Page 31 of Spinning Silver
I wouldn’t make that bargain. I was going to try and kill him, even if I was almost certain to fail, and I wouldn’t be afraid of him now, either. I straightened my shoulders and looked him in his glittering eyes. “I’d say that I’m owed an educated guess if you can make one. If you knew who built it, for instance.”
“Owed?”he spat. Out of the corner of my eye, Tsop had very slowly and carefully been maneuvering herself farther back by inches, and now she eased the rest of the way out of the chamber.“Owed?”
In a sudden lurch he was standing right before me, as if he’d moved so quickly my eyes couldn’t see him do it; he put his hand on my throat, his thumb in the hollow beneath my chin, pushing it up so I still looked him in the face, my neck bent back. “And if I say all Ioweyou is two answers more?” he said softly, glittering down at me.
“You can say what you like,” I said without yielding, my voice pressed up against the skin of my throat, forcing its way through.
“One more time I will ask: are youcertain?” he hissed.
There was a deep ominous warning in his voice, as if I was pushing him to a hard limit. But I’d already made the choice. I’d made it the winter before last, sitting at my mother’s bedside, hearing her cough away her life. I’d made it standing in a hundred half-frozen doorways, demanding what I was owed. I swallowed the sharp taste of bile back down my throat. “Yes,” I said, as cold as any lord of winter could have been.
He gave a snarl of rage and whirled away from me. He stalked to the edge of the chamber and stood there with his back to me and his fists clenched. “Youdare,” he said to the wall, not turning to look at me. “Youdareset yourself against me, to make a pretense of being my equal—”
“Youdid that, when you put a crown on my head!” I said. My hands wanted to shake, with triumph or anger or both at once. I held them clenched tight. “I am not your subject or your servant, and if you want a cowering mouse for a wife, go find someoneelsewho can turn silver to gold for you.”
He gave a hiss of frustration and displeasure, and stood there a moment longer just breathing in furious heaves, his shoulders rising and falling. But then he said, “A mighty witch grew tired of mortals asking her for favors and built for herself a house on the border of the sunlit world, that they might not find her at home when she did not desire company. But she went away long ago and has not returned, for I would know if so great a power came back into my realm.”
I was breathing just as hard, still enraged, and it didn’t make sense to me at first as victory, as an answer to my question; it felt as though it came out of nowhere. “What islong ago?” I said, too hastily.
“Do you think I care for the mayfly moments with which you count the passage of your lives in the sunlit world, save when I must?” he said. “Mortal children born then have long since died, and their children’s children now are old, that is all I can say. Askonce more.”
A good answer as far as it went: at least I could hope that no monstrously powerful witch was going to appear and decide to make Magreta her dinner in place of the porridge she’d eaten. I would have liked to know a bit more about where the food might have come from, and who had laid the fire, but I couldn’t afford to ask; I had a more pressing question. “I promised my cousin that I would dance at her wedding,” I said. “And she will be married in three days’ time.”
I thought I’d have to go on from there, but he’d already turned round to look at me, a gleam coming into his eye: I suppose as seriously as they took their given word here, he knew at once that he had me over a barrel. Which he did, if not quite the way he thought he did. “Then it seems you must ask my aid,” he said softly, with visible glee. “And hope that I don’t refuse it.”
“Well, you won’t do it to help me,” I said, and he gave a small snort, amused. “And you’ve made clear there’s only one thing I’m good for in your eyes. So how much gold do you want me to make, in exchange for escorting me to Basia’s wedding?”
He scowled with a hint of regret, as if he’d looked forward to my prostrating myself and begging for his help, but he was practical enough not to let that stop him. “I have three storerooms of silver,” he said, “each larger than the last, and you shall turn every coin therein to gold, ere I take you thence: and you must work swiftly, for if you have not finished the work in time, neither shall I convey you, and you will be foresworn.” He finished in triumph, as if he were threatening me with an axe over my head, which maybe he was; I had the bad suspicion that if I was foresworn and he knew it, he would consider that a mortal crime.
“Fine,” I said.
He jerked and stared at me in sudden dismay.“What?”
“Fine!” I said. “You just demanded—”
“Andnow,for the first time, you make no effort to negotiate—” He pulled himself up short, his face glitter-flushed again, and I had a deeply sinking feeling even as he said, bitterly, “We are agreed. And may you complete as much of your task as you can.”
“Exactly how big are these storerooms?” I demanded, but he was already going out of the room, without a pause.
I didn’t pause, either. I rang my bell urgently, and Tsop came timidly back inside, darting her eyes over me to see if I’d been, I don’t know, strangled or beaten or otherwise chastised for my dreadful temerity. “There are three storerooms of silver in the palace,” I said. “I need you to take me to them.”
“Now?” she said doubtfully.
“Now,” I said.
Chapter 14
I watched Miryem leave, and then I went back inside. Magra was huddled by the oven, wrapped in all her things and the cloaks and the fur. I asked her to lie down, but she shook her head: there was nothing on the cot but a pile of straw, and she said it was too hard for her old bones. “Sleep, dushenka,” she said. She had already found some work for her hands, a spindle and a ball of wool; she never liked to be idle. “Lie down and rest, and I will sing to you.”
The cot was narrow and stiff and uncomfortable, but I hadn’t slept well since my wedding night, and my bones weren’t old. With Magreta’s familiar creaky voice in my ears, I fell deeply asleep. It was still dark outside the little hut when I sat up again, but I felt too much refreshed to have woken in the middle of the night. Magra was drowsing half asleep in the chair. I put on my fur coat and went outside.
The shading line between night and twilight hadn’t moved from where it crossed the garden. The woods stood thick and silent on the other side of the wall, without even any signs of living things; I missed the sounds of birds and animals in the heavy hush. I went around the back to look into the big washtub. Miryem had helped me push it up against the back of the oven, on the outside of the house, and it hadn’t frozen all the way through. I broke the crust with a stick, and there in the dark water I saw sunlight in the tsar’s bedroom, gleaming on all the expanses of gilt. Mirnatius was awake and dressed and pacing the room, limping a little as if he was sore. Servants with their heads bent and shoulders hunched were hurrying to lay out his breakfast. I didn’t know what they imagined had become of me.
I went back inside and kissed Magra’s cheek: she was still spinning by the fire. “Irinushka, you shouldn’t go back,” she said tremulously, clinging to my hands. “It’s too dangerous, this plan you’ve made. That unholy thing wants to devour your soul.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” I said.
“Then wait until he isn’t watching,” Magra urged. “Wait and we’ll go back and run away.”
