I grew ever more hungry and thirsty, until I drank the liquor in his abandoned goblet, which left me light-headed and cold and furious when he finally did appear, through a doorway that hadn’t been there a moment before—and I was sure it wasn’t in the same place as where we’d come in yesterday. There were two servants following him, carrying a substantial chest that jingled as they set it down at my feet. But I put my foot up onto the lid when they would have opened it and folded my arms. “If you’re lucky enough to catch a goose that lays golden eggs,” I bit out, glaring up at the king, “and you’d like them delivered on a regular basis, you’d better see it tended to its satisfaction, if you have any sense: have you?”
The servants both flinched away in alarm, and he stiffened to a jagged looming height, glittering all over with anger of his own: icicles came prickling out of his shoulders like gleaming daggers, and his cheekbones went sharp-faceted as cut stone. But I stiffened my back with anger and kept my chin up, and abruptly he strode past me to the glass wall. He stood there looking out at the forest with his hands clenched at his sides, as if he were mastering his temper, and then he turned and said icily, “Yes—if its demands were reasonable.”
“At the moment, what I demand is dinner,” I snapped. “At your side, served as you are served, as though I were a treasured queen you were overjoyed to marry. As difficult as it may be to stretch your imagination that far.”
He still glittered, but he flicked his hand sharply at the servants; they bowed and quickly left the room, and soon a crowd of them came in; shortly they had laid a banquet on the table that I had to exert myself not to find impressive: silver plates and jewel-clear glass, a snowy linen cloth spread out, two dozen dishes offered, all cold, most of them nothing I could recognize, but to my relief, I could still eat them. Sharp spicy pink fish, slices of a pale white fruit with yellow-green skin, a clear jelly holding tiny squares of something hard and salty, a bowl of something that looked like snow but smelled of roses and tasted sweet. I thought I recognized the dish of green peas, but they were tiny and frozen nearly solid. There was venison, too, raw but sliced so thin that you could eat it anyway, served on blocks of salt.
When we finished, the servants cleared the dishes, and then he picked out two of the women and told them they were to be my attendants. They both looked unhappy with the prospect, and I wasn’t much happier. He didn’t tell me their names, either, and I could hardly tell them apart from any of the others; one had very slightly longer hair, with a single very thin braid laced with small crystal beads on the left, and the other had a small white beauty mark beneath her right eye; that was all the difference I could see. Their hair was white and grey, and they wore the same grey clothes as all the other royal servants.
But with silver buttons going down the front, so I went up to them and touched the buttons with my finger, one after another, and turned them to shining gold. All the servants darted looks over as I did it. When I finished and said, coolly, “So everyone will know you’re my servants,” they looked rather more resigned to their fate, and the Staryk king looked displeased, which pleased me. I suppose that was petty, but I didn’t care. “How do I summon you, when I need something?” I asked them, but they said nothing and darted eyes to their lord—and I realized at once, of course he’d told them not to answer my questions, to force me to use mine up with him. I bit my lip and then asked him coldly, “Well?”
He smiled very thinly, satisfied. “With this.” He inclined his head to the one with the beauty mark, who gave me a small bell to ring. Then he dismissed them; when they had left the room, he said to me coldly, “You have one question more.”
I had a thousand practical ones, especially if no one else was going to tell me anything—where was I to bathe, how was I to get clean clothes—but the urgent impractical one swelled out of my throat, the one whose answer I already knew I didn’t really want. “How do I get back to Vysnia? Or my home?”
“You? Make a way from my kingdom to the sunlit world?” His disdain made it clear he thought I had as much chance of getting there as the moon. “You do not, save if I take you there.” And then he was up and sweeping from the chamber, and I went into my bower and pulled the curtains shut against the endless twilight and buried my face into my arms with my teeth clenched and a few hot tears burning behind my eyelids.
But in the morning I got up and rang my bell, determined. My new servants did come at once, and instead of asking them questions, I tried simply issuing demands instead. It served reasonably well: they did bring me a bath, filling up an enormous and gracefully curved silver tub longer than I was tall. It had a rime of ice around the edge, and frost all over the lip of the tub, but when I warily put my hand into it, the water somehow felt just right, so I, a little wincingly, climbed in, expecting every moment to yelp, but evidently whatever the Staryk had done to bring me into his kingdom had made me able to bear the cold of it.
They also brought me food and fresh clothing, all in white and silver—every trace of which I determinedly changed to gold: I meant to go on as I’d started, and put myself in everyone’s faces as much as I could. But even serving me all morning, neither of the women told me their names, and I didn’t mean to give up a question to my lord for that. Instead, when I finally sat down to breakfast, I said to the one with the beauty mark, “I’ll call you Flek, and her Tsop,” after the braid, “unless you’d prefer me to use something else.”
Flek startled so that she nearly spilled the drink she was pouring into my glass, throwing me a look of astonishment, and trading another with Tsop, who was staring at me equally taken aback. I had a moment of alarm that I’d offended them, but they both blushed a faint delicate blue-grey in their faces. Flek said, “We are honored,” dropping her eyes, and she seemed to mean it. I wouldn’t have thought that there was anything very nice in the names I’d given them—I hadn’t tried, since I’d only been fishing for their real names.
Nevertheless, I felt reasonably satisfied, until I was finished eating and my day stretched out ahead of me, empty now except for that chest of silver, waiting in the middle of the floor. I scowled at it, but I had nothing better to do; I had nothing to do at all. And at least the king had met my demands. I didn’t like giving him anything he wanted, much less the gold he coveted with so much greed, but I also saw plainly that this was the bargain that bought my life, and if I didn’t want to make it, I might as well smash open the glass wall and hurl myself down on the waterfall rocks below.
“Tip it all out onto the floor,” I grudgingly told Tsop and Flek. They did it, without any great effort, and set the empty chest back upright at the end of a torrent of silver. Then they bowed, and left me to it.
I picked up one of the silver coins. In my world they had seemed unmarked, but in the strange, brilliant light that filtered in through my walls of crystal, a picture gleamed out in pale tracework lines: one of those slender snow-white trees on one face, and on the other side, the mountain of glass with the silver gates at its base, only in the image there was no waterfall. But in my hand, with only a faint effort of wanting, gold slid over its face, a buttery-yellow glow shining against my fingers.
It made me angry again, or I tried to have it make me angry, the contrast between that sunlit warmth caught like a prisoner in my hand, and the endless cold grey light outside. I threw it into the box, hard, and then another after it, and another. I picked up handfuls of silver coins and amused myself by letting them run out into the chest, each one tumbling into gold as they fell. It wasn’t hard, but I didn’t hurry. He’d only set me to changing another when I was done.
When I had filled perhaps a quarter of the chest, I went to the glass wall and sat there looking over my new kingdom. Still more snow had started falling. The thin black-silver snake of the river, winding away under its rafts of ice, was the only break in the forest anywhere, and soon the snow hid it. No sign of farms or roads or anything else I understood, and the sky was the heavy grey overcast that left no sign of individual clouds. The shining mountain was a solitary island of brightness, as if it caught all of that light reflected off the scattering of snow and ice and gathered it jealously to itself, to make its improbable sides. In the walls a thousand shifting degrees of light softly gleamed and faded, and when I pressed my fingers hard to the cold surface, for a moment they splintered into color around my touch.
“Where—point to where the food comes from,” I said to Flek, after she brought me the midday meal, a simple platter of thin slices of fish and delicate fruit laid one upon the other in a circle. She hesitated with confusion on her face, but when I went to the glass wall and waved out towards the countryside, she darted one quick anxious glance out at the forest and didn’t come to join me; she shook her head and then just pointed straight down.
I frowned and looked at the platter of food. “Take me where the fish come from, then.” I had some half-formed thought of escaping, of swimming down a river through the mountainside, and anyway I wanted to be out of my room. I was a queen, supposedly; I ought to be allowed to go around my domain.
Flek looked very doubtful, but she went to the wall and opened it up for me. I didn’t see anything she did; she touched no lever nor made any gesture nor said a magic word; she only walked towards the wall and turned towards me, and suddenly she was waiting by an archway as if it had always been there. I went out after her into a corridor that might have been a tunnel; the walls were smooth as glass, and I saw no break where panes had been joined. It sloped downwards steeply, and she led me down it very hesitantly, with many sidelong glances back; we passed chambers as we walked, what I realized were kitchens, though they didn’t have a single flame: long tables with grey-clothed Staryk servants preparing dishes with careful use of knives, out of boxes of pale-colored fruits and silver-skinned fish and slabs of purplish-red meat.
I was halfway glad to see them, because they made a little more ordinary sense of the place to me: at least there were some people here doing something I could understand. But whenever one of them glanced up and saw me, they stared in open astonishment, and looked at Flek, who avoided their gaze. I suppose a queen wasn’t meant to come wandering around the servants’ quarters, and I was making an odd spectacle of myself. I just kept my chin up and marched along in her wake, and after another curving, we passed the last kitchen door and came to an unbroken stretch. Flek paused there and looked back at me, as if she hoped that the kitchens had been enough to satisfy me; but the tunnel traveled onward, and I was curious, so I said, “Keep going,” and she turned and continued on more sharply downwards.