Mirnatius was scowling at me exactly as petulantly as he had in the garden seven years ago, when I’d told him to leave the dead squirrels alone. How dare I think they were worth anything next to his pleasure? It made me still more angry, and my voice sharpened. “Do you really care what my reasons are? You’re no worse off than you are now if I’m lying.”
“I might be, if you’re not telling me all the truth, and you aren’t,” he shot back. “You still haven’t told me how you vanish, or where you go—or where you’ve stashed away that old crone of yours. And you certainly aren’t being forthcoming about the details of how you’re going to provide this Staryk lord.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would I trust you? You’ve done nothing since we exchanged vows but try to stuff me down your demon’s gullet.”
“As though I had any say in it. Do you really think I wanted to marry you? He wanted you, so off to the altar I went.”
“And my father wanted me on a throne, so off to the altar I went. You can’t excuse yourself to me by pleading that you were forced to it.”
“What, you didn’t do it all on purpose to save the squirrels and mud-stained peasantry?” he sneered, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and after a moment he said, “Fine. Tonight I’ll ask him if he’ll take a Staryk king, and leave you be in exchange.”
“Good. And in the meantime,” I added, “you’ll write to your dukes and command them all to come and celebrate our wedding with us. And when you write to Prince Ulrich, you’ll make sure to tell him I insist on seeing my dear friend Vassilia. When she comes, I’ll make her my chief lady-in-waiting.”
He frowned at me. “What does that have to do with—”
“We can’t let her marry Casimir,” I reminded him, a little impatient; we’d even spoken of this already.
“If Casimir and Ulrich want to steal my throne, do you think they’ll care that his daughter’s your lady-in-waiting?” he demanded.
“They’ll care that they haven’t a blood tie to bind them together,” I said. “And all the better if there’s one that binds Ulrich to you, instead. We’ll marry her off as soon as she arrives. Do you have any suitable relatives at court—someone young and handsome, if possible? Never mind,” I added, seeing his blankness. He had two aunts, and I knew they’d produced a dozen offspring. I hadn’t met all of them to remember, but at least one of them would hopefully be unmarried or a convenient widower. “I’ll look for someone. You need to present me to the court today anyway.”
“And why, exactly? I assure you that you won’t enjoy the experience. My court has quite an elevated standard of beauty.”
It was plain he hadn’t expected me to last long enough to be presented. Perhaps he still didn’t. “I’m your tsarina, so they’ll have to get used to my deficiencies,” I said. “We need to quash any rumors before they begin. The servants must already have it all over the castle that I vanished during the night, and we can’t afford whispers. The crops are going to be bad this year, even if we do manage to stop the winter. And you’ve already made a great many of your nobles angry.”
He wanted to keep protesting, I could see it, but he glanced uneasily at the snow heaped on the balcony, and said nothing. He wasn’t stupid, after all; only as far as I could tell, he’d never given a moment’s thought to politics. I imagine that all he’d ever wanted were the trappings of rule, the wealth and luxury and beauty, and none of the work of it: he wasn’t ambitious at all.
Of course, if he had ever thought about politics, he’d be asking the far more important question of whom we were going to have Casimir marry. And the answer to that was me—as soon as Mirnatius and his demon had either been frozen solid or burned at the stake or at least exposed to the entire court and forced to flee, and I’d been granted an annulment of my thoroughly unconsummated marriage.
I didn’t particularly like Prince Casimir. He’d come to stay at my father’s house once, and I’d been beneath his notice at the time, so he hadn’t been on his best behavior. He’d made a serving-girl sit upon his lap and smile for him as if she liked it when he squeezed her breast and slapped her rear; but when he’d left three days later, she’d had a necklace of gold she couldn’t have bought on her wages, so at least he’d given her some return for it. He was nearly my father’s age, and a man who lived almost entirely on the surface. But he wasn’t a fool, or cruel. And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.
I’d weave a net out of us to hold all Lithvas. Casimir married to me and on the throne would satisfy him. Vassilia married to a nephew of the late tsar would at least balk Ulrich, and I’d put a whisper in his ear that it would be just as well for my dear friend to start having her children at the same time as I had mine, and promise him a grandchild on the throne after all. That would satisfy him and Mirnatius’s kindred both. All I needed to arrange it was a space where Mirnatius now stood, and conveniently, he’d put himself on top of a trapdoor going directly to the bowels of Hell, if I could only find the way to unlatch it.
But first, I needed his demon to kill a Staryk king for me, or there wouldn’t be any Lithvas to save. I stood up from the divan and paused, frowning slightly, as if I were having a fresh idea. “Wait,” I added abruptly. “We should go back to my father’s house for the celebration. When you write to the princes and archdukes, tell them to come to Vysnia instead of here.”
“Why should—oh, never mind,” he muttered, throwing his hand up in the air, graceful as a bird taking flight, his lace cuff its long feathered tail. I was gratified; I’d had a few excuses ready, but they were a bit thin, and all the better if I didn’t have to use them. I didn’t mean to tell him in advance that the Staryk king would hopefully be in Vysnia in three days’ time himself, to be a guest at a different celebration.
* * *
On Monday afternoon, when I was walking back to Panova Mandelstam’s house after the collecting, I met two boys from town playing in the woods. I was not big the way Sergey was, but I was still bigger than them, so they didn’t try to fight with me, but Panov Mandelstam was right anyway because they didn’t want to play with me either. One of them yelled at me, “How does it feel to have killed your own father?”
They ran away into the trees and didn’t wait for me to answer, but I thought about it the rest of the way. I wasn’t sure if I had killed my father, because I had only wanted him to not hit Wanda with the poker; I hadn’t wanted him to fall over me. But he had fallen over me and that was part of why he was dead, so maybe it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted it. I didn’t know.
I did know that it felt good to be living with Panov and Panova Mandelstam. I had stopped feeling hungry even a little bit. But anytime I thought about Sergey and Wanda, even if I was sitting at the table, I felt like I had swallowed stones instead of food. I would have felt very good if Sergey and Wanda and me were all living with Panov and Panova Mandelstam. The house was small, but me and Sergey could sleep in the barn. But we couldn’t, because Sergey had pushed my father and he was dead.
Then I thought whether it was better for me only to be living with the Mandelstams or for all of us to be living with my father. I decided it would be better to be living with my father after all, if Sergey and Wanda were there and all right. Only we could not have been doing that, either, even if my father was not killed, because he was going to make Wanda marry Kajus’s son. Then I had to think whether it would feel better to be here with the Mandelstams or better to be somewhere else that might not be as good, but with Sergey and Wanda. It was hard to think about that because I didn’t know what the somewhere else would be like, but after I thought about it a long time, I decided slowly that still I wanted to be with Sergey and Wanda. I could not be happy with stones in my stomach.
The nut from the white tree was in my pocket. I had kept thinking about planting it in the Mandelstams’ yard, but I still hadn’t done it. I took it out and I looked at it and then I said out loud, “Mama, I cannot plant the nut here, because Sergey and Wanda cannot come here ever again. I will not plant it until I find a place where me and Sergey and Wanda can all live together and be safe.” Then I put it away again. I was sorry not to be able to plant the nut, because I missed feeling that Mama was near, but still it felt like the right decision. Sergey and Wanda had given me the nut to plant, but Mama would want them to be able to visit.
I got back to the house with the basket. While Panov Mandelstam was carefully writing everything down, I asked him, “Does anyone know where Sergey and Wanda are?”
He stopped and looked up at me. “The men went out to look for them again today. They did not find anything.”
I was glad for that, but then I thought about it and I realized it was bad, too. “But I have to find them,” I said. If no one else could, even a lot of big men, then how was I going to do it?
Panov Mandelstam laid his hand on my head. “Maybe they will send word to you when they are somewhere safe,” he said, but he said it too kindly, the way you say nice things to a goat when you are trying to get it to come so you can tie it up. It did not mean he wanted to hurt me. He only wanted to keep me in a good safe warm place so I wouldn’t die in the snow somewhere. But if I stayed in this safe warm place, I would never be able to see Sergey and Wanda again.
“They cannot send word,” I said. “If they did then everyone here would know where they were, and they would go and get them.”
Panov Mandelstam did not say anything back, only looked up at Panova Mandelstam, who had stopped her spinning and was looking back at him. So I knew I was right, because if I was not right, they would have told me so.
I said, “Sergey and Wanda were going to go to Vysnia. They wanted to ask someone for work.” I had to think about it because he was someone’s grandfather, and I didn’t know who the someone was, which was strange. But I did know the grandfather’s name. “Panov Moshel.”