by Naomi Novik
Not much work was required to uncover the stones and the trapdoor; as soon as we had cleared it off, Irina knocked on it, and a moment later it was swung down and open, and I saw my father-in-law’s face swimming up out of the dark below. He nodded to Irina, and made room for us to bring the Staryk down. He’d been busy to some purpose himself: he’d pickaxed out a round channel in the floor, among the stones, and he’d filled it up with coals. There was another ring of candles burning down around the channel as a second row of fortifications, and more stacked up in a wheelbarrow waiting against the wall to replenish the supply. Everything so very tidily organized.
Timur pulled the Staryk on his leash into the ring of coals, and then climbed back over and tossed the rope back to pool at his feet. The Staryk ignored it; he stood in the circle looking out at us with his cold gleaming icicle of a face, his head high and proud even with the silver chain still wrapped around him, impossibly strange: that was winter we had locked up in the cellar there among us. He didn’t entirely seem a living creature. There was something odd in his face that didn’t stay the same whenever you looked at him twice, as if his edges were constantly melting and re-formed. He wasn’t beautiful, he was terrifying; and then he was beautiful, and then he was both, and I couldn’t decide from one moment to the next which it was.
It made something in my head itch; I would have liked to draw him, to catch him with pen and ink, and not just fire and silver. I looked over at Irina there in the dark pit: some of his cold blue light was reflecting on her face, on her silver crown and the red rubies of her silver gown, and it occurred to me that this was what they saw when they looked at her: they saw her like a Staryk, but close enough to mortal to be touched.
Inside, Chernobog stirred and gave a small internal belch, nothing I’d ever felt before and gruesomely unpleasant, and lashed me a little; I gritted my teeth and flicked my fingers at the circle of coals, and set it glowing red with flame. Timur flinched back from it. The Staryk didn’t quite flinch, but I got the impression he would have rather liked to, if that weren’t far beyond his dignity. I repressed the urge to tell him to enjoy flinching as much as he wanted to. Chernobog never took much notice of anyone’s dignity or lack thereof so far as I’d ever seen. It pleased itself either way.
“Shall we be off?” I said to Irina. “I’m sorry to forsake the manifest charms of this place, but we do have another wedding to attend tomorrow, I believe? A busy season for them.”
Irina turned away from the Staryk. “Yes,” she said somberly. She didn’t seem particularly happy with the final outcome of her excellently laid plans, although as far as I could tell they’d gone off without a hitch. Unless of course there had been a corollary to them she hadn’t shared with me—for instance, one where I had been left tucked safely in the fireplace forever, perhaps chained in gold and ringed with ice; that seemed the poetic mirror. Yes, the more I thought of it, the more I was certain something like that had been on the agenda. Ha, how silly of me—had been. That knife in the back was still very much on its way.
“A trusted man?” the duke said to Irina, gesturing at Timur. She nodded. “Good. He will come up with me and help to cover the door again, and keep guard. Walk straight down the tunnel. Take no turns. It crosses a few old sewers along the way.”
That rather nicely conveyed the prospective scenic quality of our walk. I smiled at Irina with every last ounce of the sincere affection that was blooming in my heart for her, and put out my arm formally. She looked at me, once more dull and expressionless as glass, and set her hand on the curve of my arm. We left the Staryk standing silently and alone behind us in his bonds of flame and silver, and set off together down a stinking impenetrable-dark rat tunnel full of squeaks and dangling-maggot tree roots. I cupped a fire in my hand while we walked, red light dancing over the earthen walls.
“What a convenient bolt-hole this is,” I said. “Shall I keep it in mind if your father ever rebels against the crown? I suppose that’s hardly likely anymore—or is it?” She only looked at me. “I suppose you think I’m an idiot,” I snapped at her. Her silence was more infuriating than her lectures. I hadn’t asked for any of this: I hadn’t wanted to marry her, I hadn’t wanted to help her survive, I hadn’t wanted to be smashed like eggshells for her sake. Chernobog was sitting in my belly like swallowed coals, a thick sated presence, pleased with itself—and her, too, no doubt. I couldn’t even shove her into one of these dark tunnels and run away, leaving her behind.
“Are you all right?” she asked me abruptly.
I laughed; it was so absurd. “What’s a little agony and mortal injury here and there,” I jeered at her. “Really, I don’t mind. I’m delighted to be of service anytime. Hm, delighted—do I mean that, or is there another word for it? I’ll have to give it some thought. What exactly do you expect from me? Should I be grateful to you?”
She paused. After a moment, she said, “The winter will break. Lithvas will—”
“Shut up about Lithvas,” I spat at her. “Are we playacting for the worms now, or is this something you do to keep your hand in for public appearances? As though Lithvas means anything but the lines where the last round of people finished killing each other. What do I care about Lithvas? The nobles would gladly slit my throat, the peasants don’t know who rules them, the dirt doesn’t care, and I don’t owe a thing to any of them or you. I can’t stop you dancing me around the chessboard, but I’m not going to thank you humbly for permitting me to be useful to you, my lady, like that groveling monkey up there. Stop trying to pretend you wouldn’t have been delighted to leave me there in bloody pieces on the floor. Don’t you have the next tsar waiting in the wings? It seems like the sort of thing you’d have ready just in case.”
She fell blessedly silent for a while, but not long enough to suit me. We reached the end of the tunnel and came through an archway cut into a wall of stone: it let us into a small dark cramped closet of a room, with a cleverly designed bit of the wall that swung out into the wine cellars. When we came out and I pushed it shut again, you could hardly even have told that the place was there. I ran my fingers over the bricks and could barely find the edges, and that only because the mortar was missing. Chernobog hummed drowsily in satisfaction: it would go tomorrow, it would feast again . . .
I turned and found Irina looking at me in the dark; I’d closed my hand on the flame, and there was only a little bit of lamplight shining off the stairs, reflected in the solid black pools of her eyes, to show her face to me.
“You don’t care about any of it,” she said. “And yet you bargained to be tsar anyway, in your brother’s place—”
It was very much like having a monster crush your ribs straight into your heart. Oh, how I hated her. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t have liked Karolis very much, darling girl,” I said, through my teeth. “Who do you think taught me to kill squirrels? No one else had a minute for the witch’s get, until he was—”
I stopped; I still couldn’t be clever about it. Not about that. Chernobog even stirred a bit and put out its tongue through my head, lazily lapping up the unexpected delicious treat of my pain. How nice to know I could still give satisfaction, even when it was so well-fed.
She was staring at me. “You loved him. And you bargained anyway?”
“Oh, no,” I said, thick with rage. “I’ve never had the chance to bargain for a thing. You see, my mother wasn’t as lucky as you, sweet Irina. She didn’t already have a crown, and she didn’t have magical beauty, and she didn’t have a Staryk king to buy them with. So instead she paid for them with a promissory note, and the ink on my contract was dry before I even came wet out of the womb.”
*
When Irina came back, I was sewing in the corner of her bedroom, as fast as I could. I had gone to Palmira and told her that the tsar would not let Irina wear the same dress twice, and if she had a gown I could make over for Irina to wear tomorrow, I would give her the blue with rubies to make over for Galina. Galina would not know where they came fr
om; Palmira would not. Better not to know. To them they could be jewels, rich and fine, that someone had bought and paid for with gold and not with blood. They would have gone far enough away from the cruelty that made them, and then they could be only beautiful. And I would have work to do during the night, the long night, sitting by a lamp and wondering if Irina would ever come back.
“But it must be splendid,” I said. “Otherwise it won’t do: you see how he dresses! He will not have her less fine.” So Palmira gave me a gown of deep emerald-green brocade and palest leaf-green silk, embroidered so thickly in silver that I needed to get a young maid to help carry it back to the room, with tiny beads of emeralds knotted upon it: not as valuable as the rubies, but there were so many of them that the gown glittered in the light. Galina had worn it as a girl, before her first marriage. It was too small for her now, but still it had been kept put by, for a daughter or a son’s wife. Not a stepdaughter, before now, but it would fit Irina without too much work. She was only more narrow in the chest. I was almost done bringing in the bodice when she came back to the room, and her face was white and blind above those shining ruby drops of blood.
The tsar went to the fire and snapped to his servants as they scrambled awake to bring him hot wine, and he held out his arms for them to take off his red coat of velvet, as if nothing much had happened. I went and tried to take my girl’s thin hands, but she would not let me see them, or open her cloak. But I put my arm around her and I drew her to my own chair and put her in it. She was not cold, she did not tremble. But she was as blank as a field of snow, and there was a thick terrible smell of smoke in her hair, and when she sat I saw there was blood on the blue dress, real blood, dried dark, and on her palms and under her nails, as though she had been butchering meat in that gown. I stroked her head. “I will draw a bath,” I whispered to her. “I will wash your hair.” She said nothing, so I spoke to the footmen and sent them to bring the bath, and cold water to wash the dress.
The tsar was already in his shift and drinking his wine while they warmed the bed over again fresh for him. By the time the bath was brought up and ready, he had gone into it and the curtains were drawn. I sent all the other servants out and I took the crown off Irina’s hair—she flinched and reached a hand for it and only then looked at the bed to see that he slept, and then she let me. Her necklace was gone, and I didn’t ask her what had happened to it.
First I washed her hands and arms clean in the basin. It was dark, so the water only looked dirty and cloudy, not red. I took the basin and went shivering out onto the balcony to throw the water out, down onto the stones far down there. The duke’s men drilled in that square. They would not notice a little more blood on the stones. I took the blue dress off her and put it to soak in the basin in cold water. The stains were not so old; they would come out.
Then I helped Irina into the bath, and there I washed her hair with dried myrtle I had gone and taken from the closet in our old room: a smell of sweet branches and leaves, and when I had washed it three times, at last when I put her hair to my nose I smelled only myrtle and not smoke. I took her from the bath and dried her with a sheet and put her sitting by the fire while I combed her hair. The fire was getting low, but I did not put on another log, because it was not too cold in the room yet. She sat in the chair and her eyes were drifting closed. I sang to her while I combed her hair and after I drew the last strokes from the very crown of her head all the way to the end, she put her head against the side of the chair and slept there.
The blood had come out of the blue dress. I took it dripping out and took the basin to the balcony to throw the water out again. But I was not cold when I went outside this time. Warm air came into my face and a smell of fresh trees and earth, a smell of spring that I had almost forgotten because it had been so long since it had come. I stood there with the basin full of red water and breathed that smell without thinking until my arms trembled; the basin was too heavy for me to hold for so long. I managed to get it to the stone railing and tipped it over, and then I went back inside. I did not close the doors, but let the spring come into the room. My girl, my brave girl had done this. She had gone and come back bloody and she had brought us back the spring. And she had come back, she had come back, which was worth all the spring and more for me.
I scrubbed the blue dress until the last marks came out of it; I was careful of course, but anyway the rubies were sewn on so tightly they did not come off. I took the dress and I put it over a chair and stood it outside to dry; later I could give it to Palmira, and she would never know it had been stained. When I turned to go back in, Irina was standing next to the chair, holding the sheet around her body, looking out at the window; her hair was hanging long in a pool around her, already almost dry. It was growing light outside, the sun was coming, and she came out on the balcony in her bare feet. I almost said, You will catch cold, dushenka, but I held the words in my mouth and moved the chair instead, so she could come and stand at the railing. I stood next to her and put my arms around her to keep her thin body warm. A great noise of birds and chattering animals was coming from a distance, coming nearer with every moment, nearer and nearer, until suddenly it was around us, all around us; I saw the squirrels leaping as shadows in the trees of the garden below for another moment before the sunlight touched the leaves, the soft new leaves, and together Irina and I and the joyous birds watched the sun climb into the world over green fields instead of snow.
I stroked her head and said softly, “All is well, Irinushka, all is well.”
“Magreta,” she said, without looking at me, “was he always so beautiful, Mirnatius, even as a boy?”
“Yes, always,” I said. I didn’t have to think about that; I remembered. “Always. Such a beautiful child, even in his cradle. We went for the christening. His eyes were like jewels. Your father hoped to ask for the fostering of him—your mother had no children yet, and he thought perhaps the tsar could be persuaded to think it was better than the house of a man with many sons. But your mother wouldn’t hold the baby. She only stood there like she was made of stone and didn’t lift up her hands. The nurse couldn’t even set him in her arms. Oh, how angry your father was.”
I shook my head, remembering it: how the duke had shouted, telling her that in the morning she would go and hold the child, and speak of his beauty, and say how sad she was not to have one of her own; and all the time Silvija had only stood silently with her eyes downcast before him, saying nothing—
And then it came back to me suddenly, as a drop of oil floating up to the surface of water, that he had shouted and shouted, and when he finished, Silvija had looked up at him with her silver eyes and said very softly, “No. There is another child coming to our house who will wear a winter crown,” and he had stopped shouting and taken her hands and kissed them, and he had said nothing more of fostering the prince. But then Irina had not been born for another four years. I had forgotten all about it by the time she came.
Irina stood looking out at spring, my tsarina with her winter crown and her hawk father’s eyes, and her face was still so very pale. I squeezed her a little, trying to comfort her, whatever had wounded her so. “Come inside, dushenka,” I whispered softly. “Your hair is dry. I’ll braid it, and you should sleep a little. Come lie down on the couch. I won’t let anyone come in. You don’t need to go into the bed with him.”
“No,” she said. “I know. I don’t have to lie down with him.”
She came inside, and after I braided her hair, she lay down on the couch and I covered her. Then I went into the hallway and I told the footmen out there that the tsar and tsarina were very tired from their gaiety and were not to be disturbed, and I went inside and took the green dress to the window, to finish my sewing in the spring air.
*
When I woke in my grandfather’s house the next morning, the room was stifling-hot. I stumbled still half asleep to the window to let in some air. My mother and father were still in bed, and as I went I stepped barefoot on the gold-enc
rusted gown lying crumpled on the floor. Last night I’d clawed it off my body like a snake-skin and crawled onto the foot of the bed, even while my parents were still talking to me. Their words had stopped making any sense. Then they’d stopped speaking and only put their hands on my head. I fell away into slumber while they sang softly over me, with the familiar smells of woodsmoke and wool in my nose, warm again, warm again at last.
I unlatched the window and warm air blew into my face. I was high enough in my grandfather’s house to see over the city wall and into the fields and the forest on the other side, and all the fields were green, green, green: green with rye standing as tall as if it had already had four months of spring to grow in, green with new leaves already going dark with summer, and all the wildflowers open at once. The fruit trees down in my grandmother’s garden were full of flowers, too, plum and cherry and apple blossoming together, and even in the window-box there were flowers open, and a faint low humming in the air as if all the bees in the world had rushed to work together. There was not a trace of snow anywhere on the ground at all.
After a breakfast that was tasteless in my mouth, I folded up the gold-and-silver gown and wrapped it in paper. There were crowds of people in the street when I went out carrying my parcel. In the synagogue as I passed the doors I heard singing, and it was full even though it was halfway through the morning and the middle of the week. In the market no one was doing any work. They were all telling each other stories about what had happened: about how God had stretched out his hand and given the Staryk into the tsar’s hand, and broken the sorcerous winter.
The dress got me through the gates of the duke’s house, when I showed a corner of it to a servant, but I still had to wait sitting outside the servants’ entrance for an hour before someone finally took a message and Irina had me brought up—because she was tsarina, the tsarina who had saved the kingdom, and I was only a small moneylender from the Jewish quarter in my brown wool dress. But when the message reached her, she did send someone for me at once, her old chaperone Magreta, who looked at me anxiously and sidelong as if she thought my dress and my plain braided hair were a disguise, but took me upstairs anyway.