I didn’t like seeing it, that enormous dark expanse draped with its white doilies of snow; I didn’t like seeing where Vysnia should have been and wasn’t, and the mortal road going back to my own village from it. Had they missed me, back at home? Or had I simply slipped out of their minds, the way the Staryk had gone out of mine whenever I wasn’t looking at him? Would my mother forget why I hadn’t come home yet, or forget me, forget she had ever had a daughter, who made too much money and bragged of it and so got herself stolen away by a king?
The walls of the chamber were hung with filmy silken hangings that had a shimmer of silver, and there was no comforting hearth, but at regular intervals great stands of icy crystals reared up higher than my head, capturing light and reflecting it inside themselves. There hadn’t been any feasting below, but there was a small table of white stone set and waiting for us, and a pair of goblets already poured, silver and carved, one with a stag and one with a hind. I picked that one up, but before I could drink, the Staryk king turned and took the goblet from my hand and flung it against the wall in a noisy clamor, so hard the metal dented where it rolled away. The wine spilled in a wide puddle across the floor, and where the dregs came dribbling out there was a strange white residue foaming, from something put into the glass.
I stared at it. “You were going to poison me!”
“Of course I was going to poison you!” he said savagely. “Bad enough that I’ve had to marry you, but to submit myself to—” He threw a look of loathing across the room, where I realized now the filmy hangings concealed a kind of bower, a sleeping-place.
“You didn’t have to marry me in the first place!” I said, for the moment almost more bewildered than afraid, but he made another sharp irritated gesture of contempt, as if I were only scraping a place already raw. So honor dictated that he had to marry me, because he’d promised he would, but it wouldn’t stop him murdering me right after? He hadn’t made me any vows of any kind, after all; he’d only said I was his queen, and stuck a crown on my head, no promise made to cherish or protect me.
And then he’d brought me up here to murder me, and he’d only spared me because— Slowly I went and picked up the goblet from the floor. I called back the feeling of the crown changing beneath my hands, the warming glow, and where I squeezed my hand around the stem, gold went spilling out through the silver. I turned to him with it already changed wholly in my hands, and he stared at it, bleak as if I’d shown him his doom instead of a cup of gold. He said harshly, “I do not need a further reminder. You will have your rights of me,” and he reached up and flung off his white fur cloak over the chair. He unfastened his cuffs after, and the throat of his shirt; plainly he meant to undress at once, and—
I nearly said he didn’t have to, but I realized in rising alarm that it wouldn’t be any use: he’d already married me and crowned me because he owed it, no matter that I’d tried to refuse, and though he would gladly have fed me poison, he wouldn’t cheat me. Our marriage entitled me to the pleasures of the wedding-bed, so I was getting them, whether I wanted them or not. It was as though I’d made a wish to some bad fairy for a customer who’d always pay his debts exactly on time.
“But why do you want gold so much?” I asked him desperately. “You have silver and jewels and a mountain of diamond. Is it really worth it to you?” He ignored me as entirely as he had in the sleigh: I was only something to be endured. He had what seemed fifty silver buttons to unfasten, but the last ones were slipping quickly through his fingers. Watching them go, I blurted in a final frantic attempt, “What will you give me in exchange for my rights?”
He turned instantly towards me, his shirt hanging nearly open over his bare chest, the skin revealed as milk-pale as the marble floors in the duke’s palace. “A box of jewels from my hoard.”
Relief almost had me agree instantly, but I made myself take three deep breaths to consider, the way I did when someone made me an offer in the market that I wanted very much to accept. The Staryk was watching me with narrow eyes, and he wasn’t stupid; though he didn’t want to bed me, he knew I didn’t want to bed him, either. He’d make me a low offer, one that would cost him nothing, and see if I took it quick.
Of course, I still wanted to accept—now I couldn’t stop seeing the bed behind those hangings, and I was sure he’d be cruel; by accident and haste to be done, even if not deliberately. But I made myself think of what my grandfather would have said to me: better to make no bargain than a bad one, and be thought of forever as an easy mark. I steeled myself against the churning in my stomach and said, “I can make gold from silver. You can’t pay me in treasure.”
He frowned, but there wasn’t an explosion. “What will you have, then? And think carefully before you ask too much,” he added, a cold warning.
I carefully let out the breath I’d been holding. Of course now I had a new difficulty: I hadn’t wanted to be taken advantage of, but now I also didn’t want to ask too much, and how could I know what he would and wouldn’t consider so? Besides, I knew he wouldn’t let me go, and now I knew he wouldn’t kill me, either, and there wasn’t much else that I could think of that I wanted from him. Except answers, I realized. So I said, “Each night, in exchange for my rights, I will ask you five questions, and you will answer them, no matter how foolish they may seem to you.”
“One question,” he said, “and you may never ask my name.”
“Three,” I said, emboldened at once: he hadn’t reacted with outrage, at least. He folded his arms, his eyes narrowing, but he didn’t say no. “Well? Do you need to shake to make a bargain here?”
“No,” he said instantly. “Ask twice more.”
I pressed my lips together in annoyance, and then I said, “Then how do you make a bargain here?” because I could see that was going to be important.
He looked at me narrowly. “An offer made and entered into.”
Of course, I still didn’t want to make a quarrel over it, but I could tell he was testing me again, and at three questions a night, I would be forever getting anything from him in tiny dribs and drabs like these. “That doesn’t truly answer the question for me, and if your answers are useless to me, then tomorrow I won’t ask,” I said pointedly.
He scowled, but amended his answer. “You laid forth your terms and we bargained, until I did not seek to make you amend them further. It was therefore under those terms that you have asked your questions, and I have given answer in return; when you have asked a third, and I have answered it, the bargain will be complete, and I will owe you nothing more. What more is necessary? We have no need of the false trappings of your papers and gestures, and there can be no assurance in those untrustworthy to begin with.”
So he’d closed the bargain by answering my first question as part of it—which seemed something of a cheat to me. But I wasn’t willing to make a quarrel over it. That meant I had only one question left until tomorrow, and a thousand answers I wanted in return. But I asked the most important first. “What would you take to let me go?”
He gave a savage laugh. “What have I not already given to have you? My hand and my crown and my dignities, and you ask me to set a higher price upon you still? No. You shall be content with what you have gotten of me already, in return for your gift, and mortal girl, be warned,” he added, with a cold hiss, his eyes narrowing to blue shadows like a deep crack in a frozen river, a warning of falling through into drowning water below, “it is that gift alone that keeps you in your place. Remember it.”
With that he snatched up his cloak and flung it on, and he swept out of the room and slammed the door behind him.
Chapter 11
I like goats because I know what they will do. If I leave the pen open, or there is a loose post, they get out and run away, eating the crops, and if I don’t watch out for their legs they kick me when I milk them, and if I hit them with a stick they run, but if I hit them very hard they will run always when they see me, unless they are very hungry and I have food. I can understand goats.
I tried to understand Da, because I thought if I did, he would hit me less, but I didn’t ever manage it, and for a long time I didn’t understand Wanda, because she was always telling me to go away, but she would make me food along with everyone else and give me clothing sometimes. Sergey was kind to me most of the time, but sometimes he wasn’t, and I didn’t know why about that, either. Once I thought maybe it was because I had killed our Mama being born, but I asked Sergey and he told me I had been three years old when our Mama died and it was a different baby that killed her.
That day I went to the tree and saw her grave and the baby’s grave, and I told her I was sorry she was dead. She told me she was sorry, too, and to stay out of trouble and listen to Wanda and Sergey, so I did, as much as I could.
But now Wanda and Sergey were gone and Da was dead, and it was just me and the goats and the long walk to town before us. I had only ever gone to town once before, the day the Staryk caught Sergey, and I almost didn’t go then. When I found him, first I thought that no one would help me, but then I thought maybe I was wrong about that the way I was wrong about other things and so I should at least try. Then I wondered who should I ask, Da or Wanda. Da was much closer, he was just in the field working, and Wanda was all the long way away in town and wouldn’t come home for hours and hours, and all that time Sergey would be lying in the woods. But I still wasn’t sure, so I ran and asked Mama, and she told me to go to Wanda, so that’s what I did. And that was the only time I had ever been to town.
I couldn’t go as fast now, leading the goats, but I didn’t really want to go fast anyway. I knew that Wanda liked Panova Mandelstam, and she gave us eggs sometimes, but she was someone else I didn’t know and wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t know what I would do if she told me to go away. I didn’t think I could go back and ask Mama in the tree for help anymore; otherwise she would not have given me the nut, because the nut was for being taken away. So I was afraid to get to town in case Panova Mandelstam didn’t let me stay, and then I would just be in town with four goats and only me and I wouldn’t know what to do.