by Naomi Novik
I watched to see what the Staryk would do, what spell or incantation he’d use to open a path to the sunlit world, but all he did was turn and look back at me in very nearly the same speculating way, as if he was wondering whether I might not fling out some unexpected magic. And then he said to me abruptly, “I will answer no questions for you tonight.”
“What?” My voice nearly cracked with alarm; for an instant I thought he’d guessed, he knew what I’d planned and we weren’t going to any wedding but to my execution. Then I understood what he really meant. “We have a bargain!”
“In exchange for your rights only. You have given me nothing in exchange for mine. I set no value upon them, and now see I bargained falsely—” He cut himself off abruptly, turning to face forward, and then he said slowly, “Is that why you demanded answers to fool’s questions as your return? To show your disdain for my insult?” He sat there for a moment of silence, and before I could correct him, suddenly he laughed, like a chorus full of bells singing a long way over snow, a baffling noise; I’d never even imagined him laughing. I stopped open-mouthed, half startled and half outraged, and then he turned and seized my hand and kissed it, the brush of his lips against my skin something like breathing out onto frostbitten glass.
He took me so much by surprise that I didn’t say anything at first, or even pull my hand free, and then he said to me fiercely, “I will make you amends tonight, my lady, and show you that I have learned better how to value you; I will not require another lesson beyond this one,” with a wave of his arm out of the sleigh, over the wide landscape smothered in the snow.
At first I looked in confusion, wondering what he meant, but there was nothing around us, nothing to be seen, except his depthless winter. A hundred years of winter that had somehow come all at once on a summer’s day, when the Staryk should have been shut up behind the glass walls of their mountain, waiting for the winter to come again. Though the Staryk had never before been able to hold back the spring so long.
A hundred years of winter, on a summer’s day. I said through a throat suddenly choked and tight, “You didn’t make this winter.”
“No, my lady,” he said, still looking at me with all the vast self-congratulation of a man who’d found a treasure hidden in a dirty trough. A treasure of gold, like the Staryk ever coveted; and when they’d begun to raid us more, when they’d begun to come for that gold more often—that was when the winters had begun to grow steadily worse. And now—and now—there were two vast storerooms heaped with shining, sunlit gold; the warmth of the summer sun trapped into cold metal for the Staryk to hoard deep inside his walls, while he buried my home under a wall of winter.
He smiled at me, still holding my hand; he smiled at me, and then turned to the driver and said, “Go!” and with a lurch we were onto the white road; the king’s road, Shofer had called it; the Staryk road I had known and glimpsed in the dark woods all my life. It was running on ahead of us as if it had always been there, and stretched away behind us too, as far as I could see, an endless vaulted passageway. The strange unearthly-white trees lined it on both sides, their limbs hung with clear ice-drops and white leaves, and the surface of it was smooth blue-white ice, clouded. The sleigh flew over it, and all at once a sudden strong smell of pine needles and sap came into my nose, a desperate struggling of life. Through the canopy of white branches overhead, the sky began to change: the grey flushed slowly through on one side with blue, and on the other with golden and orange, a summer evening’s sky over winter woods, and I knew that we’d slid out of his kingdom and back into my own world.
He was still holding my hand in his. I left it there deliberately, thinking of Judith singing in her sweet voice to make Holofernes’s eyes go heavy in his tent, and what else she’d endured there first. I could bear this. I was so angry I had gone cold straight through. Let him think he had me, and could have my heart for the lifting of his finger. Let him think I would betray my people and my home just to be a queen beside him. He could hold my hand the rest of the way if he wanted to, as a fair return for the gift he’d given me, the one thing I’d wanted from him after all: I’d lost even the slightest qualm about killing him.
CHAPTER 19
There were a few servants who went to the Jewish quarter sometimes: Galina’s maid Palmira, when her mistress wanted some jewelry, would go and look at their stalls. She had been too high to talk to me before with anything but impatience, when my lady was the little-wanted daughter of the wife who’d come before; all the dance that went on in the great ballrooms and bedrooms, we danced over again among ourselves in our narrow halls. But now I was servant to the tsarina, who valued me enough to have sent for me, so when I went knocking at the duchess’s dressing room, Palmira got up from where she sat polishing jewelry and came and kissed me on both cheeks, and asked me if I wasn’t tired from the journey, and had me sit in her own chair next to the wall that was on the other side of the fireplace in the bedroom; she sent the under-maid to bring a cup of tea. I sat gladly before the warm wall and drank the tea: oh, I was tired.
“The banker?” she said at once, when I told her the name Moshel. “I don’t know where he lives, but the steward will. Ula,” she said to the girl, “go bring us some kruschiki and some cherries, and then go tell Panov Nolius that dear Magreta is here and ask if he won’t join us for a cup of tea: we shouldn’t make her run all over the house after so much traveling.” Another little dancing step there, because she liked to make the steward come to her, which he would not do, except that here I was. And here I was, and the wall was warm at my back, and I was too old to keep dancing anymore. I only sat and drank my tea and took another cup with cherries and ate a sweet crisp melting kruschik and said thank you to Panov Nolius when he did deign to come and sit and have tea with us.
“Panov Moshel lives in the fourth house on Varenka Street,” he said cool and stiff, when I asked him the name. “Does Her Majesty want to arrange a loan? I would be glad to be of service.”
“A loan? The tsarina?” I said, confused; Irina had said a man in the Jewish quarter, and I had thought of those moneylenders in their little stalls who looked through their small round glasses at a silver ring that had come from your mother, and then gave you money for it. A little nothing of money, compared with what it was worth to you, but the little money that you had to have just then, because one of the girls who had sat in that dark room with you, for hours, had snuck out to see one of those soldiers who’d let you out, and now she needed a doctor who wouldn’t come except for silver and in the middle of the night. That was what it meant to me, someone who lent money in the Jewish quarter. That was not someone for a duke or a tsarina to deal with.
Nolius liked that I didn’t know any better; I might be the tsarina’s servant, but I was still a silly old woman who thought the world was made of small things, and he was the trusted steward of the duke. So then he unbent a little and took a kruschik and told me, pleased and full of knowledge, “No, no, Panov Moshel has a bank: a man of solid worth, most reputable. He helped to arrange the loans for the rebuilding of the city wall after the war, with great discretion. His Grace has had him here to the house eight times on business, and all times ordered that he be treated with great respect. And never once has Moshel tried to trade upon it. He comes always on foot, not in a carriage; the women of his family dress soberly, and he keeps a modest house. Never has he asked a favor in return.”
I had always thought of the city wall as something built by soldiers, and not with money, but of course you would have to pay for it somehow; for stones and mortar and food for men to eat and clothes for them to wear while they built it for you, but even if I had imagined it so far, I would have thought only that the money must have come from a strongroom somewhere, a chest full of gold like a duke would have or a tsar. I wouldn’t have thought of it coming from quiet men in plain coats who didn’t ride in carriages.
Nolius leaned in so he could be sure I would understand he was telling me a private thing only a m
an of his importance would know, and added with much significance, “He has been given to know that if he converted, doors might be opened for him.” Then he sat back and shrugged, opening a hand. “But he did not choose it, and His Grace was satisfied. I have heard him say, ‘I would rather have my affairs in the hands of a man who is content than a man who is hungry. I prefer to take my risks on the battlefield.’ I would certainly recommend him if Her Majesty desired to make any financial arrangements.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, it’s a different matter, a woman’s matter. His granddaughter gave her a gift, one that she treasures, and she wants to make a return on the occasion of her wedding. She asked me to arrange a gift.”
Nolius looked puzzled, and glanced at Palmira: of course they thought I had muddled the story, and they were right, I knew I had gotten something in it wrong. But it didn’t matter. Let that be the story. It was strange enough already. “It was a gift given before her wedding,” I added, though, to make it a little less strange to them.
Palmira said, “Ah!” very delicately, and they both decided at once they wouldn’t press the question more, after all. There wasn’t any sense bringing up the old days when they might have been rude to me in the hallways when we passed; the days when Irina and I lived in two cold rooms a little too high in the house for a duke’s daughter, and when she might have been glad for whatever present a Jew’s granddaughter might send her: a farsighted Jew’s granddaughter, who had been wiser than they, and planted a seed of gratitude that now would come to flower.
“Well, of course it must be something notable,” Nolius said firmly: anyone who had recognized my lady must be rewarded, since otherwise those who had neglected her must be punished. “No jewels, of course, or money. Perhaps something for her household . . .”
“We should ask Edita’s advice,” Palmira said, meaning the housekeeper, and Nolius was also happy to have her come, since he had lowered himself, so a few minutes later she came, too, and had tea with cherries and asked me questions about the tsar’s palace.
“It’s too cold for an old woman,” I said. “Such windows everywhere! Taller twice over than this whole wall,” I showed them with my hand, “and the wall as long as the ballroom, and that is only the bedchamber. Six fireplaces going at once, to keep from freezing alive, and everything in gold, everything: the windows and the table legs and the bath, everything. Six women to clean the room.”
They all sighed with pleasure, and Edita said to Nolius, “I don’t envy whoever runs his household! So many to manage!” and he nodded seriously back to her, both of them of course full of glowing envy, but since they could not have the trouble of it themselves, they would at least content themselves by reminding each other with pleasure that they, too, had a great household to manage, and understood as others could not how difficult it was.
But the conversation wasn’t foolish really: it gave us all an excuse to sit a little while longer and rest together, in the room that was warm with the fire behind me and the four of us sitting close and the hot tea, an excuse that we had to have, or else be bad servants neglecting our work. The duchess did not keep bad servants. Edita took another small sip of her cup and said to me, in a thoughtful tone, “What about that tablecloth, dear Magreta? Do you remember, the present for the wedding of the boyar’s daughter, and then nothing came of it? It was such lovely work.”
I remembered it, I remembered it very well. That boyar was a man who had fought for the duke, and so the duke wanted a handsome gift given. And everyone else had as much work as they could hold, the duchess and her ladies, and over the years I’d little by little slowed my pace and spared my hands, cautiously, as Irina grew; I’d said, oh, I have all her things to sew, and apologized, and did the tasks Edita sent me a bit slower than she liked, so she gave me a little less. But Irina was fourteen that year, so they had brought up the baskets of silk wool to our little rooms, and Edita had smiling said it was time for Irina to be learning how to do fine work; I could teach her. And it must be done in a month, dear Magreta.
So in the end, she got back all the work I had tried to save out of my hands. I had spun the silk alone with my eyes and fingers aching into the hours of the night while my girl slept, because she already wasn’t beautiful, with her thin pallid face and sharp nose, and I was afraid to make her ugly with squinting and bending over work by the fire and not enough sleep. There wouldn’t be a great marriage for her, I thought then, but there might be a house somewhere at least; maybe an older man who wouldn’t trouble her very much, and she would have a bedroom that was not at the top of the stairs, and be the mistress there. And there would be a corner for me, where I could rock by the cradle if a child came, and knit only small things.
I had spun the silk and then I had knitted it with the finest needles in the vines and flowers of the duke’s crest, so that every feast day when they laid it down on their table they would look at it and think of their patron, who showed them such favor. And then, yes, nothing came of it; a fever came instead. The boyar’s daughter died before the wedding, the boy married some girl less well-connected, and all my hours and pain were folded in paper and put away into the duchess’s cupboard for when she needed another gift to give.
“Thank you, Edita, if you can spare it,” I said. It was a kindness, a kindness and an apology both, because she had not been wise enough to give me a little help herself, and make it our work. So when next the duchess needed a notable gift, she would not have a tablecloth folded in paper to take out, and it was Edita who would have to see a gift made, without a pair of spare hands upstairs that she could easily put to use. And now Irina had a gift to give, a gift she needed because I had saved her looks enough that her father had not just left her upstairs to become a pair of spare hands for her brothers’ wives; her father had put a crown on her shining dark hair that I had combed, and given her to a demon for his wife.
“Well, of course, after all your pains on it,” Edita said, more easily now that I had accepted her apology; they all smiled at me, relieved, because I was too old and tired to dance with them and be haughty as I should have been with the tsarina as a mistress, and I would not take too much from them to pay the old debts they had laid up with me; it was too hard to collect. And oh, I wanted to creep back upstairs to the little rooms and put my hard chair close to the small fire and shut the door again. But it was too late.
We finished our tea and she brought me the tablecloth, and Nolius made me a little drawing of the streets where the house was, and I took them upstairs. The duke was out on the balcony with Irina. Their faces looking at each other were dark shapes with the grey sky behind them, a pattern knitted mirror-fashion; she was tall as he was, and she had his nose. I kept my head down and hurried into a corner for the few minutes until he left her. “Thank you, Magra,” she said absently when she came back inside afterwards, looking at the tablecloth in its paper half unfolded on the bed. She took her small wooden jewel-box and opened it: a heavy silver chain and twelve squat candles of pure white wax lay in the bottom of it, and she put the tablecloth in atop the rest. She touched it with her fingers, but she did not see it really; she was not thinking of tablecloths and thread and the time that made them one. She did not have to. I had let her sleep, and so now she could think of crowns and demons instead, and she had to, or she would die.
She closed the box as the tsar came into the room on a wave of servants: he had come to change his clothes. He looked at Irina coldly. “Have you anything else to wear?” he demanded, even as he threw himself into a chair and held out his legs one after another; the servants drew off his boots, and then he stood and put himself in the middle of the room and did nothing while they sprang to take off his coat, his belt, his shirt, and his trousers, everything.
“There’s the blue dress,” I whispered to Irina, which I had been sewing for her. It had been put aside in the rush before the wedding: it could not have been finished in time to go into her box, and it was not grand enough truly for a tsarina; I
had been making it for her to wear at her father’s table, to set off the thick braid and give a little color to her face. But then she had driven away with her box in a sleigh with the tsar, and I had been left behind alone in the cold rooms. And I knew soon they would at least put some other maids in there with me, but I hoped at least they would let me stay in them, so I took the blue dress out and worked upon it though it hurt my hands, meaning to make it for the duchess instead, something I would have crept downstairs and given to Palmira where the duchess could see, and I hoped like the dress enough to keep me sewing for her. So it was finished.
Irina nodded to me. I did not go for it myself. I went out and found one of the other maids and told her to go bring the dress down from the cold rooms, and she did it because I was important now enough to spend an hour having tea with Palmira and Nolius and Edita. I went back inside and Irina was standing by the balcony again, staring at the forest while the tsar stood all naked before the fire, dismissing this coat and that shirt and this waistcoat, out of the bags and boxes piled like a small fort made in the room. None of us mattered, of course, but it was not that he did not care because we were servants: even Galina or the duke would not stand there forever naked before a mirror while they picked through every shirt of their wardrobe, as if they did not need to be ashamed of their nakedness in their own heart and cover themselves. But the tsar stood as though he might go out of the room and put himself just so before everyone’s eyes as easily as put anything on; as though he only troubled himself with clothing for the pleasure of its beauty, and if nothing satisfied him, he wouldn’t bother, and would put everyone else to the trouble of looking away from him, or having to pretend he wasn’t naked before them.