But the truth was, I wanted the ring. I wanted to put it on my hand, and feel the cool silver against my skin, mine. I stood up and went with Magreta into my bedroom, to put on my dress. She tied on my sleeves and pulled through the big clouds of silk chemise beneath, and once I was dressed, I went back to the sitting room and called in the steward. The ring, which my father had worn on his big thick sword-hardened knuckle, slid easily to the base of my right thumb, and fit there snugly. I held my hand out before me, the cold silver shining, and the chatter of the women sitting around me fell off, or perhaps my own hearing was muted. Outside the sun was sinking quickly, and the world going to blue and grey.
Chapter 9
Wednesday night in my grandfather’s house, my aunts with their families all came to dinner, everyone gathered round the table in a noisy crowd. My cousin Basia was there, of course, and as we all carried dishes to the table, she caught me aside and hugged me tight and whispered, “It’s all agreed! Thank you, Miryem, thank you, thank you,” in my ear, and kissed my cheek, before she went back to the kitchen. And oh, why shouldn’t Basia have been happy? But I would have preferred it if she’d slapped me across the face, and laughed at me, so I could hate her. I didn’t want to be the good fairy in her story, scattering blessings on her hearth. Where did all those fairies come from, and how rich could they be in joy to spend their days flitting around to more-or-less deserving girls and bestowing wishes on them? The lonely old woman next door who died unlamented and left an empty house to rob, with a flock of chickens and a linen chest full of dresses to make over: that’s the only kind of fairy godmother I believed in. How dare Basia thank me for it, when I didn’t want to give her a thing?
At the table, I cut a big slice of the cheesecake for myself and ate it without talking, rude and starved and angry, trying to tell myself I would be glad to go away from them all and be a queen among the Staryk. I wanted to make myself cold enough to want it. But I was too much my father’s daughter. I wanted to hug Basia and rejoice with her; I wanted to run home to my mother and father and beg them to save me. The cheesecake was familiar and sweet and soft down my tight throat, and when I finished, I slipped away and went up to my grandmother’s bedroom and pressed water from the basin over my face. I held the cloth against it and breathed through the linen for a while.
Then there was a big joyful noise coming from downstairs, and when I went back down, Isaac had come with his mother and father to drink a glass of wine with us; Basia’s parents had just announced the betrothal, although everyone in the house already knew, of course. I drank their health and tried to be glad, truly, even while I heard Isaac telling my grandfather his plans, standing before him holding Basia’s hand: there was a little house that had just come for sale two doors down the street from his parents; he’d buy it outright, with that gold I’d brought to him, and in a week—a week!—they’d be married, and just so quickly as that settled; as quickly as if a magical wand had been waved over their heads.
My grandfather nodded and said since the house was small, a good size for a young family, perhaps they would care to be married from this house instead, a mark of his approval; he liked that they weren’t spending too much of the money on something more grand. My grandmother had already gathered up the two mothers to begin discussing in low voices the messengers to be sent, the people to be invited, as Isaac and Basia came to me together, both of them smiling, and Basia held her hand out to me and said, “Promise us you will be there to dance at our wedding, Miryem! It is the only gift we ask of you.”
I managed to smile back and said that I would. But the candles were burning down, and it was not the only betrothal to be finalized that night. In the midst of their happy noise I began to hear sleigh bells ringing, too high and with a strange tone. They grew louder and louder until they were at the door, heavy stamping hooves up and down, and then a thump of a fist upon the door, knocking. No one else noticed. They kept on talking and laughing and singing, even though their voices seemed to me muffled beneath that enormous echoing sound.
I slowly left them all in the sitting room and walked down the hall. The casket full of gold was still standing in the entry, half hidden beneath the coats and wraps heaped upon the rack; we had all somehow forgotten it. I opened the door, and outside on the white road stood an open sleigh, narrow and sleek and made of pale wood, with four of the deerlike creatures harnessed with white leather, with a driver on the seat and two footmen hanging on behind, all of them bloodless-pale and tall like—my Staryk, I suppose I had to think of him, although they were nothing nearly so grand. They wore their white hair in a single braid, only a few sparkling beads here and there, and their clothes were all in shades of grey.
Their lord was standing on the threshold, and he had come in ceremony: he wore a crown this time, a band of gold and silver around his forehead with points that unfurled like the sharp leaves of holly, with clear jewels set in the center of each one. He wore white leather, and a white cloak trimmed in white fur, more of the clear crystals hanging from the edge like a fringe made of glass. He looked at me from his height with an angry and dissatisfied air, his mouth turned down, as though he didn’t like what he saw. What was there for him to like? I was wearing my own best dress, my sleeves embroidered around the wrists in red and my skirt in the same color, my wool vest and apron patterned in orange, but none of it was extravagant: the clothes of a merchant’s daughter, nothing more, even the small gold buttons on my vest and the collar of black fur only the mark of a little prosperity. Small and dark and wren-colored, and entirely absurd as a wife for him; I blurted before he even spoke, “You can’t want to marry me. What will anyone think?”
His mouth grew even more displeased and his eyes knived. “What I have promised, I will do,” he hissed at me, “though all the world will end for it. Have you my silver changed for gold?”
He didn’t even sound malicious this time, as though he’d given up hope of my failing. I bent down and seized the lid of the casket and threw it open where it stood amid the coats and woolen wraps; I could not even have pushed it to his feet by myself. “There!” I said. “Take it, and leave me alone; it’s only nonsense, to marry me when you don’t want to, and I don’t want to. Why didn’t you just promise me a trifle?”
“Only a mortal could speak so of offering false coin, and returning little for much,” he said, contempt dripping, and I glared at him, glad to be angry instead of afraid.
“My account books are clean,” I said, “and I don’t call it a reward to be dragged from my home and my family.”
“Reward?” the Staryk said. “Who are you to me, that I should reward you? You are the one who demanded fair return for a proven gift of high magic; did you think I would degrade myself by pretending to be one of the low, unable to match it? I am the lord of the glass mountain, not some nameless wight, and I leave no debts unpaid. You are thrice proven, thrice true—no matter by what unnatural chance,” he added, sounding unreasonably bitter about it, “—and I shall not prove false myself, whatever the cost.”
He held his hand out to me, and I said in desperation, “I don’t even know your name!”
He glared at me in outrage as enormous as if I had demanded he cut off his own head. “My name? You think to have my name? You shall have my hand, and my crown, and content yourself therewith; how dare you demand still more of me?”
He seized my wrist, burning cold where his gloved fingers brushed me, and then he jerked me through the doorway. The cold faded out of me like a sunrise running across the wide river, even though I stood in that white forest with snow under my soft house boots and not even a shawl around my shoulders. I tried to get free of him. His grip was monstrously strong, but when I flung my whole weight against it, he only let me go. I tumbled into the snow, and scrambled up, turning at the same time, meaning to run.
But there was nowhere to go. There was only the road stretching into the white trees behind me and going on in front of me, and no sight anywhere of my grandfather’s door or the city walls. Only the bone-white casket remained, standing open in front of me. In the cold light of the forest, the gold standing in it shone as though sunlight had been trapped inside every coin, and they might run like melted butter if you picked them up.
The two footmen came past me and closed the lid carefully, almost reverentially. In their faces I saw the same yearning I had seen in the market, people’s eyes caught by the fairy silver. They lifted the casket with equal care, but easily, though my grandfather’s two stout men had only carried it with grunting effort. I turned, following it with my eyes as they carried it to the sleigh, and came back round to my Staryk lord. He flicked a hand at me, peremptorily.
What was I to do? I went to him, graceless in the deep snow, and clambered into the sleigh after him. The only comfort I had was that he held himself rigidly straight and apart from me, as much as he could without shrinking even a finger’s width from the center of the sleigh. “Go,” he said sharply to the driver, and with a quick shake of the harness bells we were off down the wide white road, flying. There was a coverlet of white furs at the foot of the sleigh, and I pulled it up over my knees for the small comfort of soft fur inside my clenching fingers. I didn’t feel the cold at all.
* * *
Magreta and I sat together in my father’s study, waiting to be summoned. I could hear the music from downstairs already, but he meant the evening’s entertainment to go on for a while before I made my entrance, not grand but subtle, coming in quietly to sit at my stepmother’s side. Magreta was still sewing, talking brightly of all the linen goods that were yet necessary to my bride’s chest, except her voice trailed away into silence for a few moments whenever I moved my hand and her eyes caught on the silver ring. When Galina had come to tell me to go wait in the study, even she had paused and looked at me, faintly puzzled.
I didn’t try to sew. I had a book from off my father’s shelf in my lap, a rare pleasure I couldn’t enjoy. I stared down at the painting of the storyteller and the sultan, a thready shadow-creature taking shape out of the smoke of the brazier between her weaving hands, and I couldn’t even reach the end of a sentence. Outside the window I could see the snow still coming. It had begun to fall suddenly late this afternoon, very thick, as if to taunt me by making impossible an already-absurd escape.