“Exactly how big are these storerooms?” I demanded, but he was already going out of the room, without a pause.
I didn’t pause, either. I rang my bell urgently, and Tsop came timidly back inside, darting her eyes over me to see if I’d been, I don’t know, strangled or beaten or otherwise chastised for my dreadful temerity. “There are three storerooms of silver in the palace,” I said. “I need you to take me to them.”
“Now?” she said doubtfully.
“Now,” I said.
Chapter 14
I watched Miryem leave, and then I went back inside. Magra was huddled by the oven, wrapped in all her things and the cloaks and the fur. I asked her to lie down, but she shook her head: there was nothing on the cot but a pile of straw, and she said it was too hard for her old bones. “Sleep, dushenka,” she said. She had already found some work for her hands, a spindle and a ball of wool; she never liked to be idle. “Lie down and rest, and I will sing to you.”
The cot was narrow and stiff and uncomfortable, but I hadn’t slept well since my wedding night, and my bones weren’t old. With Magreta’s familiar creaky voice in my ears, I fell deeply asleep. It was still dark outside the little hut when I sat up again, but I felt too much refreshed to have woken in the middle of the night. Magra was drowsing half asleep in the chair. I put on my fur coat and went outside.
The shading line between night and twilight hadn’t moved from where it crossed the garden. The woods stood thick and silent on the other side of the wall, without even any signs of living things; I missed the sounds of birds and animals in the heavy hush. I went around the back to look into the big washtub. Miryem had helped me push it up against the back of the oven, on the outside of the house, and it hadn’t frozen all the way through. I broke the crust with a stick, and there in the dark water I saw sunlight in the tsar’s bedroom, gleaming on all the expanses of gilt. Mirnatius was awake and dressed and pacing the room, limping a little as if he was sore. Servants with their heads bent and shoulders hunched were hurrying to lay out his breakfast. I didn’t know what they imagined had become of me.
I went back inside and kissed Magra’s cheek: she was still spinning by the fire. “Irinushka, you shouldn’t go back,” she said tremulously, clinging to my hands. “It’s too dangerous, this plan you’ve made. That unholy thing wants to devour your soul.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” I said.
“Then wait until he isn’t watching,” Magra urged. “Wait and we’ll go back and run away.”
“Away from the tsar? Sneak all the way out of the palace with no one seeing us?” I shook my head. “And then what?”
“We’ll go back to your father…” Magra said, but her voice trailed off. My father could avenge my murder, but he couldn’t keep me from my husband. He wouldn’t try.
I didn’t pull my hands away; I was thinking. “If I disappear now, whatever the cause,” I said, “it will be war. Father will go to Ulrich and Casimir, and give them their excuse. And Mirnatius and his demon won’t go easily. They’ll burn down half of Lithvas without a second thought, either of them. No matter who wins, the kingdom will be in ruins. And the Staryk will bury us all in ice.”
Magra said uneasily, “Dushenka, this isn’t anything for you to worry about, to think of.”
“Who else is there to think of it? I am tsarina.” Which technically meant that I was to produce a tsarevitch and otherwise stay quiet and unobtrusive, but few tsarinas did, and it wasn’t a choice open to me anyway. “I have to go back.”
“And if the demon doesn’t want this Staryk king?” she said. “You shouldn’t even try to make bargains with such a creature.”
I didn’t disagree with her, but I gently freed my hands and said softly, “Do my hair up again, Magreta.” I took off the crown and turned my back to her and sat down on the floor, to make it easy for her to work. She put her hands on my shoulders for a moment. Then she took out the silver comb and brush from her purse and went to work on it, the pull and weight of her hands as familiar as bread. When she was done, together we put my crown back on my head, and then I went out to the water.
The servants had left Mirnatius. For the moment he was sitting there alone and seething with his back to the water, only drinking angry gulps from his cup at intervals; his plate was untouched. I stepped into the tub of water as slowly and carefully as I could, and I came out of one of the enormous gilt-framed mirrors on the wall behind him. I took a few steps away from it and softly reached behind me to open one of those balcony doors, as if I’d just stepped inside. “Good morning, husband,” I said, at the same time, and he crashed out of his chair, dropping his cup in a steaming red-wine smear across the floor as he whirled to stare at me.
I was a good distance away from him: I could thank his extravagantly massive room for that, which saved my neck from being instantly wrung; by the time he’d reached me, I’d put my hand back on the door and said sharply, “Shall I just leave for good, and you can see how your demon likes that, or are you willing to discuss the situation?”
He pulled up and looked out the balcony doors—the snow had drifted in around my feet already, like I’d been blown in by the winter wind out of nowhere, and could go back into it as easily. “What exactly is there to discuss?” he bit out savagely. “Why do you keep coming back at all?”
“My father’s tax rolls,” I said. I’d thought a little what would move him—him, and not his demon; I needed him as a go-between, and I was reasonably certain he only wanted his angry demon fed, so it wouldn’t erupt and beat him. “Do you know what they are? Do you know what yours are?” I added, in case.
“Of course I know what mine are!” he snapped, which meant he hadn’t any idea what my father’s were, although he should have. “I’m supposed to believe you want me to cut your father’s taxes—”
“What’s been happening to your rolls?” I broke in on him, sharply. “Have they been going down?”
“Yes, of course, they’ve sunk year over year. I was going to raise the rates, but the council made such an infernal noise about it—why are we talking about taxes?” he burst out. “Are you trying to make a fool of me?”
“No,” I said. “Why are your rolls sinking? Why didn’t the council let you raise the rates?”
He started shouting at me, “Because the—” He stopped, and finished out more slowly, “Because the winters are getting worse.”
He wasn’t stupid, at least. Even as he spoke, he was looking past me out onto the balcony, piled thick with snow on the last day before June, with a few flurrying flakes still coming in behind me to vanish into the white of my furs, and he wasn’t seeing a freak accident of the weather anymore. And as soon as he stopped seeing it as a single unlucky chance, he began to see the rest, too: more blizzards, and failed crops; starving peasants, lords raising rebellion; his neighbors’ well-fed armies coming upon him, his glittering palace torn down around his ears while he tumbled into the hungry fire waiting for him. I saw them creeping one by one over his face, and he began to be afraid, as I wanted him to be.
“It’s the Staryk,” I said. “The Staryk are making the winter last.”
He still wasn’t pleased, but he did listen to me after that. He flung himself onto one of his gilt-and-velvet divans as I seated myself on one across from him. Between us a large table with a silvered mirror top shone with deep night sky and falling snow, a square pool I could have dived into. When I leaned back, so my own reflection didn’t catch in the glass, the image faded into the ceiling above, the gleam of the green serpent winding around the apple between us while Mirnatius reclined with a hand posed over his lips and listened to my careful proposal in sullen silence.
I’d agreed with Miryem, on the other side: we needed to bring the Staryk king here, and not the other way. On this side of the mirror, I had my father’s name and power at my back, and a tsarina’s crown on my head. If we were lucky, and our two monsters destroyed each other, most likely even Mirnatius’s soldiers would listen to me at first, for lack of anyone else to obey, and my father had two thousand men of his own to stand behind me. He still wouldn’t care what I wanted any more than he ever had, but we would want the same thing, then: to preserve my neck.
I didn’t share those details of my planning with Mirnatius. I only told him a little more, of how the Staryk were stretching the winter to strengthen their own kingdom. “Your demon wants me for my Staryk blood,” I finished. “How much more would it like a pure-blood Staryk, and their king? If it agrees, I’ll bring him to you, and you can save your kingdom and feed your demon all at once.”
“And why precisely should I believe you?”
“Why do you think I keep coming back? It should be clear to you by now that I don’t have to, and that you can’t stop me from going, either. Do you really think piling still more guards on me will do any better? If it would, why would I take the risk?”
He flicked his fingers out long and dismissive into the air. “I have no idea why you would do any of this anyway! Why do you care if the Staryk freeze the kingdom? You’re nearly one of them.”
It was a good question: Magreta had asked it, too. I hadn’t had an answer for her. “The squirrels will starve, too, when the trees die,” I said.
“Squirrels!” He glared at me, but though I’d meant to say it flippantly, the words felt strangely true when they came out of my mouth.
“Yes, squirrels,” I said, and meant it. “And peasants, and children, and old women, and all the people you don’t even see because they’re useless to you, all those who’ll die before you and your soldiers do.” I didn’t know what I was feeling, that made those words come. Angry, I think. I didn’t remember ever being angry before. Anger had always seemed pointless to me, a dog circling after its own tail. What good was it to be angry at my father, or my stepmother, or angry at the servants who were rude to me? People were angry at the weather sometimes, too, or when they stubbed their toe on a stone or cut their hand on a knife, as if it had done it to them on purpose. It had all seemed equally useless to me. Anger was a fire in a grate, and I’d never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed.