But the demon had kept hurling me at him, grabbing my shattered hands furiously on open air even while my ribs pierced into my lungs, my hips cracked apart so that my legs dangled, my jaw hung loose with teeth falling out of it like loose pebbles. I could have been crushed into wine-pulp and still I think Chernobog would have been oozing me over the floor to glaze his boots with my blood. When the Staryk finally pushed us into the fireplace and told the demon to stay there, I would have wept with gratitude, with relief, if only he’d done me the kindness of one final parting kick to crush my skull and end the agony.
But he left me there. And then my sweet Irina came and put her arms around me like some grotesque parody of comfort. If she’d wanted to comfort me, she could have slit my throat. But she had a use for me, she too had a use for me, I’m so endlessly useful; she knelt and said to me urgently, “The ring of fire. Can you light the candles?” At first I think I only wept at her a little, or maybe laughed, as much as I could make any sound at all come out of my mouth. The experience was rather cloudy in my memory. But then she took me by the shoulders and said fiercely, “You’ll be trapped here forever if we don’t stop him!” and I woke to the gruesome horrified certainty that she was right.
Oh, I thought I already knew a fate worse than death; how absurdly, ridiculously naïve I’d been. I wasn’t broken enough to die, only to lie there in the cinders and the ash. I imagined the household fled, everyone in the neighboring houses fled, from the horror of the twisted wreck of me in the fireplace. They’d board up the windows and the doors, and maybe they’d burn the whole building down and bury me in a mountain of blackened timbers, and I’d be lying underneath it forever with the demon still howling in my ears, devouring me because it couldn’t get to anyone else.
So I did get up, and with a feeble croaking spell and a trickle of the magic my demon had given me, a ragged scrap of meat tossed to an adequately obedient dog, I captured the Staryk king for my beloved queen and my beloved master. And now here I was rewarded: I was whole again! I could breathe without a fountain of blood gurgling in my throat! I could stand and walk and see out of both my eyes, and oh, how grateful I was for it, except I understood that I hadn’t escaped anything. I’d only deferred it for a while. That fate was waiting for me, sooner or later. Chernobog would never let me go, not even to death. Why would it? It didn’t have to. I’d been signed over comprehensively; no fine print or limitations on my term. All I would ever be able to do about it was what I’d ever been able to do about it: nothing. Nothing but to catch at those scraps of life when they came, and devour them, and lick my greasy fingers, and try to make life endurable when I had the chance.
So I let myself breathe in the night air, and I looked at my once-again beautiful well-formed hands, and I followed my queen and my guardsmen through the streets and through the narrow door, because as long as Chernobog had a Staryk to feast upon, I wouldn’t need to fear. It felt heavy and replete inside my belly, a well-fed monster, almost somnolent with satisfaction. Long might it sleep so.
Outside the wall, Irina took us out onto the hill, to a place beside a small wizened tree, and told the guards to put down the candles in a circle around the Staryk, and then she said, “You have served Lithvas and God tonight. You will be rewarded for what you have done. Now go back to the city, and before you return to the palace, go straight to the church and give thanks, and speak to no one of what you have seen tonight.”
They all fled promptly, the obviously sensible men they were, except for our one brave hero, who set down the rope carefully inside the ring of candles, and asked Irina, “Your Majesty, may I not stay and serve you?”
Irina looked at him and asked, “What is your name?”
“Timur Karimov, Your Majesty,” he said. Yes, very eager to serve her, that was patently obvious, although he’d want payment for it sooner or later, I imagined. However, as soon as I’d had the thought, it occurred to me—he had a Tatar strain himself: dark-skinned and handsome and broad-shouldered, and judging by that mustache he had dark hair to go with his light eyes. And if Irina didn’t insist on my providing stud services, someone was going to have to do the work.
“Timur Karimov, you have shown your worth,” I said, and startled him into noticing that yes, that was her husband standing right there, her husband the tsar of Lithvas who could have his eyes put out and his tongue slit and his head and hands cut off and nailed over the castle gate, and all for the effort of saying a word. I would have taken some small satisfaction in seeing him look a little nervous, but instead he only saw me and then looked—crumpled, with miserable envy, as if he didn’t actually hope to enjoy any favors after all, he only dreamed longingly of his shining ideal from afar, and had temporarily forgotten that she was out of his reach. Well, perhaps he could be cured of that lack of ambition. “I hereby appoint you captain of the tsarina’s personal guard, and may you ever show as much courage in protecting my greatest treasure as you have this night.”
Evidently I overdid it; he lunged forward to fall down on one knee at my feet and seized my hand and kissed it. “Your Majesty, I swear it on my life,” he said, in throbbing tones, as if he thought he were acting in a play, only it sounded as though he really was on the verge of bursting into tears.
“Yes, very well,” I said, drawing my hand away. Irina was looking at me with a little frown, as if she didn’t understand my motives; I gave a pointed look down at the charming young gallant’s bowed head and then her cheeks darkened in a completely unwarranted maidenly flush as lo, the sudden light dawned! As though she had grounds at all for not understanding in the first place after those lectures to me on dynastic succession. “Well?” I added to her. I felt quite comfortable keeping Timur around; he wasn’t going to be telling our secrets to anyone, not to betray her beautiful beloved Majesty.
Irina must have worked that out herself as well, because after a moment she pointed him to a spot in the ground in front of the Staryk’s feet and said, “Dig there.”
Not much work was required to uncover the stones and the trapdoor; as soon as we had cleared it off, Irina knocked on it, and a moment later it was swung down and open, and I saw my father-in-law’s face swimming up out of the dark below. He nodded to Irina, and made room for us to bring the Staryk down. He’d been busy to some purpose himself: he’d pickaxed out a round channel in the floor, among the stones, and he’d filled it up with coals. There was another ring of candles burning down around the channel as a second row of fortifications, and more stacked up in a wheelbarrow waiting against the wall to replenish the supply. Everything so very tidily organized.
Timur pulled the Staryk on his leash into the ring of coals, and then climbed back over and tossed the rope back to pool at his feet. The Staryk ignored it; he stood in the circle looking out at us with his cold gleaming icicle of a face, his head high and proud even with the silver chain still wrapped around him, impossibly strange: that was winter we had locked up in the cellar there among us. He didn’t entirely seem a living creature. There was something odd in his face that didn’t stay the same whenever you looked at him twice, as if his edges were constantly melting and re-formed. He wasn’t beautiful, he was terrifying; and then he was beautiful, and then he was both, and I couldn’t decide from one moment to the next which it was.
It made something in my head itch; I would have liked to draw him, to catch him with pen and ink, and not just fire and silver. I looked over at Irina there in the dark pit: some of his cold blue light was reflecting on her face, on her silver crown and the red rubies of her silver gown, and it occurred to me that this was what they saw when they looked at her: they saw her like a Staryk, but close enough to mortal to be touched.
Inside, Chernobog stirred and gave a small internal belch, nothing I’d ever felt before and gruesomely unpleasant, and lashed me a little; I gritted my teeth and flicked my fingers at the circle of coals, and set it glowing red with flame. Timur flinched back from it. The Staryk didn’t quite flinch, but I got the impression he would have rather liked to, if that weren’t far beyond his dignity. I repressed the urge to tell him to enjoy flinching as much as he wanted to. Chernobog never took much notice of anyone’s dignity or lack thereof so far as I’d ever seen. It pleased itself either way.
“Shall we be off?” I said to Irina. “I’m sorry to forsake the manifest charms of this place, but we do have another wedding to attend tomorrow, I believe? A busy season for them.”
Irina turned away from the Staryk. “Yes,” she said somberly. She didn’t seem particularly happy with the final outcome of her excellently laid plans, although as far as I could tell they’d gone off without a hitch. Unless of course there had been a corollary to them she hadn’t shared with me—for instance, one where I had been left tucked safely in the fireplace forever, perhaps chained in gold and ringed with ice; that seemed the poetic mirror. Yes, the more I thought of it, the more I was certain something like that had been on the agenda. Ha, how silly of me—had been. That knife in the back was still very much on its way.
“A trusted man?” the duke said to Irina, gesturing at Timur. She nodded. “Good. He will come up with me and help to cover the door again, and keep guard. Walk straight down the tunnel. Take no turns. It crosses a few old sewers along the way.”
That rather nicely conveyed the prospective scenic quality of our walk. I smiled at Irina with every last ounce of the sincere affection that was blooming in my heart for her, and put out my arm formally. She looked at me, once more dull and expressionless as glass, and set her hand on the curve of my arm. We left the Staryk standing silently and alone behind us in his bonds of flame and silver, and set off together down a stinking impenetrable-dark rat tunnel full of squeaks and dangling-maggot tree roots. I cupped a fire in my hand while we walked, red light dancing over the earthen walls.
“What a convenient bolt-hole this is,” I said. “Shall I keep it in mind if your father ever rebels against the crown? I suppose that’s hardly likely anymore—or is it?” She only looked at me. “I suppose you think I’m an idiot,” I snapped at her. Her silence was more infuriating than her lectures. I hadn’t asked for any of this: I hadn’t wanted to marry her, I hadn’t wanted to help her survive, I hadn’t wanted to be smashed like eggshells for her sake. Chernobog was sitting in my belly like swallowed coals, a thick sated presence, pleased with itself—and her, too, no doubt. I couldn’t even shove her into one of these dark tunnels and run away, leaving her behind.