by Naomi Novik
He frowned at me. “You don’t. What difference can it make, when you are not there?”
“I still need to celebrate Shabbat,” I said. “It begins at sundown tonight—”
He shrugged impatiently, interrupting. “This is no concern of mine.”
“Well, if you won’t help me find out when Shabbat actually is, I’ll have to treat every day as Shabbat from now on, since I’m sure to lose track of the days without sunset and sunrise to mark them,” I said. “It’s forbidden to do work on Shabbat, and I’m quite sure that turning silver to gold counts as work.”
“Perhaps you will find a reason around it,” he said, silkily, and I didn’t need to work hard to find the threat in his words. Of course if I withheld my gift, I’d stop being valuable to him, and he wouldn’t keep me around long.
I looked him squarely in the face. “It’s a commandment of my people, and if I haven’t broken it to cook food when I was hungry, or to wake a fire when I was cold, or to accept money when I was poor, you needn’t expect me to break it for you.”
Of course that was nonsense, and I would have done it if he put a knife to my throat. My people didn’t make a special virtue of dying for our religion—we found it unnecessary—and you were supposed to break Shabbat to save a life, including your own. But he didn’t need to know that. He scowled at me, and then he went out of the room again and came back a few minutes later with a mirror on a chain, a small round one in a silver frame like a pendant. Holding it cupped in his hand, he stared at it intently, and a flare of warm sunset light came out of it, not unlike the heaped gold shining out of the chest. He turned and dangled the mirror in the air in front of my face, and it was like peering out a keyhole at a slice of the horizon, orange light painting the sky with dark cold blue falling down over it, night coming on. But when I held my hand out to take it, he pulled it back and said coldly, “Ask for it, then, if you want it so badly.”
“May I have the mirror?” I said through my teeth. He held it over my hands and dropped it, so there was no chance we would touch, and instantly turned and left me.
*
Sergey and I didn’t reach the road to Vysnia. We started walking that way, through the forest, but after we walked for maybe an hour, we started to hear voices coming from the woods, and dogs barking. There were not many dogs left in the village anymore. Mostly people had eaten them because the winter was going so long. Only the best hunting dogs had been kept. Now they were hunting us. We stopped. Sergey said after a moment, “I could . . . go to them.”
If they had him, probably they would stop. They would not keep chasing me alone, most of them anyway. Then at least I would get away. If we kept going together, if we had to run, I would get tired first. Sergey was taller and stronger than me, and my skirts were not good for running in the woods. But I thought of them hanging Sergey, putting a rope around his neck and pulling him up off the ground, legs kicking in the air until he was dead. I had seen them hang a thief once that they took in the market. “No,” I said. So we turned back into the woods together.
For a little while it became quiet again, but then the sounds came back to our ears. First a bark far away, then another. They came closer. We hurried, and it became quiet again, but then we were tired, and we slowed down, and we heard a bark again, on one side of us, and another one on the other side. They were coming up around us like herding goats into a pen. There was snow still on the ground that had not melted yet, and we were leaving footprints. We could not help it.
Then suddenly it began to be dark. It wasn’t the sun going down yet. It felt as though we had been walking a very long time, but that was only because we were tired. Instead it was a great dark grey cloud coming over the sky. A gust of wind came in our faces, smelling of snow. I did not let myself think the snow would come. It was too late for a blizzard. It was almost June. But the flakes came, first a few, and then more than a few, and then we were alone in a clearing in the forest with a curtain of white all around us.
We did not hear any more barking or noises. The snow was coming fast and thick, and there was a heavy weight in the air that said it would fall for a long time. Everyone would have gone back to the village as quick as they could. We went onward as quick as we could, even though we had nowhere to go to, only away. The new snow was covering the old snow so we could not see the icy places or the mud hollows or the loose snow. My knee was hurt when I fell upon a hard stone hidden, and once Sergey tripped and went all the way on his front in the cold and wet and then there was snow clinging to his head in clumps that grew as we kept going.
I was used to walking a long way, but we had already come much farther than it was from my house to Miryem’s house, and that was on the road. But we had to just keep walking. We were not trying to walk towards the road. I didn’t know which way the road was anymore. We could have been walking in circles. The cold crept from my fingers up my arms and from my toes up my legs. My shoes were wet and a few straps were breaking. I could feel it from a little way off even though my feet were getting numb. Sergey had to stop and wait for me sometimes. Finally my shoe came all the way off and I tripped again and fell, and the pot went flying off.
We took a long time finding it. We should just have kept going, but we did not think of that until after we had dug through all the snowbanks around us, and our hands were almost frozen numb. We kept looking until finally I found a hole going all the way down to the bottom of a tall snowdrift and I dug it out. There was a small dent in the side. We looked at it and it was only a pot that we had nothing to cook in. And then we both knew we should have kept going, but we did not say so out loud. Sergey took the pot and we stood up to keep going.
But then I looked at the snowdrift. Some of the snow had come off the top, and under the snow it was a wall, only as high as my waist, but a real wall that someone had built of stones. It was not very long. On the other side, it was mostly clear, except for a very big snowdrift, twice Sergey’s height. It could have only been a few trees and bushes covered in snow, but when we climbed over the wall and went close, we saw that it was really a little hut, made of stones at the bottom and sticks above. An old dead curtain of ivy hung over all of it, over the walls and windows and the hole where the door had been. Ice had frozen over the dry leaves and snow had heaped on the ice. The vines broke right away and fell down when we pushed on them.
We went inside at once, without even waiting for our eyes to be able to see. It didn’t matter what was inside; it was better than outside. But after a few moments we could see there was a table and a chair and a bed made out of wood, and an oven. The slats had rotted away from the chair and the bed, and also the mattress, but the oven was still good and solid. There was a pile of old firewood sitting next to it.
I brushed up some crumbled slats from under the bed and some straw from the mattress for kindling, and then I sat down next to the oven and began to work up a fire with a few small sticks. I knew how to do it well because sometimes we would run out of wood and our fire would die and we would have to start it new again. Sergey put down our dented pot and warmed himself up a little with stamping. Then he went out again. When he came back, I had gotten a little fire going. He had two armfuls of wet wood and a miracle: potatoes. “There is a garden,” he said. The potatoes were small, but he had dug ten of them, and there was no one to eat them but us.
I fed the fire with the old wood until it was strong. We spread the wet wood that Sergey had brought in over the top of the oven and in front of it to dry. We put the potatoes into the oven and put our pot full of snow on to melt and get hot. We sat by the oven warming ourselves until the water boiled, and then we made cups of hot water and drank them to get warm inside. Then we boiled more water and I cut up the potatoes and put them into the water to cook the rest of the way. That way we would have the potatoes to eat, and we could drink the potato-water also. It felt like it took a long time for the potatoes to cook but then they were done and we ate them, hot and steaming and burning our tong
ues and so good.
We didn’t think about anything all that time, and while we were eating. We were so cold and so hungry. I was used to being cold and hungry but not as bad as that. It was worse than the winter when the food ran out. So I didn’t think about anything except getting warm and getting something to eat. But then we finished eating and we were warm and when I poured cups of potato-water for us out of the pot, I thought about the pot falling on Da with all the boiling-hot kasha in it, and I shook all over my body and it wasn’t with cold.
After that I was thinking again. I didn’t think about Da, I thought about us. They hadn’t caught us, they hadn’t hanged Sergey and me. We hadn’t frozen to death in the forest. Instead we were here, in this little house all alone in the woods, and we were warm by a fire and we had found potatoes, and I knew it wasn’t right.
Sergey knew, too. “No one lives here anymore, not for a long time,” he said to me. He said it very loud, as if he wanted to be sure anyone nearby would overhear it.
I wanted to believe it. But of course no real person would ever live here. The forest belonged to the Staryk. There was no road that came here. There was no farm or field. Only a little empty house in the woods for one person to live in all alone. It had to belong to a witch, and who knew whether a witch was dead or not, and when she might come back.
“Yes” was what I said, though. “Whoever lived here is gone now. Look at the bed and the chair. They have been rotting for a long time. Anyway, we will leave soon.” Sergey nodded just as eagerly as I had.
We were still afraid of sleeping in that witch hut, but we didn’t have anywhere else to go, so there was no use thinking about it. We banked the fire and then we got up on the top of the oven where it was warm. I thought of telling Sergey that one of us should watch, but I was asleep before I could make the words with my tongue.
CHAPTER 12
Alone in my chamber of glass and ice, with the sun going down in my mirror, I broke the bread that Flek had left me and drank a swallow of wine. I couldn’t light a candle; she and Tsop had only looked at me puzzled when I’d told them to bring me one. I sang the prayers, thin in my ears without my father and mother singing beside me, or my grandparents. I thought of that last night in Vysnia, the house full of people and everyone so happy around Basia and Isaac. She would be celebrating tomorrow again with my grandmother and her mother, my female cousins and her friends: the Shabbat before her wedding. My throat was dry with tears when I lay down.
I had nothing to read and no one to talk to. I kept Shabbat the next day by telling myself the Torah out loud, as much as I could remember. I confess I had never been very attached to Torah. My father loved it, deeply; I think in his heart he had dreamed of being a rabbi, but his parents were poor, and he didn’t read very well; he had to struggle over words and letters, though numbers came easily. So they had apprenticed him to a moneylender instead, and the moneylender knew Panov Moshel, and his apprentice met Panov Moshel’s youngest daughter, and so went my parents’ story.
Anyway, my father had spent almost every Shabbat reading to us, the words finally made smooth to him by repetition. But I had mostly spent the time thinking of whatever work I wasn’t allowed to do, or trying to imagine away a little gnaw of hunger, or in better times, coming up with the most difficult questions I could, as a game, to make my father have to work to answer them. But the memories had stuck deeper than I realized, and when I shut my eyes and tried to hear his voice, and murmur along with it, I found I could more or less stumble my way through. I was with Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison cell by the time the sun went down again, and Shabbat was over, and my husband came back to me.
I didn’t immediately open my eyes, glad to make him wait, but he surprised me by not saying anything, so I looked up before I’d meant to and found satisfaction in his face. The change from bitter resignation was remarkable. It made my jaw tighten. I sat back from the table and asked, “Why are you pleased?”
“The river stands still once more,” he said, but at first that meant nothing to me. Then I stood up and went to the glass wall. The crack in the mountainside had been patched thickly over with bulging curves of ice, and the thin waterfall had frozen in its tracks. Even the river below was a solid shining road, no longer flowing at all. A heavy snow had fallen, so much of it that the trees of the dark forest were all blanketed beneath it.
I didn’t know why it so pleased him, to have his world frozen, but there was something terrible and ominous in that featureless glittering white. Something deliberate, in all that green and earth wiped from the world, that made me think of all our long hard winters, of the rye killed in the fields and fruit trees withering, and as he came to stand beside me, I looked at the nearly ecstatic joy upon his face and said slowly, “When it snows in your kingdom—does it also snow in mine?”
“Your kingdom?” he said, glancing down at me, with faint contempt for such a conceit. “You mortals would like to make it so, you who build your fires and your walls to shut me out, and forget winter as soon as it is gone. But still it is my kingdom.”
“Well,” I said, “then it’s mine, now, too,” and had the satisfaction of seeing him frown with displeasure at the gruesome reminder that he’d married me. “But I’ll reword the question if you like: is there snow in the sunlit world today, even though it should be spring?”
“Yes,” he said. “The new snow comes here only when it comes in the mortal world; thus I have labored long to bring it.”
I stared at him, almost too blank at first to feel the horror of it. We knew the Staryk came in winter, that storms made them strong, and they swept out of their frozen kingdom on blizzard winds; we’d known that winter made them powerful. But it hadn’t occurred to me—to anyone I knew—that they could make the winter. “But—everyone in Lithvas will starve, if they don’t freeze first!” I said. “You’ll kill all the crops—”
He didn’t even look at me, that was how little he cared; he was already gazing out again with those clear glittering eyes, gazing with satisfaction on the endless white blanketing his kingdom, where I saw only famine and death. And there was nothing but triumph in his face, as though that was exactly what he’d wanted. My hands clenched into fists. “I suppose you’re proud of yourself,” I said through my teeth.
“Yes,” he said instantly, turning back towards me, and I realized too late it could be taken for a question. “The mountain will bleed no more while the winter holds, and I am justified in pride indeed; I have held true, though the cost was great, and all my hopes are answered.”
Having completed his toll, he turned at once and was about to go sweeping from the room, and then he paused and looked down at me suddenly. “But I have gone this far amiss,” he said abruptly. “Though you are no power either of this world or your own, you are still the vessel of high magic, and I must honor that as it deserves. Henceforth you shall have whatever comforts you desire, and I shall send more fitting attendants, ladies of high station, to serve you.”
It sounded extraordinarily unpleasant: to be surrounded by a flock of those smiling noblewomen, who surely either hated or despised me as much as he did. “I don’t want them!” I said. “My current ones will do. You might tell them they can answer my questions, if you wanted to be kind to me.”
“I do not,” he said, with a faint grimace of distaste as if I’d suggested he might want to kick some small helpless animal. Likely he’d have done that with pleasure. “But you speak as though I had barred them. It was you chose to desire answers of me, when you might have asked nearly any other gift instead. What voice should give them to you now for nothing, when you have put so high a value on them? And how can any low servant dare set you a price?”
I could have thrown up my hands in frustration as he left. But I was just as happy for him to go away. I disliked his satisfaction and pleasure far more than I’d disliked his irritation and cold anger. I sat staring out the window at the heavy blanket of snow he’d flung over the world, even while the little
mirror grew dark with night. I didn’t care for the duke’s sake, and I didn’t care for the sake of the townspeople, very much. But I knew what would happen to my people, when the crops all failed, and men with debts grew desperate enough.
I thought of my mother and father alone, snow climbing to the eaves of their house, and the colder hate pressing just as close around them. Would they go to Vysnia, to my grandfather? Would they even be safe there? I’d left behind a fortune that could buy them passage south after all, but I couldn’t make myself believe, now when I most wanted to, that they would forget me that far. They wouldn’t leave without me. Even if my grandfather could tell them where I’d been taken, they would never go; I could send them a letter and fill it full of lies: I’m a queen and I am happy, think no more of me, but they wouldn’t believe it. Or if they did, I’d break their hearts worse than dying, my mother who had wept to see me collect a cloak of fur from a woman who spat in the dust at her feet. She’d think I’d been frozen solid through, to choose to leave them and be a queen to a murderous Staryk, a king who would freeze the world just to make his mountain fortress strong.
The next morning when Flek and Tsop cleared away my breakfast dishes, I announced, “I want to go out driving.” It was a shot in the dark at something a Staryk noblewoman might do, and yet another thin hope of escape. A lucky hit this time; Flek nodded without any hesitation, for once, and led me out of my room onto the long dizzying stair that went back to that great hollow vaulted space in the center of the mountain.
It was much more alarming to go down than up: I felt much more aware of the fragile steps that looked as though they were made of glass, and how far away below the ground was. I saw more clearly than I wanted to the delicate white trees in their perfect rings nestled inside one another, the ones in the center ring tallest and most full of leaves, and the ones on the outer edge barely saplings, some of them bare-limbed.