“It’s gold all the way through!” I snapped at him.
“Yes,” he said, blankly. “It is.” He stood there still a while longer before he lifted his head at last out of a daze. He put the two halves of the coin on the ledge and bowed to me, formal and courtly. “The task I set is accomplished. I will take you to the sunlit world, as I have promised, that you shall dance at your cousin’s wedding. Ask your questions now, my lady.”
The courtesy confused me; I’d been pulling myself together to do battle with him. I stared at him blankly instead. I couldn’t think of a single question. After a moment, I said, “Do I have time to bathe?” I was a bedraggled mess, after three days and three nights more or less entire spent staggering around changing the silver.
“Make ready as you will. You shall have as much time as you require,” he said. It didn’t seem exactly an answer, but if he was that certain, I wouldn’t argue. “Ask twice more.”
I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer and said, “I promised to turn all their own silver to gold for them, in exchange for their help. They accepted, and made return of themselves. Are they my bondsmen now?”
“Yes,” he said, and inclined his head to them, as if he hadn’t the slightest trouble thinking of three servants as nobility, just like that. The three of them had a bit more difficulty with it; they all started to bob low curtseys, and had to stop themselves partway down, and when Flek came back up she seemed to suddenly realize we’d finished, it was all over, and she jerked like a doll and turned around and put her hands over her face with a stifled cry somewhere between agony and relief.
I would have liked to sit down and weep myself. “Do I have time to change their silver for them now?” I asked. I wasn’t planning to come back here if I could help it.
“That you have already asked and been answered,” he said. “Ask again.”
That was annoying, when for once I had been trying to use my questions up. “What does that mean?” I demanded. “Why is it the same whether I want to go take a bath or change their silver, too?”
He frowned at me. “As you have been true, so will I be, and in no lesser degree,” he said, a bit huffily. “I will lay my hand upon the flow of time, if need be, that you shall have however much of it you seek. Go therefore and make ready however you wish, and when you are ready to depart, we shall go.”
He paused to look around the storeroom once more, while I sluggishly puzzled through what he’d said, but by the time I burst out belatedly, “You could have taken me there in time, then, no matter what!” I was saying it to an empty doorway, which cared about as much as he would have, I suppose.
I was glaring at the space where he’d been when Tsop said a little timidly, “But he couldn’t have.”
“What?” I said.
Tsop moved her hand around the storeroom. “You have done a great working. So now he can do another in return. But high magic never comes without a price.”
“Why is it a great working that we shoved more than half his treasure into a tunnel?” I said, exasperated.
“You were challenged beyond the bounds of what could be done, and found a path to make it true,” Tsop said.
“Oh,” I said, and then I realized—“You answered me! Twice!”
“I am bondswoman to you now, Open-Handed,” she said, sounding a little taken aback. “You need not make me bargains.”
“So now you will answer my questions?” I said, trying to understand, and they all three nodded. All when I couldn’t think of anything to ask. Or rather, there were any number of questions I wanted to ask, but they seemed unwise to say out loud, even under the circumstances: how do you kill a Staryk king, what magic does he have, will he win if he fights a demon? Instead I said, “Well, if I have all the time in the world, now, I do want a bath. And then I will change your silver before I go.”
*
I wrote the letters to Prince Ulrich and Prince Casimir myself, but Mirnatius did sign them, and he even grudgingly took me down to his own table for dinner—after certain preparations. “You wore that two days ago,” Mirnatius said sharply, when I came out from the dressing alcove, and for a moment my heart stopped. I thought he had finally noticed my Staryk jewels, but then I realized he was complaining of my pale grey gown, the finest work of all my stepmother’s women, which yes, I meant to wear again, without even thinking about it. Not even archduchesses were rich enough to have a gown for every ordinary day.
But he evidently insisted on wearing an entirely new ensemble each and every single day, an extravagance so outrageous he must surely have been spending magic on his councillors just to keep them from howling every time they looked at his accounts. And apparently he now meant me to follow suit. “You should know more about the tax rolls,” I said, while he rummaged scowling through my entire bridal chest, evidently to prove to himself that I only—only—had three suitable gowns, all of which had already seen too much use to be acceptable for his tsarina.
He straightened up and glared at me, and then he abruptly put his hands on my shoulders, and beneath them my dress unfolded itself into green velvet and pale blue brocade like a gaudy butterfly fighting its way out of a grey cocoon, bannered sleeves unfurling all the way to the ground with a silver-tasseled thump. He was wearing pale blue himself, and a cloak lined in deep green, so we made a matched pair as we descended on the court. He was still far from content with my appearance. “At least your hair’s handsome,” he muttered, with a tone of dissatisfaction, looking down at the back of my intricately braided head; he plainly expected to be sniggered at for his choice.
I hadn’t been to Koron in four years, but I’d heard enough grumbles at my father’s table to know what to expect. Mirnatius had made the court his own mirror, as much as he could: of course many of the most powerful nobles of Lithvas kept houses in the city, and they were the most important, but the rest, the courtiers and hangers-on who were there by his sufferance, were one and all the beautiful and the glittering. Half the women were bare-shouldered and collarless, even with a foot of snow on the windowsills outside, and the men all wore silks and velvets as impractical for riding as his own, without the benefit of magic to keep them pristine or change them over again. They eyed one another like hungry wolves looking for something wrong, and I would have felt sorry for any girl Mirnatius had chosen to throw before them, no matter how beautiful.
But they grew less judgmental in the dazzle of Staryk silver. As we made our entrance, they looked me over with their narrowed eyes from all the corners of the room, and first they smirked, and then they looked again, and then they looked puzzled, and then they stared at me lost and half bewildered, and forgot that they had to make polite conversation. Some of the men looked at me like dragons, covetous, and they kept looking at me even when they were speaking to Mirnatius himself. After the fourth one tripped off the royal dais because he couldn’t stop staring, Mirnatius turned his own bewildered look at me. “Are you enchanting them?” he demanded, during a short break between courtesies; there were two callow young noblemen of precisely equal rank arguing violently with the herald over which one of them should be presented to me first.
I didn’t particularly want him thinking of what I might be using to make myself more beautiful. I leaned conspiratorially close. “My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died,” I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third—that fools should recognize neither.”
He flushed. “My court is full of fools,” he snapped. “So it seems she had it the wrong way round.”
I shrugged. “Well, even if I were, surely it’s no more than you’re doing. Witches always lose their looks at the end, don’t they, when their power begins to fade? I’ve always thought that’s how they looked all along, and they only covered it with spells.”
His eyes widened. “I am not covering anything!” But when he thought I was looking elsewhere, he surreptitiously touched his own face over with his fing
ertips, as if he feared an ugly troll hiding somewhere under the mask of his own beauty. It distracted him, at any rate.
“Which of these men is your relation?” I asked, to keep him so, and he irritably pointed out half a dozen cousins. They were mostly of the late tsar’s stamp: big and vigorously bearded with dirty boots and an air of having been grudgingly forced into their court elegance. They were all older than Mirnatius, of course; he’d been the son of his father’s second wife. But there was one pouting and rather splendid young man standing at the side of Mirnatius’s aunt, an old woman in lavish brocade drowsing by the fire. He was very evidently the cosseted child of her age, and if he wasn’t as beautiful as Mirnatius, at least he’d taken his tsar and cousin for a model when it came to dress, and he was tall and broad-shouldered. “Is he married?”
“Ilias? I haven’t the faintest idea,” Mirnatius said, but to give him a little credit, he stood up and took me over to present me to his aunt, who remedied our lack of knowledge very quickly.
“Who is your father?” she asked me loudly. “Erdivilas—Erdivilas—What? Oh, the Duke of Vysnia?” She peered at me a bit dubiously at that—not even an archduke?—but after a moment’s consideration she shook her head and told Mirnatius, “Well enough, well enough. It is high time you married. Perhaps next this one will give his old mother the joy of a wedding,” she added, poking the annoyed Ilias with a ring-encrusted knuckle.
Ilias bowed over my hand with remarkable coldness, despite my silver, which was quite obviously explained when he looked at Mirnatius next. Mirnatius was more interested in a critical examination of the wide panels of Ilias’s coat, which were embroidered with two peacocks with tiny glittering jeweled eyes. “A handsome design,” he told his cousin, who glowed with appreciation, and threw me another look of violent and miserable jealousy.
“He’d be loyal to you, at least,” I said, when we went back to our chairs. That wasn’t a recommendation to me, of course, but his shrewd-eyed mother was: every nobleman of real substance was stopping to pay her his respects, and half of the cousins Mirnatius had pointed out were her sons. Ilias might be unhappy to see Mirnatius fall, but she would be delighted to get her beloved son into Vassilia’s bed—however little he liked it there—and I thought she might well accept her son’s advancement as repayment for her nephew’s fall.
“Why do you imagine so?” Mirnatius said sourly. “No one here is loyal five minutes past their own interest.”
“He is interested,” I said dryly.
I thought he might be offended, but he only flicked his eyes heavenwards in impatience. “They’re all interested in that,” he sneered. It sounded odd to me, and after a moment I realized I’d heard the same thing many times before, but always in a woman’s mouth, and most often a servant’s: two of the younger maids talking as they polished the silver at the cabinet next to the back stairway, which was the easiest way for me to climb to the attic, or another chaperone speaking to Magreta at a ball, the mother of a prettier girl with a less powerful father. There was a resentment in it that didn’t fit with his crown: as if he’d felt the weight of hungry eyes on him and the sense of having to be wary.
But his mother had been executed for her sorcery when he was still young, and his brother had still been alive at the time, a promising young man by court opinion; I vaguely remembered him, a great deal more like those big burly men scattered around the room. Mirnatius would have been a court discard after that, the too-pretty son of a condemned witch—until a convenient wasting fever had carried his father and brother off from one day to the next, and made him the tsar instead. Perhaps he’d had more cause than simple greed to make his bargain, and hand himself over in exchange for his crown.
If so, I could feel a little sympathy for him after all, but only a little. His own father, his brother, too, and Archduke Dmitir: the demon hadn’t taken them for a mere snack. Mirnatius had deliberately bought their deaths, his crown, his comfort. And he’d bought them with all the nameless people he’d fed to the demon in the years since he’d let it crawl down his throat and take up residence inside his belly. I knew with cold certainty that I wasn’t the first meal he’d offered to that seething creature in the fireplace, whining of its endless thirst and hunger.
I rose from my chair while the dancing was still going. With the overcast sky, I couldn’t tell when exactly the sunset was coming. I didn’t want to be another of those meals, and I still didn’t have the demon’s agreement, even if Mirnatius had agreed to the plan. I didn’t particularly trust either of them. “I mean to go and meet with the household before bed—unless you mean to lock me up in our bedchamber yet again?” I said to him, making it sound as though I spoke of a childish folly.
“Yes, very well,” he said very shortly, distracted over his cup of wine. He was staring past me out the tall impractical windows of his ballroom: fresh snowflakes were gently drifting past their length, to add themselves to the frozen white ground.
In the kitchens, I ordered the slightly puzzled but obedient servants to make me a basket of food. I took it with me back into the presentation rooms and found one of them empty, a harp standing alone among velvet divans waiting for an occasion. In the gilt-edged mirror on the wall, I saw the low garden wall and the dark trees beyond, the same place I had left, and I stepped through to the little hut in the woods with my heavy basket on my arm.
It wasn’t snowing, at least for this one moment, but new snow had fallen since I’d gone, here just as in Lithvas: it was creeping up the sides of the house. My feet crunched alone on a thick layer of ice frozen atop the drifts. I stopped in the lonely yard at the edge of the twilight, where it cut the house in half, and on an impulse I took a piece of bread from the basket and crumbled it over the snow. Perhaps there were living things here, and it didn’t seem they would find much more to eat than the squirrels back in Lithvas.
Magreta was sleeping when I came in, deep wrinkles shadowed in her old face and silver lines in her hair. Her hands were lying idle in her lap for once, as if someone had taken her knitting away from her. The fire was very low, but the wood box was still full, at least. As I was adding another log and stirring up the fire, she muttered, “It’s still dark. Go back to sleep, Irinushka,” the way she did when I was a little girl and woke up too early in the morning and wanted to get out of bed. Then she woke up, and scolded me away from the fire, and insisted on herself putting on water to boil for tea, and cutting the cheese and ham. She never liked me to get too close to the fire, or to chance cutting myself with a knife.
I drowsed on the cot through the dark hours again, watching Magreta’s knitting needles move in the firelight the way I had used to as a child in the small room I grew up in, near the top of the house: cold in winter, stifling in summer. The cold of the Staryk kingdom crept into the hut the way it had slid like a knife around the windowsills and under the eaves of my father’s house. I still preferred it to the tsar’s palace.
CHAPTER 17
My darling tsarina vanished again after dinner, somewhere between the kitchens and my bedchamber. I was hardly surprised by now. I didn’t object, either. After several unbroken years of lecturing me on the importance of choosing my bride and all the many tedious factors to consider, all the old dotards on my council had fallen over one another to congratulate me for having shackled myself to a girl with none of the dowry or political value they’d been insisting on, which was irritating enough, but all the young dotards in my court had also fallen over one another to congratulate me on the astonishing beauty of my pale mousey rake of a bride.
Even my most reliable cynic, Lord Reynauld, on whom I’d have confidently wagered a thousand pieces of gold to find something viciously insulting to say about any new wife I’d presented—in his magnificently polite way, naturally—wandered up to my throne late in the evening and told me coolly that I’d made quite a clever and unexpected choice, and then he looked round the room and asked where she’d gone to, in a tone so artfully uninterested that I reali
zed with enormous indignation that he was passionately interested in looking at her some more.
It was enough to make me wonder if she’d been telling the truth about that enchantment from her mother. Blinding fools to her beauty seemed rather more like a curse than a blessing, given the number of fools among the nobility, but as I’d ample cause to know, mothers weren’t necessarily to be relied upon to deliver those, whatever song and story like to say about it. Or perhaps I’d been right, and the blessing really was the other way round.
Except my Aunt Felitzja, who very decidedly was not a fool—I’d found her impossible to muddle without expending really enormous amounts of power—made Ilias help her dodder over to me before leaving, and told me in resigned tones, “Well, you’ve married the way most men do, for a pretty face, so now make it worthwhile, and see to it there’s a christening before another year is gone.” And this while Ilias, who has been trying his best to worm his way into my bed since even before he’d worked out what he wanted to do once he got there—the quantities of horrible poetry he’s inflicted on me don’t bear describing—stood there and looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.
I wanted to stand up and shout at them all that my wife not only wasn’t divinely beautiful, she wasn’t even interestingly ugly; her conversation consisted entirely of insults, dire warnings, and tedious lectures I couldn’t even ignore; and they were all extraordinary idiots for imagining I could possibly have had the bad taste to fall in love with a dull, prosing, long-faced harridan. The only reason I didn’t yield to the temptation was that I’d have been put to the awkward necessity of explaining just why I had married her. “Because my demon told me to” isn’t a generally accepted reason, even if you have a crown on your head. And I would have raised more objections if I’d known what I was getting into.