But Wanda had been right, because when I did finally reach the house, Panova Mandelstam came out right away and said, “Stepon, why are you here?” as if she knew who I was, even though I had only come to the house one time, and I had never talked to her at all, only Wanda. I wondered if maybe she was a witch. “Is Sergey sick? He couldn’t come tonight? But why do you have the goats?”
She was saying so many things and asking so many questions I didn’t know which one to answer first. “Will you let me stay?” I said instead, desperately, because I couldn’t help wanting to know that, first. I thought she could ask me all her questions afterwards. “And the goats?”
She stopped talking and looked at me and then she said, “Yes. Put them in the yard, and come inside and have some tea.”
I did what Panova Mandelstam told me, and when I went inside she gave me a cup of hot tea that was much better than any tea we ever had at home, and she gave me some bread with butter and when I ate it all she gave me another piece and when I ate all of that she gave me another with honey. My stomach was so full I could feel it with my hand.
Panov Mandelstam came in while I was eating. I was a little worried at first because I thought by then that maybe everything was all right because Panova Mandelstam was a mother. I didn’t really understand what mothers were, because mine was in a tree, but I knew they were very good things and you were very angry and sad if you lost them, because Wanda was and Sergey was too, and anyway, whenever Da came into our house I always wanted to run away, like the goats. But it was not like when Da came into the house when Panov Mandelstam came in: it did not get noisy. He only looked at me and then he went to Panova Mandelstam and said to her very softly as if he didn’t want me to hear, “Did Wanda come with him?”
She shook her head. “He brought his goats. What is it, Josef? Has there been trouble?”
He nodded and put his head closer to hers so I couldn’t hear the words he was whispering, but I didn’t need to, because of course I knew what the trouble was already, it was Wanda and Sergey going away, because Da was dead in our house. Panova Mandelstam snatched up her apron and covered her mouth as he told her, and then she said fiercely, “I don’t believe it! Not for a minute. Not our Wanda! That Kajus is as good as a thief, he always was. Making trouble for that poor girl—” Panov Mandelstam was hushing her, but she turned and said to me, “Stepon, they are saying terrible things about Wanda and your brother Sergey in town. They say that—they killed your father.”
“They did,” I said, and they both stared at me. They looked at each other, and then Panov Mandelstam sat down next to me at the table and said to me quietly, the way I talked to a goat when it was scared, “Stepon, will you tell us what happened?”
I was worried when I thought about having to tell him all of it, all the words it would take, because I was not good at talking. “It will take a long time for me to say it,” I said. But he only nodded, so I did my best, and they didn’t say anything to interrupt me, even though I did take a long time. Panova Mandelstam also sat down after a little while, her hands still over her mouth.
When I was finished they still didn’t say anything for a while, and then Panov Mandelstam said, “Thank you for telling us everything, Stepon. I am very glad Wanda sent you to us. You will have a home with us as long as you want it.”
“What if I want to stay forever?” I said, to make sure.
“Then you have a home with us as long as we have one ourselves,” he said. Panova Mandelstam was crying, next to me, but she wiped her eyes and then she got up and gave me some more bread and tea.
* * *
It was a strange way to spend my first night as tsarina. I made a bed of my white furs in front of the mirror and slept right there upon them, so I could have snatched them in my arms and leapt through the glass in moments. I only slept fitfully, raising my head every little while to listen. But no one came in the night. I woke finally with the sky going pale and the morning bells ringing, and after a moment, I stood up and took the chair out from under the doorknob, and then I tapped on the door until the yawning guards outside opened it—two different men than the guards who had brought me upstairs the night before. I wondered what had happened to those men. Nothing good, I imagined, if Mirnatius really thought I had bribed them.
“I must go to morning prayers,” I told the new guards, with as much certainty as I could put into the words: I must go. “Will you show me the way? I don’t know the house.”
With a demon wanting to devour me, I was feeling inclined to be devout, and there was no one to tell the guards that I was less so at home, so they didn’t think anything of it. They took me down to the small church, and I knelt there with my head bowed, letting my lips move through the prayers. There weren’t many people, only the priest and a few older women of the household who looked at me approvingly, which might be useful. The unseasonable cold blew in through the wooden walls. But I didn’t mind it, a pale echo of the cold of that winter kingdom on the other side of the mirror, my refuge. It helped me to be cold, to think.
There was a statue standing in a niche next to me of Saint Sophia, bound in chains with her eyes turned up to heaven. A pagan tsar had bound her in those chains and cut off her head for preaching, but she’d won the war, if not the battle, and now the chains were kept with the sacred relics in the cathedral in Koron, and brought out when they crowned the tsars and on other special occasions. They’d been used when the late tsarina, Mirnatius’s mother, had been caught trying to kill his older brother with sorcery; and even if she’d had a demon familiar of her own, they had bound her long enough to burn her at the stake.
So Mirnatius had good cause not to display his powers in front of a crowd. He hadn’t simply leapt on me in the middle of the dining room, or in the sleigh for that matter, and he didn’t want the inconvenience of persuading everyone that I’d run away. I tried to take heart from that, but it was precious little to take heart from. I could try to draw borders around his power, but they were terrifyingly wide: he was my husband, and he was the tsar, and he was a sorcerer with a demon of flame, a demon that wanted me. And the only power I had was to flee into a world of ice and die in a slightly less gruesome way.
But I couldn’t stay in the church forever. The service had ended. I had to get up and go with the old women back into the house, and when we came into the hall for breakfast, Mirnatius was there, saying to the duke’s wife, “Has anyone seen my beloved wife this morning?” as if he had no idea whatever might have happened to me, and there was a hard intent look in his eyes where they fixed upon her, as if he wanted to push something into her head.
The women were a gaggle around me, and there were servants laying out breakfast, and Duke Azuolas himself coming in; I took comfort from their presence and said clearly, across the room, “I was at prayers, my lord.”
Mirnatius nearly leapt out of his skin and whirled round to stare at me as if I were a ghost, or a demon myself. “Where did you go last night!” he blurted out, even in front of our witnesses.
But what he didn’t do was summon up his demon, or leap upon me and drag me away screaming, and I let out a breath of relief silently between my lips and lowered my eyes demurely. “I slept very well after you left, my lord,” I said. “I hope you did as well.”
He was staring me up and down, and then at the guards on either side of me, who were now grinning a little at him in congratulatory form, quite obviously unsuspecting; everyone around us hid their smiles at my newlywed enthusiasm. By the time my husband’s eyes returned to my face, he had gone wary. The wreck he had made of my bedroom had included my bridal chest, and all my gowns, and his magic had repaired all of them as well. I could tell from his stare when he recognized the work of his own imagination in the elaborate vining patterns of my lace overdress. He plainly had no idea what to make of it.
I steeled myself and crossed the room to take his arm. “I am quite hungry,” I added, as if I did not notice him stiffening a little bit away from me. “Shall we go in to break our fast?”
I wasn’t lying. He hadn’t let me make much of a wedding dinner, and the cold had left me ravenous. At the table, I ate enough for two of myself, while my husband only picked at his food and occasionally stared at me with narrowed eyes, as if to make certain I was really there. “I realize, my dear, that in my passion I was a little hasty in bringing you away from your father’s house,” he said to me finally. “You must feel lonely without anyone of your household with you.”
I didn’t look up at him, but I said in limpid tones, “Beloved husband, I can want for no companion now that I have you at my side, but I confess I do miss my dear old nurse, who has been with me since my mother died.”
He opened his mouth to tell me he was sending for her, and then he paused. “Well,” he said, even more warily, “when we are settled back in Koron, we will send for her—by and by,” so I had won Magreta that much safety, at least, by making him think that I wanted her. I thanked him very sincerely.
Heavy snow had fallen overnight, keeping us in the house another day, and I took every chance I could to escape my husband’s company the rest of the day: my old catechist would have been shocked at what a difference marriage had made in my religious habits. The duke’s wife looked a little surprised when I asked to go make prayers again after breakfast, but I confided in her that my mother had died in childbirth, and I was asking the Holy Mother’s intercession for me, and then she approved of my solid understanding of my duty.
No one liked, of course, that the tsar didn’t have any sign of an heir yet, especially when he was so delicate-looking. At my father’s table, his guests would shake their heads and say that he should have been married long ago. We could not afford a struggle over succession. If we could, there would already have been one, seven years ago, when the old tsar and his eldest died and left only a thirteen-year-old boy for heir, as suspiciously beautiful as a flower, and all the great archdukes and princes eyeing one another like lions over his head.