by Naomi Novik
“Fine,” I said.
He jerked and stared at me in sudden dismay. “What?”
“Fine!” I said. “You just demanded—”
“And now, for the first time, you make no effort to negotiate—” He pulled himself up short, his face glitter-flushed again, and I had a deeply sinking feeling even as he said, bitterly, “We are agreed. And may you complete as much of your task as you can.”
“Exactly how big are these storerooms?” I demanded, but he was already going out of the room, without a pause.
I didn’t pause, either. I rang my bell urgently, and Tsop came timidly back inside, darting her eyes over me to see if I’d been, I don’t know, strangled or beaten or otherwise chastised for my dreadful temerity. “There are three storerooms of silver in the palace,” I said. “I need you to take me to them.”
“Now?” she said doubtfully.
“Now,” I said.
CHAPTER 14
I watched Miryem leave, and then I went back inside. Magra was huddled by the oven, wrapped in all her things and the cloaks and the fur. I asked her to lie down, but she shook her head: there was nothing on the cot but a pile of straw, and she said it was too hard for her old bones. “Sleep, dushenka,” she said. She had already found some work for her hands, a spindle and a ball of wool; she never liked to be idle. “Lie down and rest, and I will sing to you.”
The cot was narrow and stiff and uncomfortable, but I hadn’t slept well since my wedding night, and my bones weren’t old. With Magreta’s familiar creaky voice in my ears, I fell deeply asleep. It was still dark outside the little hut when I sat up again, but I felt too much refreshed to have woken in the middle of the night. Magra was drowsing half asleep in the chair. I put on my fur coat and went outside.
The shading line between night and twilight hadn’t moved from where it crossed the garden. The woods stood thick and silent on the other side of the wall, without even any signs of living things; I missed the sounds of birds and animals in the heavy hush. I went around the back to look into the big washtub. Miryem had helped me push it up against the back of the oven, on the outside of the house, and it hadn’t frozen all the way through. I broke the crust with a stick, and there in the dark water I saw sunlight in the tsar’s bedroom, gleaming on all the expanses of gilt. Mirnatius was awake and dressed and pacing the room, limping a little as if he was sore. Servants with their heads bent and shoulders hunched were hurrying to lay out his breakfast. I didn’t know what they imagined had become of me.
I went back inside and kissed Magra’s cheek: she was still spinning by the fire. “Irinushka, you shouldn’t go back,” she said tremulously, clinging to my hands. “It’s too dangerous, this plan you’ve made. That unholy thing wants to devour your soul.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” I said.
“Then wait until he isn’t watching,” Magra urged. “Wait and we’ll go back and run away.”
“Away from the tsar? Sneak all the way out of the palace with no one seeing us?” I shook my head. “And then what?”
“We’ll go back to your father . . .” Magra said, but her voice trailed off. My father could avenge my murder, but he couldn’t keep me from my husband. He wouldn’t try.
I didn’t pull my hands away; I was thinking. “If I disappear now, whatever the cause,” I said, “it will be war. Father will go to Ulrich and Casimir, and give them their excuse. And Mirnatius and his demon won’t go easily. They’ll burn down half of Lithvas without a second thought, either of them. No matter who wins, the kingdom will be in ruins. And the Staryk will bury us all in ice.”
Magra said uneasily, “Dushenka, this isn’t anything for you to worry about, to think of.”
“Who else is there to think of it? I am tsarina.” Which technically meant that I was to produce a tsarevitch and otherwise stay quiet and unobtrusive, but few tsarinas did, and it wasn’t a choice open to me anyway. “I have to go back.”
“And if the demon doesn’t want this Staryk king?” she said. “You shouldn’t even try to make bargains with such a creature.”
I didn’t disagree with her, but I gently freed my hands and said softly, “Do my hair up again, Magreta.” I took off the crown and turned my back to her and sat down on the floor, to make it easy for her to work. She put her hands on my shoulders for a moment. Then she took out the silver comb and brush from her purse and went to work on it, the pull and weight of her hands as familiar as bread. When she was done, together we put my crown back on my head, and then I went out to the water.
The servants had left Mirnatius. For the moment he was sitting there alone and seething with his back to the water, only drinking angry gulps from his cup at intervals; his plate was untouched. I stepped into the tub of water as slowly and carefully as I could, and I came out of one of the enormous gilt-framed mirrors on the wall behind him. I took a few steps away from it and softly reached behind me to open one of those balcony doors, as if I’d just stepped inside. “Good morning, husband,” I said, at the same time, and he crashed out of his chair, dropping his cup in a steaming red-wine smear across the floor as he whirled to stare at me.
I was a good distance away from him: I could thank his extravagantly massive room for that, which saved my neck from being instantly wrung; by the time he’d reached me, I’d put my hand back on the door and said sharply, “Shall I just leave for good, and you can see how your demon likes that, or are you willing to discuss the situation?”
He pulled up and looked out the balcony doors—the snow had drifted in around my feet already, like I’d been blown in by the winter wind out of nowhere, and could go back into it as easily. “What exactly is there to discuss?” he bit out savagely. “Why do you keep coming back at all?”
“My father’s tax rolls,” I said. I’d thought a little what would move him—him, and not his demon; I needed him as a go-between, and I was reasonably certain he only wanted his angry demon fed, so it wouldn’t erupt and beat him. “Do you know what they are? Do you know what yours are?” I added, in case.
“Of course I know what mine are!” he snapped, which meant he hadn’t any idea what my father’s were, although he should have. “I’m supposed to believe you want me to cut your father’s taxes—”
“What’s been happening to your rolls?” I broke in on him, sharply. “Have they been going down?”
“Yes, of course, they’ve sunk year over year. I was going to raise the rates, but the council made such an infernal noise about it—why are we talking about taxes?” he burst out. “Are you trying to make a fool of me?”
“No,” I said. “Why are your rolls sinking? Why didn’t the council let you raise the rates?”
He started shouting at me, “Because the—” He stopped, and finished out more slowly, “Because the winters are getting worse.”
He wasn’t stupid, at least. Even as he spoke, he was looking past me out onto the balcony, piled thick with snow on the last day before June, with a few flurrying flakes still coming in behind me to vanish into the white of my furs, and he wasn’t seeing a freak accident of the weather anymore. And as soon as he stopped seeing it as a single unlucky chance, he began to see the rest, too: more blizzards, and failed crops; starving peasants, lords raising rebellion; his neighbors’ well-fed armies coming upon him, his glittering palace torn down around his ears while he tumbled into the hungry fire waiting for him. I saw them creeping one by one over his face, and he began to be afraid, as I wanted him to be.
“It’s the Staryk,” I said. “The Staryk are making the winter last.”
He still wasn’t pleased, but he did listen to me after that. He flung himself onto one of his gilt-and-velvet divans as I seated myself on one across from him. Between us a large table with a silvered mirror top shone with deep night sky and falling snow, a square pool I could have dived into. When I leaned back, so my own reflection didn’t catch in the glass, the image faded into the ceiling above, the gleam of the green serpent winding around the apple be
tween us while Mirnatius reclined with a hand posed over his lips and listened to my careful proposal in sullen silence.
I’d agreed with Miryem, on the other side: we needed to bring the Staryk king here, and not the other way. On this side of the mirror, I had my father’s name and power at my back, and a tsarina’s crown on my head. If we were lucky, and our two monsters destroyed each other, most likely even Mirnatius’s soldiers would listen to me at first, for lack of anyone else to obey, and my father had two thousand men of his own to stand behind me. He still wouldn’t care what I wanted any more than he ever had, but we would want the same thing, then: to preserve my neck.
I didn’t share those details of my planning with Mirnatius. I only told him a little more, of how the Staryk were stretching the winter to strengthen their own kingdom. “Your demon wants me for my Staryk blood,” I finished. “How much more would it like a pure-blood Staryk, and their king? If it agrees, I’ll bring him to you, and you can save your kingdom and feed your demon all at once.”
“And why precisely should I believe you?”
“Why do you think I keep coming back? It should be clear to you by now that I don’t have to, and that you can’t stop me from going, either. Do you really think piling still more guards on me will do any better? If it would, why would I take the risk?”
He flicked his fingers out long and dismissive into the air. “I have no idea why you would do any of this anyway! Why do you care if the Staryk freeze the kingdom? You’re nearly one of them.”
It was a good question: Magreta had asked it, too. I hadn’t had an answer for her. “The squirrels will starve, too, when the trees die,” I said.
“Squirrels!” He glared at me, but though I’d meant to say it flippantly, the words felt strangely true when they came out of my mouth.
“Yes, squirrels,” I said, and meant it. “And peasants, and children, and old women, and all the people you don’t even see because they’re useless to you, all those who’ll die before you and your soldiers do.” I didn’t know what I was feeling, that made those words come. Angry, I think. I didn’t remember ever being angry before. Anger had always seemed pointless to me, a dog circling after its own tail. What good was it to be angry at my father, or my stepmother, or angry at the servants who were rude to me? People were angry at the weather sometimes, too, or when they stubbed their toe on a stone or cut their hand on a knife, as if it had done it to them on purpose. It had all seemed equally useless to me. Anger was a fire in a grate, and I’d never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed.
Mirnatius was scowling at me exactly as petulantly as he had in the garden seven years ago, when I’d told him to leave the dead squirrels alone. How dare I think they were worth anything next to his pleasure? It made me still more angry, and my voice sharpened. “Do you really care what my reasons are? You’re no worse off than you are now if I’m lying.”
“I might be, if you’re not telling me all the truth, and you aren’t,” he shot back. “You still haven’t told me how you vanish, or where you go—or where you’ve stashed away that old crone of yours. And you certainly aren’t being forthcoming about the details of how you’re going to provide this Staryk lord.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would I trust you? You’ve done nothing since we exchanged vows but try to stuff me down your demon’s gullet.”
“As though I had any say in it. Do you really think I wanted to marry you? He wanted you, so off to the altar I went.”
“And my father wanted me on a throne, so off to the altar I went. You can’t excuse yourself to me by pleading that you were forced to it.”
“What, you didn’t do it all on purpose to save the squirrels and mud-stained peasantry?” he sneered, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and after a moment he said, “Fine. Tonight I’ll ask him if he’ll take a Staryk king, and leave you be in exchange.”
“Good. And in the meantime,” I added, “you’ll write to your dukes and command them all to come and celebrate our wedding with us. And when you write to Prince Ulrich, you’ll make sure to tell him I insist on seeing my dear friend Vassilia. When she comes, I’ll make her my chief lady-in-waiting.”
He frowned at me. “What does that have to do with—”
“We can’t let her marry Casimir,” I reminded him, a little impatient; we’d even spoken of this already.
“If Casimir and Ulrich want to steal my throne, do you think they’ll care that his daughter’s your lady-in-waiting?” he demanded.
“They’ll care that they haven’t a blood tie to bind them together,” I said. “And all the better if there’s one that binds Ulrich to you, instead. We’ll marry her off as soon as she arrives. Do you have any suitable relatives at court—someone young and handsome, if possible? Never mind,” I added, seeing his blankness. He had two aunts, and I knew they’d produced a dozen offspring. I hadn’t met all of them to remember, but at least one of them would hopefully be unmarried or a convenient widower. “I’ll look for someone. You need to present me to the court today anyway.”
“And why, exactly? I assure you that you won’t enjoy the experience. My court has quite an elevated standard of beauty.”
It was plain he hadn’t expected me to last long enough to be presented. Perhaps he still didn’t. “I’m your tsarina, so they’ll have to get used to my deficiencies,” I said. “We need to quash any rumors before they begin. The servants must already have it all over the castle that I vanished during the night, and we can’t afford whispers. The crops are going to be bad this year, even if we do manage to stop the winter. And you’ve already made a great many of your nobles angry.”
He wanted to keep protesting, I could see it, but he glanced uneasily at the snow heaped on the balcony, and said nothing. He wasn’t stupid, after all; only as far as I could tell, he’d never given a moment’s thought to politics. I imagine that all he’d ever wanted were the trappings of rule, the wealth and luxury and beauty, and none of the work of it: he wasn’t ambitious at all.
Of course, if he had ever thought about politics, he’d be asking the far more important question of whom we were going to have Casimir marry. And the answer to that was me—as soon as Mirnatius and his demon had either been frozen solid or burned at the stake or at least exposed to the entire court and forced to flee, and I’d been granted an annulment of my thoroughly unconsummated marriage.
I didn’t particularly like Prince Casimir. He’d come to stay at my father’s house once, and I’d been beneath his notice at the time, so he hadn’t been on his best behavior. He’d made a serving-girl sit upon his lap and smile for him as if she liked it when he squeezed her breast and slapped her rear; but when he’d left three days later, she’d had a necklace of gold she couldn’t have bought on her wages, so at least he’d given her some return for it. He was nearly my father’s age, and a man who lived almost entirely on the surface. But he wasn’t a fool, or cruel. And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.
I’d weave a net out of us to hold all Lithvas. Casimir married to me and on the throne would satisfy him. Vassilia married to a nephew of the late tsar would at least balk Ulrich, and I’d put a whisper in his ear that it would be just as well for my dear friend to start having her children at the same time as I had mine, and promise him a grandchild on the throne after all. That would satisfy him and Mirnatius’s kindred both. All I needed to arrange it was a space where Mirnatius now stood, and conveniently, he’d put himself on top of a trapdoor going directly to the bowels of Hell, if I could only find the way to unlatch it.
But first, I needed his demon to kill a Staryk king for me, or there wouldn’t be any Lithvas to save. I stood up from the divan and paused, frowning slightly, as if I were having a fresh idea. “Wait,” I added abruptly. “We should go back to my father’s house for the celebration. When you write to the princes and archdukes, tell them to come to Vysnia instead of here.”
&
nbsp; “Why should—oh, never mind,” he muttered, throwing his hand up in the air, graceful as a bird taking flight, his lace cuff its long feathered tail. I was gratified; I’d had a few excuses ready, but they were a bit thin, and all the better if I didn’t have to use them. I didn’t mean to tell him in advance that the Staryk king would hopefully be in Vysnia in three days’ time himself, to be a guest at a different celebration.
*
On Monday afternoon, when I was walking back to Panova Mandelstam’s house after the collecting, I met two boys from town playing in the woods. I was not big the way Sergey was, but I was still bigger than them, so they didn’t try to fight with me, but Panov Mandelstam was right anyway because they didn’t want to play with me either. One of them yelled at me, “How does it feel to have killed your own father?”
They ran away into the trees and didn’t wait for me to answer, but I thought about it the rest of the way. I wasn’t sure if I had killed my father, because I had only wanted him to not hit Wanda with the poker; I hadn’t wanted him to fall over me. But he had fallen over me and that was part of why he was dead, so maybe it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted it. I didn’t know.
I did know that it felt good to be living with Panov and Panova Mandelstam. I had stopped feeling hungry even a little bit. But anytime I thought about Sergey and Wanda, even if I was sitting at the table, I felt like I had swallowed stones instead of food. I would have felt very good if Sergey and Wanda and me were all living with Panov and Panova Mandelstam. The house was small, but me and Sergey could sleep in the barn. But we couldn’t, because Sergey had pushed my father and he was dead.