by Naomi Novik
But at last we reached the ground, and then Flek took me through the grove along what I found a confounding maze of paths, all of them laid smooth as a frozen pond with borders of mosaic made of clear stones. I couldn’t have told one turning from another if I’d had the whole day to work with. Here we passed other Staryk of higher rank, in lighter grey than Flek wore, some even in ivory and near-white, with trailing servants of their own, and they stared at me openly; a few of them with faint curious smiles for my dark hair and dark skin and shining gold: I’d put on my crown again, as it seemed worthwhile to remind anyone who saw me that I was their queen.
On the far side, we followed another tunnel into the mountain wall, but a wide one, easily big enough for a sleigh to travel down, which emerged into another inner meadow where a herd of clawed deer grazed on translucent flowers, and the sleigh stood simply out in the open—they had no need of sheds or stables, I suppose. The same coachman who’d driven us to the mountain was sitting beside it holding a few straps of harness—working on them perhaps, although I didn’t see any tools in his hands. When Flek told him I wished to drive out, he silently rose and went for a pair of the deer and hitched them up swiftly. Then he opened the door of the sleigh for me, just like that.
Which was as much as to say there was no chance of my getting away by driving, and it was a waste of time. But I climbed in anyway. He spoke to the deer and flicked the reins, and they leapt lightly forward and with a lurch we plunged into another tunnel and began racing over the snowbound paths. I gripped the side of the sleigh to hold on. It seemed to me we were going much faster than when we’d come, but maybe it was because we were going down, down into the dark tunnel that led to the silver gates, the hooves of the deer making the low tap-tap-tap feet of dancers on the icy surface, until a dazzling-bright line of light cracked the dark ahead of me as the gates swung open out of our way and we came racing out of the gleaming side of the mountain and down the road into the snowbound forest.
I was still clutching on to the side of the railing, but as the cold air came into my face, I breathed deep and found myself still glad to be moving, to be getting out, even if I wasn’t likely to get anywhere useful at all. It was still worth a try.
“Shofer,” I said. The driver startled just as Flek and Tsop had, glancing around at me as if to make sure I’d been speaking to him. “I want to go to Vysnia.” He stared at me blankly, so I added, “The place where you came for me, before the wedding.”
He shuddered as if I’d asked him to drive me to the gates of Hell. “To the sunlit world? That is no distance to be crossed, save upon the king’s road, and at his will.”
When he said it, I realized only then that there was no sign of the white trees and the silver-white road that we’d traveled to reach the mountain. I turned and looked behind me. It was the same view: the glass mountain rose there tall and shining-bright, and two runner tracks ran away behind the sleigh through deep snow all the way to the silver gates. I could see the waterfall, now frozen, and the shining line of the river going towards the trees. But the Staryk road was missing as though it had never been there at all, and all the trees I could see ahead of us were dark pines, made white only with their heavy loads of snow.
I sank back into the seat, brooding, and as I didn’t say anything to turn him back, the driver kept on going. There wasn’t any other road, either: he drove onto the frozen surface of the river instead, the only path I saw between the trees. The deer didn’t seem to have any trouble running even on the ice; perhaps the claws on their hooves helped them.
The Staryk kingdom seemed endless forest otherwise. I saw nothing around us, no other buildings at all, and when I forgot and asked the driver whether any of them lived outside their mountain of ice, he didn’t answer, only glanced back at me as much as to say, Ask the king. We drove a long time and nothing changed. The day should have been going on towards noon, but instead it only grew more dim the farther we went from the mountain, the unmarked grey of the sky fading to a twilight dimness, and the trees and snow around us beginning to grow hazy and hard to see.
In the distance a line of deeper black appeared on the horizon, in the narrow opening between the trees where the river met the sky. The deer slowed, and Shofer glanced back at me. He didn’t want to keep going, the same way Flek hadn’t wanted to keep going, down into the mountain’s depths, and my sore legs reminded me of the punishment for pushing. But if I let them decide for me where I should go, I’d certainly never make an escape.
“Should we go back?” I said, making it a question, a little maliciously, to see if he could be prodded. He hesitated, and then he turned back to the deer without answering me and spoke a sharp word to them instead. We kept moving towards the dark horizon, and soon it was full night under the branches, and I could barely see the trunks along the banks. There was no moon, no stars to break the dark sky; the leaves were only a darker shadow against the charcoal-grey of it. The deer were tossing their heads, restive; they didn’t like it here, either, I could tell, and I didn’t think they cared one way or another who was in the sleigh they were pulling. The frozen river kept going on into the dark, vanishing away up ahead.
“All right, turn around,” I said finally, giving up, and Shofer turned their heads quickly, with enormous relief. But I looked back one more time as he turned the sleigh, and saw them: two people appearing upon the bank of the river, looming out of the dark: two people wrapped in heavy furs, and one of them a queen.
*
Mirnatius didn’t even twitch when the cold finally drove me back through the mirror. I crept to the hearth as slowly as I could, and warmed myself at the fire, still watching him warily for any signs he might wake. His magic had made the bed into a setting for his own beauty, and even in sprawled unconsciousness he was a work of art. He sighed and shifted in his sleep, murmuring in faint unintelligible gasps, a bare arm flung out of the covers and his head turning to show the line of his neck, his lips parted.
I belonged in that bed with him, a bride afraid of ordinary things, of clumsiness and selfishness. They would have been enough to fear; I’d never imagined more than putting up with it, and finding ways outside the bedroom that I might be useful enough to earn respect, that priceless coin. But surely with such a beautiful husband I should have had the right to entertain a few wary hopes as well, for whatever it was that made women get themselves into the troubles I only overheard in whispers.
Instead that pearled shell held a monster that wanted to drink me up like a cup of good wine, drained to the dregs and put down empty, and I’d have to outwit it every day just to live. I wasn’t sure who was master and who was servant anymore, but that demon had put Mirnatius on his throne seven years ago, and fed him with magic power since, and he was plainly ready and willing to hand me over in payment, with only a few minor complaints about the inconvenience of tidying up whatever ruin it left behind of me, like the rags of his half-burned clothing discarded on the floor.
I threw the scraps onto the fire and slept a little by the hearth, fitfully. As soon as morning came, I got up and hurried into my nightgown as if I’d worn it all night, and then rang the bell so the servants came in at once. Mirnatius started awake, looking around himself wildly at the unexpected noise, but they were already in the room. I asked them to ready a bath and bring us breakfast, and for another to help me dress, so they began bustling around the bedchamber without leaving us alone together, and then asked my husband in sweet tones, “Did you sleep well, my lord?”
He stared at me with baffled indignation, but there were four people in the room. “Very well,” he said after a moment, without ever taking his eyes from me, and also, I could see, without thinking of what he was saying, and what it would mean to my position in his court when his servants told everyone that the tsar, so worryingly uninterested in the pleasures of the flesh, had definitely slept in his wife’s bedchamber instead of his own, and slept well.
I don’t imagine he thought much about maintaining the favor of his cour
tiers, since he could simply mesmerize them when they were inclined to disagree. He only preferred to ration their displeasure, not to waste too much of his demon-borrowed magic. But I needed every weapon I could get hold of, anything that might be of use, and so I climbed into the bed with him—he edged back from me a little, eyeing me sidelong—and when they brought the tray I poured his tea, which I had noticed he liked to take very sweet, and added several spoonfuls of cherries before I presented the glass to him. He looked alarmed after he tasted it, as though he thought that was magic, too.
He couldn’t say anything to me with all the servants there—and they weren’t going anywhere when there was such gossip to be gathered, since I had given them an excuse to stay. Especially not any of the serving-maids. Mirnatius had no clothes on, after the wreck the demon had made of them last night, and the covers slipped from his bare shoulders and lean chest. The girls all darted flirtatious looks at him when they thought I wasn’t looking at them, and took every excuse to hover near him. They might as well have saved the effort: he never took his eyes away from me, only took bites from my hands warily, and answered all my small conversation in kind, until the bath was filled, and then I got up and said, “I will go to prayers while you bathe, my lord,” and escaped.
But when I came out of the church this time, the sleigh was waiting in the courtyard with our baggage going onto it. “We’ll be on our way to Koron, my dove,” Mirnatius said to me in the hall, with narrowed eyes, and I had no choice: I was going to have to get into the sleigh alone with him and drive into the dark woods, and on to his palace, full of his own soldiers and courtiers.
I went inside and put on my silver necklace and my three wool dresses and my furs and came down carrying my own jewel-box: nothing very unusual about that; my own stepmother always kept charge of her own as well, whenever she traveled, and no one was to know that there was nothing inside but my crown, or that all the rest of my trinkets had been stuffed in among my clothes to make the box lighter. I put it between my side and the sleigh. If I had to, I would jump off with the box, and run into the forest to find a reflection of frozen water to flee through.
But the demon-hunger didn’t gleam red in Mirnatius’s eyes as we set off, and I remembered I had never seen it there in daylight, only after night had fallen. Instead he waited until we were well away from the house—all the women of it waving farewells to me with their kerchiefs—and then hissed at me in his own human voice, “I don’t know where you’re scurrying away to every night, but don’t think I’ll let you keep on running off.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, dear husband,” I said, after a moment, considering carefully: what did I want him to think, or know that I knew? “I made my vows to you, but someone else keeps coming to the bedroom in your place. Squirrels run on instinct when a hunter comes too close.”
He stiffened back from me into the corner of the sleigh and settled into a seething watchful silence, his eyes on me. I sat carefully ordinary, relaxed against the cushions and looking straight ahead. We were gliding swiftly through the deep hushed stillness of the forest, the tree branches bowed under the weight of the fresh snow, and I let the steady unchanging landscape soothe me; it might have been cold, but not compared with the winter kingdom where I spent my evenings, and my ring was a chill comfort on my finger.
We drove for a long time, and then abruptly Mirnatius said, “And where do squirrels run to, when they want to hide?”
I looked at him, a little puzzled. I’d just told him that I knew about his possessing demon and its plans for me, so he couldn’t expect me to tell him anything, or cooperate with him at all. But when I didn’t answer, he scowled at me as sulky as a thwarted child, and leaned in and hissed, “Tell me where you go!”
The heat of his power washed over me and flowed into my hungry ring, leaving me untouched. I almost asked him why he was wasting his strength: he already knew it wouldn’t work. But I suppose he’d come to rely so much on his magic that he’d never learned to think. The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father’s house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I’d had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I’d never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life.
But I could tell that if I only sat there saying nothing, Mirnatius was likely to lose his temper. The storm clouds were already gathering on his brow, and even if his demon wasn’t going to put in an appearance until after nightfall, he could still have his perfectly ordinary guards throw me into a prison cell to wait for him. People would be really shocked, of course, if he had his new wife thrown into a cell and she then disappeared without explanation, and my father would undoubtedly make use of it—but Mirnatius was giving me very little reason to think he would look far enough ahead to beware those consequences.
Unless I made him do so. “Why didn’t you marry Vassilia four years ago?” I asked him sharply, even as he opened his mouth to shout at me again.
It did have the useful effect of interrupting the rise of his temper. “What?” he said, blankly, as if even the question made no sense to him.
“Prince Ulrich’s daughter,” I said. “He has ten thousand men and the salt mine, and the king of Niemsk would gladly let him swear fealty if you were killed. You needed to secure him, after you had Archduke Dmitir killed. Why didn’t you marry her?”
Scowling and bafflement were wrestling for control of his face. “You sound like one of those old hens who cluck at me in council.”
“That you never listen to, and enchant into stupors when they pester you too much?” I said, and scowling won; but it wasn’t the same kind of anger: being lectured about politics must have been a familiar annoyance to him. “But they aren’t wrong. Lithvas needs an heir, and if you aren’t going to provide one, you might as well be overthrown sooner than later. And now that you’ve married me, instead of Vassilia, Ulrich might decide to do it before you have the chance.”
“No one’s going to overthrow me,” he snapped, as if I was insulting him.
“How will you stop them?” I asked. “If Ulrich marries Vassilia to Prince Casimir, they aren’t going to come visit you in Koron so you can use magic to order them not to march an army on the city. Can you control their minds from three hundred miles off? Can you stop one of a thousand archers from shooting you across a battlefield, or make ten assassins drop their swords all at once, if they burst into your chamber determined to stab you?”
He stared at me as though he’d never tried to answer any such questions even for himself. Likely he thought all his advisors fools and worrywarts who didn’t know about his magic, which would save him from everything and anything that might threaten. But his demon didn’t seem all-powerful, and his mother’s sorcery hadn’t saved her from the stake. He seemed to feel less invincible himself in the face of a pointed question, and he certainly didn’t say I was wrong about the limits of his power.
“Why should you care?” he threw at me instead, as if he thought I was pretending some sort of deep concern for his welfare. “Surely you’d be delighted.”
“My pleasure would last only until they stabbed me right alongside you,” I said. “Ulrich and Casimir would prefer my father as an ally rather than an enemy, but they don’t have to have him, and they won’t risk me inconveniently producing an heir after they’ve taken your head off. Of course,” I added, “that’s only if you haven’t murdered me first, in some suspicious way, and given all of them together a magnificent excuse to march on you,” which was the point I really wanted to make.
Mirnatius subsided, brooding, back into his corner, but I took it as a small victory that he didn’t sit staring at me anymore, but looked out of the sleigh, frowning over the ideas I’d shoved into his head, which he’d evidently done so well at avoiding before now.
We drove all the long cold day; a few times the coachman stopped to rest the horses, and twice changed them at the stables of one middling boyar or another, people bowing energetically.
I made sure to climb out both times and walk around the courtyard and speak kindly to our hosts, saying a few favorable words about the children trotted out to make their bows. I wanted to be memorable to as many people as I could manage, if he was going to try making everyone forget me. Mirnatius held himself aloof and only spent the entire time staring at me with hooded eyes, which did nicely to make me look like a cherished bride.
The night was a long time in coming: strange on such a cold, wintry day, with the unnatural snow so thick on the ground. I was grateful for it, but even so, the setting of the sun was beginning to light the red glow in Mirnatius’s eyes as we drew into the courtyard of his palace in Koron. The walls were bristling with his soldiers, and Magreta was standing on the steps, her hands gripped tight at her breast, small and old in her dark cloak between the guards on either side of her, as if he’d sent men back to Vysnia last night, and had them drag her pell-mell to get here before dark.
When I climbed the steps, she put her arms around me and wept a little, saying, “Dushenka, dushenka.” She did thank me for remembering an old woman and sending for her, but I had been unfair to her: her voice trembled, and her hands gripped too hard at me. She understood that we were in mortal danger.
I made a show of my own, thanking my husband for his kindness and the wonderful surprise of finding her here, and I steeled myself and kissed him on the steps in front of his guards, startling him; he only thought of it as a weapon for him to use, I suppose. So he didn’t move when I brushed his warm mouth with mine and then quickly darted away from him again, as though I were embarrassed by my own daring. I turned to the guards, and asked Magreta if they’d taken good care of her, and thanked them when she nodded and said she’d felt so safe, even on the long road from Vysnia.
“Tell me your names, so I will remember them,” I said, and took my hand out of my muff to give to them, with my ring gleaming upon it, and they fumbled over it and stammered back at me, although they had surely been ordered to go and get the old woman no matter what anyone said to them, or how she wailed, and had thought of themselves as jailers, not as escort. Some of the stammering was the ring’s magic, but the rest, I suspected, was the subtler magic of contrast; I didn’t imagine Mirnatius showed much courtesy to his servants. “Matas and Vladas,” I repeated. “Thank you for your care of my old nanushka, and now let us go inside: you must have a drink of hot krupnik in the kitchen after your long trip.”