Page 30 of Spinning Silver
He walked away with her, lightly, over the top of the snow, but Irina and I both floundered through the crust and into the deep drifts beneath. We struggled on after him until suddenly it thinned as we came to the wall of the garden. It was only a very little house, barely a peasant’s hut and nearly all oven, but there was a smell of warm porridge cooking and the oven’s glow was coming through thin cracks in the window covers and the door. Shofer had stopped well back from the hut, and his fear made me wary, but Irina went straight to the door and pushed it open without hesitation: it was only a thin panel of slats and straw woven over them, to keep out the wind, and it fell in onto the floor with a bang.
“There’s no one here,” Irina said, after a moment, looking back at us.
I went inside after her: it was easy to see it was all empty. There was only one room, with a single small cot heaped with a pile of straw. Irina covered it with the cloak I had put on Magra, and Shofer very reluctantly came in and put the old woman down on it, his eyes always on the oven’s shut door, the tiny flicker of light around it, and as soon as he had laid her down, he retreated back to the threshold in a rush. There was a box heaped with firewood beside the oven, and I opened the oven door and found a pot inside, full of fresh hot porridge.
“Let me give her some,” Irina said, and on a shelf we found a wooden bowl and spoon. She put a good helping of the porridge inside, steam rising off it into the air, and knelt by the cot. She fed it to Magra, who stirred and roused with the smell, enough to eat it in small spoonfuls. Shofer was flinching with every bite, as if he were watching someone deliberately eat poison. He looked at me and his mouth worked, as though he wanted to say something and only a worse fear stopped his tongue. I kept waiting for something dreadful to happen: I looked in every corner of the room to make sure there was nothing hiding there, and then I went outside and looked all around the yard, too. Someoneshouldhave been nearby, with a fire going and hot food ready, but I didn’t even see a footprint in the snow all around the house, except the trail going back to the sleigh where Irina and I had gone floundering through the drifts. A Staryk wouldn’t have left a trail, of course. But…
“This isn’t a Staryk house,” I said to Shofer, a statement and not a question. He didn’t nod, but he also didn’t look at me puzzled or surprised, the way Flek and Tsop did when I’d gotten something wrong. I looked down at the garden again. The house stood directly upon the line: one half of the garden was in twilight, and the other in full night, caught between the two. I looked at him and said, “I’m going to close the door.”
“I will stay outside,” he said instantly, which gave me hope. I went inside and picked up the door and propped it back into place, and then I waited a little while and then with a quick jerk pulled it aside again—
But I was only looking back out onto the empty yard, with Shofer standing there waiting and anxious. He had retreated even farther, to the other side of the garden wall. I turned back inside, disappointed. Magra had opened her eyes, and she was holding Irina’s hands in hers. “You are safe, Irinushka,” she whispered. “I prayed you would be safe.”
Irina looked at me. “Can we stay here?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe,” I said.
“It’s not less safe than where we were.”
“Did the tsar refuse to marry you?” I asked. I thought the duke might have been angry with her if he had: he hadn’t seemed like a man to be satisfied if his plans went awry.
“No,” she said. “I am tsarina. For as long as I live.” She said it dryly, as if she didn’t expect that to last long. “The tsar is a black sorcerer. He is possessed by a demon of flame that wants to devour me.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t mirth, it was bitterness. “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”
I said it savagely, an angry joke, but then Irina said slowly, “The demon said I would quench its thirst a long time. It wants me because…I amcold.”
“Because you have Staryk blood, and Staryk silver,” I said, just as slowly. She nodded. I leaned into the door and peered through a crack: Shofer was still far back from the house, well out of earshot, with no sign at all that he was inclined to come any closer. I took a deep breath and turned back. “Do you think the demon would bargain? For the chance to devour a Staryk king instead?”
Irina showed me how the Staryk silver let her go back and forth: together we went out back and found a big washtub behind the house. We poured hot water into it, over the snow heaped inside, to make a pool with a reflection in it. She stared down into it and said, “I see the same place we came from: a bedroom in the palace. Do you see it?” she asked me, but I only saw our faces floating pale in the shifting water, and when she took my hand and tried to put it through, I got wet to the wrist, even as Irina drew her own hand out dry and without a drop. She shook her head. “I can’t bring you through with me.” As if I had stopped existing in the real world at all, as if the Staryk king had ripped me out of it by the roots.
“I’ll need to persuadehimto bring me over,” I said grimly: just as he’d told me. I didn’t care to be on this side of the water when and if my husband was successfully introduced to his untimely end. I didn’t think the rest of the Staryk would accept me as queen in his stead, at least not until I’d learned to make endless winters myself and pop up snow-trees out of the earth or whatever else he’d demanded.
We finished our planning quickly: there wasn’t muchtoplan, only a time and place, and all the rest just a desperate lunge at the only hope either one of us had. “The demon can’t come during the day,” Irina said. “He only appears at night. I don’t know why, but if he could, he’d surely have tried to take me before now: he had me alone today, or close enough.” She paused and added, thoughtfully, “When the tsar’s mother was condemned for sorcery, they took her and burned her all in one day, before the sun set.”
“At night, then.” I was silent, thinking what excuse I could give a Staryk king that he’d accept, for why I wanted him to take me back. “Could you persuade the tsar to go back to Vysnia?” I asked slowly. “In three days’ time?”
“If I can persuade him to do anything at all but kill me,” she said.
When we were done, Irina went back inside to her nurse, and I walked back to the sleigh. Shofer asked no questions; he was too eager to be gone. I sat unseeing for the whole drive back, my head running in circles and my stomach churning and hot with gall.
Of course I was terrified. Of trying, of failing, of success. It felt like murder—no, I wouldn’t lie to myself; itwasmurder, if it worked. But after all, the Staryk seemed to think it perfectly reasonable to murderme,and I hadn’t made him any promises, either; I wasn’t sure I was even really married. He’d given me a crown, but there certainly hadn’t been a marriage contract, and we hadn’t known each other. I’d ask a rabbi, if I ever had the chance to talk to one again. But married or not, I was reasonably sure that the rabbis would tell me that I might justly take Judith for my model, and take off the Staryk’s head if he gave me the opportunity. He was the enemy of my people, not just me alone. But that only left me the enormous difficulty of doing it.
Shofer stopped the sleigh at the foot of the steep walkway to my chambers: Tsop was sitting on a low stone there, as if she’d been all day waiting for me to come back—anxiously, judging by the look of relief that crossed her face when she saw me. I climbed out stiffly: it had been a long time driving, and my whole body was sore. Tsop led me back up to my room at a pace quick enough to make me out of breath, and flinched back and forth with visible impatience when she had to pause. She kept looking downwards, and I followed the line of her gaze to the grove of trees: the white blooms were all closing softly, as if that was what marked the night coming on. I suppose the king would have been upset if I hadn’t been home in time for him to deliver his three answers. Then it occurred to me he might feel obligated to provide marital services after all, if he missed his nightly chance, so I quickened my steps as much as I could.
He was waiting in my chamber with his arms folded and anger bright in his face, light gleaming along the edges of his cheekbones and in his eyes.“Ask,”he bit out, the instant I came in: the sun was halfway down in the mirror he’d given me.
“Who lives in the house on the edge of the night?” I said. There hadn’t been much choice about it, but I hoped I hadn’t left Magreta there to be devoured by someone coming back later.
“No one,” he said instantly. “Ask.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and Tsop, who’d been bowing her way out of the room, startled like a horse that had been struck with a whip out of nowhere. The Staryk’s eyes widened with shock, and his fists closed; he took a step towards me, as if he meant tohitme. “There was porridge in the oven!” I blurted out in an instinctive alarm.
He stopped short. His lips pressed together hard, and then after a moment he said,“that I know of,”finishing off his sentence. “Ask.”
I almost did ask again. He wasshimmeringwith anger, a faint iridescence shifting back and forth across his skin, and I couldn’t help thinking of Shofer picking up Magreta like she was a sack of wool and not a person, of Tsop and Flek easily turning over the chest full of silver; if any ordinary Staryk could do that, what couldhedo to me? I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger. For a moment I was back in the snow with Oleg coming at me, his face contorted and his big fists clenched. I wanted to scramble away, to ask for mercy, fear running hot all along my spine.
But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones. The Staryk was glaring at me, unearthly and terrifying. But what was the use of being afraid of him? For all his magic and all his strength, he couldn’t kill me any more thoroughly than Oleg would have, crushing the breath from my throat in the snow. And if I made him angry enough to do it, he wouldn’t hold back for all the pleading in the world, any more than Oleg would have stopped because I’d begged for mercy in the woods. I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time; like Scheherazade, humbly asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night. And I knew perfectly well even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.
