by Naomi Novik
But now the room seemed suddenly small and close and too hot for me after the delicate beauty of the tsar’s palace. I went to stand on the balcony while the servants brought in our things, bustling around me, with the cold wind welcome on my face. It was a little way into the afternoon, the sun going low. Magreta came in scolding along the servants who brought in my box of dresses, but then she came to stand with me silently, pressing my hand between hers, stroking the back of it.
When the others went out and we were alone for a moment, I said quietly, “Will you get one of the other servants to find out where the house of Panov Moshel stands? It’s in the Jewish quarter somewhere. There’s going to be a wedding there tonight, and the driver will need to know the way. And find me a gift to take.”
“Oh, dushenka,” she said, softly, afraid. She brought my hand to her cheek and then she kissed it and went away to do as I’d asked.
One of Mirnatius’s guardsmen came in, one of the soldiers who had come with us from the palace. He wasn’t really a footman, but unlike the other servants bustling in the room, I was not the duke’s daughter to him; I was the tsarina, and when I looked at him, he bowed deeply to me and stopped there in his place, waiting. I said, “Will you go tell my father I would like to see him?”
“At once, Your Majesty,” he said, a note in his voice like the deepest humming string on an instrument, and he went out.
My father came to me. He stopped in the doorway and I turned, still on the balcony, and looked at him with my back straight. His eyes were on me, heavy and assessing as they always had been, measuring my worth, and after a moment he crossed the room and came to join me on the cold stone. Below us, the near-unbroken white of the forest and the frozen river rolled into the blanketed countryside. “It won’t be a good harvest this year,” I said.
I half expected him to be irritated or even angry at being summoned, to speak sharply to me: to him surely I was only the unexpectedly useful pawn. I was not meant to begin sweeping independently around on the board. But he only said, “No. The rye is blighted in the fields.”
“I’m sorry to put you to the expense, but there’s going to be a wedding while we’re here,” I told him. “We’re marrying Vassilia to Mirnatius’s cousin Ilias.”
He paused and looked at me from under his brows for a long moment. He said slowly, “We can manage. How soon after she comes?”
“In the same hour,” I said, and we looked at each other, and I knew that he understood me perfectly.
He rubbed his hand across his mouth thoughtfully. “I’ll make sure Father Idoros is ready and waiting in the chapel when Ulrich’s horses come through the gate. The house will be crowded, but your mother and I will leave our bedroom for them. She’ll sleep upstairs with her women, and I’ll take the one next door, with your cousin Darius. A few other men of your husband’s household can share with us to make room.”
I nodded, and I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about Ulrich finding a way to spirit his own valuable daughter out from under her new bridegroom.
“Will Prince Casimir be visiting?” my father asked after a moment, still studying me.
“He may not come until the day after, I am afraid,” I said. “Our messenger to him was late getting started, some trouble with his horse.”
My father glanced back into the room. The servants were still working, but none of them were near the balcony. “How is your husband’s health?”
“Mostly good. But he has . . . a nervous complaint,” I said. “A trouble his mother had, I think.”
My father paused and his brows drew hard together. “Does it give him . . . difficulty?”
“So far, yes,” I said.
He was silent, and then he said, “I’ll have a quiet word with Casimir when he comes. He’s not a fool. A sensible man, and a good soldier.”
“I’m glad you think well of him,” I said.
My father put his hand up and held my cheek for a moment, so unexpected I held still beneath it, startled. He said low, fiercely, “I am proud of you, Irina,” and then he let go again. “Will you and your husband come down to dinner tonight?”
“Not tonight,” I said after a moment. It was an effort to speak, at first. I hadn’t thought that I wanted my father to be proud of me. It had never seemed possible at all, but I hadn’t known it mattered to me. I had to force myself to find words again. “There’s one more thing. Something . . . else.”
He studied my face and nodded. “Tell me.”
I waited in silence, until the room had emptied of servants again for a moment. “The winter’s being made by the Staryk. They mean to freeze us all.” He stiffened, and instinctively reached his finger halfway towards the hanging chains of my silver crown, looking at it. “Their king means to bring the snow all summer.”
His eyes were hard and intent upon me. “Why?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But there’s a way to stop it.”
I told him of the plan in those few private moments, plain and brutally quick. When I had spoken of politics, I knew just how to tell him a thousand things without saying a single betraying word that anyone else would understand, never fearing that he wouldn’t know what I meant, but not when I spoke of winter lords and demons of flame. They moved through our words like they moved through our world, disasters beyond its boundaries. I spoke quickly not just to keep from being overheard, but because I wanted to hurry through: the story made no sense beside the hard reality of stone walls and murder, and the sun shining on the snow-bright rail.
But my father listened intently, and he didn’t say Don’t be foolish, or This is madness. When I finished, he said, “There was a tower once in the southern end of the city walls, near the Jewish quarter. We broke it in the siege when we came into the city. We rebuilt the wall straight afterwards, and left the cellar and the foundations of the tower outside, covered over with dirt, and my two best men and I dug a tunnel to it all the way out of the palace cellars, while the city was still half burned.” I was nodding swiftly, understanding: he’d made a back way out of the city, a way to escape a siege, like the old duke hadn’t had to use. “Once a year, in the night, I go down the tunnel and back to check it. I’ll dig it out tonight with my own hands, and wait for you there, outside the walls. You have the chain?”
“Yes,” I said. “In my jewel-box. And twelve great candles, to make a ring of fire.”
He nodded. More servants came in and we fell silent together. He said nothing while they unpacked another two boxes of rich clothing, velvet and silk and brocades. His eyes were on the work, but he was not really seeing it; I could see his mind unwinding a tangled thread with slow careful patience, following it from one end to another through a thicket. “What is it?” I asked, when they had gone away again.
He said after a moment, “Men have lived here a long time, Irina. My great-grandfather had a farmhouse near the city. The Staryk rule the forest, and lust for gold, and they ride out in winter storms to get it, but they have never before stood in the way of the spring.” My father looked at me with his cold clear eyes, and I knew he was warning me when he said, “It would be well to know: Why?”
*
I had the Staryk king’s promise, but I didn’t want to trust it; the panic of the storerooms still filled me. But I was so tired that I drifted to sleep in my bath as soon as they put me in it. I suppose I might have slept however long I wanted, but as I lay there drowsing, I had a half dream of standing on the threshold of the ballroom in my grandfather’s house, the whole room empty and the lights dimmed and the Staryk jeering next to me, “You mistook the date.”
I jerked up in sudden terror, wide-awake, my heart pounding. I stared for a moment in confusion at the wall of my room in front of me, which wasn’t clear anymore but solid white, and then I clumsily dragged myself out of the bath, wrapping a sheet around me as I stumbled over. It wasn’t the wall that had changed: it was the whole world that had gone all to white; the forest buried so deep that the nearest pines we
re under up to their small pointed tops, coated thickly, with not a single dark green needle visible anywhere. The river had vanished completely beneath the blanket, and the sky had gone almost pearl-white above.
I stood staring out at it with the sheet clenched in my fists against me, thinking of all that snow falling on my home, falling on Vysnia, until one of the servants behind me said timidly, “My lady, will you dress?”
Flek and Tsop and Shofer had all vanished, mere servants’ work evidently beneath them now, but they’d arranged everything I needed before they went. Shofer had gone to order one of the other drivers to make the sleigh ready for my journey, and a crowd of other servants had been summoned, who obeyed me with a different kind of silence and swiftness, as though some word and whisper had already gone through the kingdom, and changed me in all their sight.
They brought me a gown of heavy white silk with a coat of white brocade embroidered in silver, and a high-necked collar of silver lace and clear jewels to go around my shoulders. They put the heavy golden crown above it all—mismatched at first, but I barely glanced at myself in the mirror and noticed, and gold shot suddenly down every line of silver all the way to the embroidered hem. Around me the women dropped their hands from the silk and their eyes from my face.
I would be far more mismatched at Basia’s wedding, a fantastical doll that someone had imagined unrestrained by cost or sense. But I didn’t tell them to bring another dress. I was bringing a Staryk king as a wedding guest, and hoping to kill him in the midst of the festivities; my clothes would be the least of it. And if I was lucky enough to escape this night with my life and dress intact, I’d sell it to some noblewoman to make a dowry for a real marriage. I didn’t believe silver would turn to gold for me in the sunlit world, but I’d still be a rich woman to the end of my days off the one ensemble.
So I held my head high under the weight of my crown and let the burden of it make me glide with stately pace to the front of the chamber. Tsop and Shofer had come back and were waiting there for me, each of them with a small box full of silver: mostly small pieces of jewelry, a cup or two, some scattered forks and knives and plates and loose coins filling in around them. They had changed their clothing, too, to garments of palest ivory. Tsop had put the gold buttons from her old clothes onto the new ones. The other servants bowed to them and looked at them sideways at the same time.
Then Flek came in, also in ivory and carrying a box of her own, and at her side a little girl followed, a Staryk girl. She was the first child I’d seen here, and even stranger to my eye than the grown Staryk were: she was as thin and reedy as an icicle and almost as translucent, and shades and veins of deep blue were visible beneath her skin, a thin clear layer of ice. Beside her the other Staryk looked like snowy hillsides, and she a frozen core that snow had yet to settle on. She looked up at me with silent wide curiosity.
“Open-Handed, this is my daughter, who now is your bondswoman, too,” Flek said softly, and touched her shoulder, and the little girl made me a careful leaning bow. She was carrying a small fine necklace of silver across her hands, a simple adornment she evidently hadn’t wanted to put into the box with the rest, and I reached down and touched it first of all.
Warm gold blushed through the whole length of it with the slightest push of my will, and the child gave a soft delighted tinkling sigh that made it feel more like magic than all the work I’d done in the treasury below. Slowly, I turned to Flek’s box and touched the top of the small pile of silver inside. Everything blazed into gold at once, the same quick and easy way, as if I’d somehow stretched the muscles of my gift to new lengths—as if now I could have gone and changed three storerooms packed full of silver into gold, without any trick involved. I changed Tsop’s silver and Shofer’s also; neither of them seemed surprised at how easily it went. I finished and then asked them, “Is it permissible to say thank you here, or is that rude somehow?”
“My lady, we would not refuse anything you wished to give us,” Tsop said a little helplessly, after they all three exchanged a look. “But we have always heard that in the sunlit world, mortals give thanks to one another to fill the hollowness where they fail to make return, and you have already given us so much that we shall only answer it with our lives’ service: you have given us names in your voice, and raised us high, and filled our hands with gold. What are your thanks besides that?”
When she put it that way—although I hadn’t thought of the names as a gift I was making them—I had to think about what I would have meant by saying thank you, instead of just the automatic politeness. I had to grope a while; I’d been jolted out of being sleepy, but I still felt dulled, as if my head had been padded with wool inside. “What I mean—what we mean by it is—it’s like credit,” I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. “Gifts, and thanks—we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go. So I do thank you,” I added abruptly, “because you risked all you had to help me, and even if you count the return fair, I’ll still remember the chance you took and be glad to do more for you if I can.”
They stared at me, and after a moment Flek reached out a hand and put it on her daughter’s head and said, “My lady, then I will ask, if you do not think it beyond what you owe: will you give my child her true name?” I must have looked as baffled as I felt; Flek lowered her eyes. “The one who sired her would not accept the burden when she was born, and left her nameless,” she said softly. “And if I ask him again now, he will agree, but he has the right to demand my hand in return, and I no longer wish to give it.”
I didn’t know what the laws among the Staryk were, about marriage, but I knew exactly what I thought of a man who’d sire a child and refuse to own it: I wouldn’t have wanted him, either. “Yes. How do I do it?” I asked, and after she told me, I held out my hand to the little girl, and she came with me to the far end of the balcony, and I bent down and whispered in her ear, “Your name is Rebekah bat Flek,” which I thought would certainly give any Staryk trying to guess it a significant degree of difficulty.
She brightened up all throughout her body, as if someone had lit a flame inside her. She ran back to her mother and said, “Mama, Mama, I have a name! I have a name! Can I tell you?” and Flek knelt and pulled her into her arms and kissed her and said, “Sleep with it in your heart alone tonight, little snowflake, and tell me in the morning.”
It made me glad looking on their joy: I felt in that moment that I had given fair return, even for that day and night of terror they had all lived with me, and if I never saw them again, I still hoped that they’d do well for themselves. I did feel a pang of guilt, because I didn’t know exactly what would happen if my plan succeeded and I left their king’s throne vacant for someone else to claim. Would that mean my own rank had fallen, and theirs with mine? But I hoped that would only put them in some lower rank of nobility at worst. I had to take the chance, anyway, for the sake of my own people, being buried alive under that endless snow outside my window.
I took a deep breath. “I’m ready to go,” I said, and almost instantly the glass wall parted and my husband came in: my husband, whom I meant to murder. For just cause and more, but still I felt a little queasy, and I didn’t look him in his face. I’d avoided looking at him before because he’d seemed so terrible and strange, a glittering of icicles brought to life; now I avoided it because he looked suddenly too much like someone, like a person. I had held the hand of that frozen little ice-statue of a girl, and she was my goddaughter now or something close to it, and when I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer, their faces were warmed by the reflection off the gold in the chests at their feet, and they were the faces of my friends, my friends who had helped me, and would help me again if they could. What did it matter that they didn’t speak of kindness, here; they had done me a kindness with their han
ds. I knew which one of those I would choose.
But they made it suddenly harder to see only winter in his face. He wasn’t my friend; he was all monstrous sharp edges of ice, wanting to cut me open and spill gold out of me while he swallowed up my world. But he was a satisfied monster for the moment: I had cut myself open, and I’d filled him two storerooms of gold, and he had to match my accomplishment to fulfill his own sense of dignity, so he came to me dressed in splendor equal to my own, as if he meant to do courtesy to the occasion, and he bowed to me as courtly as if I really was his queen. “Come, then, my lady, and let us to the wedding,” he said, even suddenly polite to me, now when I most wanted him to be cold and grudging and resentful. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised: he’d never given me anything I wanted unless I’d bound him to it beforehand.
I looked at my friends one last time and inclined my head to them, saying farewell, and walked out beside him. We went down together to the courtyard. The sleigh was waiting, heaped with white furs without a mark. My dress and my crown were so heavy on me that I reached for the sides to haul myself up into it, but before I could, he took me by the waist and lifted me without effort inside before taking his own seat next to me.
The deer leapt away at the twitch of the driver’s reins, and the mountain went flashing away around us. The wind was strong and sweet in my face, not too cold, as we rushed down the passage to the silver gates and back out into the world, the sleigh runners whispering over the road and the hooves of the deer a light drumming. It was only a few minutes before we were running quick towards the forest. The deer and the sleigh flew over the top of the new-fallen snow without leaving more than light tracks, and the half-buried trees looked oddly small as we drove through them.