by Naomi Novik
My husband appeared again just as the sunset vanished out of my mirror. I sat back on my heels and wiped my arm across my forehead. I wasn’t sweating, but I felt as though I should have been. He looked around the room with cold displeasure, measuring how much I had left to do. I’d nearly finished the fourth rack by then, but there was only one night and day left, and as far as he knew, there was that monstrous third room still to do.
“What does it mean among you to give someone a gift?” I said. I very much wanted to know what I had done, with my servants.
He frowned at me. “A gift? Something given without return?” He made it sound like murder.
I tried to think how to describe what I’d done. “Something given in thanks for what might have been demanded instead.”
His contemptuous expression didn’t change. “Only the worthless would imagine such a thing. A return must be made.”
He’d been perfectly happy to make me change silver to gold for him without any return at all until I’d prodded him, but I didn’t point that out. “You’ve given me things without return,” I said.
His silver eyes widened. “I have given you that to which you are entitled by right and have demanded of me, nothing more,” he said hastily, as if he thought I was going to be violently offended, and added, “You are already my wife; you cannot imagine I meant you to become my bondswoman.”
So a gift that couldn’t be repaid, had to be repaid with—that? “What is a bondswoman?”
He paused, once more overcome by my appalling ignorance of perfectly obvious things. “One whose fate is bound to another,” he said very slowly, as if speaking to a child.
“That’s not enough to explain it to me,” I said with asperity.
He raised his hands in impatience. “One whose fate is bound to another! Where a lord rises, so do his bondsmen; where a lord falls low, so too his bondsmen; when a lord is stained, so are they, and as he, so too must they cleanse their names with their life’s blood.”
I stared at him, queasily. I hadn’t really thought that Flek and Tsop and Shofer were putting their own lives on the line, and as much as I’d suspected it would mean my death to fail, there was something worse about hearing it plainly out of his mouth. Stained, like a ruined cloth, only to be repaired by dyeing it all the way through red with blood. “That sounds like a terrible arrangement,” I said through my tight throat, trying to coax some more out of him; perhaps I was misunderstanding. “I can’t imagine why anyone would agree to become one.”
He folded his arms. “If your imagination fails you, that is no sign I have failed to answer the question.”
I pressed my lips tight, but I’d walked into that one too squarely. I worded my final question more carefully. “All right. Then what are several illuminating reasons why anyone would either accept or refuse such an opportunity?”
“To rise beyond their station, of course,” he said immediately. “A bondsman stands always but one rank removed from their lord. Their children inherit both bond and rank, but their children’s children inherit rank alone, and whatever standing the bondsman holds, at the time of their birth, they have it in their own right. As for who would refuse, those whose rank already stands high, or who suspect the lord who asks their bond is likely to fall: only a fool would bind their fate for little gain.” He’d been visibly pleased to win his point on the question, but he paused, suddenly going wary. “What concerns you so of bondsmen?” he demanded.
“Do I owe you answers?” I asked, in the most dulcet tones I could manage, careful to make it a question. He opened his mouth and then shut it again and glared at me in irritation before sweeping out without another word to me: he couldn’t give me a free answer, after all.
But I sat there alone and silent after he’d left, instead of getting back to the work. I hadn’t known what I’d done with Shofer and Tsop and Flek, and now that I did know, I tried to convince myself I’d have done it anyway. I’d only made them the offer, after all, and they’d chosen to accept, knowing better than I did the risk they took.
But I couldn’t help thinking of those circles within circles at the wedding, and all the grey-clad servants standing far distant in the outer rings, silent and their heads bowed. I hadn’t just promised them wealth. I’d suddenly thrust open a golden path all the way from that outer ring and straight to the highest rank of the nobility, like a fairy with a poisoned fruit in one hand and a dream come true in the other. Who could turn away from such a chance, even if the risk was your life? Then a slow cold shudder ran up my back: Flek almost had turned away. Shofer and Tsop were afraid, but they’d done it; she’d really hesitated.
I didn’t want to know why. I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t ask her; I tried to make that my excuse, but my hands were shaking when I put them out over the silver coins, and they wouldn’t change. Finally I stood up and pushed open the doors to the other room, the room where Shofer and Tsop and Flek were all heaving silver into the sledge as fast as they could go, even though the sharp edges of their faces were dull with weariness and the blue-ice of their eyes clouded like a pane of glass fogged over with breath. They’d emptied nearly half of the room. There was still a chance, a chance for me: a chance I’d wrung out of their strength and courage. They stopped to look at me. I didn’t want to say the words. I didn’t want to care.
I said, through my tight throat, “If you have children, tell me how many.”
Tsop and Shofer were silent, but they looked at Flek. She didn’t look in my face. She whispered, “I have one daughter, only one,” very softly, and then she turned away blindly and began shoveling again, silver spilling over the blade and ringing on the floor like a dreadful metallic rain.
CHAPTER 16
I did not want to wake up, but I thought I heard Mama calling me in a voice that sounded like a bell ringing, so I opened my eyes. The horses had snow on their backs and there was snow in the hollows of the fur coat that Panova Mandelstam had covered us with. Everyone else had fallen asleep, too. I thought maybe I should wake them, but it was still snowing and very cold, and I thought we would probably not live until morning anyway. It did not seem to be worth waking them up only for them to be afraid. I was afraid, too, but then I heard a sound. It was the ringing sound that had woken me up. It was not far away.
After a minute I made myself get out from under the fur coat. It was very cold and I was shivering right away, but I went to the ringing sound, and in a little while I knew it was an axe, and then I stopped. Someone was cutting wood, and I could not think who would be cutting wood in the middle of the night in the forest when it was snowing, because that was very strange. But if they were cutting wood with an axe then they probably wanted the wood for a fire, and if they had a fire and they would let us come sit by the fire, then we would not die.
So I kept going. The ringing got louder until I saw the man cutting wood and first I thought it was Sergey, but then of course I knew it was not Sergey, it only looked like Sergey. Then I said, “Sergey?” and he turned around, and it was Sergey, and I ran to him. I thought for a moment maybe we were all dead and this was Heaven, like the priest talked about in church when Da took us, which he did once in a while if the priest saw him in town. But I did not think I would be cold or hungry in Heaven. I hoped we were not in Hell for killing Da.
“No, we are alive!” Sergey said. “Where did you come from?”
I took him by the hand and led him back to the big tree and showed him everyone else asleep. “But he is a spy,” I said, pointing at Algis. “The men in the village told him to tell them if we saw you.”
Sergey shrugged after a moment. He meant we could not leave Algis to freeze anyway, even if he was a spy, and even if he had forgotten to fill the grain bucket, and gotten us lost. I supposed that was true. Also, if he had not gotten us lost, I would not have found Sergey, so maybe I could not be angry at Algis anymore.
We woke up the Mandelstams and Algis, and they were all very surprised to see Sergey, but of c
ourse they were glad, although Algis was afraid also, but even he was glad that there was somewhere warm to go. Sergey went to the horses. One of them was dead, and the other one did not want to get up, but Sergey got his arms under the horse’s front legs and pushed up while Algis pulled on the reins and Panov Mandelstam and Panova Mandelstam and me all helped push from under, and finally the horse got up.
Sergey took us through the forest back to where he was chopping wood and then he kept going, and in a few steps more I could see a little firelight up ahead. We all walked quicker once we saw it, even the horse. There was a little house there with a chimney and a big shed with a heap of straw. Sergey put the horse in the shed and it started eating the straw right away. “There are oats inside,” Sergey said. “Go in.”
Wanda was inside the house, but she opened the door because she heard us. Panova Mandelstam made a glad noise when she saw her and ran to Wanda and put her arms around her and kissed her cheeks. I could tell that Wanda did not know what to do but she looked happy anyway, and she said, “Come in,” so we went into the house and it was very warm and there was a good smell of porridge. There was only one chair and a log stump to sit on, but there was also a cot and a pallet on the top of the stove. We gave Panova Mandelstam the chair and put her by the fire, and Wanda put a big blanket over her. Panov Mandelstam sat on the stump next to her. Algis sat down on the floor near the fire and huddled up. Wanda told me to climb up on top of the oven and I did and I felt very warm.
“I will make tea,” Wanda said, and I wondered how she would make tea, and where the house had come from, but mostly I thought about how good it would be to drink hot tea, but I fell asleep again before it was ready. I didn’t wake up again until it was early morning, and I heard a noise of wood rubbing against itself and felt cold air sweeping in on my head. I picked up my head. I was still on top of the oven and Panova Mandelstam and Panov Mandelstam were sleeping on either side of me. Wanda and Sergey were sleeping on the floor in front of the oven.
The sound was the door scraping shut. Algis was going out into the snow. I put my head down again. Then I picked it up again and said, “Sergey!” but it was too late. When we went outside, Algis was already gone. He had taken the horse. Sergey had fed it oats and rubbed its legs and given it warm water to drink so it had gotten better by morning. It was a big strong horse meant for pulling a sleigh. With just Algis on its back I thought it would be fast. Probably if he just let the horse lead him, it would go back home to its stable. He would tell everyone in the village where we were.
“We must try to get to Vysnia before the snow melts,” Panova Mandelstam said, while we sat around the table. Wanda had made tea, and she was cooking porridge now for us all to eat before we left. Sergey and Panov Mandelstam had brought in a few more stumps to sit on. “We have food and warm coats. We will get out to the road and get someone to take us on to the city. No one will tell on us in the quarter, and there is some money in the bank. We will bribe someone to clear your names if we can. My father will know who to go to.”
“I must finish the mattress before we go,” Wanda said. She went and picked up the big blanket she had been knitting, and I saw it was not a blanket but a mattress cover. It was very pretty. There was a beautiful pattern in it of leaves.
“Wanda, this is beautiful work,” Panova Mandelstam even said, touching it. “You should bring it with you.”
But Wanda shook her head. “We need to fix the bed.”
I didn’t know why, but if she said so, then she had to. I looked at the cot and the mattress cover. “It is almost done, isn’t it?” I asked. “It is the right size.”
Wanda held up the blanket and it was the right size. It was longer than she was. When she held up her hands over her head it still reached almost all the way to the floor. She put it down again and I thought she looked a little scared even though I didn’t know why she would be scared because it was done, when she wanted it to be done. “Yes,” she said. “I can finish it quickly now.”
“Wanda,” Panov Mandelstam said slowly, as if he wanted to ask a question, but Wanda shook her head fiercely, because she did not want to talk about it, and even though Panov Mandelstam liked words so much, he saw that she did not want to talk, so he stopped.
“It is all right, Wanda,” Panova Mandelstam said after a moment. “Go ahead and do what you need to do. I will make some more porridge.”
Wanda quickly sewed up two open sides of the mattress, and then she stuffed it with a big pile of wool, and then she sewed up the last bit of the mattress and put it on the cot. The cot looked very pretty with the mattress on it. Meanwhile Panov Mandelstam and I helped Sergey tidy up the yard and the shed. We filled the woodbox again. It had gone empty overnight. I didn’t know why the oven took so much wood, but now I knew why Sergey was cutting wood in the forest at night, and it was just as well he had been doing that. Panova Mandelstam asked me to bring her a long stick, and she tied some straw around the bottom and swept the house.
The porridge was ready so we ate it. We went outside with our plates, which were just pieces of wood that Sergey had cut off a tree, and rubbed them with snow until they were clean. We put them on a shelf inside the house. Wanda made up another pot of porridge and put it into the ashes to cook, even though we were leaving. She closed the door of the oven and we looked around. The house looked nice and tidy. It was almost as big as our old house, but I liked it more. The boards were close together and the oven was very solid and the roof was snug. I was sorry to go away from it, and I thought Sergey and Wanda were sorry to go away too.
“Thank you for giving us shelter,” Wanda said to the house, as if it were a person. Then she picked up the basket and went outside. We all followed her out.
*
Minutes went slipping through my fingers with silver coins, vanishing as they changed to gold. I was close enough to the doors now that I could hear the shovels ringing faintly in the other room, going quickly, whipped along by the same fatal deadline, but I didn’t allow myself to go and look and see how far they’d gotten. We worked all through the night without stopping. When the disk of the mirror began to glow with morning, I had to make myself keep changing them systematically: my head swam, nauseated, when I looked up and saw it. There was still an entire rack left to change, and my first flinching terrified instinct was to madly turn out every last chest and try to change them all at once. I closed my hands and eyes for a moment before I could go on.
I didn’t stop to eat any breakfast. I was distantly grateful that my husband didn’t come to inspect my progress again that morning, as much as I could be grateful for anything. I felt sore as if I really were being beaten. But the horror kept me at it. I kept thinking how they would do it, what they would do. Would they put a knife in the hand of a small child and expect her to put it to her own throat, or would they kill the child themselves? Would they make her watch her mother die first, or the other way around? Would they make Flek do it? I knew that no matter what there would be no mercy to it, no kindness allowed. You couldn’t return a kindness after you were dead.
In the middle storeroom I spilled the chests out one after the other and changed them, until I finally poured out the very last one, and made all of it go to gold. I spilled the final heap off the tablecloth and staggered up. The blue of the mirror’s sky was just starting to go dim with the approach of sunset. I had perhaps an hour until my time expired. Dragging the cloth behind me, I opened the doors.
The storeroom was nearly empty. The sledge was all the way at the far opening, nearly full again, and inside the mouth of the tunnel I could see the gleam of silver packed from the surface of the ice all the way to the ceiling. Flek and Tsop were working in the last corner on the nearer side of the river, and Shofer was on the other side. I ran to them. “Go help him!” I told Flek and Tsop. They didn’t even nod; they only went to the other one where Shofer was working and joined him. I put down my cloth and shoved silver onto it with my bare hands and changed it. All that was l
eft was a tiny pile, almost pathetic in that enormous space, only the crust of honey you would scrape from around the edges of an empty jar when you had nothing else left. But it was a big jar, and even this little scraping still had to be gold, not silver.
My hands were trembling by the time I changed the last coins. Shofer had gone and emptied another load into the tunnel, and while he had done it, Flek and Tsop had shoveled the last of the final corner into a pile by the river’s edge, so when Shofer brought the sledge back, they could load it quickly. I let them do it, and went around the room searching in every corner for any gleam of silver, any last coin left. My mirror was almost gone full dark.
But they had cleared the room. Only on one little ledge jutting from the wall, I found a single silver coin caught. The hooves of the deer clattered on the ice behind my back as Shofer turned the sledge, with only one small mound in the bottom. They had packed the tunnel so full that he had to back it up to have room to dump the last heap out onto the ice. Flek and Tsop came slowly towards me. I picked the one coin up and held it up, and between my thumb and forefinger gold swept across its face, just as the great double doors of the storeroom were thrust open, and my husband came into the room.
He had a grim anger-clenched look on his face that fell away instantly. He stopped open-mouthed, gazing on his emptied storeroom. I was shaking with weariness and reaction, but I dragged myself straight and said with hoarse defiance, “There. I have changed every coin within your storerooms to gold.”
He jerked his head to stare at me. I’d expected him to be furious; instead he looked almost—bewildered, as if he had no idea what to make of it, of me. He slowly turned his head to look: at the silver piled inside the tunnel, at Shofer standing there sagging, holding the heads of the deer on the sledge, at Flek and Tsop both wavering like willow saplings in a high wind, and at last at me again. He walked slowly across the room and took the final coin out of my fingers and looked at it, and broke it in half with his bare hands.