A few of them had even come to Vysnia over the years, courting my father’s support, and I had sat silent at my father’s table with my eyes on my plate, listening to his answers. They never spoke straight out, and he never answered so, but he would hand them a platter full of fresh-baked pastries made with the tart, small-berried jam that came from Svetia, and say idly, “We see a great many merchants from Svetia in the markets here. They always complain of the tariffs,” by which he meant the king of Svetia had a great fleet and a hungry eye on our northern port. Or he would say, “I hear that the Khan’s third son sacked Riodna last month, in the east,” by which he meant that the Great Khan had seven sons eager for plunder, all of them proven warriors with large bands of raiders at their command.
Just last year we had gone on a visit ourselves to Prince Ulrich. In the evenings, after Vassilia and her whispering friends left the table, darting pleased glances at me because I wasn’t threatening to be beautiful, I would stay sitting beside my father. Ulrich, whose daughter was not yet married to the tsar even though she should have been, talked of the rising price of salt, which made him rich, and how well his young knights were coming along in their horsemanship. On the last night of our visit, my father reached out his arm across the table to take some hazelnuts from the bowl, and remarked absently, “The Staryk burned a monastery a day’s ride from Vysnia this winter,” as he cracked them open and picked out the nutmeats and left the hollow shells scattered on his plate.
All those lords had understood his meaning: that even victory, which was unlikely to come swiftly, would leave them easy prey for the larger beasts outside our borders, or the enemy within. So far, all of them had taken that advice to heart. Only Archduke Dmitir could maybe have seized the throne without provoking a wider struggle: he had been the ruler of the Eastern Marches and five cities, with a host of Tatar horsemen in his service. But even he had cautiously settled for making himself regent, until Mirnatius was old enough to marry off to his daughter.
Naturally, as soon as an heir had been produced, the delicate tsar would have suffered a regrettable illness, and Dmitir would have gone on being regent with his grandson on the throne. But instead, three days before the wedding, he had died unexpectedly of a blistering fever—a healthy dose of dark magic, I now presumed, and the deaths of the old tsar and his son seemed remarkably convenient as well—and after the funeral, Mirnatius had announced he was too overcome with grief for his beloved regent to contemplate marriage anytime soon. The princess had vanished into a convent and never been heard from again, and the five cities had been given to five different cousins.
Since then, Mirnatius had been ruling in his own right, and no one had yet taken the risk of overthrowing him. But still great lords came to my father’s table, or sent him their invitations, and more frequently of late. It had been four years since the abortive marriage, and Mirnatius hadn’t married Vassilia or anyone else, and whispers said his bed was cold. I’d once heard an indiscreet baron visiting from Koron complain, late and drunk, that there wouldn’t be bastards, even, the way things were going. Of course the lords didn’t know the tsar had a demon to be consulted in the process. But they did know that if Mirnatius wasn’t going to produce an heir, the struggle over succession would happen sooner or later. And there were enough of them willing to have it be sooner.
My father had more than one reason for wanting to see the tsar married: otherwise he would soon have to make a decision where to cast his lot, with all the risk it would entail. He wasn’t the only lord, either, who saw a war on the horizon with very little chance of gain. Duke Azuolas himself was in very much the same position: not strong enough to aim for the throne himself, and too strong to be allowed to sit the struggle out. So no one in his household objected when I made my prayers over and over, and all the women were glad to help me when afterwards I asked them what the best food was to encourage fertility. By the end of the day I had a large basket full of the things that everyone had encouraged me to take from the kitchens. “You need to be fatter, dushenka,” the duke’s mother said, patting my cheek: her selections alone filled half the basket.
It waited next to the mirror as I put my silver on for dinner. I had a crowd of ladies trailing me, and when I put on my crown, I took it off again and complained to them that I had a headache, and that perhaps instead of coming down, I would stay quietly in my room, to be better rested when my husband joined me. They nodded approvingly and went away, and quickly I pulled on my three woolen dresses and my furs and put the crown back on my head. Then I took my basket and stepped through the mirror.
Just in time: Mirnatius had shot upstairs as soon as he’d been told I wasn’t coming down. He had meant not to take his eyes off me from dinner until he’d dragged me into the bedroom with his own hands, I imagine. But I slipped through with my basket just as his key rattled in the lock, and I was safely sitting at the edge of the water with my meal of oysters and brown peasant bread and cherries when he burst through the door and found me gone again.
He looked around the empty room and threw his arms up in frustration. He didn’t go into a howling fit this time, although he went around pushing aside covers and curtains and looking beneath the bed for a few minutes; then he went and stood in the middle of the room staring out the window at the setting sun with his jaw and fists clenched. The last ray of orange sunlight slid off his face, and suddenly his features twisted all at once into wild distorted fury, thwarted rage, and I thought he might smash the bedchamber again.
But he gasped out in a strangled voice, “Will you give me the power to repair it all over again?” He shut his eyes tight and shuddered all over, then abruptly the fire roared up into a loud angry crackling, and Mirnatius sank to his knees and fell forward onto his hands on the floor. He held himself shakily there, gasping, with his head hanging down, and then he, grimacing, pushed himself back up onto his heels and said to the fire, “Is this why you wanted her? She’s a witch?”
The fire hissed, “No! She is like the ones of winter, cold and sweet; like a well, she runs so deep. I will drink a long time before I come to the end of her…I want her! Find her!”
“What do you expect me to do?” Mirnatius demanded. “How is she disappearing if she’s not a witch? The men on the door weren’t bribed, either last night or now. There’s no other way out of here—or in again, for that matter.”
The fire crackled muttering to itself. “I do not know, I cannot see,” it hissed. “The old woman, did you get her for me?”
“No,” the tsar said after a moment, warily. “Irina wanted me to send for her. What if she’s the one who taught her all these clever tricks?”
“Do it!” the fire said. “Bring her! And if Irina still is fled, I will drink the old woman in her stead…but oh, I do not want her! She is old, she is frail, she will go so quick! I want Irina!”
Mirnatius scowled. “And then you’ll leave me to explain how my wife and her old nurse both died mysteriously within a day of each other? Will you see reason? I can’t make everyone just forget them!”
Then he jerked back, terrified, as the fire came roaring out of the hearth. A face took horrible shape out of it, hollow mouth and eye sockets, and it swelled across the room and thrust itself towards him. “I want her!” it shrieked in his face, and then became a solid club of flame that lashed him violently from side to side like some monstrous big cat batting around a mouse before it withdrew again and sank back into the burning logs, leaving the tsar flung to the ground with his clothes smoking and charred away where the fire had touched him.
The fire died down slowly, hissing and muttering. Mirnatius lay there huddled and still, an arm over his head, curled protectively around himself. When at last the fire fell into dull silent embers, and he moved, it was slowly, wincingly, like someone badly beaten. But he was still perfectly beautiful: the ruins of his clothes crumbled off his skin into ash and rag-scraps as he stood up, and there wasn’t a single mark upon him. The demon liked to preserve appearances all around, I suppose. He swayed with weakness, though, and after a moment looking at the door, he crawled instead into the bed—my bed—and fell almost at once into sleep.
On the bank of the river, I closed my hands tight around each other. My body wasn’t as cold as I had been the night before, thanks to my layers of dresses and the basket of food. I’d worried it would all freeze almost at once, but instead with every bite a memory came to me like a gentle touch on the mind of the woman giving it to me, all their whispered advice and encouragement, and each taste warmed me all the way through. But it couldn’t touch the ice of fear in my belly. Tomorrow Mirnatius would send for Magreta, no matter what clever things I said at the breakfast table, and I still didn’t have a way to save her, or myself.
* * *
For a long time after the Staryk king left me, I paced my new bedchamber in anger and in fear. The dented golden cup stood on the table, taunting me with the reminder he’d given me unnecessarily. This was what my life was to be from now on: trapped among these ice-hearted people, filling their king’s treasure-chests with gold. And if I ever refused him—there would be another cup of poison for me soon enough, surely.
I slept uneasily behind the fine silken curtains that whispered eerily when they rustled against one another, and in the morning I realized I hadn’t asked the most important question after all: I didn’t know how to get out of my room. The walls had no sign of any door at all. I was sure I’d come in opposite the wall of glass, and that he’d left the same way, but I ran my hands over every scrap of the surface and couldn’t find a trace of any opening. I had no way to get anything to eat or drink, and no one came to me.
The only cold comfort I had was that he lusted after gold enough to marry me for it, so he wouldn’t leave me here to starve to death; and I’d stipulated him answering my questions every night, but he might still leave me to be uncomfortable for a long time. And when would it be night? I paced the room in bursts until I grew tired, and then I went and sat by the wall of glass and stared out at the endless forest, waiting, but hours passed, or I thought they did, and the light outside never changed. Only a little snow was still drifting down; the blanket laid over the pines had grown thicker overnight.