by Naomi Novik
“How did you get here?” I demanded.
Irina looked up at me, without any recognition in her face. “We mean no trespass,” she said. “Will you give us shelter? My nurse cannot stand in the cold.”
“Come in the sleigh,” I said, though Shofer flinched, and I put out my hand. Irina hesitated only a moment, glancing down at the river, then she urged the old woman up into the sleigh and climbed up after her. I took off my own cloak, and put it over the old woman like a blanket. She was trembling even more, and her lips were going blue. “Take us to the nearest shelter,” I told Shofer.
He flinched again, but after a moment he turned the deer and drove up over the bank and into the dark trees. On our left there was solid night, and on the right the pale twilight brightened in the distance, as if we were on the very border of the dark. Irina had turned her head to look behind at the river disappearing behind us, and then she looked at me. Her long dark hair was stark against the white of her furs and beneath the silver crown, and snowflakes drifted onto it from the trees and gleamed on its length like small clear jewels. The twilight behind her caught in her pale skin, and she gleamed with it so I realized suddenly she must have Staryk blood, somewhere in her line; in her glittering silver she could have changed places with me, and fit into this kingdom as though it were her own. “How did you get here?” I asked her again.
But she was staring back at me, frowning, and she said slowly, “I know you. You’re the jeweler’s wife.”
Of course she didn’t know better: no one would have told her my name, or Isaac’s. She was a princess, and we didn’t matter. I wished bitterly that I still didn’t, that she was right; that I was home in Basia’s place or in my own. “No,” I said. “I only gave him the silver. My name is Miryem.”
Shofar flinched on the seat ahead of me, his eyes darting back shocked a moment. Irina only nodded a little, still frowning in thought, and she reached up to touch the necklace at her throat. “Silver from here,” she said.
“That’s how,” I said, understanding. “The silver brought you?”
“Through the mirror,” Irina said. “It saved me, saved us—” but then she was leaning over the old woman. “Magra! Magra, don’t fall asleep.”
“Irinushka,” the old woman muttered. Her eyes were half closed, and she had stopped shivering.
The sleigh jerked to a halt: Shofer had pulled hard on the reins, and the deer threw their heads up, restive. He was staring ahead of us, his back very straight and his shoulders rigid. We’d come to a low garden wall, almost buried in the snow, and on the other side I saw a faint, familiar orange glow: the flickering of an oven’s fire from inside a house, warm and welcoming. From his face it might have been the coming of an angry mob.
“Who lives there?” I asked without thinking, but Shofer only threw me an anguished look, and anyway I didn’t see what else there was for it; the old woman was sinking quickly. “Help us get her out,” I said, and with enormous reluctance he hooked the reins over the seat and climbed down. He lifted Magra as easily as if she were a small child, although she whimpered at his touch even through the layers of her clothing and fur.
He walked away with her, lightly, over the top of the snow, but Irina and I both floundered through the crust and into the deep drifts beneath. We struggled on after him until suddenly it thinned as we came to the wall of the garden. It was only a very little house, barely a peasant’s hut and nearly all oven, but there was a smell of warm porridge cooking and the oven’s glow was coming through thin cracks in the window covers and the door. Shofer had stopped well back from the hut, and his fear made me wary, but Irina went straight to the door and pushed it open without hesitation: it was only a thin panel of slats and straw woven over them, to keep out the wind, and it fell in onto the floor with a bang.
“There’s no one here,” Irina said, after a moment, looking back at us.
I went inside after her: it was easy to see it was all empty. There was only one room, with a single small cot heaped with a pile of straw. Irina covered it with the cloak I had put on Magra, and Shofer very reluctantly came in and put the old woman down on it, his eyes always on the oven’s shut door, the tiny flicker of light around it, and as soon as he had laid her down, he retreated back to the threshold in a rush. There was a box heaped with firewood beside the oven, and I opened the oven door and found a pot inside, full of fresh hot porridge.
“Let me give her some,” Irina said, and on a shelf we found a wooden bowl and spoon. She put a good helping of the porridge inside, steam rising off it into the air, and knelt by the cot. She fed it to Magra, who stirred and roused with the smell, enough to eat it in small spoonfuls. Shofer was flinching with every bite, as if he were watching someone deliberately eat poison. He looked at me and his mouth worked, as though he wanted to say something and only a worse fear stopped his tongue. I kept waiting for something dreadful to happen: I looked in every corner of the room to make sure there was nothing hiding there, and then I went outside and looked all around the yard, too. Someone should have been nearby, with a fire going and hot food ready, but I didn’t even see a footprint in the snow all around the house, except the trail going back to the sleigh where Irina and I had gone floundering through the drifts. A Staryk wouldn’t have left a trail, of course. But . . .
“This isn’t a Staryk house,” I said to Shofer, a statement and not a question. He didn’t nod, but he also didn’t look at me puzzled or surprised, the way Flek and Tsop did when I’d gotten something wrong. I looked down at the garden again. The house stood directly upon the line: one half of the garden was in twilight, and the other in full night, caught between the two. I looked at him and said, “I’m going to close the door.”
“I will stay outside,” he said instantly, which gave me hope. I went inside and picked up the door and propped it back into place, and then I waited a little while and then with a quick jerk pulled it aside again—
But I was only looking back out onto the empty yard, with Shofer standing there waiting and anxious. He had retreated even farther, to the other side of the garden wall. I turned back inside, disappointed. Magra had opened her eyes, and she was holding Irina’s hands in hers. “You are safe, Irinushka,” she whispered. “I prayed you would be safe.”
Irina looked at me. “Can we stay here?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe,” I said.
“It’s not less safe than where we were.”
“Did the tsar refuse to marry you?” I asked. I thought the duke might have been angry with her if he had: he hadn’t seemed like a man to be satisfied if his plans went awry.
“No,” she said. “I am tsarina. For as long as I live.” She said it dryly, as if she didn’t expect that to last long. “The tsar is a black sorcerer. He is possessed by a demon of flame that wants to devour me.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t mirth, it was bitterness. “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”
I said it savagely, an angry joke, but then Irina said slowly, “The demon said I would quench its thirst a long time. It wants me because . . . I am cold.”
“Because you have Staryk blood, and Staryk silver,” I said, just as slowly. She nodded. I leaned into the door and peered through a crack: Shofer was still far back from the house, well out of earshot, with no sign at all that he was inclined to come any closer. I took a deep breath and turned back. “Do you think the demon would bargain? For the chance to devour a Staryk king instead?”
*
Irina showed me how the Staryk silver let her go back and forth: together we went out back and found a big washtub behind the house. We poured hot water into it, over the snow heaped inside, to make a pool with a reflection in it. She stared down into it and said, “I see the same place we came from: a bedroom in the palace. Do you see it?” she asked me, but I only saw our faces floating pale in the shifting water,
and when she took my hand and tried to put it through, I got wet to the wrist, even as Irina drew her own hand out dry and without a drop. She shook her head. “I can’t bring you through with me.” As if I had stopped existing in the real world at all, as if the Staryk king had ripped me out of it by the roots.
“I’ll need to persuade him to bring me over,” I said grimly: just as he’d told me. I didn’t care to be on this side of the water when and if my husband was successfully introduced to his untimely end. I didn’t think the rest of the Staryk would accept me as queen in his stead, at least not until I’d learned to make endless winters myself and pop up snow-trees out of the earth or whatever else he’d demanded.
We finished our planning quickly: there wasn’t much to plan, only a time and place, and all the rest just a desperate lunge at the only hope either one of us had. “The demon can’t come during the day,” Irina said. “He only appears at night. I don’t know why, but if he could, he’d surely have tried to take me before now: he had me alone today, or close enough.” She paused and added, thoughtfully, “When the tsar’s mother was condemned for sorcery, they took her and burned her all in one day, before the sun set.”
“At night, then.” I was silent, thinking what excuse I could give a Staryk king that he’d accept, for why I wanted him to take me back. “Could you persuade the tsar to go back to Vysnia?” I asked slowly. “In three days’ time?”
“If I can persuade him to do anything at all but kill me,” she said.
When we were done, Irina went back inside to her nurse, and I walked back to the sleigh. Shofer asked no questions; he was too eager to be gone. I sat unseeing for the whole drive back, my head running in circles and my stomach churning and hot with gall.
Of course I was terrified. Of trying, of failing, of success. It felt like murder—no, I wouldn’t lie to myself; it was murder, if it worked. But after all, the Staryk seemed to think it perfectly reasonable to murder me, and I hadn’t made him any promises, either; I wasn’t sure I was even really married. He’d given me a crown, but there certainly hadn’t been a marriage contract, and we hadn’t known each other. I’d ask a rabbi, if I ever had the chance to talk to one again. But married or not, I was reasonably sure that the rabbis would tell me that I might justly take Judith for my model, and take off the Staryk’s head if he gave me the opportunity. He was the enemy of my people, not just me alone. But that only left me the enormous difficulty of doing it.
Shofer stopped the sleigh at the foot of the steep walkway to my chambers: Tsop was sitting on a low stone there, as if she’d been all day waiting for me to come back—anxiously, judging by the look of relief that crossed her face when she saw me. I climbed out stiffly: it had been a long time driving, and my whole body was sore. Tsop led me back up to my room at a pace quick enough to make me out of breath, and flinched back and forth with visible impatience when she had to pause. She kept looking downwards, and I followed the line of her gaze to the grove of trees: the white blooms were all closing softly, as if that was what marked the night coming on. I suppose the king would have been upset if I hadn’t been home in time for him to deliver his three answers. Then it occurred to me he might feel obligated to provide marital services after all, if he missed his nightly chance, so I quickened my steps as much as I could.
He was waiting in my chamber with his arms folded and anger bright in his face, light gleaming along the edges of his cheekbones and in his eyes. “Ask,” he bit out, the instant I came in: the sun was halfway down in the mirror he’d given me.
“Who lives in the house on the edge of the night?” I said. There hadn’t been much choice about it, but I hoped I hadn’t left Magreta there to be devoured by someone coming back later.
“No one,” he said instantly. “Ask.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and Tsop, who’d been bowing her way out of the room, startled like a horse that had been struck with a whip out of nowhere. The Staryk’s eyes widened with shock, and his fists closed; he took a step towards me, as if he meant to hit me. “There was porridge in the oven!” I blurted out in an instinctive alarm.
He stopped short. His lips pressed together hard, and then after a moment he said, “that I know of,” finishing off his sentence. “Ask.”
I almost did ask again. He was shimmering with anger, a faint iridescence shifting back and forth across his skin, and I couldn’t help thinking of Shofer picking up Magreta like she was a sack of wool and not a person, of Tsop and Flek easily turning over the chest full of silver; if any ordinary Staryk could do that, what could he do to me? I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger. For a moment I was back in the snow with Oleg coming at me, his face contorted and his big fists clenched. I wanted to scramble away, to ask for mercy, fear running hot all along my spine.
But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones. The Staryk was glaring at me, unearthly and terrifying. But what was the use of being afraid of him? For all his magic and all his strength, he couldn’t kill me any more thoroughly than Oleg would have, crushing the breath from my throat in the snow. And if I made him angry enough to do it, he wouldn’t hold back for all the pleading in the world, any more than Oleg would have stopped because I’d begged for mercy in the woods. I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time; like Scheherazade, humbly asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night. And I knew perfectly well even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.
I wouldn’t make that bargain. I was going to try and kill him, even if I was almost certain to fail, and I wouldn’t be afraid of him now, either. I straightened my shoulders and looked him in his glittering eyes. “I’d say that I’m owed an educated guess if you can make one. If you knew who built it, for instance.”
“Owed?” he spat. Out of the corner of my eye, Tsop had very slowly and carefully been maneuvering herself farther back by inches, and now she eased the rest of the way out of the chamber. “Owed?”
In a sudden lurch he was standing right before me, as if he’d moved so quickly my eyes couldn’t see him do it; he put his hand on my throat, his thumb in the hollow beneath my chin, pushing it up so I still looked him in the face, my neck bent back. “And if I say all I owe you is two answers more?” he said softly, glittering down at me.
“You can say what you like,” I said without yielding, my voice pressed up against the skin of my throat, forcing its way through.
“One more time I will ask: are you certain?” he hissed.
There was a deep ominous warning in his voice, as if I was pushing him to a hard limit. But I’d already made the choice. I’d made it the winter before last, sitting at my mother’s bedside, hearing her cough away her life. I’d made it standing in a hundred half-frozen doorways, demanding what I was owed. I swallowed the sharp taste of bile back down my throat. “Yes,” I said, as cold as any lord of winter could have been.
He gave a snarl of rage and whirled away from me. He stalked to the edge of the chamber and stood there with his back to me and his fists clenched. “You dare,” he said to the wall, not turning to look at me. “You dare set yourself against me, to make a pretense of being my equal—”
“You did that, when you put a crown on my head!” I said. My hands wanted to shake, with triumph or anger or both at once. I held them clenched tight. “I am not your subject or your servant, and if you want a cowering mouse for a wife, go find someone else who can turn silver to gold for you.”
He gave a hiss of frustration and displeasure, and stood there a moment longer just breathing in furious heaves, his shoulders rising and falling. But then he said, “A mighty witch grew tired of mortals asking her for favors and built for herself a house on the border of the sunlit world, that they might not find her at home when she did not desire company. But she went away long ago and has
not returned, for I would know if so great a power came back into my realm.”
I was breathing just as hard, still enraged, and it didn’t make sense to me at first as victory, as an answer to my question; it felt as though it came out of nowhere. “What is long ago?” I said, too hastily.
“Do you think I care for the mayfly moments with which you count the passage of your lives in the sunlit world, save when I must?” he said. “Mortal children born then have long since died, and their children’s children now are old, that is all I can say. Ask once more.”
A good answer as far as it went: at least I could hope that no monstrously powerful witch was going to appear and decide to make Magreta her dinner in place of the porridge she’d eaten. I would have liked to know a bit more about where the food might have come from, and who had laid the fire, but I couldn’t afford to ask; I had a more pressing question. “I promised my cousin that I would dance at her wedding,” I said. “And she will be married in three days’ time.”
I thought I’d have to go on from there, but he’d already turned round to look at me, a gleam coming into his eye: I suppose as seriously as they took their given word here, he knew at once that he had me over a barrel. Which he did, if not quite the way he thought he did. “Then it seems you must ask my aid,” he said softly, with visible glee. “And hope that I don’t refuse it.”
“Well, you won’t do it to help me,” I said, and he gave a small snort, amused. “And you’ve made clear there’s only one thing I’m good for in your eyes. So how much gold do you want me to make, in exchange for escorting me to Basia’s wedding?”
He scowled with a hint of regret, as if he’d looked forward to my prostrating myself and begging for his help, but he was practical enough not to let that stop him. “I have three storerooms of silver,” he said, “each larger than the last, and you shall turn every coin therein to gold, ere I take you thence: and you must work swiftly, for if you have not finished the work in time, neither shall I convey you, and you will be foresworn.” He finished in triumph, as if he were threatening me with an axe over my head, which maybe he was; I had the bad suspicion that if I was foresworn and he knew it, he would consider that a mortal crime.