen surface of it grew thinner, so I could see water moving deep beneath it, and where it reached the wall, it cracked upon the surface to show moving water beneath before it plunged into a dark tunnel mouth and vanished.
Beside that tunnel mouth a long stairway began, cut into the mountainside. The Staryk king led me up the stairs, a dizzy, leg-aching climb that took us high above the tops of the white trees. When I glanced down by accident—I did my best to avoid it, for fear of tumbling straight off; there was no railing on the stairs—I could see the rings more clearly, and the rest of the meadow spread white around them. I kept my hand on the mountain wall next to me and placed my feet carefully. He had gotten far ahead of me by the time I finally reached the top, but the staircase delivered me to a single large chamber, and he was waiting there with his fists clenched at his sides, his back to me.
It was massively long and the full thickness of the mountain wall: it ended in a thin wall of glass on the other end, perfectly clear, that looked straight out of the mountainside. I went slowly to it and looked far, far down the slope. Below me now, the waterfall was draining directly out of a large fissure in the mountainside, smoky-edged like a glass cracked in a fire. It tumbled down into a misty cloud that was all I could see from above, the half-frozen river emerging to run away into the dark forest, the fir-green trees dusted with white. I couldn’t see the road of white trees anywhere. We had only driven a few hours, but there was no sign of Vysnia in the distance, no sign of any mortal village at all. Only the endless winter forest stretching away in all directions.
I didn’t like seeing it, that enormous dark expanse draped with its white doilies of snow; I didn’t like seeing where Vysnia should have been and wasn’t, and the mortal road going back to my own village from it. Had they missed me, back at home? Or had I simply slipped out of their minds, the way the Staryk had gone out of mine whenever I wasn’t looking at him? Would my mother forget why I hadn’t come home yet, or forget me, forget she had ever had a daughter, who made too much money and bragged of it and so got herself stolen away by a king?
The walls of the chamber were hung with filmy silken hangings that had a shimmer of silver, and there was no comforting hearth, but at regular intervals great stands of icy crystals reared up higher than my head, capturing light and reflecting it inside themselves. There hadn’t been any feasting below, but there was a small table of white stone set and waiting for us, and a pair of goblets already poured, silver and carved, one with a stag and one with a hind. I picked that one up, but before I could drink, the Staryk king turned and took the goblet from my hand and flung it against the wall in a noisy clamor, so hard the metal dented where it rolled away. The wine spilled in a wide puddle across the floor, and where the dregs came dribbling out there was a strange white residue foaming, from something put into the glass.
I stared at it. “You were going to poison me!”
“Of course I was going to poison you!” he said savagely. “Bad enough that I’ve had to marry you, but to submit myself to—” He threw a look of loathing across the room, where I realized now the filmy hangings concealed a kind of bower, a sleeping-place.
“You didn’t have to marry me in the first place!” I said, for the moment almost more bewildered than afraid, but he made another sharp irritated gesture of contempt, as if I were only scraping a place already raw. So honor dictated that he had to marry me, because he’d promised he would, but it wouldn’t stop him murdering me right after? He hadn’t made me any vows of any kind, after all; he’d only said I was his queen, and stuck a crown on my head, no promise made to cherish or protect me.
And then he’d brought me up here to murder me, and he’d only spared me because—Slowly I went and picked up the goblet from the floor. I called back the feeling of the crown changing beneath my hands, the warming glow, and where I squeezed my hand around the stem, gold went spilling out through the silver. I turned to him with it already changed wholly in my hands, and he stared at it, bleak as if I’d shown him his doom instead of a cup of gold. He said harshly, “I do not need a further reminder. You will have your rights of me,” and he reached up and flung off his white fur cloak over the chair. He unfastened his cuffs after, and the throat of his shirt; plainly he meant to undress at once, and—
I nearly said he didn’t have to, but I realized in rising alarm that it wouldn’t be any use: he’d already married me and crowned me because he owed it, no matter that I’d tried to refuse, and though he would gladly have fed me poison, he wouldn’t cheat me. Our marriage entitled me to the pleasures of the wedding-bed, so I was getting them, whether I wanted them or not. It was as though I’d made a wish to some bad fairy for a customer who’d always pay his debts exactly on time.
“But why do you want gold so much?” I asked him desperately. “You have silver and jewels and a mountain of diamond. Is it really worth it to you?” He ignored me as entirely as he had in the sleigh: I was only something to be endured. He had what seemed fifty silver buttons to unfasten, but the last ones were slipping quickly through his fingers. Watching them go, I blurted in a final frantic attempt, “What will you give me in exchange for my rights?”
He turned instantly towards me, his shirt hanging nearly open over his bare chest, the skin revealed as milk-pale as the marble floors in the duke’s palace. “A box of jewels from my hoard.”
Relief almost had me agree instantly, but I made myself take three deep breaths to consider, the way I did when someone made me an offer in the market that I wanted very much to accept. The Staryk was watching me with narrow eyes, and he wasn’t stupid; though he didn’t want to bed me, he knew I didn’t want to bed him, either. He’d m
ake me a low offer, one that would cost him nothing, and see if I took it quick.
Of course, I still wanted to accept—now I couldn’t stop seeing the bed behind those hangings, and I was sure he’d be cruel; by accident and haste to be done, even if not deliberately. But I made myself think of what my grandfather would have said to me: better to make no bargain than a bad one, and be thought of forever as an easy mark. I steeled myself against the churning in my stomach and said, “I can make gold from silver. You can’t pay me in treasure.”
He frowned, but there wasn’t an explosion. “What will you have, then? And think carefully before you ask too much,” he added, a cold warning.
I carefully let out the breath I’d been holding. Of course now I had a new difficulty: I hadn’t wanted to be taken advantage of, but now I also didn’t want to ask too much, and how could I know what he would and wouldn’t consider so? Besides, I knew he wouldn’t let me go, and now I knew he wouldn’t kill me, either, and there wasn’t much else that I could think of that I wanted from him. Except answers, I realized. So I said, “Each night, in exchange for my rights, I will ask you five questions, and you will answer them, no matter how foolish they may seem to you.”
“One question,” he said, “and you may never ask my name.”
“Three,” I said, emboldened at once: he hadn’t reacted with outrage, at least. He folded his arms, his eyes narrowing, but he didn’t say no. “Well? Do you need to shake to make a bargain here?”
“No,” he said instantly. “Ask twice more.”
I pressed my lips together in annoyance, and then I said, “Then how do you make a bargain here?” because I could see that was going to be important.
He looked at me narrowly. “An offer made and entered into.”
Of course, I still didn’t want to make a quarrel over it, but I could tell he was testing me again, and at three questions a night, I would be forever getting anything from him in tiny dribs and drabs like these. “That doesn’t truly answer the question for me, and if your answers are useless to me, then tomorrow I won’t ask,” I said pointedly.
He scowled, but amended his answer. “You laid forth your terms and we bargained, until I did not seek to make you amend them further. It was therefore under those terms that you have asked your questions, and I have given answer in return; when you have asked a third, and I have answered it, the bargain will be complete, and I will owe you nothing more. What more is necessary? We have no need of the false trappings of your papers and gestures, and there can be no assurance in those untrustworthy to begin with.”
So he’d closed the bargain by answering my first question as part of it—which seemed something of a cheat to me. But I wasn’t willing to make a quarrel over it. That meant I had only one question left until tomorrow, and a thousand answers I wanted in return. But I asked the most important first. “What would you take to let me go?”
He gave a savage laugh. “What have I not already given to have you? My hand and my crown and my dignities, and you ask me to set a higher price upon you still? No. You shall be content with what you have gotten of me already, in return for your gift, and mortal girl, be warned,” he added, with a cold hiss, his eyes narrowing to blue shadows like a deep crack in a frozen river, a warning of falling through into drowning water below, “it is that gift alone that keeps you in your place. Remember it.”
With that he snatched up his cloak and flung it on, and he swept out of the room and slammed the door behind him.
CHAPTER 11
I like goats because I know what they will do. If I leave the pen open, or there is a loose post, they get out and run away, eating the crops, and if I don’t watch out for their legs they kick me when I milk them, and if I hit them with a stick they run, but if I hit them very hard they will run always when they see me, unless they are very hungry and I have food. I can understand goats.
I tried to understand Da, because I thought if I did, he would hit me less, but I didn’t ever manage it, and for a long time I didn’t understand Wanda, because she was always telling me to go away, but she would make me food along with everyone else and give me clothing sometimes. Sergey was kind to me most of the time, but sometimes he wasn’t, and I didn’t know why about that, either. Once I thought maybe it was because I had killed our Mama being born, but I asked Sergey and he told me I had been three years old when our Mama died and it was a different baby that killed her.
That day I went to the tree and saw her grave and the baby’s grave, and I told her I was sorry she was dead. She told me she was sorry, too, and to stay out of trouble and listen to Wanda and Sergey, so I did, as much as I could.
But now Wanda and Sergey were gone and Da was dead, and it was just me and the goats and the long walk to town before us. I had only ever gone to town once before, the day the Staryk caught Sergey, and I almost didn’t go then. When I found him, first I thought that no one would help me, but then I thought maybe I was wrong about that the way I was wrong about other things and so I should at least try. Then I wondered who should I ask, Da or Wanda. Da was much closer, he was just in the field working, and Wanda was all the long way away in town and wouldn’t come home for hours and hours, and all that time Sergey would be lying in the woods. But I still wasn’t sure, so I ran and asked Mama, and she told me to go to Wanda, so that’s what I did. And that was the only time I had ever been to town.
I couldn’t go as fast now, leading the goats, but I didn’t really want to go fast anyway. I knew that Wanda liked Panova Mandelstam, and she gave us eggs sometimes, but she was someone else I didn’t know and wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t know what I would do if she told me to go away. I didn’t think I could go back and ask Mama in the tree for help anymore; otherwise she would not have given me the nut, because the nut was for being taken away. So I was afraid to get to town in case Panova Mandelstam didn’t let me stay, and then I would just be in town with four goats and only me and I wouldn’t know what to do.
But Wanda had been right, because when I did finally reach the house, Panova Mandelstam came out right away and said, “Stepon, why are you here?” as if she knew who I was, even though I had only come to the house one time, and I had never talked to her at all, only Wanda. I wondered if maybe she was a witch. “Is Sergey sick? He couldn’t come tonight? But why do you have the goats?”
She was saying so many things and asking so many questions I didn’t know which one to answer first. “Will you let me stay?” I said instead, desperately, because I couldn’t help wanting to know that, first. I thought she could ask me all her questions afterwards. “And the goats?”
She stopped talking and looked at me and then she said, “Yes. Put them in the yard, and come inside and have some tea.”
I did what Panova Mandelstam told me, and when I went inside she gave me a cup of hot tea that was much better than any tea we ever had at home, and she gave me some bread with butter and when I ate it all she gave me another piece and when I ate all of that she gave me another with honey. My stomach was so full I could feel it with my hand.
Panov Mandelstam came in while I was eating. I was a little worried at first because I thought by then that maybe everything was all right because Panova Mandelstam was a mother. I didn’t really understand what mothers were, because mine was in a tree, but I knew they were very good things and you were very angry and sad if you lost them, because Wanda was and Sergey was too, and anyway, whenever Da came into our house I always wanted to run away, like the goats. But it was not like when Da came into the house when Panov Mandelstam came in: it did not get noisy. He only looked at me and then he went to Panova Mandelstam and said to her very softly as if he didn’t want me to hear, “Did Wanda come with him?”
She shook her head. “He brought his goats. What is it, Josef? Has there been trouble?”
He nodded and put his head closer to hers so I couldn’t hear the words he was whispering, but I didn’t need to, because of course I knew what the trouble was already, it was W
anda and Sergey going away, because Da was dead in our house. Panova Mandelstam snatched up her apron and covered her mouth as he told her, and then she said fiercely, “I don’t believe it! Not for a minute. Not our Wanda! That Kajus is as good as a thief, he always was. Making trouble for that poor girl—” Panov Mandelstam was hushing her, but she turned and said to me, “Stepon, they are saying terrible things about Wanda and your brother Sergey in town. They say that—they killed your father.”
“They did,” I said, and they both stared at me. They looked at each other, and then Panov Mandelstam sat down next to me at the table and said to me quietly, the way I talked to a goat when it was scared, “Stepon, will you tell us what happened?”
I was worried when I thought about having to tell him all of it, all the words it would take, because I was not good at talking. “It will take a long time for me to say it,” I said. But he only nodded, so I did my best, and they didn’t say anything to interrupt me, even though I did take a long time. Panova Mandelstam also sat down after a little while, her hands still over her mouth.
When I was finished they still didn’t say anything for a while, and then Panov Mandelstam said, “Thank you for telling us everything, Stepon. I am very glad Wanda sent you to us. You will have a home with us as long as you want it.”
“What if I want to stay forever?” I said, to make sure.
“Then you have a home with us as long as we have one ourselves,” he said. Panova Mandelstam was crying, next to me, but she wiped her eyes and then she got up and gave me some more bread and tea.
*
It was a strange way to spend my first night as tsarina. I made a bed of my white furs in front of the mirror and slept right there upon them, so I could have snatched them in my arms and leapt through the glass in moments. I only slept fitfully, raising my head every little while to listen. But no one came in the night. I woke finally with the sky going pale and the morning bells ringing, and after a moment, I stood up and took the chair out from under the doorknob, and then I tapped on the door until the yawning guards outside opened it—two different men than the guards who had brought me upstairs the night before. I wondered what had happened to those men. Nothing good, I imagined, if Mirnatius really thought I had bribed them.