* * *
Mirnatius did not speak to me more than he needed to on the journey, his face as close to sour as expression could make it. “Please yourself,” he’d said shortly, when I told him we should leave for Vysnia at once. “And when precisely is this Staryk going to materialize? There isn’t an infinite store of patience to be had, as I trust you realize.”
“Tomorrow night, in Vysnia,” I said.
He grimaced, but didn’t argue. In the sleigh he put me beside him on the seat and looked elsewhere, except when we stopped at another nobleman’s house to break our journey. The household came out and bowed to us, and Prince Gabrielius himself, proud and white-haired. He had fought alongside the old tsar, and he’d had a granddaughter in the running for tsarina, too, so he had ample cause for the cold offended resentment in his face when I was first presented to him, but it faded out as he stood too long with my hand clasped in his, staring at me, and then he said in low tones, “My lady,” and bowed too deeply.
Mirnatius spent all dinner looking at me with angry desperation, as if it was near driving him mad wondering what the rest of the world saw in me. “No, we’re not staying the night,” he said with savage rudeness to the prince afterwards, all but dragging me away to the sleigh in what I suppose looked like a jealous ferment. He threw himself into the corner violently, his jaw clenched, and snapped at the driver to get the horses moving, and as we went he darted quick, half-unwilling glances at me, as if he thought maybe he could surprise my mysterious beauty and catch it unawares before it fled his eyes.
Not quite an hour passed, and then he abruptly called a halt mid-forest and ordered a footman to bring him a drawing-box: a beautiful confection of inlaid wood and gold that folded into a sort of small easel, and a book of fine paper inside. He waved the sleigh onward and opened it. I caught glimpses from within as he turned the pages, designs and patterns and faces glancing back out at me, some of them beautiful and familiar from the dazzle of his court, but on one page a brief flicker of another face went by, strange and terrible. Not even a face, I thought after it had vanished; it was formed only roughly with a few shadows here and there, like wisps of smoke, but that was enough to leave the suggestion of horror.
He stopped at a blank page, near the end. “Sit up and look at me,” he said sharply, and I obeyed without arguing, a little curious myself; I wondered if the magic would hold, when men looked at a picture of me. He drew with a swift sure hand, looking more at me than at his paper. Even while we glided onward, my face took shape quickly on his page, and when he finished, he stared at it and then tore it out with a furious jerk and held it out to me. “What do they see?” he demanded.
I took it and saw myself for the first time with my crown. More myself on the page in his few lines, it seemed to me, than I had ever seen in a mirror. He hadn’t been unkind, though utterly without flattery, and he had put me together somehow out of pieces: a thin mouth and a thin face, my thick brows and my father’s hatchet nose only not twice broken, and my eyes one of them a little higher than the other. My necklace was a scribble in the hollow of my throat and my crown on my head and the thick doubled braid of my hair resting on my shoulder, a suggestion of weight and luster in the strokes. It was an ordinary unbeautiful face, but it was certainly mine and no other’s, though there were only a handful of lines on the page.
“Me,” I said, and offered it back to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was watching me, and the sun going down was red in his eyes, and as it lowered, he leaned in and said to me in a voice of smoke, “Yes, Irina; you they see, sweet and cold as ice,” caressing and horrible. “Will you keep your promise? Bring me the winter king, and I will make you a summer queen.”
My hands closed, crumpling the paper, and I steadied my voice before I spoke. “I will take you to the Staryk king, and put him in your power,” I said. “And you will swear to leave me be, after, and all those I love as well.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the demon said, sounding almost impatient. “You will have beauty and power and wealth, all three; a golden crown and a castle high; I will give you all you desire, only bring him soon to me…”
“I don’t want your promises or gifts, and I have a crown and a castle already,” I said. “I’ll bring him to you to break the winter, for Lithvas, but my desires I’ll manage on my own once you’ve left me and mine alone.”
He didn’t like it. That glimpse from the notebook, the shadow of horror, looked out of Mirnatius’s face at me scowling, and I had a struggle not to flinch back. “But what will you have, what will I give you in return,” he said, complainingly. “Will you take youth forever, or a flame of magic in your hand? The power to cloud the minds of men and bend them to your will?”
“No, and no, and no again,” I said. “I’ll take nothing. Do you refuse?”
He made a spiteful hissing noise and curled himself up unnaturally in the seat of the sleigh, drawing Mirnatius’s legs up and wrapping his arms over them, his head swaying back and forth, like a fire clinging around a log. He muttered, “But she will bring him…she will bring him to me…” and he glared at me again, red-eyed, and hissed, “Agreed! Agreed! But if you bring him not, a feast still I will have, of you and all your loves.”
“Threaten me again, and I’ll go and take them all to live with me in the Staryk lands,” I said, a show of purest bravado, “and you can hunger alone in a winter without an end, until your food vanishes and your fire dwindles to embers and ash. Tomorrow night you will have your Staryk king. Now leave until then. I care for your company even less than his, and that’s saying a great deal.”
It hissed at me, but I’d struck on some threat it didn’t care for, or else it didn’t like my company, either; it shrank back into Mirnatius like a spark dying out, the red gleam gone, and he sank back gasping against the cushions with his eyes shut until he caught his breath. When he had it again, he turned his head to stare at me. “You refused him,” he said to me, almost angrily.
“I’m not a fool, to take gifts from monsters,” I said. “Where do you think its power comes from? Nothing like that comes without a price.”
He laughed, a little shrill and sharp. “Yes, the trick is to have someone else pay it for you,” he said, and shouted ahead to the driver, “Koshik! Find us a house to stop for the night!” and sank back again with his hand over his face.
He hadn’t thought the situation through well enough when rushing us back onto the road, and neither had I, while I was making my grandiose speeches to his demon. The only shelter to be found was a modest boyar’s house, nothing so grand as if we’d stayed with Prince Gabrielius. Naturally the boyar gave up his own bedroom to the tsar and tsarina, and a well-curtained bed in it, but everyone else was crammed in only with difficulty. It was bitterly cold again, enough that all the horses and livestock had to be gotten under cover; no one could sleep outside at all, and there was little enough room in the stables. It meant a few servants had to sleep on the floor in our room, so I couldn’t take flight, and though the demon wasn’t there, my husband still was.
My wedding night had been so long a thing of hideous and unnatural dread that I’d forgotten to be alarmed by the ordinary horror of having to lie down with a stranger. I told myself with relief that at least he didn’t want me, no matter how unpleasant it would be even just to lie in a bed together. When the servants began to undress him, and he noticed I was still there, he also looked over at the bed in a kind of blank resignation. And then, after the candles were put out and we were lying stiffly beside each other with the bedcurtains drawn around us, the winter chill still creeping in around them despite the wooden walls and the fire in the grate, he heaved out an angry breath and turned over towards me, with his mouth tight as a prisoner going to the block.
I stopped him with my hands on his chest, staring at him in the dim rose light with my heart thundering suddenly fast. “Well, my beloved wife?” he said bitterly, and too loud, a mockery of tenderness performed for our audience, and I realized he meant to have me after all. I couldn’t think; I was as blank as a page. There were four servants outside listening: if I said no, if I said not yet, if they heard me—and then his hand bunched my gown and drew the thin fine linen of it up over my thighs, and his fingers trailed over my skin.
It made me jump, an involuntary shiver, and my cheeks went painfully red and hot. Then I said too loudly, “Oh, beloved,” and put my hands on his chest and shoved him back from me, as hard as I could.
He wasn’t expecting it, and he was only propped up in the bed on his arms, so he fell over; he pushed himself up with a half-outraged expression, for all he’d been doing it as a man condemned, and I leaned in and whispered fiercely, “Bounce the bed!”
He stared at me. I moved on the bed myself, enough to make the old wood groan audibly, to demonstrate, and with a half-bewildered look he joined me, until I gave another small cry for the benefit of our audience, and he abruptly seized a pillow and thrust his face into it and began shaking with a laughter so violent I thought for a moment he’d been possessed again into a fit.
And then suddenly he was weeping instead, so stifled I didn’t hear a sound even there behind the curtains with him; only when he had to break away just long enough to snatch one breath between agonies. If they had heard him out in the room, there would have been nothing to make them doubt our theater; he only made the small gasps, all other sound silenced.
I sat there wooden as a doll; I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to feel anything, and at first I only resented it, that he had the bad taste to weep in front of me as if he had the right to expect me to care, but I’d never heard anyone weep so. I had been afraid, and I had been hurt, and I had sorrowed, but I didn’t have cries like that inside me. He would have filled me with them, if he’d fed me to his demon. As he was being devoured himself, perhaps.