Warm gold blushed through the whole length of it with the slightest push of my will, and the child gave a soft delighted tinkling sigh that made it feel more like magic than all the work I’d done in the treasury below. Slowly, I turned to Flek’s box and touched the top of the small pile of silver inside. Everything blazed into gold at once, the same quick and easy way, as if I’d somehow stretched the muscles of my gift to new lengths—as if now I could have gone and changed three storerooms packed full of silver into gold, without any trick involved. I changed Tsop’s silver and Shofer’s also; neither of them seemed surprised at how easily it went. I finished and then asked them, “Is it permissible to say thank you here, or is that rude somehow?”
“My lady, we would not refuse anything you wished to give us,” Tsop said a little helplessly, after they all three exchanged a look. “But we have always heard that in the sunlit world, mortals give thanks to one another to fill the hollowness where they fail to make return, and you have already given us so much that we shall only answer it with our lives’ service: you have given us names in your voice, and raised us high, and filled our hands with gold. What are your thanks besides that?”
When she put it that way—although I hadn’t thought of the names as a gift I was making them—I had to think about what I would have meant by saying thank you, instead of just the automatic politeness. I had to grope a while; I’d been jolted out of being sleepy, but I still felt dulled, as if my head had been padded with wool inside. “What I mean—what we mean by it is—it’s like credit,” I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. “Gifts, and thanks—we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go. So I do thank you,” I added abruptly, “because you risked all you had to help me, and even if you count the return fair, I’ll still remember the chance you took and be glad to do more for you if I can.”
They stared at me, and after a moment Flek reached out a hand and put it on her daughter’s head and said, “My lady, then I will ask, if you do not think it beyond what you owe: will you give my child her true name?” I must have looked as baffled as I felt; Flek lowered her eyes. “The one who sired her would not accept the burden when she was born, and left her nameless,” she said softly. “And if I ask him again now, he will agree, but he has the right to demand my hand in return, and I no longer wish to give it.”
I didn’t know what the laws among the Staryk were, about marriage, but I knew exactly what I thought of a man who’d sire a child and refuse to own it: I wouldn’t have wanted him, either. “Yes. How do I do it?” I asked, and after she told me, I held out my hand to the little girl, and she came with me to the far end of the balcony, and I bent down and whispered in her ear, “Your name is Rebekah bat Flek,” which I thought would certainly give any Staryk trying to guess it a significant degree of difficulty.
She brightened up all throughout her body, as if someone had lit a flame inside her. She ran back to her mother and said, “Mama, Mama, I have a name! I have a name! Can I tell you?” and Flek knelt and pulled her into her arms and kissed her and said, “Sleep with it in your heart alone tonight, little snowflake, and tell me in the morning.”
It made me glad looking on their joy: I felt in that moment that I had given fair return, even for that day and night of terror they had all lived with me, and if I never saw them again, I still hoped that they’d do well for themselves. I did feel a pang of guilt, because I didn’t know exactly what would happen if my plan succeeded and I left their king’s throne vacant for someone else to claim. Would that mean my own rank had fallen, and theirs with mine? But I hoped that would only put them in some lower rank of nobility at worst. I had to take the chance, anyway, for the sake of my own people, being buried alive under that endless snow outside my window.
I took a deep breath. “I’m ready to go,” I said, and almost instantly the glass wall parted and my husband came in: my husband, whom I meant to murder. For just cause and more, but still I felt a little queasy, and I didn’t look him in his face. I’d avoided looking at him before because he’d seemed so terrible and strange, a glittering of icicles brought to life; now I avoided it because he looked suddenly too much like someone, like a person. I had held the hand of that frozen little ice-statue of a girl, and she was my goddaughter now or something close to it, and when I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer, their faces were warmed by the reflection off the gold in the chests at their feet, and they were the faces of my friends, my friends who had helped me, and would help me again if they could. What did it matter that they didn’t speak of kindness, here; they had done me a kindness with their hands. I knew which one of those I would choose.
But they made it suddenly harder to see only winter in his face. He wasn’t my friend; he was all monstrous sharp edges of ice, wanting to cut me open and spill gold out of me while he swallowed up my world. But he was a satisfied monster for the moment: I had cut myself open, and I’d filled him two storerooms of gold, and he had to match my accomplishment to fulfill his own sense of dignity, so he came to me dressed in splendor equal to my own, as if he meant to do courtesy to the occasion, and he bowed to me as courtly as if I really was his queen. “Come, then, my lady, and let us to the wedding,” he said, even suddenly polite to me, now when I most wanted him to be cold and grudging and resentful. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised: he’d never given me anything I wanted unless I’d bound him to it beforehand.
I looked at my friends one last time and inclined my head to them, saying farewell, and walked out beside him. We went down together to the courtyard. The sleigh was waiting, heaped with white furs without a mark. My dress and my crown were so heavy on me that I reached for the sides to haul myself up into it, but before I could, he took me by the waist and lifted me without effort inside before taking his own seat next to me.
The deer leapt away at the twitch of the driver’s reins, and the mountain went flashing away around us. The wind was strong and sweet in my face, not too cold, as we rushed down the passage to the silver gates and back out into the world, the sleigh runners whispering over the road and the hooves of the deer a light drumming. It was only a few minutes before we were running quick towards the forest. The deer and the sleigh flew over the top of the new-fallen snow without leaving more than light tracks, and the half-buried trees looked oddly small as we drove through them.
I watched to see what the Staryk would do, what spell or incantation he’d use to open a path to the sunlit world, but all he did was turn and look back at me in very nearly the same speculating way, as if he was wondering whether I might not fling out some unexpected magic. And then he said to me abruptly, “I will answer no questions for you tonight.”
“What?” My voice nearly cracked with alarm; for an instant I thought he’d guessed, he knew what I’d planned and we weren’t going to any wedding but to my execution. Then I understood what he really meant. “We have a bargain!”
“In exchange for your rights only. You have given me nothing in exchange for mine. I set no value upon them, and now see I bargained falsely—” He cut himself off abruptly, turning to face forward, and then he said slowly, “Is that why you demanded answers to fool’s questions as your return? To show your disdain for my insult?” He sat there for a moment of silence, and before I could correct him, suddenly he laughed, like a chorus full of bells singing a long way over snow, a baffling noise; I’d never even imagined him laughing. I stopped open-mouthed, half startled and half outraged, and then he turned and seized my hand and kissed it, the brush of his lips against my skin something like breathing out onto frostbitten glass.
He took me so much by surprise that I didn’t say anything at first, or even pull my hand free, and then he said to me fiercely, “I will make you amends tonight, my lady, and show you that I have learned better how to value you; I will not require another lesson beyond this one,” with a wave of his arm out of the sleigh, over the wide landscape smothered in the snow.
At first I looked in confusion, wondering what he meant, but there was nothing around us, nothing to be seen, except his depthless winter. A hundred years of winter that had somehow come all at once on a summer’s day, when the Staryk should have been shut up behind the glass walls of their mountain, waiting for the winter to come again. Though the Staryk had never before been able to hold back the spring so long.
A hundred years of winter, on a summer’s day. I said through a throat suddenly choked and tight, “You didn’t make this winter.”
“No, my lady,” he said, still looking at me with all the vast self-congratulation of a man who’d found a treasure hidden in a dirty trough. A treasure of gold, like the Staryk ever coveted; and when they’d begun to raid us more, when they’d begun to come for that gold more often—that was when the winters had begun to grow steadily worse. And now—and now—there were two vast storerooms heaped with shining, sunlit gold; the warmth of the summer sun trapped into cold metal for the Staryk to hoard deep inside his walls, while he buried my home under a wall of winter.
He smiled at me, still holding my hand; he smiled at me, and then turned to the driver and said, “Go!” and with a lurch we were onto the white road; the king’s road, Shofer had called it; the Staryk road I had known and glimpsed in the dark woods all my life. It was running on ahead of us as if it had always been there, and stretched away behind us too, as far as I could see, an endless vaulted passageway. The strange unearthly-white trees lined it on both sides, their limbs hung with clear ice-drops and white leaves, and the surface of it was smooth blue-white ice, clouded. The sleigh flew over it, and all at once a sudden strong smell of pine needles and sap came into my nose, a desperate struggling of life. Through the canopy of white branches overhead, the sky began to change: the grey flushed slowly through on one side with blue, and on the other with golden and orange, a summer evening’s sky over winter woods, and I knew that we’d slid out of his kingdom and back into my own world.