We finished our planning quickly: there wasn’t much to plan, only a time and place, and all the rest just a desperate lunge at the only hope either one of us had. “The demon can’t come during the day,” Irina said. “He only appears at night. I don’t know why, but if he could, he’d surely have tried to take me before now: he had me alone today, or close enough.” She paused and added, thoughtfully, “When the tsar’s mother was condemned for sorcery, they took her and burned her all in one day, before the sun set.”
“At night, then.” I was silent, thinking what excuse I could give a Staryk king that he’d accept, for why I wanted him to take me back. “Could you persuade the tsar to go back to Vysnia?” I asked slowly. “In three days’ time?”
“If I can persuade him to do anything at all but kill me,” she said.
When we were done, Irina went back inside to her nurse, and I walked back to the sleigh. Shofer asked no questions; he was too eager to be gone. I sat unseeing for the whole drive back, my head running in circles and my stomach churning and hot with gall.
Of course I was terrified. Of trying, of failing, of success. It felt like murder—no, I wouldn’t lie to myself; it was murder, if it worked. But after all, the Staryk seemed to think it perfectly reasonable to murder me, and I hadn’t made him any promises, either; I wasn’t sure I was even really married. He’d given me a crown, but there certainly hadn’t been a marriage contract, and we hadn’t known each other. I’d ask a rabbi, if I ever had the chance to talk to one again. But married or not, I was reasonably sure that the rabbis would tell me that I might justly take Judith for my model, and take off the Staryk’s head if he gave me the opportunity. He was the enemy of my people, not just me alone. But that only left me the enormous difficulty of doing it.
Shofer stopped the sleigh at the foot of the steep walkway to my chambers: Tsop was sitting on a low stone there, as if she’d been all day waiting for me to come back—anxiously, judging by the look of relief that crossed her face when she saw me. I climbed out stiffly: it had been a long time driving, and my whole body was sore. Tsop led me back up to my room at a pace quick enough to make me out of breath, and flinched back and forth with visible impatience when she had to pause. She kept looking downwards, and I followed the line of her gaze to the grove of trees: the white blooms were all closing softly, as if that was what marked the night coming on. I suppose the king would have been upset if I hadn’t been home in time for him to deliver his three answers. Then it occurred to me he might feel obligated to provide marital services after all, if he missed his nightly chance, so I quickened my steps as much as I could.
He was waiting in my chamber with his arms folded and anger bright in his face, light gleaming along the edges of his cheekbones and in his eyes. “Ask,” he bit out, the instant I came in: the sun was halfway down in the mirror he’d given me.
“Who lives in the house on the edge of the night?” I said. There hadn’t been much choice about it, but I hoped I hadn’t left Magreta there to be devoured by someone coming back later.
“No one,” he said instantly. “Ask.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and Tsop, who’d been bowing her way out of the room, startled like a horse that had been struck with a whip out of nowhere. The Staryk’s eyes widened with shock, and his fists closed; he took a step towards me, as if he meant to hit me. “There was porridge in the oven!” I blurted out in an instinctive alarm.
He stopped short. His lips pressed together hard, and then after a moment he said, “that I know of,” finishing off his sentence. “Ask.”
I almost did ask again. He was shimmering with anger, a faint iridescence shifting back and forth across his skin, and I couldn’t help thinking of Shofer picking up Magreta like she was a sack of wool and not a person, of Tsop and Flek easily turning over the chest full of silver; if any ordinary Staryk could do that, what could he do to me? I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger. For a moment I was back in the snow with Oleg coming at me, his face contorted and his big fists clenched. I wanted to scramble away, to ask for mercy, fear running hot all along my spine.
But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones. The Staryk was glaring at me, unearthly and terrifying. But what was the use of being afraid of him? For all his magic and all his strength, he couldn’t kill me any more thoroughly than Oleg would have, crushing the breath from my throat in the snow. And if I made him angry enough to do it, he wouldn’t hold back for all the pleading in the world, any more than Oleg would have stopped because I’d begged for mercy in the woods. I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time; like Scheherazade, humbly asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night. And I knew perfectly well even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.
I wouldn’t make that bargain. I was going to try and kill him, even if I was almost certain to fail, and I wouldn’t be afraid of him now, either. I straightened my shoulders and looked him in his glittering eyes. “I’d say that I’m owed an educated guess if you can make one. If you knew who built it, for instance.”
“Owed?” he spat. Out of the corner of my eye, Tsop had very slowly and carefully been maneuvering herself farther back by inches, and now she eased the rest of the way out of the chamber. “Owed?”
In a sudden lurch he was standing right before me, as if he’d moved so quickly my eyes couldn’t see him do it; he put his hand on my throat, his thumb in the hollow beneath my chin, pushing it up so I still looked him in the face, my neck bent back. “And if I say all I owe you is two answers more?” he said softly, glittering down at me.
“You can say what you like,” I said without yielding, my voice pressed up against the skin of my throat, forcing its way through.
“One more time I will ask: are you certain?” he hissed.
There was a deep ominous warning in his voice, as if I was pushing him to a hard limit. But I’d already made the choice. I’d made it the winter before last, sitting at my mother’s bedside, hearing her cough away her life. I’d made it standing in a hundred half-frozen doorways, demanding what I was owed. I swallowed the sharp taste of bile back down my throat. “Yes,” I said, as cold as any lord of winter could have been.
He gave a snarl of rage and whirled away from me. He stalked to the edge of the chamber and stood there with his back to me and his fists clenched. “You dare,” he said to the wall, not turning to look at me. “You dare set yourself against me, to make a pretense of being my equal—”
“You did that, when you put a crown on my head!” I said. My hands wanted to shake, with triumph or anger or both at once. I held them clenched tight. “I am not your subject or your servant, and if you want a cowering mouse for a wife, go find someone else who can turn silver to gold for you.”
He gave a hiss of frustration and displeasure, and stood there a moment longer just breathing in furious heaves, his shoulders rising and falling. But then he said, “A mighty witch grew tired of mortals asking her for favors and built for herself a house on the border of the sunlit world, that they might not find her at home when she did not desire company. But she went away long ago and has not returned, for I would know if so great a power came back into my realm.”
I was breathing just as hard, still enraged, and it didn’t make sense to me at first as victory, as an answer to my question; it felt as though it came out of nowhere. “What is long ago?” I said, too hastily.
“Do you think I care for the mayfly moments with which you count the passage of your lives in the sunlit world, save when I must?” he said. “Mortal children born then have long since died, and their children’s children now are old, that is all I can say. Ask once more.”
A good answer as far as it went: at least I could hope that no monstrously powerful witch was going to appear and decide to make Magreta her dinner in place of the porridge she’d eaten. I would have liked to know a bit more about where the food might have come from, and who had laid the fire, but I couldn’t afford to ask; I had a more pressing question. “I promised my cousin that I would dance at her wedding,” I said. “And she will be married in three days’ time.”
I thought I’d have to go on from there, but he’d already turned round to look at me, a gleam coming into his eye: I suppose as seriously as they took their given word here, he knew at once that he had me over a barrel. Which he did, if not quite the way he thought he did. “Then it seems you must ask my aid,” he said softly, with visible glee. “And hope that I don’t refuse it.”
“Well, you won’t do it to help me,” I said, and he gave a small snort, amused. “And you’ve made clear there’s only one thing I’m good for in your eyes. So how much gold do you want me to make, in exchange for escorting me to Basia’s wedding?”
He scowled with a hint of regret, as if he’d looked forward to my prostrating myself and begging for his help, but he was practical enough not to let that stop him. “I have three storerooms of silver,” he said, “each larger than the last, and you shall turn every coin therein to gold, ere I take you thence: and you must work swiftly, for if you have not finished the work in time, neither shall I convey you, and you will be foresworn.” He finished in triumph, as if he were threatening me with an axe over my head, which maybe he was; I had the bad suspicion that if I was foresworn and he knew it, he would consider that a mortal crime.
“Fine,” I said.
He jerked and stared at me in sudden dismay. “What?”
“Fine!” I said. “You just demanded—”
“And now, for the first time, you make no effort to negotiate—” He pulled himself up short, his face glitter-flushed again, and I had a deeply sinking feeling even as he said, bitterly, “We are agreed. And may you complete as much of your task as you can.”