“But you, I’m afraid, my own darling bride, must resign yourself to a cold bed,” Mirnatius said in savage mockery of us both, when we were alone in our room, as he tossed aside his circlet and scattered the rings from his fingers over the dressing table. The sun’s rays were going down through the balcony. “Unless you’d like to send for that enthusiastic guard of mine; if so, you’ll have a good couple of hours to enjoy yourselves. It’s rather a tiresome walk there and back, and I imagine my friend will want to linger over his meal.”
I let him spit the words at me, and said nothing. He scowled at me and then suddenly he smiled, red, and oh, I would rather have had him scowling. “Irina, Irina,” Chernobog sang at me, smoky. “Once again I ask. Will you not take some high gift of me, in exchange for the winter king? Give him to me, name your price, I will give you anything!”
There was no temptation in it. Mirnatius had saved me from that forever. I don’t think I could ever have wanted anything enough to take it from his hands, with a demon smiling out of his hollowed-out face at me. I tried to imagine something that would make me do it: a child whose face I had not yet seen dying in my arms; war about to devour Lithvas whole, the hordes on the horizon and my own terrible death coming. Not even then, perhaps. Those things had an end. I shook my head. “No. Only leave us all alone, me and mine. I want nothing else of you. Go.”
He hissed and muttered and glared at me redly, but he went seething out the door. Magreta crept in as soon as he had left, as if she’d hidden somewhere just outside waiting. She helped me undress, and put aside the crown, and ordered tea, and after it came I sat down on the floor beside her chair and rested my head in her lap, the way I never had when I was a little girl, because there had always been work there. But tonight she had nothing, no sewing or knitting for once, and she stroked my head and said softly, “Irinushka, my brave one. Don’t sorrow so. The winter is gone.”
“Yes,” I said, and my throat ached. “But it is gone because I have fed the fire, Magra, and it wants more wood.”
She bent and kissed my head. “Have some tea, dushenka,” she said, and made my cup very sweet.
* * *
There were no more stars carved in the walls for me to follow, only a straight line, but I still went slowly. I tried to stay in the very middle of the earthen tunnel, and stepped as lightly as I could, and I let my cloak drag behind me to smooth my footprints: it was long, and its hem had trailed in the wet of the sewer. I hadn’t gone far when the dark began to break, a faint light in the distance coming around a curve, making the dirt walls take a comforting real shape, full of pebbles and tree roots: I wasn’t walking blind anymore, and there was a strong smell of smoke building in my nostrils. A hundred steps more, and I was looking at a star of yellow candlelight far in the distance.
It was so bright against the dark of the tunnel, I couldn’t see anything else anymore. I started walking towards it. The light grew bigger, and my steps slowed; the question was getting louder in my ears with every one. It had been easier to tell my father and mother that I had to be brave when I was safe in a room with them, with my mother’s hand holding mine. It had even been easier to stand in front of the Staryk and refuse to bend before him. At least I’d been angry, then; I’d had vengeance and desperation on my side, and nothing to lose that I valued. Now the scales had a heavy weight on them: my people, my grandfather, my family; Wanda and her brothers, who had saved me. My own life, my life that I’d fought to win back. I didn’t have to do this. I could go back and walk out of this tunnel and still be myself, as clever and brave as I wanted to be.
But as I came slowly closer, so close that I began to see the stone walls of the room at the end of the tunnel and the candlelight shining steady on them, suddenly at my back there came a strong breath of hot wind flowing, and the light inside the room flickered with it. My skin crawled under it, and I knew what was there behind me. What had opened a door behind me, and now was coming down this tunnel, coming to this room.
There was a moment still to ask the question one more time. By now I was standing all the way at the far side of the city. It wasn’t far back to the sewer, and it was a long way from here to the ducal palace. I had time still to turn around and run back. No one would ever know that I had been here. But I hurried forward instead, to the archway, as silently as I could. I peered quick around the edge and I didn’t see a guard, only the curve of a ring of candles, dripping low to stubs, and beyond it a glowing line of burning coals in the ground. There was smoke in the air, though not as much as I would have expected: there was a draft going up.
Then I drew a breath and I stepped into the room, and the Staryk turned and saw me. He went very still a moment, and then he bowed his head slightly to me. “Lady,” he said. “Why have you come?”
He was standing alone inside the ring of coals, flames licking around him. The silver chain was wrapped around him tight enough to press imprints into his silver clothing. I still wanted to hate him, but it was hard to hate anyone chained, waiting for that thing down the tunnel. “You still owe me three answers,” I said.
He paused and said, “So I do, it seems.”
“If I let you go,” I said, “will you promise not to bring back the winter? To leave my people alone, and not try to starve them all to death?”
He flinched back from me, and straightened glittering and said coldly, “No, lady. I will not give you that promise.”
I stared at him. I’d thought out my questions carefully, all that way in the dark. One to make him end the winter, one to make him leave me be, one to make him promise to stop the raiding forevermore. I had as good a bargaining position as I could have. It hadn’t even occurred to me as a chance to consider that even now—he was bound, bound to his death, to all their deaths, and he still wouldn’t—“So you want us all dead so badly,” I choked out, in horror, “even more than you want to save your own people—you hate us so that you would rather die here, feasted on—”
“To save my people?” he said, his voice rising. “Do you think I have spent my strength, spent the treasure of my kingdom to the last coin, and given my hand to as I thought an unworthy mortal,” and even angry, he paused and inclined his head to me as if in fresh apology, “for any lesser cause than that?”
I stopped talking. My throat had closed on words. He glared at me and added bitterly, “And after all this that I have done, now you come and ask me a coward’s question, if I will buy my life, with a promise to stand aside and let him take them all instead? Never,” and he was snarling it, hurling the words at my head like stones. “I will hold against him as long as my strength lasts, and when it fails, when I can no longer hold the mountain against his flames, at least my people will know that I have gone before them, and held their names in my heart until the end.” He shook his head savagely. “And you speak to me of hate. It was your people who chose this vengeance against us! It was you who crowned the devourer, named him your king! Chernobog had not the strength to break our mountain without you behind him!”
“We didn’t know!” I burst out, horror bringing my voice out again. “None of us knew that the tsar had bargained with a demon!”
“Are your people such fools, then, to unwitting give Chernobog power over you?” he said contemptuously. “You will be well served for it. Do you think he will be true? He clings to the forms for protection, but when he sees a chance to slake his thirst, he abandons them again without hesitation. When he has drained us to the dregs, he will turn on you, and make your summer into desert and drought, and I will rejoice to think that you have brought yourselves low with me and mine.”
I put my hands on my temples, pressed my palms flat against them, my head pounding with smoke and horror. “We aren’t fools!” I said. “We’re mortals, who don’t have magic unless you ram it down our throats. Mirnatius was crowned because his father was the tsar, and his brother died; he was next in line, that’s all. We can’t see a demon hiding in a tsar; there’s no high magic protecting us, whether we’re true or not! You didn’t need my name to threaten me and drag me from my home. And you thought that made me unworthy, instead of you.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him, and went sharp and jagged-edged in his prison. “You have thrice shown me wrong,” he said after a moment, through a grinding of his teeth like floes of ice scraping against one another. “I cannot call you liar now, however I want to. But still I hold to my answer. No. I will not promise.”
I tried to think, desperately. “If I let you go,” I said finally, “will you promise to stop the winter once Chernobog is off the throne, and help us find a way to throw him down? The tsarina will help!” I added. “She wants him gone herself; you saw she wouldn’t take anything from him. She’ll help as long as it doesn’t mean all of us frozen into ice! All the lords of Lithvas will, to have an end to winter. Will you help us fight him, instead of just killing us to starve him of his prey?”
He couldn’t move, inside the silver chain; so instead he stamped his foot and burst out, “I had defeated him! I had thrown him down and bound him with his name! It is by your act that he was unleashed again!”
“Because you tried to drag me away screaming to make more winter for you the rest of my life, and threatened to murder everyone I love!” I shouted back at him. “Don’t you dare try to say it’s my fault—don’t you dare say any of it is our fault! The tsar was only crowned seven years ago. But you’ve been sending your knights to steal gold ever since mortals came here to live in the first place, and who cared if they murdered and raped for their amusement while they were at it: we weren’t strong enough to stop you, so you looked down your nose from your glass mountain and decided we didn’t matter! You deserve to be bound here and eaten by a demon, and so here you are! But Flek’s daughter doesn’t deserve it! I’ll save you for her sake, if you’ll help me save the children here!”