Page 15 of Spinning Silver
He said it smiling down at me, cruel and satisfied, as though he was sure he had set me an impossible task, and it made me angry. I stood up and raised my chin and said, coolly, “I will be here, with your gold.”
His face lost its smile, which was satisfying, but I paid for it; he said in answer, “And if you do as you have said, I will take you away with me, and make you my queen,” and it didn’t seem like a joke here, with the stone of my grandfather’s threshold patterned white with frost that crept lacelike out of his grove, and the cold silver light shining out of the chest.
“Wait!” I said, as he began to turn away. “Why would you take me? You must know I have no magic, not really: I can’t change silver to gold for you in your kingdom, if you take me away.”
“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he stepped forward and the heavy door swung shut in my face, leaving me with a casket full of silver coins and a belly full of dismay.
Isaac made the crown in that one feverish week, laboring upon it in his stall in the marketplace. He dipped out cupfuls of silver and hammered out great thin sheets to make the fan-shaped crown, tall enough to double the height of a head, and then with painstaking care added droplets of melted silver in mimic of pearls, laying them in graceful spiraling patterns that turned upon themselves and vined away again. He borrowed molds from every other jeweler in the market and poured tiny flattened links by the hundreds, then hung glittering chains of them linked from one side of the crown to the other, and fringed along the rest of the wide fan’s bottom edge. By the second day, men and women were coming just to watch him work. I sat by, silent and unhappy, and kept them off. Each night he took the work home with him, and I took back the lightened casket, my grandfather’s two manservants carrying it for me. No one troubled us. Even the little pickpockets, with ambitions to slip a single thin silver coin off the table, were caught by the winter light; when they drifted too close their mouths softened into parted wonder, their eyes puzzled, and when I looked at them, they startled and melted away into the crowds.
By the end of the fifth day, the casket was empty and the crown was finished; when Isaac had assembled the whole, he turned and said, “Come here,” and set it upon my head to see whether it was well-balanced. The crown felt cool and light as a dusting of snow upon my forehead. In his bronze mirror, I looked like a strange deep-water reflection of myself, silver stars at midnight above my brow, and all the marketplace went quiet in a rippling wave around me, silent like the clearing with the Staryk standing in it. I wanted to burst into tears, or run away; instead I took the crown off my head and put it back into Isaac’s hands, and when he’d carefully swathed it with linen and black velvet, the crowds finally drifted away, murmuring to each other.
My grandfather’s manservants guarded us all the way to the duke’s palace. We found it full of bustle and the noise of preparations: the tsar was arriving in two days’ time, and all the household was full of suppressed excitement; they all knew something of the duke’s plans, and the servants’ eyes followed the swathed shape of the crown as Isaac carried it through the corridors. We were put into a better antechamber to wait this time, and then the chaperone came to fetch me. “Bring it with you. The men stay here,” she said, with a sharp suspicious glare at them.
She took me upstairs to a small pair of rooms, not nearly so grand as the ones below: I suppose a plain daughter hadn’t merited better before now. Irina was sitting stiff as a rake handle before a mirror made of glass. She wore a silver-grey silk dress over pure white skirts, the bodice cut much lower this time to make a frame around the necklace. Her long beautiful hair had been braided into several thick ropes, ready to be put up, and her hands were gripped tightly around themselves in front of her.
Her fingers worked slightly against each other, nervous, as the chaperone pinned up the braids, and then I unwrapped the crown and carefully set it upon her head. It stood glittering beneath the light of a dozen candles, and the chaperone fell silent, her eyes wide as they rested on her charge. Irina herself slowly stood up and took a step closer to her reflection in the mirror, her hand reaching up towards the glass almost as if to touch the woman inside.
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 in the mirror, pale and thin and transported as she looked at herself in her crown, 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 and turned back into the room, our eyes met: 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.
Then the door opened: the duke himself come to inspect her. He paused in the doorway. Irina curtseyed 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 it, before he turned to me. “Very well, Panovina,” he said, without hesitation, though I hadn’t said a word. “You will have your gold.”
He gave us a thousand gold pieces: enough to heap the Staryk’s box full again, with hundreds more left over: a fortune, for what good it would do me now. My grandfather’s servants carried the chest and the sacks 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 sacks, meant for the vault, and gave two each to the servants before he dismissed them. “Spend 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 my good fortune; and when she was gone to the kitchens, 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.
And I believed now that he would take me away. I hadn’t been able to make sense of it before: what use would a mortal woman be to an elven lord, and why should boasting make me worth marrying, even if I somehow scrabbled together six hundred pieces of gold for a dowry? But of course a Staryk king would want a queen who really could make gold out of silver, mortal or not. The Staryk always came for gold.
But my grandfather only listened as I wept it out to him, and then he said, “At least he’s not a fool, this Staryk, to want a wife for such a reason. It would make the fortune of any kingdom. What else do you know of him?” I stared at him, still wet-faced. He shrugged. “It’s not what you would have looked for, but there’s worse things in life than to be a queen.”
By speaking so, he gave me a gift: making it an ordinary match, to be discussed and considered, even if it wasn’t really. I gulped and wiped away my tears, and felt better. After all, in cold hard terms itwasa catch, for a poor man’s daughter. My grandfather nodded as I calmed myself. “Good. Think on it with a clear head. Lords and kings often don’t ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners. There’s no one else, is there?”
“No,” I said, with a small shake. There wasn’t, although I’d walked back from the duke’s house at Isaac’s side, and when he had parted from me with his share, four sacks of his own full of gold, he had said to me jubilantly, “Tell your grandfather I will come and speak to him tomorrow,” meaning that he had enough money not to wait any longer to be married, and I had been so jealous of Basia I could have burst into flames. It wasn’t really Isaac, though: it was thinking of her married to a man with careful hands and dark brown eyes, and in her own home, where love could grow in earth made rich with gold my work had put there.
“You will go to your husband with wealth in your hands,” my grandfather said, with a gesture to the casket of gold, as if he knew what was in my heart. “And he is wise enough to value what you bring him, even if he doesn’t yet know the rest of your worth. That’s not nothing, to be able to hold your head up.” He cupped his hand under my chin and gripped it hard. “Hold your head up, Miryem,” and I nodded, my mouth tight over the weeping I wouldn’t let out again.
Mirnatius arrived in a vast closed sleigh painted in black and gold, drawn by four black horses steaming and stamping in the cold air, with soldiers hanging on the back and more of them riding in crisp martial ranks around it. There must have been other people, too, other sleighs, but it was hard to pay attention to anyone else when he flung open the door and climbed down in a gust of air that fogged in the cold. He wore black also, with delicate embroidery in gold thread gleaming all over the wool panels of his heavy coat. His black hair was long and curling, and everyone turned towards him a little, moths eager for the flame.
He greeted my father, perfunctorily, and when asked about his journey said something mildly complaining about the vigor of the winter, and how thin and weak the game was grown. The remark would have neatly diminished my father’s entertainment, if he had then spent the tsar’s visit on hunting—which of course he had intended to do, and Mirnatius plainly meant to needle him for it. But instead my father bowed and said, “Indeed, the hunting has grown sadly dull, Your Majesty, but I hope the hospitality of my hall will not disappoint you,” and the tsar paused.
I was almost entirely hidden behind a curtain, but I drew back anyway when the tsar looked up and swept his gaze across the windows of the house like a hawk going over a field, trying to flush out some prey. Fortunately he looked at the main floor of the house, and not at my high-up little window. My father had not given me new chambers. There were many guests in the tsar’s company whom he wanted to impress, and anyway he hoped I would be leaving soon.
Then Mirnatius smiled at my father, with the pleasure of a man who expects to be richly amused at someone else’s expense, and said, “I hope so as well. Tell me, Erdivilas, how are your family? Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?” It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisors knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar’s head—if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.
“They all are well, and Irina is healthy, Sire, that is all a father can ask of God,” my father said. “I would not name her a beauty to other men. But I will not lie: I think she has something in her more than most girls. You will see her while you are here, and tell me if you agree. I would welcome your counsel, for she is of an age to marry, and I would find a man worthy of her if I can arrange it.”
A blunt declaration that, almost crude by the standards of court conversation, where it was a point of honor always to speak to the side and not the heart of the thing, but it served my father’s purpose: Mirnatius lost his look of easy malice. He followed my father into the house with a thoughtful frowning look instead. He had understood the message—that my father meant seriously to offer me as a bride, despite the extremely bad politics of the match, and also was not a fool who thought to sneak an ugly girl into the tsar’s bed as a beauty with the help of dim lights and strong liquor; therefore, something unusual was in the offing.
Then they were all gone inside, to be greeted by my stepmother and the household, out of the cold. I stood behind the curtain without moving while the rest of the tsar’s retinue were disposed of, soldiers and courtiers and servants flowing away into all the nooks and crannies of the house and stables. There was nothing more to see, and in my small crowded rooms the other women who had gone to cluster around the other window all went back to their seats and their frantic sewing, and the scullery-maids with their buckets went back to emptying out the washtubs still sitting before the fire: one to wash me and a second one just to wash my hair.
“Pardon, milady,” one of them said to me timidly, by way of asking if she could use the window I was standing by, which had a useful eave below it that would catch the runoff, so it didn’t just rain down onto the windows below. I stepped back, making room for her. My hair was still damp, draped all over my shoulders, long and loose down my back. It smelled faintly of myrtle, because Magreta had put branches of it in the water. “They say it protects against ill-wishing and sorcery,” she had said, in a businesslike tone, “but really it’s just a nice smell.”
The fire had been built up, roaring to keep the chill off me, so all the other women were sweating and red-faced while they sewed urgently. I stood apart from their excited bustle. They were all half strangers to me; I knew their faces and their names, but nothing really of them. My stepmother made it her business to hire all the women of the house and know them and speak to them, so they would do good work for her, but she had never brought me into supervising the work of the household. She might have had a daughter of her own, after all.
But she had never been unkind to me; she had even sent her own best women to help with my sewing, although she would have liked to have the tsar’s visit as an excuse for new gowns for herself. Of course, she saw the value of having me settled in such a place—if it could be managed. As the other women went back to their seats, from peeping at the tsar, they had all glanced at me and looked dubious. I wished I could have felt so, myself. But they hadn’t seen me in the necklace, the crown. Only Magreta had, and she wrung her hands when she thought I didn’t see, and gave me bright encouraging smiles when she thought I did.
The women were working on linens now. My own gowns were already finished and waiting for me, in three shades of grey, like a winter’s sky. My father had ordered them made almost without ornament, of fine silk, with only a little touch of white embroidery. I had been wearing one of them for the last fitting yesterday when the jeweler’s woman had brought me the crown; she had given it to Magreta, who had set it on my head, and in the mirror I had become a queen in a dark forest made of ice. I had reached towards the glass and felt cold biting at the tips of my fingers with sharp teeth. I wondered if I really could do it, run away into the white world in the mirror. The cold on my fingers felt like a warning; it didn’t seem to me anything mortal could live in that frozen place.
