The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “It’s not enough to buy anything here,” he said, matter-of-factly, with barely a glance; he started to go back to his work, but then he frowned a little and turned around again. He picked one coin up and peered at it closely, and turned it over in his fingers, and rubbed it between them, and then he put it down and stared at me. “Where did you get these?”

  “They came from the Staryk, if you want to believe me,” I said. “Can you make them into something? A bracelet or a ring?”

  “I’ll buy them from you,” he offered.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “To make them into a ring would cost you two gold coins,” he said. “Or I’ll buy them from you for five.”

  “I’ll pay you one,” I said firmly, “or if you like, you can sell the ring for me and keep half the profit,” which was what I really wanted. “I have to give the Staryk back six gold coins in exchange.”

  He grumbled a little but finally agreed, which meant he thought he could sell it for a high enough price to make it worthwhile, and then he set about the work. He melted the silver over a hot little flame and ran it into a mold, a thick one made of iron, and when it had half cooled, he took it out with his leathered fingertips and etched a pattern into the surface, fanciful, full of leaves and branches.

  It didn’t take him long: the silver melted easily and cooled easily and took the pattern easily, and when it was done, the pattern seemed oddly to move and shift: it drew the eye and held it, and shone even in the midday sun. We looked down at it for a while, and then he said, “The duke will buy it,” and sent his apprentice running into the city. A tall, imperious servant in velvet clothes and gold braid came back with the boy, making clear in every expression how annoyed he was by the interruption of his more important work, but even he stopped being annoyed when he saw the ring and held it on his palm.

  The duke paid ten gold coins for the ring, so I put two in the bank, and six back into the little white pouch, and I climbed back into Oleg’s sledge to go home that same evening. We flew through the snow and dark, the horse trotting quickly with only my weight in back. But in the woods the horse slowed, and then dropped to a walk, and then halted; I thought she just needed a rest, but she stood unmoving with her ears pricked up anxiously, warm breath gusting out of her nostrils. “Why are we stopping?” I asked, and Oleg didn’t answer me: he slumped in his seat as though he slept.

  The snow crunched behind me once and once again: something picking its way toward the sleigh from behind, step by heavy step. I swallowed and drew my cloak around me, and then I summoned up all the winter-cold courage I’d built inside me and turned around.

  The Staryk didn’t look so terribly strange at first; that was what made him truly terrible, as I kept looking and slowly his face became something inhuman, shaped out of ice and glass, and his eyes like silver knives. He had no beard and wore his white hair in a long braid down his back. His clothes, just like his purse, were all in white. He was riding a stag, but a stag larger than a draft horse, with antlers branched twelve times and hung with clear glass drops, and when it put out its red tongue to lick its muzzle, its teeth were sharp as a wolf’s.

  I wanted to quail, to cower; but I knew where that led. Instead I held my fur cloak tight at the throat with one hand against the chill that rolled off him, and with my other I held out the bag to him, in silence, as he came close to the sleigh.

  He paused, eyeing me out of one silver-blue eye with his head turned sideways, like a bird. He put out his gloved hand and took the bag, and he opened it and poured the six gold coins out into the cup of his hand, the faint jingle loud in the silence around us. The coins looked warm and sun-bright against the white of his glove. He looked down at them and seemed vaguely disappointed, as though he was sorry I’d managed it; and then he put them away and the bag vanished somewhere beneath his own long cloak.

  I called up all my courage and spoke, throwing my words against the hard, icy silence like a shell around us. “I’ll need more than a day next time, if you want more of them changed,” I said, a struggle to keep trembling out of my voice.

  He lifted his head and stared at me, as though surprised I’d dared to speak to him, and then he wasn’t there anymore; Oleg shook himself all over and chirruped to the horse, and we were trotting again. I fell back into the blankets, shivering. The tips of my fingers where I’d held out the purse were numbed and cold. I pulled off my glove and tucked them underneath my arm to warm them up, wincing as they touched my skin.

  One week went by, and I began to forget about the Staryk, about all of it. We all did, the way one forgets dreams: you’re trying to explain the story of it to someone and halfway through it’s already running quicksilver out of your memory, too wrong and ill-fitting to keep in your mind. I didn’t have any of the fairy silver left to prove the whole thing real, not even the little purse. Even that same night I’d come home, I hadn’t been able to describe him to my anxious mother; I’d only been able to say, “It’s all right, I gave him the gold,” and then I’d fallen into bed. By morning I couldn’t remember his face.

  But Sunday night the knocking came again at the door, and I froze for a moment. I was standing already, about to fetch a dish of dried fruit from the pantry; with a lurch of my heart I went to the door and flung it open.

  A burst of wind came growling through the house, as cold as if it had been shaved directly off the frozen crust of the snow. The Staryk hadn’t abandoned a purse on the stoop this time: he stood waiting outside, all the more unearthly for the frame of wood around his sharp edges. I looked back into the house wildly, to see if they saw him also; but my father was bent over his whittling as though he hadn’t even heard the door opening, and my mother was looking into the fire with a dreamy, vague look on her face. Wanda lay sleeping on her pallet already, and her brother had gone home three days before.

  I turned back. The Staryk held another purse out to me, to the very border of the door, and spoke, a high, thin voice like wind whistling through the eaves. “Three days,” he said.

  I was afraid of him, of course; I wasn’t a fool. But I had only believed in him for a week, and I had spent all my life learning to fear other things more: to be taken advantage of, used unfairly. “And what in return?” I blurted, putting my hands behind my back.

  His eyes sharpened, and I regretted pressing him. “Thrice, mortal maiden,” he said, in a rhythm almost like a song. “Thrice shall I come, and you shall turn silver to gold for my hands, or be changed into ice yourself.”

  I felt half ice already, chilled down to my bones. I swallowed. “And then?”

  He laughed and said, “And then I will make you my queen, if you manage it,” mockingly, and threw the purse down at my feet, jingling loud. When I looked back up from it, he was gone, and my mother behind me said, slow and struggling, as if it was an effort to speak, “Miryem, why are you keeping the door open? The cold’s coming in.”

  I had never felt sorry for the miller’s daughter before, in the story: I’d been too sorry for my father, and myself. But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who’d as cheerfully have cut off your head if your dowry didn’t match your boasting? I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his servant, or frozen into ice.

  The purse he’d left was ten times as heavy as before, full of shining coins. I counted them out into smooth-sided towers, to try and put my mind into order along with them. “We’ll leave,” my mother said. I hadn’t told her what the Staryk had promised, or threatened, but she didn’t like it anyway: an elven lord coming to demand I give him gold. “We’ll go to my father, or farther away,” but I felt sure that wasn’t any good. I hadn’t wanted to believe in the Staryk at all, but now that I couldn’t help it, I didn’t believe there was a place I could run away that he wouldn’t find some way to follow. And if I did, then what? My whole life afraid, looking around for the sound of footfalls in snow?

  Anyway, we couldn’t just go. It would mean
bribes to cross each border, and a new home wherever we found ourselves in the end, and who knew how they’d treat us when we got there? We’d heard enough stories of what happened to our people in other countries, under kings and bishops who wanted their own debts forgiven, and to fill their purses with confiscated wealth.

  So I put the six towers of coins, ten in each, back into the purse, and I sent Wanda for Oleg’s sledge. We drove back to the city that very night, not to lose any of my precious time. “Do you have any more?” Isaac the jeweler demanded the moment he saw me, eagerly, and then he flushed and said, “That is, welcome back,” remembering he had manners.

  “Yes, I have more,” I said, and spilled them out on the cloth. “I need to give back sixty gold this time,” I told him.

  He was already turning them over with his hands, his face alight with hunger. “I couldn’t remember,” he said, half to himself, and then he heard what I’d said and gawked at me. “I need a little profit for the work that this will take!”

  “There’s enough to make ten rings, at ten gold each,” I said.

  “I couldn’t sell them all.”

  “Yes, you could,” I said. That, I was sure of: if the duke had a ring of fairy silver, every wealthy man and woman in the city needed a ring just like it, right away.

  He frowned down over the coins, stirring them with his fingers, and sighed. “I’ll make a necklace, and see what we can get.”

  “You really don’t think you can sell ten rings?” I said, surprised, wondering if I was wrong.

  “I want to make a necklace,” he said, which didn’t seem very sensible to me, but perhaps he thought it would show his work off and make a name for him. I didn’t really mind as long as I could pay off my Staryk for another week.

  “I only have three days,” I said. “Can you do it that quickly?”

  He groaned. “Why must you ask for impossibilities?”

  “Do those look possible to you?” I said, pointing at the coins, and he couldn’t really argue with that.

  I had to sit with him while he worked, and manage the people who came to the stall wanting other things from him; he didn’t want to talk to anyone and be interrupted. Most of them were busy and irritated servants, some of them expecting goods to be finished; they snapped and glared, wanting me to cower, but I met their bluster too and said coolly, “Surely you can see what Master Isaac is working on. I’m sure your mistress or your master wouldn’t wish you to interrupt a patron I cannot name, but who would purchase such a piece,” and I waved to send their eyes over to the worktable, where the full sunlight shone on the silver beneath his hands. Its cold gleam silenced them; they stood staring a little while and then went away, without trying to argue again.

  I noticed that Isaac tried to save a few of the coins aside while he worked, as though he wanted to keep them to remember. I thought of asking him for one to keep myself, but it didn’t work. On the morning of the third day, he sighed and took the last of the ones he’d saved and melted it down, and strung a last bit of silver lace upon the design. “It’s done,” he said afterward, and picked it up in his hands: the silver hung over his broad palms like icicles, and we stood looking at it silently together for a while.

  “Will you send to the duke?” I asked.

  He shook his head and took out a box from his supplies: square and made of carved wood lined with black velvet, and he laid the necklace carefully inside. “No,” he said. “For this, I will go to him. Do you want to come?”

  “Can I go and change my dress?” I said, a little doubtful: I didn’t really want the necklace to go so far out of my sight unpurchased, but I was wearing a plain work dress only for sitting in the market all day.

  “How far do you live?” he said, just as doubtful.

  “My grandfather’s house is only down the street with the ash tree and around the corner,” I said. “Three doors down from the red stables.”

  He frowned a moment. “That’s Panov Moshel’s house.”

  “That’s my grandfather,” I said, and he looked at me, surprised, and then in a new way I didn’t understand until I was inside, putting on my good dress with the fur and the gold buttons, and I looked down at myself and patted my hair and wondered if I looked well, and then my cheeks prickled with sudden heat. “Do you know Isaac, the jeweler?” I blurted to my grandmother, turning away from the brass mirror.

  She peered at me over her spectacles, narrowly. “I’ve met his mother. He’s a respectable young man,” she allowed, after some thought. “Do you want me to put up your hair again?”

  So I took a little longer than he would have liked, I suspect, to come back; then we went together to the gates and through the wall around our quarter, and walked into the streets of the city. The houses nearest were mean and low, run-down; but Isaac led me to the wider streets, past an enormous church of gray stone with windows like jewelry themselves, and finally to the enormous mansions of the nobles. I couldn’t help staring at the iron fences wrought into lions and writhing dragons, and the walls covered with vining fruits and flowers sculpted out of stone. I admit I was glad not to be alone when we went through the open gates and up the wide stone steps swept clear of snow.

  Isaac spoke to one of the servants. We were taken to a small room to wait: no one offered us anything to drink, or a place to sit, and a manservant stood looking at us with disapproval. I was grateful, though: irritation made me feel less small and less tempted to gawk. Finally the servant who had come to the market last time came in and demanded to know our business. Isaac brought out the box and showed him the necklace; he stared down at it, and then said shortly, “Very well,” and went away again. Half an hour later he reappeared and ordered us to follow him: we were led up back stairs and then abruptly emerged into a hall more sumptuous than anything I had ever seen, the walls hung with tapestries in bright colors and the floor laid with a beautifully patterned rug.

  It silenced our feet and led us into a sitting room even more luxurious, where a man in rich clothes and a golden chain sat in an enormous chair covered in velvet at a writing table. I saw the ring of fairy silver on the first finger of his hand, resting on the arm of the chair. He didn’t look down at it, but I noticed he thumbed it around now and again, as though he wanted to make sure it hadn’t vanished from his hand. “All right, let’s see it.”

  “Your Grace.” Isaac bowed and showed him the necklace.

  The duke stared into the box. His face didn’t change, but he stirred the necklace gently on its bed with one finger, just barely moving the looped lacelike strands of it. He finally drew a breath and let it out again through his nose. “And how much do you ask for it?”

  “Your Grace, I cannot sell it for less than a hundred and fifty.”

  “Absurd,” the duke growled. I had a struggle to keep from biting my lip, myself: it was rather outrageous.

  “Otherwise I must melt it down and make it into rings,” Isaac said, spreading his hands apologetically. I thought that was rather clever: of course the duke would rather no one else had a ring like his.

  “Where are you getting this silver from?” the duke demanded. Isaac hesitated, and then looked at me. The duke followed his eyes. “Well? You’re bringing it from somewhere.”

  I curtsied, as deeply as I could manage and still get myself back up. “I was given it by one of the Staryk, my lord,” I said. “He wants it changed for gold.”

  “And you mean to do it through my purse, I see,” the duke said. “How much more of this silver will there be?”

  I had been worrying about that, whether the Staryk would bring even more silver next time, and what I would do with it if he did: the first time six, the second time sixty; how would I get six hundred pieces of gold? I swallowed. “Maybe—maybe much more.”

  “Hm,” the duke said, and studied the necklace again. Then he put his hand to one side and took up a bell and rang it; the servant reappeared in the doorway. “Go and bring Irina to me,” he said, and the man bowed. We waited a handfu
l of minutes, and then a woman came to the door, a girl perhaps a year younger than me, slim and demure in a plain gray woolen gown, modestly high-necked, with a fine gray silken veil trailing back over her head. Her chaperone came after her, an older woman scowling at me and especially at Isaac.

  Irina curtsied to the duke without raising her downcast eyes. He stood up and took the necklace over to her, and put it around her neck. He stepped back and studied her, and we did too. She wasn’t especially beautiful, I would have said, only ordinary, except her hair was long and dark and thick; but it didn’t really matter with the necklace on her. It was hard even to glance away from her, with all of winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her eyes as they darted sideways to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall there.

  “Ah, Irinushka,” the chaperone murmured, approvingly, and the duke nodded.

  He turned back to us. “Well, jeweler, you are in luck: the tsar visits us next week. You may have a hundred gold pieces for your necklace, and the next thing you make will be a crown fit for a queen, to be my daughter’s dowry: you will have ten times a hundred gold for it, if the tsar takes her hand.”

  I left twenty gold pieces in the bank and carried the swollen purse into the sledge waiting to carry me home. My shoulders tightened as we plunged into the forest, wondering when and if the Staryk would come on me once more, until halfway down the road the sledge began to slow and stop under the dark boughs. I went rabbit-still, looking around for any signs of him, but I didn’t see anything; the horse stamped and snorted her warm breath, and Oleg didn’t slump over, but hung his reins on the footboard.