by Naomi Novik
Mirnatius could hardly take back such a small kindness without looking peculiar as well as petty, but of course he didn’t like his men taking any sort of order from me. “You and your nurse will go up to my rooms and wait for me,” he said coldly, as soon as he followed me into the halls, and he beckoned sharply to two other guardsmen at the door. “Take them upstairs and wait in the room with them until I arrive,” he ordered, the very trap I’d feared, and stalked away himself into the great hall. I gripped Magreta’s hand tight as we went up the stairs. She held on with equal force, and didn’t ask me if my husband was kind to me, or if I was happy.
“Will you tell me, did I do something wrong, to tell the guards to go have krupnik?” I asked one of the guards, as we went upstairs. “Does my lord disapprove of drink?”
“No, my lady,” the guard said, darting a look at me.
“Oh,” I said, with a show of being a little downcast, disappointed in my husband’s mercurial mood. “I suppose some affairs of state must be worrying him. Well, I will try and take his mind off it tonight. Perhaps we will have dinner in the room. Magreta, you will brush out my hair, and put it up fresh.”
The bedchamber was as large as my father’s ballroom and absurd in its gilded and impractical splendor. I hardly had to study to look wide-eyed all around myself, at the vast mural nearly twenty feet overhead—of Eve tempted by the serpent, which struck me as particularly unjust under the circumstances—and the bed itself, which could have served nicely as a bedroom on its own, being built into a large alcove in the wall and framed with golden scrollwork and pillars and rich curtains of silk damask subtly patterned with lighter threads. The windows were set in doorframes that could be swung open to a balcony outside of delicate wrought-iron. Trees from the garden overhung the edge of the balcony, covered presently with snow.
There were four separate fireplaces in the room, which were all blackened with smoke and roaring even in the middle of the day, in May: there was a servant feeding them even when I came in. It was a room for a duke in Salvia, or in Longines, some country where winter only glanced in briefly and in passing. No one of sense would have built this room here in Lithvas, and indeed I could see no one of sense had: there were faint cracks in the walls where Mirnatius himself had surely ordered them to knock out the floors above and the rooms beside, to make this ridiculous space.
But for all its excess, the chamber was still beautiful—extravagant and inconvenient and uncomfortable, yes, but taken all together it somehow skirted the edge of taste to be lush and not simply ludicrous. It was out of a book of fairy-stories painted by an inventive hand, and everything harmonized. Just barely, but that only made it somehow more impressive, like watching a juggler keep seven sharp knives in the air at once, knowing one slip would bring them all down in disaster. I think anyone would have found it difficult to stand in that room and not however grudgingly be won over by it. The guards themselves stood looking around it when they came in with us, forgetting to look stern and unyielding.
They didn’t say anything when I took my jewel-case and led Magreta behind the bathing-screen. Another fireplace was going on the other side, too, warming the air around a truly magnificent bath—that was also gilded, and so large I could have stretched in it my full length. But more important, beside it stood an even more magnificent mirror, as though Mirnatius liked to admire the work of art he was when he stepped from his bath.
I called to the guards from behind the screen to ask them to send down for tea, while Magreta quickly in response to my motioning hands put the necklace and the crown upon me. She looked puzzled even as she obeyed, and still more when I wrapped my spare cloak around her, and knelt down to drag up the heavy fur before the fireplace, to wrap around her shoulders. She clutched it around herself when I put the ends into her hands, and didn’t say anything out loud, but her mouth opened and moved, silently forming the questions she wanted to utter. I put my finger to my lips to keep her silent, and beckoned her over to the mirror.
The dark forest stood on the other side, blanketed white with deep snow. I didn’t know if it would work, if I could bring her through with me, but I had no other hope at all. Even as I reached for Magreta’s hand, I heard a noise in the corridor, footsteps coming, and as the door banged open violently I heard the demon hiss, in Mirnatius’s voice, “Where is Irina, where is my sweet?”
But Magreta had given a small gasp: I had taken her hand, and she was staring at the mirror, her face pale, and pulling against my grip instinctively. I held on tighter. “Don’t let go of me,” I whispered to her, and after a single frightened look behind her shoulder, she jerked her head in a nod. I turned to the mirror and stepped through, pulling her with me, out onto the frozen bank of the river.
CHAPTER 13
In the morning Panov Mandelstam came in and stamped snow off his boots and told Panova Mandelstam quietly, “They didn’t catch them. The snow came first.” So I was glad for the snow. Although then I didn’t know if I should be glad for the snow, because what if Wanda and Sergey were frozen to death somewhere, but then I decided I would be glad for the snow, because I had been cold sometimes working out in the snow and sleepy and Da would smack me on the head to wake me up and say did I want to freeze to death, and I didn’t, but it was only falling asleep, and that didn’t hurt and you wouldn’t be scared. I wondered if Da was scared when he died. It had sounded like he was scared.
For breakfast Panova Mandelstam gave me two bowls of porridge with some milk on top and some dry blueberries and she put a little bit of brown sugar on top, and I ate it and it was very good and sweet. Then I went to take care of the goats, because that was what Wanda had said to do. “They should have a hot breakfast, too, on such a cold day,” Panova Mandelstam said, and helped me cook up a big pot of mash. I made sure to give my goats big helpings. They looked skinny next to the Mandelstams’ goats, and the other goats had been butting them and biting them yesterday. But now the other goats were glad for more company because their coats had already been cut, and my goats still had theirs although theirs were full of burs and dirt. They all huddled together in the shed after they ate up all the hot mash.
There was a lot of snow in the yard. I shoveled some of it into big heaps so the goats and chickens could get to the grass. The ground was frozen, but I took out the nut from the white tree and looked at it and wondered if maybe I should plant it here. But I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to make a mistake, so I put it back in my pocket instead and went back inside. For lunch Panova Mandelstam gave me three pieces of bread with butter and jam and two eggs and some carrots and dried plums cooked together. That was very good too.
Then it was the afternoon, and I didn’t know what to do. Panova Mandelstam sat down at her spinning wheel, but I didn’t know how to do that, and Panov Mandelstam was reading a book, and I didn’t know how to do that. “What should I do?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go out and play, Stepon?” Panova Mandelstam said, but I didn’t know how to do that either, and anyway Panov Mandelstam said to her, “The other boys . . .” and she pressed her mouth together and nodded back to him, and they meant that the boys in town would be mean to me, because I had maybe helped kill my father, or just because I was a new goat.
“What did Wanda do when she was here?” I asked, but I remembered as soon as I asked. “She did the collecting.”
“But you are too young to do that,” Panova Mandelstam said. “Why don’t you go and see if you can find some good mushrooms in the forest. Do you know how to tell good ones to eat?”
“Yes,” I said, and she gave me the basket, but there was a lot of snow in the forest today, so it didn’t really make sense to go picking mushrooms. And I went outside and looked at all the snow and I didn’t see any mushrooms. Then I thought I would try to do the collecting even though I was too young, because if the Mandelstams weren’t doing it, and Wanda wasn’t doing it, then I didn’t see who else there was to do it. Someone else had lived in the house also, I rem
embered Wanda talking about them, but I couldn’t remember their name. It made me feel strange trying to remember when the name didn’t come, because names always came when I wanted them to. But anyway I was sure there was no one else in the house or the barn now, because I looked around all over for them. If I found them then I could just have asked them what their name was and I would stop feeling strange. I even looked inside the chicken coop in case maybe someone had crawled in there, but there were only chickens. So there was really no one else but me.
It was the day after market day in the fourth week of the month, so that meant Wanda was going to collect from the two villages down the cart-track going southeast from town and the names to collect from were Rybernik, Hurol, Gnadys, Provna, Tsumil, and Dvuri. I said the names over to myself on the way because they made a nice song in my head. When I got there I knocked on all the doors I saw and asked their name and if they said it was one of those names then I held out the basket. They looked at me and then they put things into it. Panova Tsumil said to me, softly, “Poor child!” and put her hand on my head. “And the Jews are already putting you to work!”
“No?” I said, but she only shook her head and put some balls of yarn in the basket and then gave me a thing to eat that was called a cookie. Wanda had brought some home once that Panova Mandelstam gave her and they were very nice. So I didn’t argue with Panova Tsumil, I just ate the cookie, which was also very good and said, “Thank you,” and then I went on.
Then I brought back the basket to Panova Mandelstam and told her, “I am not too young after all.” She looked in the basket and then she was very upset. I didn’t know why, but then Panov Mandelstam put his hand on my shoulder very gently and said, “Stepon, we should have explained. It is very important not to make any mistakes when collecting, and to keep a careful account. Do you think if you try very hard you can remember and tell us exactly where you went, and exactly who gave you each thing?”
“Yes,” I said. “This day of the month Wanda goes to Rybernik, Hurol, Gnadys, Provna, Tsumil, and Dvuri,” and then I pointed to each thing and told him who gave it to me. I thought Panova Mandelstam was still unhappy afterwards, but she gave me some dumplings with a thick sauce with carrots and potatoes and real chicken meat in it, and a cup of tea with two big spoons of honey, so I must have been wrong.
*
Sergey and I did not like staying in the little house, but we couldn’t leave right away. The first day when we woke up, there was snow drifted over the threshold, and on all the windowsills and beneath them in big heaps. When we went outside, all the forest was white and white, only little bits of dark trunks showing and all the trees bent low. They had started to put out leaves before the snow came, so now they were weighed down. We didn’t know where the road was.
We looked all around the house. We found many things. There were potatoes and carrots in the garden, and a shed where goats had lived with one heap of old straw and another heap of shorn wool as tall as my head. It had not been washed, and the bottom layers were stained and had mold, but there was still good wool at the top. Up on a shelf there was a basket and in a corner a shovel that would make it easier to dig potatoes. Inside the house we found a folded blanket on a shelf.
The sun was out all that day and it was warm even though the snow was still on the ground. It began to melt quickly. Sergey went out to get firewood and I put the potatoes and carrots to cook and then I started to make us new shoes out of the straw. One of mine was already lost, and the rest were falling apart. I used some of the wool, too, so the shoes wouldn’t be so hard, since we didn’t have any real shoe bark. The wool was full of burs and nettles and thorns. I made a pot of water and washed it in there, but I had no comb. The spines stuck my hands and made them sting as I worked, but we had to have shoes.
I finished a pair for Sergey by the time he came back with the firewood. He tried them on and they weren’t too bad. I put more wool inside them and that helped. We ate the potatoes and carrots. After that I made my shoes, and when those were done I made covers for the windows. Sergey found a bird nest in a tree with eggs that were speckled brown, so we could take them. We ate those and then it was dark, so we went to sleep again.
In the morning we found a grain box, because the snow had melted off its sides, half full of oats. We looked inside it. There was enough for us to stay and eat for a long time. Sergey and I looked at each other. The witch had not come back, and that made me think maybe she would never come back. But I didn’t like the way we were finding so many things.
“Maybe we should go,” I said to Sergey reluctantly. I did and did not want to. Who knew if we would find the road? But then Sergey looked up, and I looked up, too, and the sun was going away. It had already started to snow again. We could not go anywhere.
Sergey did not say anything for a moment. He was unhappy, too. Then he said, “We could fix the chair and the bed. In case anyone ever comes back.”
That seemed like a very good idea to me. If we were only taking potatoes and carrots and wool and oats and staying in this house without giving anything back, then we would be thieves. Someone who came back here would be angry and they would be right to be angry. We had to pay it back.
So I took the oats inside, and while they cooked we made a new seat for the chair: Sergey went out in the snow and pulled some thin branches off young trees and made a frame and I wove the straw and wool around it, the way I had done our shoes, until it was good enough to tie onto the chair to sit on. Then the chair was fixed.
All we meant to do was put new mats like that on the bed, but when Sergey went out to look for firewood after we ate, he came back almost right away. He had found a small load of wood buried under the snow behind the house, next to a chopping block, and there was an axe someone had just left sticking in it. It was rusted and the handle was a little rotten and full of splinters, but Sergey scraped off the rust with a stone and then he could use it to cut wood, even though it hurt his hands. So now we could make a whole new frame for the bed, not just a new mat.
We were afraid to stay, but now we were also afraid to go away and leave the work undone. It seemed we were meant to do what we had promised. Anyway, it was still snowing. So Sergey began on the frame while I worked on the mats.
By the morning the snow was two feet deep again. At least we had food and the house was warm. Sergey worked on the bed and I wove six big mats like the chair seat to rest on them. We heaped them with straw and clean wool. Then I thought at last we were finished, and we could go if we wanted to. All that day it had been sunny again and more snow melted. Sergey and I agreed we would go the next day.
The next morning we went outside to look for some more food in the garden to take with us and we found a whole patch of strawberries. The plants were dying from the frost, and the berries were frozen solid, but they would still be good to eat. I went inside and looked for something to carry them in, and on a shelf in a dark corner next to the oven, I found some old jars that I hadn’t noticed before, though I was almost sure I had looked there. One big one was empty and just right to hold the strawberries. One was full of salt and one had a little bit of honey that still tasted all right.
That was bad enough, but on the shelf next to the biggest jar, there was an old wooden spindle and some knitting needles. So that meant we weren’t done, because now I could spin the wool and knit the yarn I made, and that meant we could make a real mattress like the one that had been on the bed and rotted away. I showed it to Sergey. “How long will it take?” he asked me, uneasily. I shook my head. I didn’t know.
I spent all the rest of that day spinning yarn while Sergey washed some more wool for me. I made six big balls of yarn, as fast as I could, but I thought it would take more to make a mattress cover. Then Sergey went out and got more firewood. He got a lot, and I made a big pot of porridge, so the next day we would not have to go out at all. We could just eat from the pot all day. Then we went to sleep on the oven again.
“Wanda,” Sergey sai
d the next morning. He was looking at the table. I looked at it, too. Everything seemed all right. The table was cleared off. The chair was neatly tucked in against it to keep it out of the way. Then I thought, but we had put it against the wall yesterday. Maybe we had moved it back before we went to bed. But I did not think we had. “Let’s eat,” I said, finally.
The pot of porridge was still warm in the oven. I took off the lid and I stopped, looking inside. I had made the whole pot full. It was not a very big pot and we would eat all of it in one day. But someone had already eaten a big helping of it. I couldn’t even think to myself that maybe they hadn’t, or maybe Sergey had taken some, because there was a big wooden spoon sticking in the pot, and last night I had thought to myself, I wish I had a big spoon, and there had not been a spoon like that anywhere in the house.
*
When I said “Stop!” Shofer pulled the deer to a halt, but he looked back in alarm over his shoulder at the two figures on the riverbank, and he said, urgent and low, “Only wights would come to this place.”
But I knew who she was, the girl standing there in her white furs with the familiar crown of silver on her head, the crown that had brought me my own: Irina, the duke’s daughter. And if she had found a way here, there was a way back. “Go to them, or answer me, why can’t we?” I said, ruthlessly, and after a moment Shofer reluctantly turned us back around and drove along the river until we drew up beside them. Irina wore the crown, and the necklace gleaming, and her silver ring on her finger, and her breath didn’t frost in the air. She had her arms around the other, an old woman who was shivering terribly though she had a heavy fur wrapped all around her, her breath hanging in thick mists around her head.