“Something of my kingdom!” he said. “Something of winter, to help me open the way.”
Wanda paused and then went to look around the side of the fireplace, where there were shelves, but there wasn’t much on them. “There’s nowhere else to look,” she said.
He made an impatient noise. “There!” he said, “and there,” and pointed to two doors in the walls left and right of the oven.
We all stared: we couldn’t have overlooked them. But the Staryk only turned back to the cupboard and went on throwing cups and handkerchiefs and spoons out of it in frantic haste, and after a moment, Wanda went and pulled open the door to the left. There was another bedroom standing on the other side that couldn’t have fit inside the outside of the house. A big wooden bed hung with curtains stood there with two heavy wardrobes on either side. Behind the other door, there was a faint thumping noise: when my father carefully opened it, on the other side was a storeroom, with ropes of dried-up ancient garlic hanging from the ceiling between bunches of crumbling lavender, and a heavy wooden table standing in the middle with a mortar and a pestle, and the mortar was rolling faintly in the bowl as if it had just been in use, with a faint smell of crushed herbs in the air.
“One person should hold the door,” my mother said, warily, as we went into each one searching. Wanda stayed by the bedroom door to keep it open while we hunted through the wardrobes, and in the wooden chest at the foot of the bed: all of them heaped with the useless ordinary moth-eaten linens and dresses with pockets full of crumbling dust; rotted old boots and cloaks and blankets. But in the pocket of one dress that seemed heavy, I found a handful of smooth black pebbles that shone strangely; I ran out with them, but the Staryk said impatiently, “No! What use is that? I might wander ten thousand years in the goblin depths and never find a way out again; put them away!”
Under the pillow, my mother found an old dull-copper coin, which he rejected by saying, “I cannot dream my way home, either!” In the storeroom we found on a shelf a beautiful little glass jar of perfume, stoppered, that still had a few drops in the bottom; that only made him shrug. “Poison or elixir; what does it matter now?” he said, pulling open another drawer; three grey mice sprang out of it and ran away over the floor and out the door. The sky was growing a little light in the distance, and his bare wounded leg was leaving a wet mark on the wooden boards of the floor where he stood.
“Maybe there isn’t anything!” I said.
His head was drooping, and he stopped and leaned against the door. “There is something!” he said. “There is. I feel the wind of my kingdom on my face, it murmurs in my ears and the corners, though I cannot tell where it has come in. We must find it.”
“I don’t feel anything but hot,” I said, “even though the fire’s almost out.”
He was silent, and then he raised his head again and there was a terrible, stricken look in his face. “Yes,” he said hollowly. “The wind is warm.”
I stared at him. “What does that mean?” I said warily.
“Chernobog is there,” the Staryk said. “He has gotten into my kingdom. He is there!” He turned away abruptly and with a fresh surge of desperation began to tear out the little drawers along the top of the cupboard one by one, flinging them on the ground, half of them breaking, scattering everywhere: marbles, pen-nibs, handkerchiefs, a doll made out of rags, unraveling strings, a handful of pennies, old candy in a bag, lumps of carded wool, a thousand and one untidy things stuffed carelessly in one knothole after another, and none of it from the winter kingdom.
“We can’t find anything else,” my mother said to me softly, coming dusty and tired out of the bedroom again. “We’ve looked three times in every corner, unless he can show us another place to look.”
“It is here!” he said, wheeling on her ferociously. “It is somewhere!”
I threw up my hands, helplessly, as she backed away startled, and then from where he was huddled on top of the oven, Stepon said, very low, “I have this, but I cannot make it grow.”
We turned. Wanda and Sergey had gone very still, looking at him: in his hand, Stepon held a pale-white fruit, the shape of a fresh green walnut. The Staryk saw it and gave a cry, springing forward. “Where came you by this?” he said, accusatory. “Who gave it to you?”
He was reaching out as if to snatch it from his hand. Stepon curled his fingers around it, pulling it back, and Wanda stepped between them and said fiercely, “Mama gave it to him! It came from her, from her in the tree, and it is his, not yours!”
The Staryk stopped, looking at her. “There is not enough breath in a mortal life to bring a snow-tree to fruit!” he said. “Though you fed it with one, with two, with three, you would have barely brought it to leaf. By what blood did you raise this, that you can claim it true?”
“Da buried all five of the babies there,” Wanda said. Her face was white and hard and angry as I had ever seen it. “All five of my brothers who died. And Mama at the end. She gave it to Stepon! It is his!”
The Staryk looked at her, and then at Sergey and Stepon, as if he used them to measure the six lives missing: five brothers never grown and a mother gone besides. Then he dropped his hand to his side. His face gone faded and terrible, he stared at the white nut curled half hidden behind Stepon’s fingers, and whispered, “It is his,” agreeing, only he sounded as if he was agreeing to his own death.
He gave way so completely that Wanda even stopped looking angry. Then we were all standing there together with the white fruit shining in the house with the same pale gleam as his silver, and the Staryk only kept looking at it desperate and yet without saying a word, as if he couldn’t even imagine how to offer a bargain for it. How could you: what could you give someone that would be a fair price for all their pain, for all those buried years of sorrow? I wouldn’t have taken a thousand kingdoms for my mother.
Stepon looked down at it in his hand again, and then silently he held it out. But the Staryk stared at it, at him, stricken; he didn’t reach for it, as if he couldn’t take it even when offered.
And then my mother leaned forward and kissed Stepon on his forehead. “She would be proud of you,” she said to him, and taking it from his hand she turned and held it out to the Staryk. “Take it and save the Staryk children. What better can you do with it?”
He only kept staring at her without moving, until I reached forward and took it, and he turned blank and helpless to me instead. “What do we do?” I asked him. “How do we use it?”
“Lady,” he said, “you must do with it as you will. It is not mine.”
I glared at him in some indignation. “What would you have done, then, if it were yours?”
“I would lay it in the earth and call it forth,” he said, “and open my road beneath its boughs. But that I cannot do. I have no claim upon this seed; it will not answer to my voice. And I know not how you can do it, either. A snow-tree will not take root in spring, and you hold sun-warm gold and not winter in your hands.”
And then he went on gazing at me—expectantly, as if I’d surprised him so often that now he was simply waiting for me to do it again, when I hadn’t the slightest idea of anything to do. “We’ll try to plant it again,” I said, for lack of anything better to do. “Can you come and freeze the ground?”
He inclined his head. But when we opened the door, he shuddered back, almost falling before the wave of warm air that blew in, warmer even than the inside of the house; it smelled of soft wet earth and spring. He struggled out of the house anyway into the face of it, bent like a man turned to force his way with his shoulder into a howling blizzard.
By the side of the door we found the mound of earth where Stepon had tried to plant the nut already, a good place for a tree to grow and shade the house. But when the Staryk touched the earth, only a ghost of frost left his fingers, and vanished quickly as a breath blown over cold glass. I put the nut back in the ground quickly and tried to press it down with his hand; only a brief silvering outline spread around his fingers, and faded away again.
He took his hand away, and we watched the earth a little while, and he shook his head. I dug the nut up again, and held it in my hand, trying to think: it wouldn’t grow in spring. And then I thought suddenly—how had Chernobog come into the Staryk kingdom, now, when he’d only ever been able to breach it from a distance before?
I got up and ran around to the back of the house, to the deep washtub there. I looked down into it. It was only water in a wooden tub, but it might be something more on the other side—if Irina was standing on that other side, with her crown of silver, after she’d taken Chernobog slithering through into the winter kingdom, trying again to save Lithvas from the Staryk king I’d freed.
I didn’t know if she was there, or if she’d even try to help me if she was. And if she was, and would, I couldn’t even explain what I wanted her to do. But I knew I couldn’t do anything more on this side, alone. I thought of doors that opened where they hadn’t been, and rooms and cupboards appearing out of nowhere, and then I shut my eyes and plunged my hand into the water, reaching out for hope, for help.
My knuckles didn’t hit the bottom. I kept reaching down, deep, and for a moment I felt a hand on the other side, reaching back. I caught it and pressed the white nut into it, and then I pulled my arm out of the water and stared at my empty palm. I looked into the tub as well, and the nut was gone. I could see the bottom of the washtub clearly through the water: there was nothing there.
I stared down into the tub another moment, half disbelieving that it had worked, and then I ran back to the front of the house: everyone was in a circle staring at the Staryk, and he was leaning against the wall of the house, gone thin and shining almost as if with sweat, blind agony in his face. I caught him by the arms. “It went through! It went over! What else do I do?”
He opened his eyes, but I didn’t think he saw me; they were filmy and smeared white and blue. He whispered, “Call it forth. Call it forth if you can.”