And then it came back to me suddenly, as a drop of oil floating up to the surface of water, that he had shouted and shouted, and when he finished, Silvija had looked up at him with her silver eyes and said very softly, “No. There is another child coming to our house who will wear a winter crown,” and he had stopped shouting and taken her hands and kissed them, and he had said nothing more of fostering the prince. But then Irina had not been born for another four years. I had forgotten all about it by the time she came.
Irina stood looking out at spring, my tsarina with her winter crown and her hawk father’s eyes, and her face was still so very pale. I squeezed her a little, trying to comfort her, whatever had wounded her so. “Come inside, dushenka,” I whispered softly. “Your hair is dry. I’ll braid it, and you should sleep a little. Come lie down on the couch. I won’t let anyone come in. You don’t need to go into the bed with him.”
“No,” she said. “I know. I don’t have to lie down with him.”
She came inside, and after I braided her hair, she lay down on the couch and I covered her. Then I went into the hallway and I told the footmen out there that the tsar and tsarina were very tired from their gaiety and were not to be disturbed, and I went inside and took the green dress to the window, to finish my sewing in the spring air.
* * *
When I woke in my grandfather’s house the next morning, the room was stifling-hot. I stumbled still half asleep to the window to let in some air. My mother and father were still in bed, and as I went I stepped barefoot on the gold-encrusted gown lying crumpled on the floor. Last night I’d clawed it off my body like a snakeskin and crawled onto the foot of the bed, even while my parents were still talking to me. Their words had stopped making any sense. Then they’d stopped speaking and only put their hands on my head. I fell away into slumber while they sang softly over me, with the familiar smells of woodsmoke and wool in my nose, warm again, warm again at last.
I unlatched the window and warm air blew into my face. I was high enough in my grandfather’s house to see over the city wall and into the fields and the forest on the other side, and all the fields were green, green, green: green with rye standing as tall as if it had already had four months of spring to grow in, green with new leaves already going dark with summer, and all the wildflowers open at once. The fruit trees down in my grandmother’s garden were full of flowers, too, plum and cherry and apple blossoming together, and even in the window-box there were flowers open, and a faint low humming in the air as if all the bees in the world had rushed to work together. There was not a trace of snow anywhere on the ground at all.
After a breakfast that was tasteless in my mouth, I folded up the gold-and-silver gown and wrapped it in paper. There were crowds of people in the street when I went out carrying my parcel. In the synagogue as I passed the doors I heard singing, and it was full even though it was halfway through the morning and the middle of the week. In the market no one was doing any work. They were all telling each other stories about what had happened: about how God had stretched out his hand and given the Staryk into the tsar’s hand, and broken the sorcerous winter.
The dress got me through the gates of the duke’s house, when I showed a corner of it to a servant, but I still had to wait sitting outside the servants’ entrance for an hour before someone finally took a message and Irina had me brought up—because she was tsarina, the tsarina who had saved the kingdom, and I was only a small moneylender from the Jewish quarter in my brown wool dress. But when the message reached her, she did send someone for me at once, her old chaperone Magreta, who looked at me anxiously and sidelong as if she thought my dress and my plain braided hair were a disguise, but took me upstairs anyway.
Irina was in her bedchamber. Four women were sitting together near the fire, sewing frantically to make over a gown almost as splendid as the monstrosity I had brought; she was going to another wedding that very day, it seemed. But she was on the balcony, scattering bread for a feasting of birds and squirrels: they had all come out again, too, just like the people into the streets, lean and hungry after the long winter and willing to dare human company in exchange for food. As she threw out a handful, they darted in close to her feet to snatch up hunks and then darted back away to eat it before rushing in for another helping.
“I need to see him,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked me, slowly.
“We’ve done more than just stopped him!” I said. “If you keep him for—” I glanced over my shoulder into the bustle of the room, and didn’t say the name. “—that one to devour, it won’t just end the winter, it will destroy his kingdom. All of the Staryk will die, not just him!”
Irina finished scattering her bread and then spread her empty hand out to me: unadorned, except for the ring of Staryk silver gleaming upon it, a thin band of cold light even in the bright sun. “But what else would you have us do?” I stared at her. “Miryem, the Staryk have raided in this kingdom ever since men first settled here. They treat us like vermin skulking among their trees, only with more cruelty.”
“A handful of them!” I said. “Most of them can’t come here, any more than we can cross to their kingdom whenever we like. Only the powerful among them can open a path…” I stopped, realizing I wasn’t making matters any better, and maybe worse.
“And those also have the power to decide for the rest,” Irina said. “I don’t think with pleasure of the death of all the Staryk people, but their king began this war. He stole the spring; he would have let all our people, all of Lithvas, starve to death. Do you tell me he didn’t know what he was doing?”
“No,” I said grimly. “He knew.”
Irina nodded slightly. “My hands don’t feel clean, either, after last night. But I won’t wash them in my people’s blood. And I see nothing else we can do.”
“If they offered us a treaty, in exchange for his life, they’d hold to it. They never break their word.”
“Who would that treaty come from?” Irina said. “And even if one came…” She looked into the bedchamber, her bedchamber: a room she shared with the tsar and a black thing of smoke and hunger that lived inside him. Her face was bleak. “I don’t pretend to be glad of the bargain we’ve made. But there is spring in Lithvas today, and there will be bread on the table in every peasant’s house this winter.” She looked back at me. “I will buy that for them,” she said quietly. “Even if it costs more than I would like to pay.”
So I left with nothing to show for my visit but a sick hollow emptiness in my stomach. Her chaperone stopped me in the room as I left and asked me what I wanted for the dress, but I only shook my head and went. But leaving it didn’t help. I could slough off the dress of a Staryk queen, but I had been one for too long to just forget. And yet I couldn’t tell Irina she was wrong, and I couldn’t even tell her she was selfish. She was going to pay, the price I hadn’t been willing to pay myself: she was going to lie down with that demon next to her, and even if she hadn’t let it put its fingers into her soul, she’d feel them crawling over her skin.
And with that payment, she would buy us more than spring. She would buy us spring, and summer, and winter, too; a winter where no Staryk road would gleam between the trees and no white-cloaked raiders would come out to steal our gold. Instead our woodsmen and our hunters and our farmers would go into the forest, with axes and traps for the white-furred animals. She’d buy us the forest and the frozen river, and it would all go to crops and timber, and in ten years Lithvas would be a rich kingdom instead of a small, poor one, while somewhere in a dark room far below, Chernobog crunched up the Staryk children in his teeth one bite at a time, to keep all the rest of us warm.
I went back to my grandfather’s house. My mother was waiting for me anxiously outside, sitting on the steps, as if she hadn’t been able to bear having me out of her sight. I went and sat beside her, and she put her arms around me and kissed my forehead and held my head against her shoulder, stroking her hand over my hair. There were many other people going in and out of the house around us: wedding guests leaving with ordinary smiling faces. They were already forgetting a night of dancing under white trees, with all winter and a burning shadow coming into the house among us.
Only my grandfather remembered a little. I’d crept down from the bedroom that morning, leaving my parents asleep, to take a cup of tea and a crust of bread in the kitchen, bewildered and trying to fill the cold hollow inside me. It was still early, and only a couple of servants had been stirring in the house, beginning to put food out on the tables for the guests who would soon be waking up. But after a little while, one of them came and told me my grandfather wanted me. I’d gone up to his study. He was standing by the window frowning out at spring, and he looked me in the face and said abruptly, “Well, Miryem?” the same way he did when I came to show him my books. He was asking if they were clean and balanced, and I had found I couldn’t answer him.
So I’d gone to the duke’s palace, and now I’d come back with no better answer than when I’d gone. It should have been easy. The Staryk himself had told me yes: he’d bowed to me without hatred or even reproach, as though I had the right to do just as he’d done, and set fire to his kingdom for trying to bury mine in ice. And maybe I did, but I wasn’t a Staryk myself. I’d said thank you to Flek and Tsop and Shofer, and I’d named that little girl I didn’t want to think about. She had a claim on me, surely, if no one else in that kingdom did.
“We’ll go home tomorrow,” my mother said softly into my hair. “We’ll go home, Miryem.” It was all I’d wanted, the only hope I’d had to give me courage, but I couldn’t imagine it anymore. It seemed as unreal to me as a mountain of glass and a silver road. Would I really go back to my narrow town and feed my chickens and my goats, with the scowls of the people I’d saved on my back every day? They didn’t have a right to hate me, but they would anyway. The Staryk was a tale for a winter’s night. I was their monster, the one they could see and understand and imagine tearing down. They wouldn’t believe I’d done anything to help them even if they heard a story of it.