by Naomi Novik
I could have picked up the dagger and stabbed him myself. “Chernobog still sits in that castle ready to devour all of us, you’re half dead on the ground, and you’d still lie here thinking first of your pride. Be proud after he’s gone!”
But he only looked at me reproachfully. “Lady, I will be proud then,” he said, “and before also; I set no limits on my pride.”
I ground my teeth, and then I told Sergey, “Ask him for something!” Sergey stared at me as if he thought I’d gone mad. “What would you have him give you for your help? And don’t bargain short,” I added vengefully, “since he’s so eager to be proud.”
Sergey said after a moment, very slowly, as if he didn’t entirely trust me, “For—for my crops never to be blighted by frost?” I nodded, and the Staryk didn’t immediately start trying to kill him again, so he took courage and added, “And none of my herds ever lost in a blizzard? And—” I was still beckoning him on, “to hunt even the white animals in the forest?”
The Staryk scowled a little bit there, so Sergey stopped hurriedly, but I felt that was about right anyway. “There!” I said to him. “Will that do? Will you make that bargain, for the help to get you to safety? Or will you lie here until spring rains melt you entirely?”
“He bargains high, for a low thief,” the Staryk muttered. “But fortune smiles on him; very well, I agree,” and then he let his head sink back against the cloak, and was gone limp. Sergey very slowly edged towards the ends of the cloak and even more slowly reached for them again, his eyes on the Staryk all the while. “It’s all right,” I told him. “He’s said yes,” but Sergey only darted one quick look at me as though to say he’d take his time anyway, thank you.
We finally heaved him up and staggered away with his weight swinging between us in the hammock of the cloak. He made an awkward bundle to carry, and after we walked ten minutes without him summoning a blizzard or trying another murder, or even sitting up to say a word, Sergey said to me low, “Wait. I’ll take him on my shoulders.” We propped him on his feet, and I helped Sergey tip him across his shoulders, still keeping the cloak wrapped around him. Sergey staggered a bit under the weight, and shivered, but after that we went more quickly.
The air around us was cold and biting, not quite frozen but not warm spring, either, and when I looked behind us, we were trailing white frost over the road, and trees overhead were curling back new leaves wilted with cold. Anyone could have followed us. I feared the demon, I feared more guards, I feared even just a riot of ordinary men, desperate to slay winter. But no one came on behind us, and then instead we heard a rattling of cart wheels coming towards us from the other way; then we stopped and hurried into the trees on the side of the road to hide: not a very effective hiding, when glittering needles of frost bloomed around us like a flower, but at least it was still dark. The cart came on, and passed us, a gleam of firelight going between the trees, and then it stopped and my father called, “Miryem?” softly, into the dark.
We came out and put the Staryk into the cart. I sat beside him while Sergey and my father turned around and drove us on, the cart wheels squeaking with frost turning them white and crawling over the wooden planks. The horses twitched uneasy ears around to listen behind them and hurried their stride, but they couldn’t get away; we carried winter with us. At least the drive was very short: from what my father had said, I’d expected it to be a longer way off from Vysnia. But it felt like less than an hour before we came out of the trees to a little house inside a garden, surrounded by a low stone wall, and they pulled the horses to a halt.
Wanda came out to open the gate for us, and Sergey climbed down and went to put the horses in the small shed. I shook the Staryk awake enough to say, “The same bargain, for everyone who lives here, to help you.”
He looked at me with slitted white eyes and muttered, “Yes,” before he faded back away.
“We’ll put him in the bed?” my father asked, looking up at me from behind the cart, but I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “In the coldest place we can find: is there a cellar?”
Sergey coming back heard me asking, and shrugged and said, “We can look for one,” as if he thought one might suddenly appear unexpectedly; and then he took a lantern and went looking behind the house, and then around behind the shed, and then his voice called softly, “There’s a door here.”
My father held the lantern for him while Sergey pulled up the flat wooden door and propped it open: a cold waft of air came up to meet us, with a smell of frozen earth. We carried the Staryk down the ladder into it. It was a large open space, with walls of earth and a floor of stone still bitter cold to the touch. When we lay him down on it and took the cloak off him, the frost spread around him quickly, and now that we’d stopped moving him, it began to build up more thickly white; my father gave a small exclamation when his fingers were caught pulling back the cloak.
We stood back and stared down at the Staryk: his face was drawn and narrow with pain, and the sharp lines of his cheekbones still glistened wet for a moment, but the sheen of water hardened into ice even as we watched, and I thought he breathed a little more easily.
“Maybe some water,” I said after a moment. From outside, Wanda lowered a bucket to us with a wooden cup. I dipped it, and lifted the Staryk’s head to put it to his mouth, and he stirred and sipped a very little. The cup frosted at the touch of his lips, and a skim of ice was already forming over the surface of the water when I took it away again. I looked at his bare, burned foot: in parts misshapen like a half-melted snowman only vaguely recognizable anymore. I picked out the skim of ice from the water and put it onto the worst patch, and it sank into his flesh and lifted it out a little. I looked up at Wanda, who was still looking down at us from above. “Is there any ice anywhere? Or any part of the river still frozen?”
But she had gone to get water, earlier, and she shook her head. “It’s all melted,” she said. “The whole river is open, bank-to-bank.”
“We could pack him in straw,” my father suggested doubtfully. “Like keeping ice for summer.”
“What we need is to get him back to his kingdom,” I said. If Chernobog found us here, it wouldn’t need any help to put silver chains and a ring of fire back around the Staryk. It would do it all by itself, this time, and then perhaps it would be able to force him to give up his name and all his people. But I didn’t know what to do. His road wouldn’t run under green trees, and the only winter left in Lithvas was in our cellar. When we climbed back out, Wanda giving me her hand to help me up, the nails of the ladder and the iron rim around the door all were frosted white and painfully cold to the touch, and the grass above had all died to crisp cracklings; the earth was cold and frozen solid under our feet.
But even as I stood there in the dark staring down into the cellar at him, a pale coffin-statue lying in a ring of frost, a sudden strong gusting of warm wind came through the trees, stirring my hair, and when I looked back at the road, the trail of frost we’d left behind us on the road had already vanished like dew. And in the morning, a summer sun would rise.
I’d wanted him dead, and I wanted to still be angry at him: everything he’d done to me, and he wasn’t even really sorry that he’d done it; he was only sorry he hadn’t believed that I could make him pay. But I’d walked down that tunnel to save Rebekah, and Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, and he’d gone into the dark to do that, too. He’d laid himself out as a sacrifice for their sake; and he’d bent that iron pride of his and married a mortal, not to store up treasure for himself or to conquer, but to save his people from a terrible enemy. And now he was lying down there half dead, and the thought twisted my stomach, of watching him melt away to nothing, him and all of them gone as though they’d never won their winter kingdom from the dark.
*
The silver crown felt strangely warm upon my head. I held my white furs around me and watched the faint red glow of Chernobog traveling away in the distance: the fire I had unleashed upon this icy kingdom that had s
heltered me. The wind blowing in my face was full of ash instead of snow, and the smell of burning wood, and I was as sorry as Miryem. But I knew I’d had to do it, and I knew what I still had to do now. I had to go back to my own kingdom, and call my father and send for the priests and blessed chains. I didn’t know how long the lives of all the Staryk would satisfy Chernobog, but whenever he was done, he would come back. And during the hours of the day, while he slept curled and replete in Mirnatius’s belly, we would put the chains on him and burn him out, breaking one fire with another.
The sooner I went, the better; we needed to be ready when he came back. But I still stood there watching the fire rise, and I said, “I’m sorry,” though no one to whom I might have apologized was there. I was alone in a garden half snow and half green grass. There was no Staryk child standing before me accusingly, and not even my own imprisoned husband; the only living creature anywhere in view was a single squirrel that had come out to paw over the crumbs I’d scattered, a few days before. And if anyone else had been there, I would have been silent. It didn’t matter that I cared, that I was sorry; what mattered was what I had done, what I would do.
“I would save your kingdom, too, if I could,” I told the squirrel, which paid me no attention: it was only interested in the crumbs, which were at least of some use to one creature, as my apologies weren’t. I went back to the tub full of water. I looked down into it and saw my bedchamber, with the dressing table before the mirror covered with the rings Mirnatius had scattered, and the fine coat he’d flung carelessly down. One deadly fire I’d stoked behind me, and another one still ahead, and I shut my eyes a moment as useless tears slid off my cheeks and dripped into the water.
I blindly reached my hand into the water to go through, but instead of the warm air of the bedchamber, my hand went into biting-cold water, and below the surface, another hand met mine, and put something into it. I jumped back startled from the touch, and stared into my hand. It was the nut of some strange tree, oval and smooth and pale white as milk, fresh. A little dirt was clinging to its sides. I looked at the water again; the bedchamber was still there, waiting. Tentatively I put my other hand in, and this time I didn’t feel the water, and I saw it coming through on the other side.
But I pulled my hand back instead of going all the way through. I looked at the nut in my hand again. Slowly I turned and went back out to the front of the house. There was a patch of open ground near the door, just over the line between twilight and night, where the snow had melted: the ground even looked as though someone had been digging there, turning up the soil. I thought maybe it would be worth trying to plant it. I didn’t know anything better to do with it, and it had been sent here, to the Staryk kingdom; I didn’t think I was meant to take it straight back with me.
I put down the nut and began to open a little hole in the dirt, but before I could finish, abruptly the squirrel came in two bounds towards me and snatched it. “No!” I said. I didn’t really know whether I was doing the right thing to plant the nut, but I was sure it wasn’t meant to feed to a squirrel. I tried to catch the squirrel by the tail as it jumped away again, foolish, and of course I missed. But the squirrel only ran away to the half-buried garden gate, and stopped there and began to dig in the snowdrift.
I got up and tried to get close without startling it, although I was struggling to get through the drifts; where it hadn’t melted, the snow was wet and heavy and clung to my skirts and my furs. By the gate, it was still higher than my knees. But when I came close, the squirrel dropped the nut into the hole it had made and ran away into the woods. The squirrel hadn’t made much headway digging through the deep snow, but in that little snowy hollow, the nut glistened with a moonlit shine almost like Staryk silver, something vital there beneath the surface.
I put the nut safely into my pocket this time, and started to push aside the snow, digging down through the drift. My fingers stung and burned with ice, and my feet and knees were soaked and wet, drawing the cold into my skin as I dug and dug. I tried to wrap my hands in my fur cloak, but it made me slow; I gave up and just kept digging while my hands went numb and my fingers felt thick even though I could see they were still the same size, only frozen pale white.
At last I reached the ground: frozen and packed hard, full of pebbles. I had to get a stick from the woodbox in the house to pry out the big stones and break it up, and my fingernails broke and bled into the dirt while I dug. But I kept working until I made a hole in the frozen ground, not very deep, and then I took out the white nut with my bloody hands and put it down into the hole and covered it over again, with the frozen earth and snow.
I stood up and waited for something more to happen. But nothing happened. The woods were silent again, and I saw no more squirrels or birds moving. Even the red glow of Chernobog’s flame had disappeared into the distance. I didn’t know what it meant. I wanted it to have meant something; I wanted someone or something to have heard my apology, and given me some means to make amends. I wanted at least to have satisfied my one squirrel. But perhaps it only hoped that a nut-tree would grow, for it to feast on someday; or perhaps it wasn’t for me to know what I’d done. I didn’t have a right to demand answers and explanations: I’d come here with an invading army.
My hands and feet were aching and frozen, and I couldn’t stay anymore. I turned and dragged myself with my wet cloak back to the back of the house, and stepped back into the washtub, and when I came out of the mirror on the other side Magreta came running to me exclaiming in horror over my filthy, bloody, frostbitten hands and took me to the basin to pour water over them, over and over, washing them clean.
*
While I stood looking down into the cellar at my sleeping Staryk king, Wanda took hold of my shoulders gently and said, “Come inside and eat. We’ll put something cold on your face. It will help.”
We went towards the house together. I was trying to think what to do, and then I slowed and stopped in the yard, staring at it. I turned and looked back at the shed—the small familiar shed—and back at the house. The sloping thatched roof wasn’t heavy with snow anymore, but the shape was the same, and the firelight shining out of it for welcome.
The others had gone on beyond me a few steps before they saw I wasn’t with them; they looked at me puzzled. But I turned and hurried suddenly around to the back, and found the deep washtub standing there full of water, that Irina had tried to take me through, and stared down into the reflection of my face. “It’s the same house,” I said aloud. Wanda came and looked into the water and then at me. I told her, “This house stands in the Staryk kingdom also. It’s in both worlds.”
She was silent. Then she said, “We found things here each day. Things we needed, that weren’t there the night before. And someone spun the yarn for me, and ate our food.”
I thought of Irina’s chaperone, Magreta, whom we’d tucked away inside to hide her from a demon. “Did you make the porridge?” I asked her, and Wanda nodded.
I didn’t know what good it would do. There would be snow there on the other side; there would be icicles hanging on the eaves. But I couldn’t reach my own hands through to grab hold of them. I went back down to the cellar. The Staryk looked a little better; the faint signs of color were disappearing out of his cheeks. “This is the house,” I told him, when his eyes fluttered open on me. “The witch’s house that you told me of. The one that stands in both kingdoms. Is there some way to cross from here?”
He stared at me for a little while before he comprehended, and then he whispered, “I sealed the way between; only cracks are left. I did not want any more mortals wandering through. It must be opened again . . .”
“How?” I said. “With what?”
He shut his eyes. Then he drew a breath and opened them again and said, “Help me to stand.”
Together we got him to the ladder. He looked up at the rectangle of open air standing over our heads, the stars glittering against a dark night sky, and shuddered a little. “Won’t you get worse if yo
u climb out?” I said. “It’s warm.”
“And will be warmer soon,” he said. “From now on my strength will ebb, not grow. I must make use of what little of it I have left, while it lasts.”
He climbed out in slow stages and limped slowly to the house, a hand pressed over his side, but he halted outside the door, staring at the orange coal-flickering light of the fire, his face gone flat and expressionless, and I remembered how Shofer had looked at it with fear. “Wait,” I said, and went in and hurriedly shoveled a heap of ashes over the flames to put them out, and closed the oven door. Then I turned and paused, looking around the room: my mother and father were standing holding each other’s hands staring out the door, Wanda next to them, and Sergey had picked up a poker. Stepon was already huddled on top of the oven under the cloak as a blanket, but even he had lifted his head. All of them watched the Staryk as he bent his head to fit under the lintel and came inside the house.
But he didn’t look back at any of them. He looked around the room instead, and raised his hands and let them drop a little limply, as if in desperation, and then he went to a cupboard standing in the corner on his left, and opened it. My mother stared. “Was there a cupboard—” she said to my father, but the Staryk had already pulled both doors open and was digging through it, throwing things impatiently on the ground as he dug them out of drawers: a necklace of green beads, a cloak dark red and torn and stained with blood, a faded bunch of roses, a small sack of dried peas that burst and went rolling out over the floor everywhere—
He turned around and saw us all staring and snapped, “Help me! Or you’ve not given me the aid you bargained with!”
“What are we looking for?” I demanded.
“Something of my kingdom!” he said. “Something of winter, to help me open the way.”
Wanda paused and then went to look around the side of the fireplace, where there were shelves, but there wasn’t much on them. “There’s nowhere else to look,” she said.