“The king of the Staryk, instead of her,” I said, and my voice sounded perfectly normal. A considerable effort was required not to let it waver, but the demon likes tears and misery, so I do my best not to produce them; the last thing I want is to encourage it to extend its entertainments. These days I’ve become more of a boring convenience than an exciting toy. I’ve found the line to tread between servility, which it enjoys too much, and provocation, which makes it fly into rages. It had been almost a year since it had bothered to beat me. Until darling Irina appeared on the scene, that is. If something else drives it into a frenzy, and I’m the nearest target to hand—as I rather inevitably am—then there’s not much I can do about it.
I was more than a little reluctant to risk prodding it further, but Irina’s offer had a remarkable effect: the demon came flowing back out of the fireplace and went coiling around me like a purring cat. Its flames still came licking at my skin, but only incidentally; it wasn’t trying to hurt me anymore. Still, there was nothing to shield me from the stinging tendrils, as it had done very permanent damage to my clothes. Irina had sniffed quite censoriously when I made a point of ensuring she didn’t wear the same gown twice. I suppose she’d rather scatter alms to the poor or endow a bunch of droning monks somewhere; it would go far better with the holier-than-thou drivel she attempted to feed me. But I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure everyone knows that I never appear in the same ensemble twice. The last thing I need is for anyone to start wondering what’s happened to my favorite pair of trousers or those expensive riding boots I wore three days ago. I’d rather be thought a mad spendthrift than a sorcerer—and it would look odd if I didn’t insist on my tsarina matching me for style.
“How?” the demon breathed out over my ear, claws of flame curling around my shoulder, a grip that shot fresh agony down my back. I clenched my teeth down over a howl; it would let go of me in a moment if I didn’t stir up its interest. “How will she give him to me…?”
“She was thin on the details,” I managed to force out. “She says he’s making the winters longer.”
The demon made a low roaring noise in its throat and prowled away from me again, leaving smoking trails in the carpets on its way back to the fireplace. I shut my eyes and breathed a few times before gathering myself to push back up. “She’s certainly lying about any number of things, but she’s been hiding somewhere,” I said. “And two blizzards since Spring Day does rather stretch the bounds of chance.”
“Yes, yes,” it crackled to itself, gnawing idly on a log. “He has locked them away beneath the snow, and there she flees where I cannot go…but can she bring him to me?”
As little as I cared to trust Irina’s too-clever explanations—not for a second did I imagine she had my welfare anywhere remotely near at heart—she had made a few excellent arguments. “If she can’t, we’re no worse off for her trying,” I said. “Are you sure you can defeat him, if she does manage it?”
It made its sputtering crackle of laughter. “Oh, I will slake my thirst, I will drink so deep,” it muttered. “Only he must be held fast! A chain of silver to bind him tight, a ring of fire to quench his might…bring him to me!” it hissed at me. “Bring him to me and make ready!”
“She wants your promise, of course,” I said. Irina seemed rather eager to rely on the word of an unholy creature, for all her cleverness and sanctimony, but then she’d plainly decided that I’d made a bargain with it myself to get the throne, and fair enough, here I was upon it, for all the delights it afforded me. I would have thought my situation rather an object lesson in being careful what you wished for.
“Yes, yes,” the demon said. “She will be tsarina with a golden crown, and whatever she desires will be hers, only let her bring him to me!”
So I’d been quite right: I was going to be stuck with delightful darling Irina for the rest of my days, and much say I was going to get in any aspect of the matter.
* * *
My Irina went back to the demon in the morning. I had knitted away the night too quickly. After she had gone, I smoothed my hands over the wool, my fingers trembling as they had not done while I worked. I had made flowers and vines, a cover for a wedding-bed, and it seemed to me that whenever I closed my eyes, they kept growing on their own, quicker than my hands could have made them. I drowsed beneath the heavy weight of the cover in my lap by the fire, until the door swung shut and Irina’s hand was on my shoulder again. “Irinushka, you gave me a fright. Is it night again already?” I said.
“No,” she said. “The bargain is made, Magreta. He will leave me alone, and take the Staryk king in my place. Come. We’re leaving for Vysnia right away. We have to be there in two days’ time.”
I left the knitting on the bed when I went with her. Maybe someone else would come to this little house and need it someday. I didn’t argue. Her father was in her face, then, though she did not know it, and I knew there wasn’t any use. He had looked so in the old duke’s study, and he had looked so when he had taken Irina down to the chapel to be married to the tsar: his feet were on a path and he was walking, and if there were turns, he would not take them aside. That was how she looked, now.
I only hoped not to be so cold anymore, when she brought me out into the palace, in a room full of shining mirrors and silence and a golden harp no one was playing. But there was snow high on the windowsills, and there was no fire in that dark room to warm my hands. There was no chance to find another one lit. The household was all in a frenzy when we came out, servants running in the halls, except when they saw Irina, and then they stopped and bowed to her. She asked each one of them their name, and when they were gone she said it over to herself three times—a trick her father used also, whenever new men came to his army. But what good would scullery-maids and footmen do her, with a demon and a devil on either side?
I followed after her to the courtyard: a royal sleigh was made ready, a great chariot of gilt and white painted fresh, perhaps that morning, and the tsar stood beside it in black furs with golden tassels and gloves of red wool and black fur; oh that vain boy, and his eyes were on my girl, and I could not hide her from him anymore.
“Magra, the tsar is a sorcerer,” she had said to me: ten years old, with her hair already a flowing dark river under the silver brush as we sat by the fire in a small room in the old tsar’s palace. “The tsar is a sorcerer,” just in such a way she said it, calmly out loud, as if that were a thing anyone might say at any time with nothing ill to come of it, as if a girl might say it at the dinner table in front of the whole court just as easily as she said it fresh out of her bath to only her old nanusha; a girl who was only the daughter of a duke whose new wife already had a great belly.
But it was even worse than that: after I slapped her cheek with the brush and told her not to say such things, she put her hand up to her cheek where the color was already fading, and stared at me, and said, “But it’s true,” as though that mattered, and added, “He is leaving dead squirrels for me.”
I did not let her out into the gardens again while we were in Koron, though her skin grew even more pale, and she listless and tired from sitting all day by the fire, helping me spin. With those skeins of yarn I bribed the girl who scrubbed our floor to tell me every day when the tsar left the tables: she knew from her sister, who was two years older and trusted to carry plates, and for finespun yarn she would carry away the tsar’s plate and then run up half the stairs quickly and call to her sister, who would run back up to us in the attic rooms, and only then I would take Irina down to eat, in the last minutes of cold food before the platters were taken away.
It was seven weeks like that, seven hard weeks, for the tsar came always very late to the table and lingered there very long; but every morning as we sat hungry and cold waiting upstairs, I brushed Irina’s hair until the serving-girl came and told us he had gone, and every evening I kept her busy carding the wool and giving it to me in clouds, until it was safe to creep downstairs for whatever was left to glean.
At last one morning, thin and white, she burst from the chair and ran to the window: a cold wind was blowing in, the first frost of the year, and she cried out, “Winter will be here soon, and I want to go outside,” and wept. My heart broke, but I was not a young girl anymore, afraid of being trapped behind a door forever. I knew the door was safety, I knew the door would not always be closed, and I did not let her out. That evening her father’s servant came, impatient after climbing the stairs because we were not at the tables for him to find us; he told us sharply the roads had frozen hard, so we would be going in the morning. I thanked the saints after he had gone.
The seven years of safety since then I had won for her, with those seven hard weeks of patience: that was not nothing. But they felt as nothing when I saw him look at her with eyes as hard as stone. Seven years were gone, gone so quickly, and I could not close a door against him anymore. Someone stronger than I had pulled it open. He held out his gloved hand, and she let go of my arm; she murmured to me, “Go in the sledge there with the guards, Magra. They’ll look after you.”
They were young men, soldiers, but she was right anyway; I was an old woman, white-haired, and my lady was their own tsarina now. Those rough boys helped me into the sledge, and put blankets over me and a warmer at my feet, and called me baba kindly, and old nanusha, and paid no attention to me otherwise; they were talking to each other about good places to drink in Vysnia, and grumbling because the duke’s kitchens were not generous, and when they thought I was drowsing they talked of this girl and that.
They prodded and jostled one of them, a strapping young fellow with a mustache, handsome enough that he should have had girls sighing for him, and who did not speak of anyone, until another one laughed and said, “Ah, leave Timur alone, I know where his heart is: in the tsarina’s jewel-box.” They all laughed, but only a little, and they did not keep teasing him; when I sat up and yawned to let them believe I had really been asleep, I saw him, eyes wounded as if he had been caught by an arrow. He was looking ahead past the driver, at the white sleigh in the distance running, and I, too, could see Irina’s dark hair beneath the white fur of her hat.