“Yes, very well,” he said very shortly, distracted over his cup of wine. He was staring past me out the tall impractical windows of his ballroom: fresh snowflakes were gently drifting past their length, to add themselves to the frozen white ground.
In the kitchens, I ordered the slightly puzzled but obedient servants to make me a basket of food. I took it with me back into the presentation rooms and found one of them empty, a harp standing alone among velvet divans waiting for an occasion. In the gilt-edged mirror on the wall, I saw the low garden wall and the dark trees beyond, the same place I had left, and I stepped through to the little hut in the woods with my heavy basket on my arm.
It wasn’t snowing, at least for this one moment, but new snow had fallen since I’d gone, here just as in Lithvas: it was creeping up the sides of the house. My feet crunched alone on a thick layer of ice frozen atop the drifts. I stopped in the lonely yard at the edge of the twilight, where it cut the house in half, and on an impulse I took a piece of bread from the basket and crumbled it over the snow. Perhaps there were living things here, and it didn’t seem they would find much more to eat than the squirrels back in Lithvas.
Magreta was sleeping when I came in, deep wrinkles shadowed in her old face and silver lines in her hair. Her hands were lying idle in her lap for once, as if someone had taken her knitting away from her. The fire was very low, but the wood box was still full, at least. As I was adding another log and stirring up the fire, she muttered, “It’s still dark. Go back to sleep, Irinushka,” the way she did when I was a little girl and woke up too early in the morning and wanted to get out of bed. Then she woke up, and scolded me away from the fire, and insisted on herself putting on water to boil for tea, and cutting the cheese and ham. She never liked me to get too close to the fire, or to chance cutting myself with a knife.
I drowsed on the cot through the dark hours again, watching Magreta’s knitting needles move in the firelight the way I had used to as a child in the small room I grew up in, near the top of the house: cold in winter, stifling in summer. The cold of the Staryk kingdom crept into the hut the way it had slid like a knife around the windowsills and under the eaves of my father’s house. I still preferred it to the tsar’s palace.
Chapter 17
My darling tsarina vanished again after dinner, somewhere between the kitchens and my bedchamber. I was hardly surprised by now. I didn’t object, either. After several unbroken years of lecturing me on the importance of choosing my bride and all the many tedious factors to consider, all the old dotards on my council had fallen over one another to congratulate me for having shackled myself to a girl with none of the dowry or political value they’d been insisting on, which was irritating enough, but all the young dotards in my court had also fallen over one another to congratulate me on the astonishing beauty of my pale mousey rake of a bride.
Even my most reliable cynic, Lord Reynauld, on whom I’d have confidently wagered a thousand pieces of gold to find something viciously insulting to say about any new wife I’d presented—in his magnificently polite way, naturally—wandered up to my throne late in the evening and told me coolly that I’d made quite a clever and unexpected choice, and then he looked round the room and asked where she’d gone to, in a tone so artfully uninterested that I realized with enormous indignation that he was passionately interested in looking at her some more.
It was enough to make me wonder if she’d been telling the truth about that enchantment from her mother. Blinding fools to her beauty seemed rather more like a curse than a blessing, given the number of fools among the nobility, but as I’d ample cause to know, mothers weren’t necessarily to be relied upon to deliver those, whatever song and story like to say about it. Or perhaps I’d been right, and the blessing really was the other way round.
Except my Aunt Felitzja, who very decidedly was not a fool—I’d found her impossible to muddle without expending really enormous amounts of power—made Ilias help her dodder over to me before leaving, and told me in resigned tones, “Well, you’ve married the way most men do, for a pretty face, so now make it worthwhile, and see to it there’s a christening before another year is gone.” And this while Ilias, who has been trying his best to worm his way into my bed since even before he’d worked out what he wanted to do once he got there—the quantities of horrible poetry he’s inflicted on me don’t bear describing—stood there and looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.
I wanted to stand up and shout at them all that my wife not only wasn’t divinely beautiful, she wasn’t even interestingly ugly; her conversation consisted entirely of insults, dire warnings, and tedious lectures I couldn’t even ignore; and they were all extraordinary idiots for imagining I could possibly have had the bad taste to fall in love with a dull, prosing, long-faced harridan. The only reason I didn’t yield to the temptation was that I’d have been put to the awkward necessity of explaining just why I had married her. “Because my demon told me to” isn’t a generally accepted reason, even if you have a crown on your head. And I would have raised more objections if I’d known what I was getting into.
Under normal circumstances, when my friend wants itself a meal, it doesn’t usually last long. I just hold my nose and dive deep until the screaming is all over, then cover things over and occasionally send a compensatory purse to the appropriate destination. I have had words with it about snatching up awkward people like noblemen and parents of small children, to a little grudging effect, but that’s only because it’s not very picky. Unless I do something stupid like smile encouragingly at a serving-maid or a well-turned footman, even in broad daylight, in which case I’m sure to find their staring corpse in my bed a few nights later. “Why didn’t you marry Prince Ulrich’s daughter?” indeed. It delights in doing that sort of thing—the added pleasure of surprising the poor fool who thinks they’re about to have an evening’s delight and a handsome reward in the morning. I’m dreading the night Ilias finally gets really enterprising and bribes his way into my bedchamber. My aunt will not be happy in the least. As for Ulrich’s daughter, if I had let my councillors shove me into bed with her, she’d have had a great many objections afterwards, if she didn’t before.
But not sweet innocent Irina, who evidently doesn’t bat an eye at flaming horrors. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have thought for an instant she’d have trouble with the court; a woman who can coolly bargain with a demon that wants to gnaw on her soul is hardly to be intimidated by Lord Reynauld D’Estaigne. Or, more to the point, by her husband.
I could already see the freshly hideous future taking shape ahead of me. I was going to be stuck with her. My blasted demon was going to snatch at her offer with both clawed hands, Aunt Felitzja was going to be delighted at the chance to marry Ilias off to a rich princess, my entire court already thought her enchantingly beautiful, and my councillors were really going to adore my having a wife who would listen to them prose on about tax rolls and then come and harangue me for hours in their stead, since I couldn’t send her away. And everyone would love her as absolutely no one did me.
Oh, and five minutes from now she’d undoubtedly inform me that she expected me to consummate this relationship, so she could pop out an heir or two to still more general acclaim. After which I wouldn’t be the least surprised to find a knife sticking out of my back some morning. There was a gruesome inevitability to it all. My life has been a sequence of monsters one after another tossing me about to suit their whims; I’ve got a finely tuned sense for when another round of buffeting has arrived.
And one was certainly on the way now. I drank half of a bottle of brandy as the sun began coming sideways through the windows of the ballroom, and took the rest of it along with me to my chambers. I hadn’t any idea what the servants thought had become of Irina this time, and I didn’t care, either. She could worry about the rumors she was starting herself, if she cared so much.
Except—a morose realization—the rumors would undoubtedly all end up being about me. I’d be the hobgoblin locking my poor innocent wife in a closet somewhere, and if I refused to lie back and be mounted when she decided it was time to take possession, I’d be the pathetic impotent who couldn’t get a child on what everyone else seemed to think was the most beautiful woman in the world.
I was in a fine mood by the time I reached the privacy of my chambers, and to improve it, I only just had time to down a final gulp of brandy as the fire climbed out of the knot at the base of my skull and jerked me puppetlike to my feet. “Where has she gone?” it hissed with my tongue and throat, clawing through my mind and memories just enough to find that she was gone again, and then it screamed with fury and spun out of me into the open air, a firespout twisting around my body.
“Why did you let her go?” it snarled, and didn’t let me answer. It shoved a flaming brand down my throat, scorching up my screams before they could emerge into the air, and flung me to the floor and beat me savagely with whips of fire, every blow a shock of bright pain against my skin. There was nothing to be done but endure it. Fortunately it had thrown me on my back: I find it helps somewhat to follow the endless up-and-down pattern of the gilt line bordering the ceiling, all the way around the full length of the room. The demon was in fine form tonight: I had gone around five times before the beating finally wound to a halt and it hurled me away with sulky finality onto the floor beneath the fireplace. It went slouching into the crackling flames and spat at me, “What bargain?” So it had picked that much out of my head already, not that it had felt the need to let that get in the way of finishing up a proper thrashing.
I couldn’t so much as twitch without agony, and my throat was raw as though I’d drunk broken glass, but of course that had nothing to do with anything truly being wrong. The demon seems to feel the need to keep the terms of the original bargain for beauty, crown, and power, no matter how the circumstances have changed, and I suppose leaving me festooned with scars wouldn’t fit. But it’s grown quite adept over the years at managing to produce the sensation of lingering damage without leaving any actual marks behind.