He was about to answer, and then he hesitated, and looked towards the tunnel. I looked back in the pitch depths: there was a faint red glow down there coming nearer, a fire building, and he turned to me and said, “Very well! Free me, and this I will promise, not to hold the winter once Chernobog is thrown down and my people safe from his hunger, and to aid you to defeat him. But until that is done, I give no word!”
“Fine!” I snapped. “And if I free you, will you promise—” and then I stopped, realizing suddenly I had only one question left, not two. Hastily I changed it, and finished, “will you promise for yourself and all the Staryk to leave me and all my people—to leave Lithvas—alone? No more raiding, no more coming out to rape and murder us for gold or any other cause—”
He looked at me, and then he said, “Free me, and this I will promise: there will be no more hunting your people in winter wind; we will come, and ride the forest and the snow-driven plains, and hunt the white-furred beasts that are ours, and if any are fool enough to come in our way or trespass on the woods, they may be trampled; but we will seek no mortal blood and take no treasure, not even sun-warmed gold, save in just vengeance for equal harm given first, and we shall take no woman unwilling who has refused her hand.”
“Not even you,” I added pointedly.
“So I have said!” He looked towards the door again, and the light was getting brighter, red and leaping on the walls. It was coming quickly now. “Break the rings of fire!”
I bent down and tried to blow out one of the candles, but the flame only jumped and wouldn’t go out. It was melted so thickly to the ground I couldn’t even pry it off. I had to run to the tunnel mouth and scrape up dirt with my hands and pour it down, smothering it like a kitchen fire of hot oil, and it burned my hands at the last before it went out. But the coals were so hot that all the dirt I could hold in my two hands together did nothing to stop them burning, so instead I took off my cloak and folded it over so the damp part was on the bottom, and I threw it down over the ring.
“You must draw me out!” he said, and I reached over the scorching-hot ring and snatched the rope and pulled him out over the cloak, just in time; it caught fire under his foot as he stepped off, flames licking up with such fury that the long curling tip of his boot ignited. The whole thing scorched off his leg in a sudden burst of flame and smoke, and he stumbled into me gasping. I nearly fell over with his weight, and only just managed to turn him to lean against the wall. He was shivering, his eyes nearly shut, and gone translucent with pain; faint reddish lines were climbing spiderwebs over his whole foot and up to his knee, where the scorched end of his breeches hung, still smoking faintly.
I seized the silver chain and tried to pull it off over his head, and then I tried to thrust it down, but even with all my weight, it wouldn’t move. I looked around in desperation; there was a shovel there, thrust into a waiting wheelbarrow full of coals. I took him by the shoulders and tipped him down lying on the ground so I could set the shovel’s tip onto one of the silver links. I stepped down onto the blade with my foot like someone digging, trying to push into the ground, catching the link between hardened iron and the stone floor: it was only an inch long, not nearly as thick around as my little finger, but it wouldn’t open: it wouldn’t open, and behind my back I heard a sudden distant shriek of rage.
I didn’t look: what was the use in looking? I lifted up the shovel and jammed it down again in desperation, and then I dropped it and knelt and seized the silver chain in my hands. I tried to change it; I shut my eyes and remembered the chests in the storerooms, remembered the feeling of silver sliding into gold under my hands, the world gone slippery in my fingers because I willed it so. But the chain only grew hot in my hands, almost burning. There were footsteps running towards us down the tunnel, and the coals all suddenly burst into roaring flame, even the ones in the wheelbarrow, thick black smoke billowing around us.
And then he stirred in my hands and whispered, “The shovel. Quickly. Put the blade on my throat. Kill me, and he cannot devour my people through me.”
I stared at him in horror. I’d wanted him dead, but not bloody under my own hands; I hadn’t wanted to be that much like Judith, hacking off a man’s head. “I can’t!” I croaked out. “I can’t—look down at you and push a shovel through your neck!”
“You said you would save the child!” he said to me accusingly. “You said you would! The fire comes for us, will you go a liar to your death?”
I gasped in a breath of smoke, black charring smoke that burned my mouth and nose and throat, and tears burst from my eyes. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to kill; I didn’t want to go to death a murderer with bloody hands. I wanted that more than I didn’t want to be a liar. But he was going to die anyway, die worse, and they would all die with him. There were a thousand ways to die, and not all of them were equally as bad. I whispered, “Turn over on your face,” and I reached for the shovel again and stood up with it, my eyes running with tears, smoke shrouding him as he turned over—
—and through the smoke a single bright gleam shone from the middle of his imprisoned back: a cold gleam like moonlight, blue on snow, where Irina had used her necklace of Staryk silver to bind the two ends of a broken silver chain together. I dropped the shovel and reached for it. A fist suddenly seized my hair from behind and yanked my head back, and I felt flame catch in my hair, a terrible stink of it burning, but I, straining, caught the necklace with a fingertip, and it went to gold at my touch.
The grip let go my hair. I fell to the ground coughing and sick and with my hair still smoldering as another roar of rage went up. But it went suddenly thin and high-pitched as a shrieking blast of winter wind burst through the room, a cold as bitter as the flames had been, and all around me every fire in the room went out: the coals went dead and black and the candles blew into pitch dark, and the only light left was the dull red shining of two savage eyes above me.
The next breath I dragged in was clean and cold as the frozen air after a blizzard, and it cooled my singed skin and my burning throat. From out of the dark, the Staryk said, “Your bindings are broken, Chernobog; by high magic and fair bargain I am freed!” His voice was echoing against the stones. “You cannot hold me here and now. Will you flee, or will I put out your flame forever, and leave you buried in the dirt?” And with another choking howl of rage, the red eyes vanished. Heavy footsteps went running away, back down the tunnel, and I closed my eyes and curled against cold stones, gulping fresh winter air.
* * *
I slept for a while after Magreta coaxed me to lie down again; I felt tired and painfully sore. But I stirred when a sudden rattle of wind came shivering through the open doors of the balcony, and I stood up and went to look out. I couldn’t see anything in the dark past the torches lit on the castle walls, but the wind in my face was cold again, and I was sure suddenly that the Staryk had gotten free. And at once I was also sure that Miryem had done it. I didn’t know how or what she’d done, but I was sure.
I couldn’t find anger in me, only fear. I understood her choice, though it wasn’t mine: she didn’t want to feed the flame. I didn’t, either, but she had unbound winter to keep her hands clean. The snow would come again: if not tonight then in the morning, and everything green that had grown would die.
The other corpses would mount swiftly after. I’d seen the hollowed sides of the animals that had come to me for bread this morning; they hadn’t had much longer to live. Only the sudden bounty of leaves and berries had really made my father’s feast tables tonight worthy of his rank, with all he had been able to do. There had been no whole roast pig or ox brought to the table for display: game and cattle were both too thin to make a fine show. There had probably been twice as many animals butchered as usual to make the same feasting, and I’d seen the musicians dunking their crusts a long time in the thin soup they’d been given, because the bread was stale. This at a duke’s table, for the wedding of a princess. I knew what that meant for the poorer tables outside the city walls.
But I didn’t know what to do. We’d only caught the Staryk king with Miryem’s help, and still he’d nearly defeated us. He wouldn’t make such a fool’s mistake again. I would have liked to believe that Miryem had made a bargain with him, the treaty she’d spoken of to stop the winter—but the snow on the wind said that she hadn’t, and we had no time for negotiations. If the snow came again tomorrow and killed the rye, all the joy in the city today would go to rioting as soon as the streets cleared enough. And if they never did clear again, we’d all starve to death buried in our homes, cottages and palaces alike. Could we make a mirror wide enough for our armies to march through? But Staryk huntsmen with their flashing silver blades cut down mortal men like wheat when they came. We might leave a song of ourselves, making a war on winter, but the people we left behind couldn’t eat music.
Magreta put my fur cloak around my shoulders. I looked down. Her face was sad and afraid. She also felt the cold. “Your stepmother would like it if you paid her the favor of a visit in her rooms,” she said softly.
She meant, let us get out of this room; let us not be here when the tsar comes back. Chernobog would be coming back, of course, hot and savage and angry. Fire and ice both on the horizon at once, and my little kingdom of squirrels caught in between them. But he was also my only hope of finding some way to save it.
“Go to my father,” I said. “Tell him I want him to send Galina and the boys away—tonight, at once, for a holiday in the west. With sleigh runners in the carriage. Tell him I want you to go with them.”
She pressed my hands. “Come.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have a crown. If it means anything, it means this.”
“Then leave it,” she said. “Leave it, Irinushka. It’s only sorrow on sorrow.”
I bent and kissed her cheek. “Help me put it on,” I said softly, and she went and took it with tears in her eyes, and put it back on my head. Afterwards, I pushed her gently towards the door. She hurried away, her shoulders bent.