“At once, Your Majesty,” he said, a note in his voice like the deepest humming string on an instrument, and he went out.
My father came to me. He stopped in the doorway and I turned, still on the balcony, and looked at him with my back straight. His eyes were on me, heavy and assessing as they always had been, measuring my worth, and after a moment he crossed the room and came to join me on the cold stone. Below us, the near-unbroken white of the forest and the frozen river rolled into the blanketed countryside. “It won’t be a good harvest this year,” I said.
I half expected him to be irritated or even angry at being summoned, to speak sharply to me: to him surely I was only the unexpectedly useful pawn. I was not meant to begin sweeping independently around on the board. But he only said, “No. The rye is blighted in the fields.”
“I’m sorry to put you to the expense, but there’s going to be a wedding while we’re here,” I told him. “We’re marrying Vassilia to Mirnatius’s cousin Ilias.”
He paused and looked at me from under his brows for a long moment. He said slowly, “We can manage. How soon after she comes?”
“In the same hour,” I said, and we looked at each other, and I knew that he understood me perfectly.
He rubbed his hand across his mouth thoughtfully. “I’ll make sure Father Idoros is ready and waiting in the chapel when Ulrich’s horses come through the gate. The house will be crowded, but your mother and I will leave our bedroom for them. She’ll sleep upstairs with her women, and I’ll take the one next door, with your cousin Darius. A few other men of your husband’s household can share with us to make room.”
I nodded, and I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about Ulrich finding a way to spirit his own valuable daughter out from under her new bridegroom.
“Will Prince Casimir be visiting?” my father asked after a moment, still studying me.
“He may not come until the day after, I am afraid,” I said. “Our messenger to him was late getting started, some trouble with his horse.”
My father glanced back into the room. The servants were still working, but none of them were near the balcony. “How is your husband’s health?”
“Mostly good. But he has…a nervous complaint,” I said. “A trouble his mother had, I think.”
My father paused and his brows drew hard together. “Does it give him…difficulty?”
“So far, yes,” I said.
He was silent, and then he said, “I’ll have a quiet word with Casimir when he comes. He’s not a fool. A sensible man, and a good soldier.”
“I’m glad you think well of him,” I said.
My father put his hand up and held my cheek for a moment, so unexpected I held still beneath it, startled. He said low, fiercely, “I am proud of you, Irina,” and then he let go again. “Will you and your husband come down to dinner tonight?”
“Not tonight,” I said after a moment. It was an effort to speak, at first. I hadn’t thought that I wanted my father to be proud of me. It had never seemed possible at all, but I hadn’t known it mattered to me. I had to force myself to find words again. “There’s one more thing. Something…else.”
He studied my face and nodded. “Tell me.”
I waited in silence, until the room had emptied of servants again for a moment. “The winter’s being made by the Staryk. They mean to freeze us all.” He stiffened, and instinctively reached his finger halfway towards the hanging chains of my silver crown, looking at it. “Their king means to bring the snow all summer.”
His eyes were hard and intent upon me. “Why?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But there’s a way to stop it.”
I told him of the plan in those few private moments, plain and brutally quick. When I had spoken of politics, I knew just how to tell him a thousand things without saying a single betraying word that anyone else would understand, never fearing that he wouldn’t know what I meant, but not when I spoke of winter lords and demons of flame. They moved through our words like they moved through our world, disasters beyond its boundaries. I spoke quickly not just to keep from being overheard, but because I wanted to hurry through: the story made no sense beside the hard reality of stone walls and murder, and the sun shining on the snow-bright rail.
But my father listened intently, and he didn’t say Don’t be foolish, or This is madness. When I finished, he said, “There was a tower once in the southern end of the city walls, near the Jewish quarter. We broke it in the siege when we came into the city. We rebuilt the wall straight afterwards, and left the cellar and the foundations of the tower outside, covered over with dirt, and my two best men and I dug a tunnel to it all the way out of the palace cellars, while the city was still half burned.” I was nodding swiftly, understanding: he’d made a back way out of the city, a way to escape a siege, like the old duke hadn’t had to use. “Once a year, in the night, I go down the tunnel and back to check it. I’ll dig it out tonight with my own hands, and wait for you there, outside the walls. You have the chain?”
“Yes,” I said. “In my jewel-box. And twelve great candles, to make a ring of fire.”
He nodded. More servants came in and we fell silent together. He said nothing while they unpacked another two boxes of rich clothing, velvet and silk and brocades. His eyes were on the work, but he was not really seeing it; I could see his mind unwinding a tangled thread with slow careful patience, following it from one end to another through a thicket. “What is it?” I asked, when they had gone away again.
He said after a moment, “Men have lived here a long time, Irina. My great-grandfather had a farmhouse near the city. The Staryk rule the forest, and lust for gold, and they ride out in winter storms to get it, but they have never before stood in the way of the spring.” My father looked at me with his cold clear eyes, and I knew he was warning me when he said, “It would be well to know: Why?”
* * *
I had the Staryk king’s promise, but I didn’t want to trust it; the panic of the storerooms still filled me. But I was so tired that I drifted to sleep in my bath as soon as they put me in it. I suppose I might have slept however long I wanted, but as I lay there drowsing, I had a half dream of standing on the threshold of the ballroom in my grandfather’s house, the whole room empty and the lights dimmed and the Staryk jeering next to me, “You mistook the date.”
I jerked up in sudden terror, wide-awake, my heart pounding. I stared for a moment in confusion at the wall of my room in front of me, which wasn’t clear anymore but solid white, and then I clumsily dragged myself out of the bath, wrapping a sheet around me as I stumbled over. It wasn’t the wall that had changed: it was the whole world that had gone all to white; the forest buried so deep that the nearest pines were under up to their small pointed tops, coated thickly, with not a single dark green needle visible anywhere. The river had vanished completely beneath the blanket, and the sky had gone almost pearl-white above.
I stood staring out at it with the sheet clenched in my fists against me, thinking of all that snow falling on my home, falling on Vysnia, until one of the servants behind me said timidly, “My lady, will you dress?”
Flek and Tsop and Shofer had all vanished, mere servants’ work evidently beneath them now, but they’d arranged everything I needed before they went. Shofer had gone to order one of the other drivers to make the sleigh ready for my journey, and a crowd of other servants had been summoned, who obeyed me with a different kind of silence and swiftness, as though some word and whisper had already gone through the kingdom, and changed me in all their sight.
They brought me a gown of heavy white silk with a coat of white brocade embroidered in silver, and a high-necked collar of silver lace and clear jewels to go around my shoulders. They put the heavy golden crown above it all—mismatched at first, but I barely glanced at myself in the mirror and noticed, and gold shot suddenly down every line of silver all the way to the embroidered hem. Around me the women dropped their hands from the silk and their eyes from my face.
I would be far more mismatched at Basia’s wedding, a fantastical doll that someone had imagined unrestrained by cost or sense. But I didn’t tell them to bring another dress. I was bringing a Staryk king as a wedding guest, and hoping to kill him in the midst of the festivities; my clothes would be the least of it. And if I was lucky enough to escape this night with my life and dress intact, I’d sell it to some noblewoman to make a dowry for a real marriage. I didn’t believe silver would turn to gold for me in the sunlit world, but I’d still be a rich woman to the end of my days off the one ensemble.
So I held my head high under the weight of my crown and let the burden of it make me glide with stately pace to the front of the chamber. Tsop and Shofer had come back and were waiting there for me, each of them with a small box full of silver: mostly small pieces of jewelry, a cup or two, some scattered forks and knives and plates and loose coins filling in around them. They had changed their clothing, too, to garments of palest ivory. Tsop had put the gold buttons from her old clothes onto the new ones. The other servants bowed to them and looked at them sideways at the same time.
Then Flek came in, also in ivory and carrying a box of her own, and at her side a little girl followed, a Staryk girl. She was the first child I’d seen here, and even stranger to my eye than the grown Staryk were: she was as thin and reedy as an icicle and almost as translucent, and shades and veins of deep blue were visible beneath her skin, a thin clear layer of ice. Beside her the other Staryk looked like snowy hillsides, and she a frozen core that snow had yet to settle on. She looked up at me with silent wide curiosity.
“Open-Handed, this is my daughter, who now is your bondswoman, too,” Flek said softly, and touched her shoulder, and the little girl made me a careful leaning bow. She was carrying a small fine necklace of silver across her hands, a simple adornment she evidently hadn’t wanted to put into the box with the rest, and I reached down and touched it first of all.