That was bad enough, and now I had dragged her all the way through snow and ice to Vysnia, a small backward city next to her father’s main seat in the west with its great thick-walled citadel of red brick, and she knew exactly why, because she knew exactly how she would have behaved in my place. She would have proudly walked before all the princesses and dukes’ daughters of the realm with her crowned head high; when we arrived for the feasting, she would have inclined her head and deigned with cool, muted politeness to speak to one or another of us who had been particularly good at flattering and currying favor with her. I would not have been among them. So she knew I had dragged her here so she would have to bow to me and call me Majesty, so I could pay off all my own debts of tittering and smirks around us.
She had imagined it so well that as she stared up at me in my silver crown and climbed the stairs to meet me, she had her hands closed into fists, waiting to be humiliated, and she did not know what to do with them when I stepped down out of my place to meet her, too soon, and took her by the shoulders and kissed her cheeks. “My dearest Vassilia,” I said. “It’s been too long since we saw each other, I’m so glad you’ve come. Dear Uncle Ulrich,” I added, turning to him, startled on the step above me, where he was facing Mirnatius and my father, and he looked at my face as I held my hand out to him and forgot for just one moment to be angry. “Forgive me: it’s hard for a girl to live so far from her friends. Please will you let us not stand on ceremony? Let’s all go inside, and drink a cup of welcome, and let me steal your daughter from you.”
I took her upstairs to the great bedchamber with the balcony open, and sent all the servants away, and told her softly that there must be an heir for Lithvas sooner rather than late, and it might not be enough for Mirnatius to marry; I let her draw her own conclusions. And then he and my father came in together, with Ilias trailing sullenly behind, and I held Vassilia’s hand while Mirnatius said, as cold as ashen coals, “The joys of the nuptial state are so many, we have decided to bestow them more widely; Ilias, dear cousin, allow me to present to you your bride.”
He stood beside me in the church with his mouth twisted in cynical amusement all the time. Vassilia was happy, with cause—I had given her Miryem’s golden dress, so splendid she looked more like a tsarina than I did, and she was marrying a handsome young man who would bed her that night with at least some modicum of care. My father had seen Ilias’s sullen looks, and while my servants had been helping Vassilia dress, he’d taken him out onto the balcony and told him that if he meant to be a fool about the matter, we’d find another man. And if instead he behaved like a man of sense and made himself satisfactory to the great heiress he was about to marry, he could stop being his mother’s lapdog and be a prince and a ruler of men in his own right when Ulrich died. When they’d come back into the room, Ilias had kissed Vassilia’s hand and made a reasonably successful effort at compliments. It turned out that even great passions could be satisfied by other means.
Ulrich took over her anger and was livid enough for them both, of course, but he couldn’t do anything about it: we took them from the bedroom straight to the church without a pause, and Mirnatius claimed the privilege of handing off the bride for himself. And meanwhile I took Ulrich’s arm and spoke to him. Even if he had wanted to make a dash for it with her out through the ranks of his soldiers, silver gleamed on my brow; for as long as he looked at me, he forgot that he was angry, and there were already whispers traveling through the city by then, that his own men would have heard: whispers of winter overthrown by magic.
The feasting was reasonably splendid. Even if there had been nothing else, the greens heaped on the tables would have satisfied us all: not even archdukes had tasted fresh lettuce these last months. There were towers of strawberries gathered in a hurry from the woods by every hand my father could reach pressed into service, and though still small, they burst red and sweet and juicy on the tongue. Mirnatius ordered a servant to give him an entire bowl of them and ate them delicately one by one, all the while surveying the room with his hard mouth turned down. He didn’t speak to me, and I said nothing to him. All I could think of when I looked at him was the high sharp note in his voice, down in the cellars.
My mother wasn’t real to me. I didn’t remember the touch of her hand or the sound of her voice. All of that in me was Magreta. But my mother had brought me through to safety, twice; she’d carried me under her heart until I could breathe, and she’d given me a last drop of magic almost thinned out to nothing in our blood, enough for me to find my way to winter in a mirror’s glass. I had those gifts of her, and I had taken them so much for granted that it had never occurred to me before to be grateful for them. And even less for my sharp, ambitious father, who would have delivered me to a brutish husband or even to a sorcerer without hesitation. I hadn’t believed there was a limit on the use he would have made of me. But with the memory of Chernobog crackling in the fire’s grate, smoke and red flame, I found a clear sharp certainty in me that my father, who had told me he was proud of me, would not have sold my soul to a demon for a crown.
There wasn’t much of a kindness to be found in that narrow limit. It had left me cold, all my life. But even that was more than Mirnatius had been given. I could hardly blame him any more for not caring. Where was there anything in him to care with? No one else had a minute for the witch’s get, he’d said, the only kind words he’d ever said of anyone; of the only one of whom he’d ever had any kindness.
In the ordinary course of things, the son of an executed wife would have been tucked away in a lavish monastery somewhere to keep from getting awkward children, once his brother had been safely crowned and he was no longer needed as a spare. I had imagined that as a fate he’d wanted to avoid, one of the reasons he’d made his bargain; it would have been a punishment to an ambitious man. But of course that wasn’t true. The man who spent demon-hot magic to build his own gilded cage and gave more time to his sketchbooks than his tax rolls could have gone into that retreat without regret. Mirnatius would have spent his days with pen and ink and gilt, shaping beauty, and been content. Instead his demon had murdered the brother he loved, to put a crown he’d never wanted on his head.
And now here I was dragging him along like a careless child bumping a broken doll along behind her, bargaining with the demon that sat in his belly for the sake of the kingdom he didn’t care about, as if he weren’t even there. As if he didn’t matter, as he’d never mattered to anyone. No wonder he hated me for it.
It couldn’t make me sorry for what I’d done. I was sorry for it already. Miryem had cried out to me over the horror in that tower room below, chaining up a sacrificial victim to be devoured over and over by a demon of flame, and I hadn’t needed her to tell me it was evil. But I could be sorry only with my father’s kind of regret. I had pity for Staryk children, and I would have stopped their winter king some other way, if I could. I would have set Mirnatius free, if I had the chance, instead of adding to his chained-slave misery. But the world I wanted wasn’t the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.
I couldn’t even apologize to him. He wouldn’t have believed me, and he shouldn’t have. There was still a fault line in Lithvas to be healed, and a demon sitting on our throne. I was glad to have the winter broken no matter how it had been done, but I wasn’t a fool to think we could make an ally of a thing like Chernobog. Last night it had become a choice between helping him, or letting the Staryk king bury us in ice, so I’d chosen—not the lesser evil, but the less immediate one. But I knew that when Chernobog finished drinking up Staryk lives, he’d turn and come right back for us, and I wasn’t going to leave Lithvas bare before him.
So tomorrow, when Casimir arrived, still more enraged than Ulrich, my father would whisper a promise of treachery into his ear. And when finally the Staryk king had been devoured to nothing, down below, they and Ulrich would go all three together and speak to the old priests who twenty years ago had brought the saint-blessed chains out of the cathedral to bind a witch-tsarina for the flame. And that day at dawn, when the demon went into hiding from the sun, they would take my husband to the stake and burn him like his mother, to set us all free of its grasp.
I knew all of it would happen, and I wouldn’t put out my hand to stop it, even now that I knew Mirnatius himself was innocent. I still wouldn’t save him, in his half-life, and condemn Lithvas to the flame in his place, any more than I would try to save Staryk children with a bargain that used the lives of my own people as surety. I was cold enough to do what I had to do, so I could save Lithvas.
But it would leave me cold inside again, too. I looked at Vassilia and at Ilias, who was leaning over to her and whispering and making her blush, and I envied her as much as ever she might have wanted, now when I couldn’t let myself dream anymore, even half unwilling, of warmth in my own marriage bed. That was the only thing I could do for Mirnatius. I wouldn’t pretend to offer him kindness. I wouldn’t ask him again for gratitude or forgiveness or civility. And I wouldn’t look at him and want something for myself, like another hungry wolf licking my chops over an already-exposed red bone.
So I sat in silence during the meal, except to speak to Ulrich on my other side and offer him the best of everything, flattering and soothing him as much as I could. When the hour grew late and the sun began to sink beneath the windows, Mirnatius rose, and we all delivered the happy couple in a procession to their bedchamber down the hall from our own. Ulrich saw the other men of Mirnatius’s family settling themselves in the room on the other side, and Vassilia smiling at Ilias, who had drawn her arm through his and was kissing the tips of each of her fingers in turn, both of them flushed pink with wine and triumph. And Ulrich ground his jaw, but then he accepted my father’s invitation to come to his study and drink a toast of the good brandy to both their future grandchildren, so at least he had given up, even if he was not yet reconciled.