He stared at me as though he’d never tried to answer any such questions even for himself. Likely he thought all his advisors fools and worrywarts who didn’t know about his magic, which would save him from everything and anything that might threaten. But his demon didn’t seem all-powerful, and his mother’s sorcery hadn’t saved her from the stake. He seemed to feel less invincible himself in the face of a pointed question, and he certainly didn’t say I was wrong about the limits of his power.
“Why should you care?” he threw at me instead, as if he thought I was pretending some sort of deep concern for his welfare. “Surely you’d be delighted.”
“My pleasure would last only until they stabbed me right alongside you,” I said. “Ulrich and Casimir would prefer my father as an ally rather than an enemy, but they don’t have to have him, and they won’t risk me inconveniently producing an heir after they’ve taken your head off. Of course,” I added, “that’s only if you haven’t murdered me first, in some suspicious way, and given all of them together a magnificent excuse to march on you,” which was the point I really wanted to make.
Mirnatius subsided, brooding, back into his corner, but I took it as a small victory that he didn’t sit staring at me anymore, but looked out of the sleigh, frowning over the ideas I’d shoved into his head, which he’d evidently done so well at avoiding before now.
We drove all the long cold day; a few times the coachman stopped to rest the horses, and twice changed them at the stables of one middling boyar or another, people bowing energetically. I made sure to climb out both times and walk around the courtyard and speak kindly to our hosts, saying a few favorable words about the children trotted out to make their bows. I wanted to be memorable to as many people as I could manage, if he was going to try making everyone forget me. Mirnatius held himself aloof and only spent the entire time staring at me with hooded eyes, which did nicely to make me look like a cherished bride.
The night was a long time in coming: strange on such a cold, wintry day, with the unnatural snow so thick on the ground. I was grateful for it, but even so, the setting of the sun was beginning to light the red glow in Mirnatius’s eyes as we drew into the courtyard of his palace in Koron. The walls were bristling with his soldiers, and Magreta was standing on the steps, her hands gripped tight at her breast, small and old in her dark cloak between the guards on either side of her, as if he’d sent men back to Vysnia last night, and had them drag her pell-mell to get here before dark.
When I climbed the steps, she put her arms around me and wept a little, saying, “Dushenka, dushenka.” She did thank me for remembering an old woman and sending for her, but I had been unfair to her: her voice trembled, and her hands gripped too hard at me. She understood that we were in mortal danger.
I made a show of my own, thanking my husband for his kindness and the wonderful surprise of finding her here, and I steeled myself and kissed him on the steps in front of his guards, startling him; he only thought of it as a weapon for him to use, I suppose. So he didn’t move when I brushed his warm mouth with mine and then quickly darted away from him again, as though I were embarrassed by my own daring. I turned to the guards, and asked Magreta if they’d taken good care of her, and thanked them when she nodded and said she’d felt so safe, even on the long road from Vysnia.
“Tell me your names, so I will remember them,” I said, and took my hand out of my muff to give to them, with my ring gleaming upon it, and they fumbled over it and stammered back at me, although they had surely been ordered to go and get the old woman no matter what anyone said to them, or how she wailed, and had thought of themselves as jailers, not as escort. Some of the stammering was the ring’s magic, but the rest, I suspected, was the subtler magic of contrast; I didn’t imagine Mirnatius showed much courtesy to his servants. “Matas and Vladas,” I repeated. “Thank you for your care of my old nanushka, and now let us go inside: you must have a drink of hot krupnik in the kitchen after your long trip.”
Mirnatius could hardly take back such a small kindness without looking peculiar as well as petty, but of course he didn’t like his men taking any sort of order from me. “You and your nurse will go up to my rooms and wait for me,” he said coldly, as soon as he followed me into the halls, and he beckoned sharply to two other guardsmen at the door. “Take them upstairs and wait in the room with them until I arrive,” he ordered, the very trap I’d feared, and stalked away himself into the great hall. I gripped Magreta’s hand tight as we went up the stairs. She held on with equal force, and didn’t ask me if my husband was kind to me, or if I was happy.
“Will you tell me, did I do something wrong, to tell the guards to go have krupnik?” I asked one of the guards, as we went upstairs. “Does my lord disapprove of drink?”
“No, my lady,” the guard said, darting a look at me.
“Oh,” I said, with a show of being a little downcast, disappointed in my husband’s mercurial mood. “I suppose some affairs of state must be worrying him. Well, I will try and take his mind off it tonight. Perhaps we will have dinner in the room. Magreta, you will brush out my hair, and put it up fresh.”
The bedchamber was as large as my father’s ballroom and absurd in its gilded and impractical splendor. I hardly had to study to look wide-eyed all around myself, at the vast mural nearly twenty feet overhead—of Eve tempted by the serpent, which struck me as particularly unjust under the circumstances—and the bed itself, which could have served nicely as a bedroom on its own, being built into a large alcove in the wall and framed with golden scrollwork and pillars and rich curtains of silk damask subtly patterned with lighter threads. The windows were set in doorframes that could be swung open to a balcony outside of delicate wrought-iron. Trees from the garden overhung the edge of the balcony, covered presently with snow.
There were four separate fireplaces in the room, which were all blackened with smoke and roaring even in the middle of the day, in May: there was a servant feeding them even when I came in. It was a room for a duke in Salvia, or in Longines, some country where winter only glanced in briefly and in passing. No one of sense would have built this room here in Lithvas, and indeed I could see no one of sense had: there were faint cracks in the walls where Mirnatius himself had surely ordered them to knock out the floors above and the rooms beside, to make this ridiculous space.
But for all its excess, the chamber was still beautiful—extravagant and inconvenient and uncomfortable, yes, but taken all together it somehow skirted the edge of taste to be lush and not simply ludicrous. It was out of a book of fairy-stories painted by an inventive hand, and everything harmonized. Just barely, but that only made it somehow more impressive, like watching a juggler keep seven sharp knives in the air at once, knowing one slip would bring them all down in disaster. I think anyone would have found it difficult to stand in that room and not however grudgingly be won over by it. The guards themselves stood looking around it when they came in with us, forgetting to look stern and unyielding.
They didn’t say anything when I took my jewel-case and led Magreta behind the bathing-screen. Another fireplace was going on the other side, too, warming the air around a truly magnificent bath—that was also gilded, and so large I could have stretched in it my full length. But more important, beside it stood an even more magnificent mirror, as though Mirnatius liked to admire the work of art he was when he stepped from his bath.
I called to the guards from behind the screen to ask them to send down for tea, while Magreta quickly in response to my motioning hands put the necklace and the crown upon me. She looked puzzled even as she obeyed, and still more when I wrapped my spare cloak around her, and knelt down to drag up the heavy fur before the fireplace, to wrap around her shoulders. She clutched it around herself when I put the ends into her hands, and didn’t say anything out loud, but her mouth opened and moved, silently forming the questions she wanted to utter. I put my finger to my lips to keep her silent, and beckoned her over to the mirror.
The dark forest stood on the other side, blanketed white with deep snow. I didn’t know if it would work, if I could bring her through with me, but I had no other hope at all. Even as I reached for Magreta’s hand, I heard a noise in the corridor, footsteps coming, and as the door banged open violently I heard the demon hiss, in Mirnatius’s voice, “Where is Irina, where is my sweet?”
But Magreta had given a small gasp: I had taken her hand, and she was staring at the mirror, her face pale, and pulling against my grip instinctively. I held on tighter. “Don’t let go of me,” I whispered to her, and after a single frightened look behind her shoulder, she jerked her head in a nod. I turned to the mirror and stepped through, pulling her with me, out onto the frozen bank of the river.
Chapter 13
In the morning Panov Mandelstam came in and stamped snow off his boots and told Panova Mandelstam quietly, “They didn’t catch them. The snow came first.” So I was glad for the snow. Although then I didn’t know if I should be glad for the snow, because what if Wanda and Sergey were frozen to death somewhere, but then I decided I would be glad for the snow, because I had been cold sometimes working out in the snow and sleepy and Da would smack me on the head to wake me up and say did I want to freeze to death, and I didn’t, but it was only falling asleep, and that didn’t hurt and you wouldn’t be scared. I wondered if Da was scared when he died. It had sounded like he was scared.
For breakfast Panova Mandelstam gave me two bowls of porridge with some milk on top and some dry blueberries and she put a little bit of brown sugar on top, and I ate it and it was very good and sweet. Then I went to take care of the goats, because that was what Wanda had said to do. “They should have a hot breakfast, too, on such a cold day,” Panova Mandelstam said, and helped me cook up a big pot of mash. I made sure to give my goats big helpings. They looked skinny next to the Mandelstams’ goats, and the other goats had been butting them and biting them yesterday. But now the other goats were glad for more company because their coats had already been cut, and my goats still had theirs although theirs were full of burs and dirt. They all huddled together in the shed after they ate up all the hot mash.