Whatever magic the silver had to enchant those around it either faded with use or couldn’t touch me any longer; I wished that it could, and that my eyes could be dazzled enough to care for nothing else. Instead I watched Irina’s face, pale and thin and transported, and I wondered if she would be glad to marry the tsar; to leave her quiet, small rooms for a distant palace and a throne. As she dropped her hand, our eyes met in the reflection: we didn’t speak, but for a moment I felt her a sister, our lives in the hands of others. She wasn’t likely to have any more choice in the matter than I did.
After a few minutes, the duke himself came in to inspect her, and paused in the doorway of the room behind her. Irina was still standing before the mirror; she turned and curtsied to her father, then straightened again, her chin coming up a little to balance the crown; she looked like a queen already. The duke stared at her as if he could hardly recognize his own daughter; he shook himself a little, pulling free of the pull, before he turned to me. “You will have your gold, Panovina,” he said. “And if your Staryk wants more of it, you will come to me again.”
So I had six hundred gold pieces for the casket and two hundred more for the bank, and my sack full of silver pennies besides; a fortune, for what good it would do me. At least my mother and father wouldn’t go cold or hungry again, when the Staryk had taken me away.
My grandfather’s servants carried it all home for me. He came downstairs, hearing my grandmother’s exclamations, and looked over all the treasure; then he took four gold coins out of the heap meant for the bank, and gave two each to the young men before he dismissed them. “Drink one and save one, you remember the wise man’s rule,” he said, and they both bowed and thanked him and dashed off to revel, elbowing each other and grinning as they went.
Then he sent my grandmother out of the room on a pretext, asking her to make her cheesecake to celebrate our good fortune; and when she was gone he turned to me and said, “Now, Miryem, you’ll tell me the rest of it,” and I burst into tears.
I hadn’t told my parents, or my grandmother, but I told him: I trusted my grandfather to bear it, as I hadn’t trusted them, not to break their hearts wanting to save me. I knew what my father would do, and my mother, if they found out: they would make a wall of their own bodies between me and the Staryk, and then I would see them fall cold and frozen before he took me away.
But my grandfather only listened, and then he said, “Do you want to marry him, then?” I stared at him, still wet-faced. He shrugged. “Sorrow comes to every house, and there’s worse things in life than to be a queen.”
By speaking so, he gave me a gift: making it my choice, even if it wasn’t really. I gulped and wiped away my tears, and felt better at once. After all, in cold, hard terms it was a catch, for a poor man’s daughter. My grandfather nodded as I calmed myself. “Lords and kings often don’t ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners,” he said. “Think it over, before you turn away a crown.”
I was tempted more by the power my grandfather had given me than the promise of a crown. I thought of it: to harden my heart a little more and stand straight and tall when the Staryk came, to put my hand in his and make it my own will to go with him, so at least I could say the decision had been mine.
But I was my father’s daughter also, after all, and I found I didn’t want to be so cold. “No,” I said, low. “No, Grandfather, I don’t want to marry him.”
“Then you must make it better sense for him to leave you be,” my grandfather said.
The next morning I rose, and put on my best dress, and my fur cloak, and sent for a sledge to carry me. But as I fastened the cloak around my throat in the sitting room, I heard a high cold jangling of bells drifting faintly in from the street, not the bells of a hired harness. I opened the door, and a narrow elegant sleigh drew up outside, fashioned it seemed entirely out of ice and heaped with white furs; the wolfen stag drew it, legs flashing, and the Staryk held the reins of white leather. The street lay blanketed by a thick, unnatural silence: empty even in midmorning, not another soul or sledge or wagon anywhere in sight, and the sky overhead gray and pearled-over like the inside of oyster shells.
He climbed out and came to me, leaving long boot prints in the snow down the walk, and came up the stairs. “And have you changed my silver, mortal girl?” he asked.
I swallowed and backed up to the casket, standing in the room behind me. He followed me inside, stepping in on a winter’s blast of cold air, thin wispy flurries of snow whirling into the room around his ankles. He loomed over me to watch as I knelt down behind the casket and lifted up the lid: a heap of silver pennies inside, all I’d taken in the market.
He looked maliciously satisfied a moment, and then he stopped, puzzled, when he saw the coins were different: they weren’t fairy silver, of course, though they made a respectable gleam.
“Why should I change silver for gold,” I said, when I saw I’d caught his attention, “when I could make the gold, and have them both?” And then I untied the sack sitting beside the chest, to show him the heap of gold waiting inside.
He slowly reached in and lifted out a fistful of gold and let it drop back inside, frowning as he’d frowned each time: as though he didn’t like to be caught by his own promises, however useful a queen would be who could turn silver to gold. What would the other elven lords think, I wondered, if he brought home a mortal girl? Not much, I hoped. I daresay in the story, the king’s neighbors snickered behind their hands, at the miller’s daughter made a queen. And after all, she hadn’t even kept spinning.
“You can take me away and make me your queen if you want to,” I said, “but a queen’s not a moneychanger, and I won’t make you more gold, if you do.” His eyes narrowed, and I went on quickly, “Or you can make me your banker instead, and have gold when you want it, and marry whomever you like.”
I put my money in a vault and bought a house near my grandfather’s; we even lent some of the gold back to the duke for the wedding. Isaac was busy for a month making jewelry for all the courtiers and their own daughters, to make a fine show at the celebrations, but he found time to pay visits to my family. I saw Irina once more, when she drove out of the city with the tsar; she threw handfuls of silver out of the window of the carriage as they went through the streets, and looked happy, and perhaps she even was.
We left the business back home in Wanda’s hands. Everyone was used to giving her their payments by then, and she’d learned figuring; she couldn’t charge interest herself, but as long as she was collecting on our behalf it was all right, and by the time everyone’s debts had been repaid, she would have a handsome dowry, enough to buy a farm of her own.
I’ve never seen the Staryk again. But every so often, after a heavy snowfall, a purse of fairy silver appears on my doorstep, and before a month is gone, I put it back twice over full of gold.
TWO’S COMPANY
Joe Abercrombie
JOE ABERCROMBIE (www.joeabercrombie.com) attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, and was followed by sequels Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, stand-alone novels Best Served Cold, The Heroes, and Red Country, and the Shattered Sea trilogy, Half a King, Half a World, and Half a War. His most recent book is short story collection Sharp Ends. Abercrombie lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.
Somewhere in the North, Summer 576
“THIS IS HELL,” muttered Shev, peering over the brink of the canyon. “Hell.” Rock shiny-dark with wet disappeared into the mist below, water rushing somewhere, a long way down. “God, I hate the North.”
“Somehow,” answered Javre, pushing back hair turned lank brown by the eternal damp, “I do not think God
is listening.”
“Oh, I’m abundantly aware of that. No one’s bloody listening.”
“I am.” Javre turned away from the edge and headed on down the rutted goat-track beside it with her usual mighty strides, head back, heedless of the rain, soaked cloak flapping at her muddy calves. “And, what is more, I am intensely bored by what I am hearing.”
“Don’t toy with me, Javre.” Shev hurried to catch her up, trying to find the least boggy patches to hop between. “I’ve had about as much of this as I can take!”
“So you keep saying. And yet the next day you take some more.”
“I’m bloody furious!”
“I believe you.”
“I mean it!”
“If you have to tell someone you are furious, and then, furthermore, that you mean it, your fury has failed to achieve its desired effect.”
“I hate the bloody North!” Shev stamped at the ground, as though she could hurt anything but herself, succeeding only in showering wet dirt up her leg. Not that she could have made herself much wetter or dirtier. “The whole place is made of shit!”
Javre shrugged. “Everything is, in the end.”
“How can anyone stand this cold?”
“It is bracing. Do not sulk. Would you like to ride on my shoulders?”
Shev would have, in fact, very much, but her bruised pride insisted that she continue to squelch along on foot. “What am I, a bloody child?”
Javre raised her red brows. “Were you never told only to ask questions you truly want the answer to? Do you want the answer?”
“Not if you’re going to try to be funny.”
“Oh, come now, Shevedieh!” Javre bent down to snake one huge arm about her shoulders and gave her a bone-crushing squeeze. “Where is that happy-go-lucky rascal I fell in love with back in Westport, always facing her indignities with a laugh, a caper and a twinkle in her eye?” And her wriggling fingers crept towards Shev’s stomach.
Shev held up a knife. “Tickle me and I will fucking stab you.”
Javre puffed out her cheeks, took her arm away and squelched on down the track. “Do not be so overdramatic. It is exhausting. We just need to get you dry and find some pretty little farm-girl for you to curl up with and it will all feel better by morning.”
“There are no pretty farm-girls out here! There are no girls! There are no farms!” She held out her arms to the endless murk, mud and blasted rock. “There isn’t even any bloody morning!”
“There is a bridge,” said Javre, pointing into the gloom. “See? Things are looking up!”
“I never felt so encouraged,” muttered Shev.
It was a tangle of fraying rope strung from ancient posts carved with runes and streaked with bird-droppings, rotten-looking slats tied to make a precarious walkway. It sagged deep as Shev’s spirits as it vanished into the vertiginous unknown above the canyon and shifted alarmingly in the wind, planks rattling.
“Bloody North,” said Shev as she picked her way towards it and had a tentative drag at the ropes. “Even their bridges are shit.”
“Their men are good,” said Javre, clattering out with no fear whatsoever. “Far from subtle, but enthusiastic.”
“Great,” said Shev as she edged after, exchanging a mutually suspicious glance with a crow perched atop one of the posts. “Men. The one thing that interests me not at all.”
“You should try them.”
“I did. Once. Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even speak your language, let alone understand the topic.”
“Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others.”
“No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and... balls. I mean, balls. What’s that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anatomy. That is just... that is bad design, is what that is.”
Javre sighed. “It is the great shame of creation that we cannot all be so perfectly formed as you, Shevedieh, springy little string of sinew that you are.”
“There’d be more bloody meat on me if we weren’t living on high hopes and the odd rabbit. I may not be perfect but I don’t have a sock of bloody gravel swinging around my knees, you’d have to give me. . . Hold on.” They had reached the sagging middle of the bridge now, and Shev could see neither rock face. Only the ropes fading up into the grey in both directions.
“What?” muttered Javre, clattering to a stop.
The bridge kept on bouncing. A heavy tread, and coming towards them.
“There’s someone heading the other way,” muttered Shev, twisting her wrist and letting the dagger drop from her sleeve into her waiting palm. A fight was the last thing she ever wanted, but she’d reluctantly come to find there was no downside to having a good knife ready. It made a fine conversation point, if nothing else.
A figure started to form. At first just a shadow, shifting as the wind drove the fog in front of them. First a short man, then a tall one. Then a man with a rake over his shoulder. Then a half-naked man with a huge sword over his shoulder.
Shev squinted around Javre’s elbow, waiting for it to resolve itself into something that made better sense. It did not.
“That is. . . unusual,” said Javre.
“Bloody North,” muttered Shev. “Nothing up here would surprise me.”
The man stopped perhaps two strides off, smiling. But a smile more of madness than good humour. He wore trousers, thankfully, made of some illcured pelt, and boots with absurd fur tops. Otherwise he was bare, and his pale torso was knotted with muscle, criss-crossed with scars and beaded with dew. That sword looked even bigger close up, as if forged by an optimist for the use of giants. It was nearly as tall as its owner, and he was not short by any means, for he looked Javre more or less in the eye.
“Someone’s compensating for something,” muttered Shev, under her breath.
“Greetings, ladies,” said the man, in a thick accent. “Lovely day.”
“It’s fucking not,” grumbled Shev.
“Well, it’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it, though?” He raised his brows expectantly, but when neither of them answered, continued, “I am Whirrun of Bligh. Some folk call me Cracknut Whirrun.”
“Congratulations,” said Shev.
He looked pleased. “You’ve heard of me, then?”
“No. Where the hell’s Bligh?”
He winced. “Honestly, I couldn’t say.”
“I am Javre,” said Javre, puffing up her considerable chest, “Lioness of Hoskopp.” Shev rolled her eyes. God—warriors, and their bloody titles, and their bloody introductions, and their bloody chest-puffing. “We are crossing this bridge.”
“Ah! Me too!”
Shev ground her teeth. “What is this, a stating-the-obvious competition? We’ve met in the middle of it, haven’t we?”
“Yes.” Whirrun heaved in a great breath through his nose and let it sigh happily away. “Yes, we have.”
“That is quite a sword,” said Javre.
“It is the Father of Swords, and men have a hundred names for it. Dawn Razor. Grave-Maker. Blood Harvest. Highest and Lowest. Scac-ang-Gaioc in the valley tongue which means the Splitting of the World, the Battle that was fought at the start of time and will be fought again at its end. Some say it is God’s sword, fallen from the heavens.”
“Huh.” Javre held up the roughly sword-shaped bundle of rags she carried with her. “My sword was forged from a fallen star.”
“It looks like a sword-shaped bundle of rags.”
Javre narrowed her eyes. “I have to keep it wrapped up.”
“Why?”
“Lest its brilliance blind you.”
“Ooooooooh,” said Whirrun. “The funny thing about that is, now I really want to see it. Would I get a good look before I was blinded, or—”
“Are you two done with the pissing contest?” asked Shev.
“I would not get into a pissing contest with a man.” Javre pushed her hips forward, st
uck her hand in her groin and indicated the probable arc with a pointed finger. “I have tried it before and you can say what you like about cocks but they just get far more distance. Far more. What?” she asked, frowning over her shoulder. “It simply cannot be done, no matter how much you drink. Now, if you want a pissing contest—”
“I don’t!” snapped Shev. “Right now all I want is somewhere dry to kill myself!”
“You are so overdramatic,” said Javre, shaking her head. “She is so overdramatic. It is exhausting.”
Whirrun shrugged. “It’s a fine line between too much drama and too little, isn’t it, though?”
“True,” mused Javre. “True.”
There was a pause, while the bridge creaked faintly.
“Well,” said Shev, “this has been lovely, but we are being pursued by agents of the Great Temple in Thond and some fellows hired by Horald the Finger, so, if you don’t mind—”
“In fact I do. I, too, am pursued, by agents of the King of the Northmen, Bethod. You’d think he’d have better things to do, what with this mad war against the Union, but Bethod, well, like him or no, you have to admit he’s persistent.”
“Persistently a shit,” said Shev.
“I won’t disagree,” lamented Whirrun. “The greater a man’s power swells, the smaller his good qualities shrivel.”
“True,” mused Javre. “True.”
Another long silence, and the wind blew up and made the bridge sway alarmingly. Javre and Whirrun frowned at one another.
“Step aside,” said Javre, “and we shall be on our way.”
“I do not care to step aside. Especially on a bridge as narrow as this one.” Whirrun’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And your tone somewhat offends me.”
“Then your delicate feelings will be even worse wounded by my boot up your arse. Step aside.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 9