by Naomi Novik
Irina was in her bedchamber. Four women were sitting together near the fire, sewing frantically to make over a gown almost as splendid as the monstrosity I had brought; she was going to another wedding that very day, it seemed. But she was on the balcony, scattering bread for a feasting of birds and squirrels: they had all come out again, too, just like the people into the streets, lean and hungry after the long winter and willing to dare human company in exchange for food. As she threw out a handful, they darted in close to her feet to snatch up hunks and then darted back away to eat it before rushing in for another helping.
“I need to see him,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked me, slowly.
“We’ve done more than just stopped him!” I said. “If you keep him for—” I glanced over my shoulder into the bustle of the room, and didn’t say the name. “—that one to devour, it won’t just end the winter, it will destroy his kingdom. All of the Staryk will die, not just him!”
Irina finished scattering her bread and then spread her empty hand out to me: unadorned, except for the ring of Staryk silver gleaming upon it, a thin band of cold light even in the bright sun. “But what else would you have us do?” I stared at her. “Miryem, the Staryk have raided in this kingdom ever since men first settled here. They treat us like vermin skulking among their trees, only with more cruelty.”
“A handful of them!” I said. “Most of them can’t come here, any more than we can cross to their kingdom whenever we like. Only the powerful among them can open a path . . .” I stopped, realizing I wasn’t making matters any better, and maybe worse.
“And those also have the power to decide for the rest,” Irina said. “I don’t think with pleasure of the death of all the Staryk people, but their king began this war. He stole the spring; he would have let all our people, all of Lithvas, starve to death. Do you tell me he didn’t know what he was doing?”
“No,” I said grimly. “He knew.”
Irina nodded slightly. “My hands don’t feel clean, either, after last night. But I won’t wash them in my people’s blood. And I see nothing else we can do.”
“If they offered us a treaty, in exchange for his life, they’d hold to it. They never break their word.”
“Who would that treaty come from?” Irina said. “And even if one came . . .” She looked into the bedchamber, her bedchamber: a room she shared with the tsar and a black thing of smoke and hunger that lived inside him. Her face was bleak. “I don’t pretend to be glad of the bargain we’ve made. But there is spring in Lithvas today, and there will be bread on the table in every peasant’s house this winter.” She looked back at me. “I will buy that for them,” she said quietly. “Even if it costs more than I would like to pay.”
So I left with nothing to show for my visit but a sick hollow emptiness in my stomach. Her chaperone stopped me in the room as I left and asked me what I wanted for the dress, but I only shook my head and went. But leaving it didn’t help. I could slough off the dress of a Staryk queen, but I had been one for too long to just forget. And yet I couldn’t tell Irina she was wrong, and I couldn’t even tell her she was selfish. She was going to pay, the price I hadn’t been willing to pay myself: she was going to lie down with that demon next to her, and even if she hadn’t let it put its fingers into her soul, she’d feel them crawling over her skin.
And with that payment, she would buy us more than spring. She would buy us spring, and summer, and winter, too; a winter where no Staryk road would gleam between the trees and no white-cloaked raiders would come out to steal our gold. Instead our woodsmen and our hunters and our farmers would go into the forest, with axes and traps for the white-furred animals. She’d buy us the forest and the frozen river, and it would all go to crops and timber, and in ten years Lithvas would be a rich kingdom instead of a small, poor one, while somewhere in a dark room far below, Chernobog crunched up the Staryk children in his teeth one bite at a time, to keep all the rest of us warm.
I went back to my grandfather’s house. My mother was waiting for me anxiously outside, sitting on the steps, as if she hadn’t been able to bear having me out of her sight. I went and sat beside her, and she put her arms around me and kissed my forehead and held my head against her shoulder, stroking her hand over my hair. There were many other people going in and out of the house around us: wedding guests leaving with ordinary smiling faces. They were already forgetting a night of dancing under white trees, with all winter and a burning shadow coming into the house among us.
Only my grandfather remembered a little. I’d crept down from the bedroom that morning, leaving my parents asleep, to take a cup of tea and a crust of bread in the kitchen, bewildered and trying to fill the cold hollow inside me. It was still early, and only a couple of servants had been stirring in the house, beginning to put food out on the tables for the guests who would soon be waking up. But after a little while, one of them came and told me my grandfather wanted me. I’d gone up to his study. He was standing by the window frowning out at spring, and he looked me in the face and said abruptly, “Well, Miryem?” the same way he did when I came to show him my books. He was asking if they were clean and balanced, and I had found I couldn’t answer him.
So I’d gone to the duke’s palace, and now I’d come back with no better answer than when I’d gone. It should have been easy. The Staryk himself had told me yes: he’d bowed to me without hatred or even reproach, as though I had the right to do just as he’d done, and set fire to his kingdom for trying to bury mine in ice. And maybe I did, but I wasn’t a Staryk myself. I’d said thank you to Flek and Tsop and Shofer, and I’d named that little girl I didn’t want to think about. She had a claim on me, surely, if no one else in that kingdom did.
“We’ll go home tomorrow,” my mother said softly into my hair. “We’ll go home, Miryem.” It was all I’d wanted, the only hope I’d had to give me courage, but I couldn’t imagine it anymore. It seemed as unreal to me as a mountain of glass and a silver road. Would I really go back to my narrow town and feed my chickens and my goats, with the scowls of the people I’d saved on my back every day? They didn’t have a right to hate me, but they would anyway. The Staryk was a tale for a winter’s night. I was their monster, the one they could see and understand and imagine tearing down. They wouldn’t believe I’d done anything to help them even if they heard a story of it.
And they were right, because I hadn’t done it for them at all. Irina had saved them, and they’d love her for it. I’d done it for myself, and for my parents, and for these people: for my grandfather, for Basia, for my second cousin Ilena coming down the stairs and kissing us on our cheeks before she climbed into the waiting cart to set off for her own home in another narrow village where she lived with seven other houses around hers and every village around them hating them all. I’d done it for the men and women going by in the street in front of my grandfather’s house. Lithvas didn’t mean home to me; it was just the water we lived beside, my people huddled together on the riverbanks, and sometimes the wave came rolling up the slope and dragged some of us down into the depths for the fish to devour.
I didn’t have a country to do it for. I only had people, so what about those people: what about Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, whose lives I’d bound to mine, and a little girl I’d given a Jewish name like a gift, before I’d gone away to destroy her home?
But I’d already done it, and it seemed past my power to undo. I wasn’t anyone here that mattered. I was just a girl, a moneylender from a small town with a little gold in the bank, and what had once seemed a fortune to me now looked like a scant handful of coins, not even a single chest out of my Staryk king’s storeroom. I’d picked up a silver fork that morning and held it in my hand, not sure what I wanted to happen. But what I wanted didn’t matter. Nothing happened. The fork stayed silver, and whatever magic I had was back in that winter kingdom I would never see again. A kingdom that would fade away forever soon, beneath that same rolling wave. And I had nothing left to say about it.
So I went inside with my mother. In our bedroom we made a parcel of the few things my parents had brought from home, and then we went downstairs to help: there were still so many people in the house, people I’d never met, but who were still my family and friends, and there was cooking to be done and dishes to be washed, tables to be laid and cleaned again, children to be fed and crying babies to be held. A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly. I wanted to stop my ears and my eyes and my mouth with it. I could worry about this, whether there was enough food, whether the bread was rising well, whether the beef had cooked long enough, whether there were enough chairs at the table; I could do something about these things.
No one was surprised to see me. No one asked me where I’d been. They all kissed me when they saw me for the first time and told me I’d gotten so tall, and some of them asked me when they’d be dancing at my wedding. They were happy that I was there, and happy I was helping, but at the same time I didn’t really matter. I could have been any of my cousins. There wasn’t anything special about me, and I was glad, so glad, to be ordinary again.
I finally sat down at the tables to fill my own plate, tired out at last with carrying and cooking, tired enough not to think. Guests were leaving as the meal wound to a close, already saying goodbye and flowing out the door. I was still deep underwater, a fish in a school, indistinguishable. But then suddenly the flow was checked. People cleared out of the doorway, and a footman came into it in the livery of the tsar, red and gold and black, and looked around us down his nose with the faint disdain of borrowed superiority.
And when he came in, I stood up. It wasn’t my place, it wasn’t the place of an unmarried girl in my grandfather’s house, but I stood and said to him sharply from across the table, “What are you here for?”
He paused and looked at me and frowned, and then he said, very coolly, “I have a letter for Wanda Vitkus: are you she?”
All that afternoon, Wanda had been swimming alongside me in that crowd of women; she had carried heavy stacks of plates and brought large buckets of water, and we’d barely talked, but we’d looked at each other and we’d been together in the work, the safe and simple work. She was standing in the back of the room, just inside the kitchen, and after a moment she came forward, wiping her wet red hands in her apron, and the footman turned and gave her the letter into her hands: a thick folded sheet of heavy parchment sealed with a great lump of smoke-blackened red wax, with a few runny drops like blood that had trickled away before it hardened.
She took it in her hands and opened it and looked inside it for a long time, and then she put her apron up to cover her mouth, her lips pressed tight, and she jerked her head twice in a nod and then she folded the letter back up and held it tight, pressed against her chest, and she turned and went away into the back of the house, towards the stairs. The footman threw a dismissive look over us—we did not matter, we were not important—and he turned and left the house as quickly as he had come.
I was still standing at the table. Around me the conversation resumed, the flow resumed; When will you be in town again, How old is your eldest now, How is your husband’s business, the steady lapping waves, but I didn’t go back into the water. I pushed my chair back from the table and I went upstairs to my grandfather’s study. He was there with a few other old men, all of them talking in their deep voices; they were smoking pipes and cigars and speaking of work. They looked at me frowning: I didn’t belong there, unless I was coming to bring them more brandy and tea and food.
But my grandfather didn’t frown. He only looked at me and put his glass and his cigar aside and said, “Come,” and took me into the small room next to the study where he kept his important papers locked behind glass doors, and he shut the door behind us and looked down at me.
“I owe a debt,” I said. “And I have to find a way to pay it.”
CHAPTER 21
In the morning, there were red blistered marks across my palms where I had held the silver chain with Sergey and Stepon. Last night before the tsarina left, she had said to me, “How can I repay you?” I had not known what to say to her, because it was me doing that; I was repaying. Miryem had taken me out of my father’s house for six kopeks, when I was only worth three pigs to my father, who stole money from hers with lies. Her mother had put bread on my plate and love in my heart. Her father had sung blessings on that bread before he gave it to me to eat. It did not matter I did not know the words. They had given it to me even when I didn’t know what they meant by it and thought they were devils. Miryem had given me silver for my work. She had put her hand out to me and taken mine, like I was someone who could make a bargain for myself, instead of just someone stealing from my father. There had been food in her house for me.
And that Staryk wanted to take her for nothing. He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him. He sold me for six kopeks, for three pigs, for a jug of krupnik. He tried to sell me again and again like I was still his no matter how many times he sold me. And that was how that Staryk thought. He wanted to keep her and make more gold out of her forever, and it did not matter what she wanted, because he was strong.
But I was strong, too. I was strong enough to make Panova Mandelstam well, and I was strong enough to learn magic, Miryem’s magic, and use it to turn three aprons into six kopeks. I was strong enough, with Sergey and Stepon, to stop my father selling me or killing me. And last night I did not know if I was strong enough to stop the Staryk, even with a silver chain, even with Sergey and Stepon, even with Miryem’s mother and father. But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing. Afterwards, Stepon put his face in my apron and cried because he was still feeling afraid, and he asked me how I knew the tsarina would make magic and stop the Staryk from killing us, and I had to tell him that I did not know. I only knew the work had to come first.
So when the tsarina asked me how she could pay me, I did not know what to say. I did not do it for her. I did not know her. Maybe she was the tsarina, but I did not even know what her name was. One day when I was ten one of our neighbors came to the house and said the tsar was dead and when I asked what it meant they said that there would be a new tsar. So I did not really see why a tsar mattered. And now that I had seen a tsar, I did not want anything to do with one. He was terrible and full of fire. I would have told her that to repay me, she could make the tsar go away, but he had already gone out of the house with the guards who were leading the Staryk.
But Miryem’s father heard her asking me, and he saw I did not know what to say. He had a big bruise all on the side of his face, and his hands were all hurt and shaking where he had been holding tight on that silver chain with me, and he was sitting with Panova Mandelstam and they had their arms wrapped around Miryem and they were kissing her head and touching her face like she was worth more to them than silver kopeks, more to them than gold, more than everything they had. But when he saw I did not know what to do, he kissed Miryem’s forehead and he got up and he came limping over the floor to the tsarina and said to her, “This brave girl and her brothers came to the city with us because they are in trouble at home.” Then he put his hand on my shoulder and he said to me softly, “Go and sit down and rest, Wanda, I will tell her about it.”
So I went away and sat down with Sergey and Stepon and put my arms around them, and they put their arms around me. We were too far away to hear what Panov Mandelstam was saying because he said it very quietly. But he talked to the tsarina for a little time, and then he came limping over to us and told us that everything would be all right. We believed him. The tsarina was going out of the house
then. She walked out those big doors into the courtyard where some more of the guards were waiting for her. Two of them reached inside and took hold of the doors and they pulled them shut. And we were inside the house without them.
There was a big mess in the room. Around the edges of the room there was still some food on the tables going bad and flies were already buzzing around it. Chairs were knocked over everywhere and coming out of the fireplace over the floor there were black scorch marks like the footprints a man leaves walking through snow in heavy boots. The big golden crown Miryem had been wearing was on the floor near the fireplace and it was all bent out of shape and almost melted. Nobody could have put it back on. But it did not matter. We looked at Miryem’s family, and they looked at us, and we all got up and Panov Mandelstam put his arm around Sergey’s back, and I put my arm around Panova Mandelstam’s, and we were a circle all together, the six of us: we were a family, and we had kept the wolf away again; for another day we had kept the wolf away.
Then we went upstairs and went to sleep. We did not clean up the mess. I slept a long time in that beautiful big quiet room up at the top of the stairs, and when I woke up there was spring outside, spring everywhere, and it felt like that spring outside was inside me, too. Even though my hands had blisters, I felt so strong that I did not even worry a little about what would happen to us. I kissed Sergey and Stepon and I went downstairs to help the other women in the house, and I did not care anymore that I did not understand what they were saying. When someone said something to me that I did not know, I only smiled at her, and she smiled at me and said, “Oh, I forget!” and told me over again what she was saying except in the words I knew.