I put my things away and talked over dinner about the aprons I had sold, and the load of wool that would go with my grandfather’s barge, when the river at last melted: thirty bales, not an enormous amount, but something to make a start with. I was glad to have the brick walls of my grandfather’s house around us, solid and prosaic like our conversation. But that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother in the cozy sitting room, behind us the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and though the noise was loud, my grandmother didn’t lift her head at all. I slowly put aside my own work and got up and went to the door. I pulled it open and flinched back: there was no narrow alleyway behind the Staryk, no brick wall of the house next door, and no hardened slush beneath his feet. He stood outside in a clearing ringed with pale-limbed trees, and behind him the white ice-road ran away into the distance under a grey sky washed with clear cold light, as if one step across the threshold would carry me out of all the world.
There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a small chest made of pale white wood bleached as bone, bound around with thick straps of white leather and hinged and clasped with silver. I knelt and opened it. “Seven days this time I’ll grant you, to return my silver changed for gold,” the Staryk said in his voice like singing, as I stared at the heap of coins inside. Silver enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars, and I didn’t doubt for a moment that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.
The Staryk was looking down at me with his sharp silver eyes, eager and vicious as a hawk. “Did you think mortal roads could run away from me, or mortal walls keep me out?” he said, and I hadn’t really, after all. “Think not to escape from me, girl, for in seven days I will come for you, wherever you have fled.”
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 it was a 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.