The road turned strangely slow once we saw it. The hooves flashed as quickly and the trees glided as steadily past, but the mountain came no nearer, only standing there cutting out the same portion of the sky. We didn’t seem to draw any closer. Beside me the Staryk sat very still, gazing always straight ahead. Then the driver turned his head just a little: he didn’t look around exactly, but he made a small gesture in that direction, and the Staryk’s lips tightened minutely. He made no other sign and said nothing, but the mountain suddenly began to move towards us again, as if only his will had held it off.
We emerged from the forest, and the canopy of white trees ended. The Staryk road fell in with a river running in the opposite direction, coming from the mountain and covered in a thin creaking layer of ice, large floes outlined in dark water, gradually sliding away downstream. As we came closer, I saw that a narrow waterfall from the mountain fed the river, a long thin veil falling down the side of the glass mountain that ended in a pool of blurring mist before the river ran away. I didn’t understand where the waterfall came from: there was no snow resting on those strange crystalline slopes to melt and feed it, no earth that it might have drained from. But we passed close enough for me to feel a fine spray on my cheek before the road climbed up, and the silver gates swung open for us as we came.
The sleigh plunged inside the mountain without slowing, moving like a blink from one light into another, a strange glimmering that seemed caught in the walls, with twisting lines of silver veined through them, and here and there a flash of brilliant crystal in vivid colors. Darker mouths of branching tunnels split away around us, but our road kept climbing upwards and curving, gathering light until it at last emerged into a vast frost-white meadow. I thought at first we’d gone through the entire mountain and come back outside, but we hadn’t: we were inside a great hollow space near the peak, with shining crystal facets high overhead. The pale endless grey of the sky in here was broken up into jeweled brilliance, thin dazzling rainbow lines sketched across it, and in the center of the meadow beneath that diamond roof, a grove of white trees grew.
Even sick with fear and anger and my own helplessness, the impossible wonder of the place snagged at me. I stared up into the mountain’s vault with my eyes stinging from winter glare, and I almost managed to persuade myself I was dreaming. I couldn’t put myself into the picture of it. I could more easily put myself back into my narrow bed in my grandfather’s house, maybe even sick with a fever. But the picture didn’t let me out. The sleigh slowed and stopped instead, as the driver pulled the deer to a halt outside the ring of trees, and a crowd of Staryk faces turned to look at me from beneath the boughs.
After a single moment, my Staryk stood up and climbed out of the sleigh stiffly. He stood there with his back to me, rigid and unmoving, until I slowly and cautiously climbed out behind him. The ground crunched under my foot a little when I stepped down on it, full of silver-grey grass, crisp with white patterns of frost. It felt too real. He still didn’t give me a word of explanation. He said curtly to the driver, “Take it to the storeroom,” jerking his hand towards the chest of gold still sitting on the back of the sleigh. The driver nodded and turned the heads of the deer and drove away, over the meadow and around the grove of trees until he was gone out of sight. Then the Staryk lord turned and set off instantly into the grove of trees, and I had to scurry to keep up with his long strides.
The white trees of the grove were planted in widening rings, and within those rings, the other Staryk had arranged themselves by rank, or at least by splendor. The ones in the outermost rings, the most crowded, wore grey clothes and touches of silver; a few jewels in deep colors made their appearance in the next rings. As the circles grew smaller, the jewels and the clothes grew steadily lighter, and the ones in the smallest circles dazzled with jewels of palest pink and yellow and cloudy white, their clothing all in white and palest grey.
But only as we walked through the very narrowest circle did I catch even small gleams of gold, and even then, only an edge of gilding upon a cloak clasp or a silver ring, as if it was nearly as rare here as Staryk silver in my own world. Among them all, only my Staryk wore clothing all in white, and clear jewels, and there was a solid band of gold around the base of his silver crown. He led me past all of them without stopping to a raised mound at the very center of the grove. A great jagged cluster of frozen spars of ice or clear crystals stood there, shining, and the tiny narrow curling of a frozen stream wound around the base and trickled away as a silver line through the trees.
Next to the cluster, a servant stood so very still he might have been carved from ice, his eyes downcast. He was holding a white cushion, and upon it a tall crown made all of silver, strangely familiar to my eyes: Isaac might have used it for a pattern. The Staryk paused when he came to it, looking down at the delicate, fanciful thing, and when he turned out to face the crowd of his people, his own face had also gone deathly still. He didn’t look at me, and his voice was cold. “Behold my lady, your queen,” he said.
I looked out over that glittering sea, those impossible frozen faces staring back at me expressionless with disapproval: they couldn’t put me into this picture, either, and they didn’t want to. There were some smiles in the nearest circles, cruel and familiar: they were the same smiles I’d grown up with all my life, the ones people had worn when they told me the story of the miller’s daughter, the smiles when I’d knocked on their doors the first time. Only this time, they weren’t even smiling at me: I was too small for that. They were smiling at him, a little incredulous, nobles pleased to see their own king brought low and marrying a brown lump of a mortal girl.
He picked up the crown from the cushion at once: moving quickly to get it over with and finish his humiliation. I hardly wanted to be there myself, being smirked at by them all, but I knew what my grandfather would have told me: those faces would smile forever if I let them. I didn’t see how I could ever make them stop. The tall knights with their white cheekbones and icicle beards wore silver swords and daggers at their sides, white bows slung over their shoulders, bows they used to hunt mortal men for pleasure, and I had seen their king steal the living soul out of a man with the touch of his hand. Any one of them could surely have cut me down.
But when the king turned to me, with the crown in his hands and his face cold with discontent, I reached out boldly and took hold of it with him before he could simply plunk it on my head. He glared at me over it, startled at least into some kind of expression, and I glared determination back at him. The old anger was rising in me, but here I didn’t feel cold with it; I felt hot enough for steam to rise from my cheeks, to glow through my palms. Where my hands touched the crown, it began to warm, and all around me the blade-sharp smiles began to melt away as thin lines of gold crept from beneath my fingers and went running through the silver, widening, curling over every fragile twist of lacework, every separate link.
The Staryk king stood unmoving, his mouth a straight line as he watched the silver change, until between our hands the whole crown shone gold as sunrise, strange and vivid beneath that overcast sky. All the crowd sighed together when it was done, a soft whispering noise. He held it in place another moment longer, but then together we put it on my head.
It was far heavier than the silver crown had been; I felt its weight on my neck and in my shoulders, trying to bend me. And I remembered, belatedly, that this was the very power he’d come seeking from me, what he’d wanted me for all along, and now I’d shown them all that I really had it. Surely there was no chance he’d ever let me go now. But I kept my head high and turned back to face all of them. There were no smiles among them now, and the disapproval had gone to wariness. I looked them in their cold faces and I decided I wouldn’t be sorry, all over again.
We didn’t exchange any vows, and there was no feasting and certainly no congratulations. A few cut-glass faces and sidelong eyes glanced at me, but mostly they all just turned and glided away out of the grove from all around us, leaving us there alone at the mound. Even the servant bowed himself away and vanished, and when they were gone, the Staryk king stood there another moment before he turned abruptly and walked away, too, along the glassy polished-mirror of the tiny frozen stream.
I followed him. What else was I to do? As we neared the shining glass wall of that vaulted space, I saw other Staryk stepping into openings, doorways and tunnel mouths, as if they lived within the crystal walls like houses around a meadow. The ice stream widened steadily as we walked alongside it; near the end of the vaulted grove, where we came to the shining wall, the frozen surface of it grew thinner, so I could see water moving deep beneath it, and where it reached the wall, it cracked upon the surface to show moving water beneath before it plunged into a dark tunnel mouth and vanished.
Beside that tunnel mouth a long stairway began, cut into the mountainside. The Staryk king led me up the stairs, a dizzy, leg-aching climb that took us high above the tops of the white trees. When I glanced down by accident—I did my best to avoid it, for fear of tumbling straight off; there was no railing on the stairs—I could see the rings more clearly, and the rest of the meadow spread white around them. I kept my hand on the mountain wall next to me and placed my feet carefully. He had gotten far ahead of me by the time I finally reached the top, but the staircase delivered me to a single large chamber, and he was waiting there with his fists clenched at his sides, his back to me.
It was massively long and the full thickness of the mountain wall: it ended in a thin wall of glass on the other end, perfectly clear, that looked straight out of the mountainside. I went slowly to it and looked far, far down the slope. Below me now, the waterfall was draining directly out of a large fissure in the mountainside, smoky-edged like a glass cracked in a fire. It tumbled down into a misty cloud that was all I could see from above, the half-frozen river emerging to run away into the dark forest, the fir-green trees dusted with white. I couldn’t see the road of white trees anywhere. We had only driven a few hours, but there was no sign of Vysnia in the distance, no sign of any mortal village at all. Only the endless winter forest stretching away in all directions.