The pot of porridge was still warm in the oven. I took off the lid and I stopped, looking inside. I had made the whole pot full. It was not a very big pot and we would eat all of it in one day. But someone had already eaten a big helping of it. I couldn’t even think to myself that maybe they hadn’t, or maybe Sergey had taken some, because there was a big wooden spoon sticking in the pot, and last night I had thought to myself, I wish I had a big spoon, and there had not been a spoon like that anywhere in the house.
* * *
When I said “Stop!” Shofer pulled the deer to a halt, but he looked back in alarm over his shoulder at the two figures on the riverbank, and he said, urgent and low, “Only wights would come to this place.”
But I knew who she was, the girl standing there in her white furs with the familiar crown of silver on her head, the crown that had brought me my own: Irina, the duke’s daughter. And if she had found a way here, there was a way back. “Go to them, or answer me, why can’t we?” I said, ruthlessly, and after a moment Shofer reluctantly turned us back around and drove along the river until we drew up beside them. Irina wore the crown, and the necklace gleaming, and her silver ring on her finger, and her breath didn’t frost in the air. She had her arms around the other, an old woman who was shivering terribly though she had a heavy fur wrapped all around her, her breath hanging in thick mists around her head.
“How did you get here?” I demanded.
Irina looked up at me, without any recognition in her face. “We mean no trespass,” she said. “Will you give us shelter? My nurse cannot stand in the cold.”
“Come in the sleigh,” I said, though Shofer flinched, and I put out my hand. Irina hesitated only a moment, glancing down at the river, then she urged the old woman up into the sleigh and climbed up after her. I took off my own cloak, and put it over the old woman like a blanket. She was trembling even more, and her lips were going blue. “Take us to the nearest shelter,” I told Shofer.
He flinched again, but after a moment he turned the deer and drove up over the bank and into the dark trees. On our left there was solid night, and on the right the pale twilight brightened in the distance, as if we were on the very border of the dark. Irina had turned her head to look behind at the river disappearing behind us, and then she looked at me. Her long dark hair was stark against the white of her furs and beneath the silver crown, and snowflakes drifted onto it from the trees and gleamed on its length like small clear jewels. The twilight behind her caught in her pale skin, and she gleamed with it so I realized suddenly she must have Staryk blood, somewhere in her line; in her glittering silver she could have changed places with me, and fit into this kingdom as though it were her own. “How did you get here?” I asked her again.
But she was staring back at me, frowning, and she said slowly, “I know you. You’re the jeweler’s wife.”
Of course she didn’t know better: no one would have told her my name, or Isaac’s. She was a princess, and we didn’t matter. I wished bitterly that I still didn’t, that she was right; that I was home in Basia’s place or in my own. “No,” I said. “I only gave him the silver. My name is Miryem.”
Shofar flinched on the seat ahead of me, his eyes darting back shocked a moment. Irina only nodded a little, still frowning in thought, and she reached up to touch the necklace at her throat. “Silver from here,” she said.
“That’s how,” I said, understanding. “The silver brought you?”
“Through the mirror,” Irina said. “It saved me, saved us—” but then she was leaning over the old woman. “Magra! Magra, don’t fall asleep.”
“Irinushka,” the old woman muttered. Her eyes were half closed, and she had stopped shivering.
The sleigh jerked to a halt: Shofer had pulled hard on the reins, and the deer threw their heads up, restive. He was staring ahead of us, his back very straight and his shoulders rigid. We’d come to a low garden wall, almost buried in the snow, and on the other side I saw a faint, familiar orange glow: the flickering of an oven’s fire from inside a house, warm and welcoming. From his face it might have been the coming of an angry mob.
“Who lives there?” I asked without thinking, but Shofer only threw me an anguished look, and anyway I didn’t see what else there was for it; the old woman was sinking quickly. “Help us get her out,” I said, and with enormous reluctance he hooked the reins over the seat and climbed down. He lifted Magra as easily as if she were a small child, although she whimpered at his touch even through the layers of her clothing and fur.
He walked away with her, lightly, over the top of the snow, but Irina and I both floundered through the crust and into the deep drifts beneath. We struggled on after him until suddenly it thinned as we came to the wall of the garden. It was only a very little house, barely a peasant’s hut and nearly all oven, but there was a smell of warm porridge cooking and the oven’s glow was coming through thin cracks in the window covers and the door. Shofer had stopped well back from the hut, and his fear made me wary, but Irina went straight to the door and pushed it open without hesitation: it was only a thin panel of slats and straw woven over them, to keep out the wind, and it fell in onto the floor with a bang.
“There’s no one here,” Irina said, after a moment, looking back at us.
I went inside after her: it was easy to see it was all empty. There was only one room, with a single small cot heaped with a pile of straw. Irina covered it with the cloak I had put on Magra, and Shofer very reluctantly came in and put the old woman down on it, his eyes always on the oven’s shut door, the tiny flicker of light around it, and as soon as he had laid her down, he retreated back to the threshold in a rush. There was a box heaped with firewood beside the oven, and I opened the oven door and found a pot inside, full of fresh hot porridge.
“Let me give her some,” Irina said, and on a shelf we found a wooden bowl and spoon. She put a good helping of the porridge inside, steam rising off it into the air, and knelt by the cot. She fed it to Magra, who stirred and roused with the smell, enough to eat it in small spoonfuls. Shofer was flinching with every bite, as if he were watching someone deliberately eat poison. He looked at me and his mouth worked, as though he wanted to say something and only a worse fear stopped his tongue. I kept waiting for something dreadful to happen: I looked in every corner of the room to make sure there was nothing hiding there, and then I went outside and looked all around the yard, too. Someone should have been nearby, with a fire going and hot food ready, but I didn’t even see a footprint in the snow all around the house, except the trail going back to the sleigh where Irina and I had gone floundering through the drifts. A Staryk wouldn’t have left a trail, of course. But…
“This isn’t a Staryk house,” I said to Shofer, a statement and not a question. He didn’t nod, but he also didn’t look at me puzzled or surprised, the way Flek and Tsop did when I’d gotten something wrong. I looked down at the garden again. The house stood directly upon the line: one half of the garden was in twilight, and the other in full night, caught between the two. I looked at him and said, “I’m going to close the door.”
“I will stay outside,” he said instantly, which gave me hope. I went inside and picked up the door and propped it back into place, and then I waited a little while and then with a quick jerk pulled it aside again—
But I was only looking back out onto the empty yard, with Shofer standing there waiting and anxious. He had retreated even farther, to the other side of the garden wall. I turned back inside, disappointed. Magra had opened her eyes, and she was holding Irina’s hands in hers. “You are safe, Irinushka,” she whispered. “I prayed you would be safe.”
Irina looked at me. “Can we stay here?”
“I don’t know if it’s safe,” I said.
“It’s not less safe than where we were.”
“Did the tsar refuse to marry you?” I asked. I thought the duke might have been angry with her if he had: he hadn’t seemed like a man to be satisfied if his plans went awry.
“No,” she said. “I am tsarina. For as long as I live.” She said it dryly, as if she didn’t expect that to last long. “The tsar is a black sorcerer. He is possessed by a demon of flame that wants to devour me.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t mirth, it was bitterness. “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”
I said it savagely, an angry joke, but then Irina said slowly, “The demon said I would quench its thirst a long time. It wants me because…I am cold.”
“Because you have Staryk blood, and Staryk silver,” I said, just as slowly. She nodded. I leaned into the door and peered through a crack: Shofer was still far back from the house, well out of earshot, with no sign at all that he was inclined to come any closer. I took a deep breath and turned back. “Do you think the demon would bargain? For the chance to devour a Staryk king instead?”
* * *
Irina showed me how the Staryk silver let her go back and forth: together we went out back and found a big washtub behind the house. We poured hot water into it, over the snow heaped inside, to make a pool with a reflection in it. She stared down into it and said, “I see the same place we came from: a bedroom in the palace. Do you see it?” she asked me, but I only saw our faces floating pale in the shifting water, and when she took my hand and tried to put it through, I got wet to the wrist, even as Irina drew her own hand out dry and without a drop. She shook her head. “I can’t bring you through with me.” As if I had stopped existing in the real world at all, as if the Staryk king had ripped me out of it by the roots.
“I’ll need to persuade him to bring me over,” I said grimly: just as he’d told me. I didn’t care to be on this side of the water when and if my husband was successfully introduced to his untimely end. I didn’t think the rest of the Staryk would accept me as queen in his stead, at least not until I’d learned to make endless winters myself and pop up snow-trees out of the earth or whatever else he’d demanded.