by Naomi Novik
I was concentrating hard—I’d found I could reliably manage the pieces two deep, if I worked at it—but the question interrupted me. I sat back with a huff of breath. “What I promised was to dance at their wedding, and the musicians will be going until midnight,” I said coldly. “I have until then.” For all my bravado, it didn’t feel like very much time: two nights left and two days, to dig my way through a mountain with a spoon.
“You have not finished here, and there is all the third storeroom yet to change,” he said—bitterly, when it was his fault for demanding the impossible in the first place. I was glad that the doors were shut, so he couldn’t see what was going on inside the last room of his treasury. “Well, you will change what you can, before you fail.” I glared at him. If I hadn’t had any prospect of succeeding, I certainly would have stopped even trying that instant.
He ignored my glares and only said coldly, “Ask your questions.”
I wanted time more than answers. I suppose I could have asked him what he would do to me if I didn’t succeed, but I didn’t much want to know, and have something more to fear in advance. “How can I make this go quicker, if you know of any way?” I asked. I didn’t have much hope of it, but he certainly knew more about magic than I did.
“You can only do it as quickly as you can,” he said, eyeing me almost suspiciously, as if the question were so ridiculous he couldn’t quite believe I’d asked it. “Why would I know, if you do not?”
I shook my head in frustration and rubbed the back of my hand across my forehead. “What’s past the edge of your kingdom? Where the light ends.”
“Darkness,” he said.
“I could see that much for myself!” I said with asperity.
“Then why do you ask?” he said, in equal answering irritation.
“Because I want to know what’s in the dark!” I said.
He made an impatient gesture. “My kingdom! My people and our deep strength, that makes the mountain strong. Through ages of your mortal lives we have raised high our shining walls, and together we have won this fastness from the dark, that we may ever dwell in winter. Do you think it is so lightly done, that you can wander blindly past the borders of my realm and find your way into another?” Then he looked around the room and the silver heap in downturned sourness. “Perhaps you now regret your mortal-hasty promise, and wonder where you might flee, from an oath broken in my kingdom? Do not imagine you will find some way into the dwarrowrealms, or that they would shelter you against retribution.”
He sneered it at me, as if I should have been ashamed to flee from him. Well, I would have made a dash for escape without the least hesitation, but I had no more notion how I would find these dwarrowrealms than I did the moon, and I was sure he was entirely right about the welcome I would receive from whoever lived there. But that left me without a question to ask him. I didn’t care about his customs or his kingdom anymore: one way or another, I was leaving it, and the only thing I wanted was to get on with my work. “Is there any use you can be to me at all in this?” I said.
He made an impatient gesture. “None I can see, and if there were, you have naught left to barter for my aid in any case,” he said. “You have pledged your gift too high in folly, and I have little hope you can redeem it.”
He turned and left me, and I looked at the poisonous mountains of silver around me, and thought he was very likely right.
CHAPTER 15
It was so cold in that little house after Irina left, and outside the white trees seemed to have crept closer to the windows, as if they wanted to reach their branches in. I kept the heavy fur rug clutched around my shoulders and dragged the chair to the oven and sat there shivering while I ate another helping of the porridge, my bones sore so that I could feel them rub one against the other at every joint, a little pain every time I moved. But worst of all was to be there alone, with the terrible winter outside. I put another stick on the fire and stirred it to have a brighter flame leaping, like a little bit of company, and to chase away that cold dark outside that would not change. It was no place for an old woman to be, a tired old woman. “Stay out of the woods or the Staryk will snatch you, and take you away to their kingdom,” my mother would say, when I was a little girl. And now here I was hiding in their kingdom like a mouse, and what when the fire went out, and what when the porridge was gone? At least there was a great deal of wood in the box next to the oven.
It was a peculiar housekeeper who lived there. While Irina had talked to that strange Jew girl, I found strawberries and honey and salt and oats, and six enormous balls of rough yarn, uneven as lumpy porridge, beside an old-fashioned spindle. It caught on my fingers, but the wool underneath was good; it had only been spun without carding or care, by someone in too much of a hurry to do it properly. My lady the duchess would have cracked my hand across the knuckles with her stick if I had made such a mess in her sight. Not the duchess now, of course—Galina was a good manager, but she spun very indifferent; nor Irina’s mother before her, who when she would spin at all made thread that shone like alabaster off her spindle while she stared out the window and sang softly to herself, and never looked at the work of anyone else’s hands. But the duchess that was, before either of them.
She had gone to the convent long ago, of course; ten years dead now I had heard, God keep her in his sight. I had seen her last on that terrible day when Irina’s father broke the city wall, in the battle that had made him the duke and helped to put the tsar’s father on his throne. We watched the smoke of the fighting together from the palace, all of us her women close together, until the smoke began to move into the city. Then she turned away from the window and said, “Come,” to me and to the other girls, the six of us not married, and took us down into the cellars to a little room far in the back, with a door fitted out of the stones of the wall, and locked us into it. That was the last time I saw her.
It was so cold and dark and close. That place felt near again to me now, in the cold dark little hut with the deadly winter pressing in. We held to each other and wept and trembled. And they found us anyway there, the soldiers. They found everything in the house—jewels, furniture, the sweet little golden harp that Lady Ania had played, before she died of the fever; I saw it smashed in the hall. There were so many of them, like ants that find any crumb anyone has left unswept.
But by the time they broke open the door to that little room, it was very late in the night; they were already tired out, and it was only a few of them; most of the men had fallen asleep. They only found us because we were all so frightened by then, we thought it had been days, though it was only hours, and one of the girls had begun to rock and say that no one would ever find us and we would die there walled up. We all caught the terror from her, so that when we heard voices passing, first one and then the rest of us began to scream for help. So when they brought us out we fell into their arms weeping, and they were kind to us, and gave us some water when we begged them for it, and one of them was a sergeant, who took us up to his lord and told him we had been locked up in the cellars.
Erdivilas, Baron Erdivilas he was then, was in the duke’s study, already at home there, his own papers everywhere and his own men coming in and out. It didn’t seem very different to me, either. I had only once or twice been there. I was not so pretty that the duke would send for me, and not so ugly that the duchess would have me go, when she wanted to send him a message. The new duke had a harder face than the old. But after he looked us over he said, “Just as well. Take them up to the women’s quarters and tell the men to leave them alone; we don’t always need to be brutes. Do what you can for the others,” he told us. I tried as best I could, and when I couldn’t do anything more, I went and spun the wool that was left in my lady’s rooms, and made many skeins of fine thread while in the city they put out the fires, and so when things were settled a little more, he kept me on in his household, as he did not keep anyone who did not make themselves useful enough.
I was grateful for it, like I was gr
ateful to be let out of that cellar room even by enemy soldiers. I had no husband and no dowry and no friends. My mother had been the wife of a poor knight who lost his little land to gambling and the Jews. He had gotten her a place with the duchess and went out on Crusade to die, and the duchess had kept me with her women out of kindness when my mother also passed—the same fever, that winter year, and she was sorrowful over Ania; I was only a few years younger. But I was no longer young when the city fell, and she went to the holy sisters even before I was out of the cellar.
There was no one else left for me. There was not anyone for me, there had not been since my mother died. I stayed on in the women’s quarters and spun, and still the years went by and by, and my hands began to ache if I spun too much, and my eyes began to see less well for fine sewing. So when Silvija, Irina’s mother, died with the stillborn boy, I did not stay with the other ladies dutifully weeping. I crept away into the nursery where the little one slept. No one liked her, as no one had liked her mother, because they did not seem to care to be liked. She was too quiet, all the time, and though she did not have her mother’s strange eyes, still she seemed to be thinking too much behind them. Irina was sitting up in the bed when I came in, as if she had been woken by the wailing. She was not crying. She only looked up at me with those dark eyes and I felt uneasy, but I sat down beside her and I sang to her and I told her everything would be all right, so that when Erdivilas came to the room he found me already tending her, and told me to keep doing it.
I was glad for it, to have a place secure again, but after he left the room, Irina still looked at me too thoughtfully, as if she understood why I had come to look after her. Of course I came to love her very soon anyway. I had no one else to love, and even if she was not mine, I had been let to borrow her. But I had never been quite sure what she felt for me. Other little children would go running to their nurses and their mamas with open arms and kisses. She never did. I told myself all these years that it was only her way, cool and quiet as new-fallen snow, but still in my secret heart I had not been truly sure, not until the tsar sent men to bring me to hurt her with, and I saw that it would have worked. Oh, it was a strange way to be happy.
She had slept on the cot here in the hut for a little while, and I had sung over her, over my girl, sitting by the fire like all these years, and now I knew she was mine, and not just borrowed for a little while. The yarn I had found was loose enough I could pull the wool apart easily, even now with my big-knuckled hands, and I had the silver comb and brush, the comb and brush that were all Irina’s mother had left for her daughter. I combed the wool out soft and spun it over from the beginning, and coiled it into skeins, and after each one was done I put another log in the oven, and so sat spinning away the time, until Irina had woken.
But she had gone back to him now, to that monstrous creature crouching in the palace, black evil disguised as beauty. If he hurt her, if he did not listen . . . But what use was it to worry? I could not do anything, an old woman carried so long here and there on life’s stream and washed now to this strange shore; what could I do? I loved her and I had taken care of her as well as I could, but I could not protect her from men or fiends. I braided her hair for her again, and put the crown upon her head, and I let her go. And when she left I did what I could, which was to sit and wait and spin, until my hands grew heavy and I rested them in my lap and shut my eyes for a little while.
I woke with a start and the last log cracking. Outside there was a step, and I was afraid and lost from myself, trying to remember where I was, why was it so cold, while the steps came closer and Irina opened the door. For a single dreadful moment more I still didn’t know her—she was so strange and silver in the opening, with that wide crown on her brow and the winter outside crowding close behind her, and she seemed part of it. But it was still her face, and the moment passed. She came in and shut the door and then stopped and looked at it. “Did you do this, Magra?” she asked me.
“Do what?” I said, confused.
“The door,” Irina said. “It’s properly fastened to the wall now.”
I still didn’t understand: it hadn’t been, before? “I’ve only been spinning,” I said, and I meant to show her the yarn, but I couldn’t remember where I had put the skeins; they weren’t on the table. But it wasn’t important. I stood and went to my girl and held her hands, her cold hands; she had brought in a basket full of things for me. “You’re all right, dushenka? He didn’t hurt you?” She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.
*
Sergey and I looked into the porridge pot together and we did not say anything. Then we turned and looked at the rest of the house. I remembered suddenly I had put my yarn away on the shelf with the spindle and the knitting needles, but now it was all in a heap on the table. Or I thought it was my yarn, but it was not. It had been wound into skeins and when I picked one up it was different, smooth and soft and much more fine. There was a silver comb lying next to them, a beautiful silver comb that looked like something a tsarina would have, with a picture on it of two deer with antlers drawing a sleigh in snowy woods.
I looked on the shelves for my yarn, but it was gone. The fine smooth yarn was the same color. When I looked very closely it was the same wool. It had only been spun differently, as if to show me what was wanted.
Sergey was looking into the fire box. It was half empty. We looked at each other. It had grown very cold again during the night, so one of us might have climbed down to put more wood on the fire. But I knew I had not done it, and I could see from Sergey’s face that he had not done it. Then Sergey said, “I will go see if I can get a squirrel or a rabbit. And I will fetch more wood while I am at it.”
There was still plenty of the wool that Sergey had washed for me. I had never spun yarn so fine as the yarn here, but now I tried to do it better. I combed the wool for a long time with the silver comb, carefully so as not to break the teeth, and when at last I began to spin, I remembered suddenly my mother telling me to make the yarn tighter. Try to go a little faster than that, Wanda. I had forgotten. I had stopped being careful how I spun after she was dead. There was no one in our house who knew better than I how it was supposed to be. I looked down at my own skirt, which was knitted roughly of my lumpy yarn. Before she died my mother would make big balls of yarn from our goats and take them to our neighbor three houses away who had a loom, and come back with cloth. But the weaver would not take my yarn, so I had always had to knit our clothes instead.
It took me a long time, hours, just to spin one ball of good yarn. Sergey came back as I was finished. He had caught a rabbit, brown and grey. I made another pot of porridge for us while he skinned it. I put all the meat and the bones into the pot to make a stew with the porridge, and some carrots. I made it as much as our pot could hold, more than the two of us would eat. Sergey saw me doing it and he did not say anything and I did not say anything, but we were both thinking the same thing: we did not want whoever was eating our porridge and spinning the yarn to be hungry. If they did not eat the porridge, who knew what they might want to eat instead.
While it was cooking I thought I would start knitting. I wanted to see how much of the bed I could cover with what I already had, so I did not waste time spinning more yarn than we needed. I knitted a strip twice the width of the bed, measuring it until it was long enough, and then I went on from there. The work did not go quickly. I tried to be careful and keep it even and smooth. But I was not used to knitting so carefully either. It was hard to remember not to make it so loose. And then in one place I made it too tight instead, and I did not notice at first until I had already knitted three rows onward and I started having to push hard to get the needles in. Then I tried to keep going and just make it better from there on, but I had made that last row so tight that I was going very slow, like trying to walk through thick mud, and finally I gave up and unraveled those three big rows and did the wrong part all over again.
Once I had fin
ished up the first skein, I stopped and looked at how much I had made. It was a piece as long as my hand. It was so nicely spun and wound up that there was more yarn than I thought there could be. I measured the length of the bed with my hands and counted ten. I had five skeins left and the ball of yarn I had made today. So if I made only three more balls of yarn, that would be enough. I folded up my knitting carefully and I put it on the shelf and I went back to spinning.
I spun all the afternoon. It was still getting colder and colder. All around the door and windows there were little clouds of fog where the air from outside came in through the cracks, and there was starting to be frost creeping inside. Sergey could not help me, so instead he made wooden hinges to hang the door. He had found some old nails and a little rusted saw in a corner of the shed to make them. On the inside of the house, he nailed on some more branches around the edges of the doorway, making the opening smaller than the door, to block the wind. He did the same thing around each window. Then he plastered it all with straw and mud. After that the cold air could not come in and we were warm and cozy in the house. The oven and the porridge filled it with a good smell. It felt strange to be in that warm quiet place with food. It felt strange because I was already used to it. It was so easy to be used to it.
We stopped to eat after I finished spinning. “I think I can finish in three days more,” I told Sergey, while we ate the good meat porridge. We left plenty over in the pot.
“How long have we been here?” Sergey asked me.
I had to stop and count it in my head. I started from market day. I had sold the aprons in the market. I did that in the morning and then I went home and Kajus was there waiting. Even in my head, I hurried past the rest of that, but it was all still one day. Then we had run into the woods and we had kept going a long time into the night. Until we found the house. We had found the house that day. It didn’t feel as though it could all have been the same day, but it had been. “It is Monday,” I said finally. “Today is Monday. We have been here five days.”