I was very puzzled the whole time why they thought we were dead, but I did not want to ask. Instead I brought out the letters from Panov Mandelstam and gave them to all the people who were there, and the ones who were not, I gave to the priest, to give to them. Then everyone was really happy, and they even drank a toast to Panov Mandelstam’s health.
After that we went to the Mandelstams’ house and packed everything into the cart. Panova Gavelyte was the only one who was not happy to see us. I think she had planned to tell Panova Mandelstam that the goats and the chickens were hers now and Panova Mandelstam could not have them back. But she knew about the tsar’s letter like everyone by then so when me and Sergey came she only said, “Well, those are theirs,” and pointed to some thin sickly goats.
But I looked in her face and said, “You should be ashamed.” Then I went and took all of the right goats, ours and theirs, and we tied them to the end of the cart. I went and got all the chickens too, and packed them into a box. We took the furniture and the things off the shelves and packed it all carefully, and the ledger we put under the cart seat carefully covered with a blanket.
Then we were done and we could go back, but Sergey sat on the wagon seat silently and did not start driving, and I looked at him, and he said, “Do you think anyone buried him?”
I did not say anything. I did not want to think about Da. But Sergey was already thinking about him, and then I was thinking about him also. And I would keep thinking about him there, on the floor of the house, not buried. And Stepon might start thinking about it too. So Da would always be there on the floor, even once he was not anymore. “We’ll go,” I said finally.
We drove the cart out to our old house. The rye was growing. It was full of weeds because nobody was taking care of it, but it was still tall and green. We stopped the cart in the field so the goats and the horses could eat some of it, and then we went to the white tree. We put our hands on it together. It was quiet. Mama was not there anymore, and the tree outside our house did not speak to us. But Mama did not need to talk to us out of a tree anymore, because we had Mama Mandelstam now, and she would talk for her.
There were silver flowers on the tree’s branches. We picked six of them and we put one on Mama’s grave, and one for each of the babies. Then we went to the house. Nobody had buried Da, but it was not that bad. Some animals had come, and it was only some bones and ripped clothes left, and not a bad smell, because the door had been left open. We got a sack and we put all the bones into it. Sergey got the shovel. We carried the sack back to the white tree and we dug a grave and we buried Da there next to all the other graves, the ones he had dug, and I put a stone on top.
We didn’t take anything else from our house. We went back to the cart and we drove all the way back to town. It was getting late then, but we decided we would keep going. We would stop for the night at the next town instead. It was ten miles to go, but the road was clear, and it was a very pleasant night. The sun was not all the way down yet. As we drove out of town, there was another cart coming, with one horse. It was empty so the driver pulled off to the side to let us go past because we had a big load, and as we came close and passed him, I saw it was that boy Algis, Oleg’s son, sitting there on the seat. We stopped a moment and looked at him, and he looked back at us. We did not say anything, but then we knew that he had not told anyone where we were. He had just gone home and he had not told anyone he had seen us at all. We nodded to him, and Sergey shook the reins, and we went on. We went home.
* * *
The walls of the glass mountain were secure now, but even so, inside them it had been a lean summer and fall: many of the pools down below had gone dry in Chernobog’s attack, and more of the vineyards and orchards had died. But we’d fed the children first, and then shared what there was left, and the Staryk king had told me, “They will fill again when the winter comes,” when we’d walked through the lower passageways together, to see what harm had been done.
We’d buried the dead and treated the wounded, laying them in quiet rows beneath the white trees: the king carefully took shavings of ice from the very wellspring of the stream, and laid them on their wounds, and put his hands on either side and coaxed it to grow and merge with their bodies. Some of the great caverns had closed themselves up like turtles pulling into their shells, and had to be opened again, and in the fields below we cut back the dead vines and trees, and started cuttings from what had lived, to make ready for a new planting.
At least now I was able to find my own way around. Either I’d learned the trick of it without realizing, or the mountain itself was grateful to me, because when I went looking for some room or cavern, the right doors and passages softly opened for me. And amid all the work, I found more than enough to make a place for me. The Staryk didn’t know anything of keeping records: I suppose it was only to be expected from people who didn’t take on debts and were used to entire chambers wandering off and having to be called back like cats.
But with everything in disarray, we needed something better. I had to commandeer pen and paper from their poets just to have something to keep track of all the fields and pools and what state they were in, and how much we expected to have, to last us until the winter. I divided up the supplies and measured out days, so none of us would go hungry before the end.
The tally of those days seemed a long one at the beginning, but every hour was filled. By the end, they were sliding away so quickly that it took me by blank surprise the day I woke up and found the trees outside the mountain frosted with the first new snow, and I knew the king’s road stood open once again. And I missed my mother and my father, I ached for them to know I was well, but still I stood there looking out for a long time before I rang the bell to call the servants to help me get ready.
It didn’t take me long. I’d taught Flek and Tsop how I kept my papers sorted, and my books were clean; my grandfather wouldn’t have found any fault. I packed one small bundle, only a few things in it but dear to me: a few pressed silver flowers, a pair of gloves sewn very badly that Rebekah had made for me, and the dress I’d worn for the midsummer dancing. It wasn’t a grand gown; the celebration had been a rejoicing for survival, a few weeks after we’d buried our dead, and there hadn’t been time or strength for anything grand. It wasn’t much more than a simple shift, but of cool silvery silk that ran through the fingers like water, and caught the light coming in through the mountain. I’d worn it with my hair braided up in flowers, and danced in a circle holding hands with my friends, the new ones and the old, who’d worked beside me, and at the end the king had come to me and bowed, and together we’d led two lines through the grove, dancing beneath the white branches as they shed their last flowers to rest until the snow.
He’d kept his own promises, of course; he’d made no more claims upon me, and down in the grove the sleigh was waiting. I drew one final breath and turned and left my chamber, and went down the narrow stair. The white trees had bloomed again this morning, full of leaves and flowers. There were still a few gaps left in the circles, where some of them had died in Chernobog’s attack. But in each of those spaces, one of the fallen knights had been buried with a silver fruit upon his breast, and thin white saplings had come out of the ground when I called them with the blessing. They’d keep growing here, even after I had gone. It made me glad to think of it, that I’d leave them living behind me.
But as I came low enough to see beneath the leaves, I paused, my eyes stinging: behind the sleigh, a full and dazzling company of the Staryk had assembled, mounted on the backs of sharp-antlered deer. The knights and nobles carried white hawks on jeweled gauntlets, and white hounds clustered around the hooves of their mounts, and silver and jewels gleamed on their pale leather: many of them I’d seen at the gates, or helped to tend beneath the trees. But it wasn’t only them; even some of the farmers were there, looking at once excited and afraid, plainly uneasy about going to the sunlit world but coming to see me off in their best finery, their hair strung with silver. And in the very front rank, just behind the sleigh, were Flek and Tsop and Shofer, with Rebekah there sitting nervous and wide-eyed in front of her mother, her long fingers wound into the braided reins.
All the beauty and danger of a winter’s night caught out in living shape, and when I came down and the Staryk king held his hand out to me and helped me into the sleigh, I stood in it a moment longer, holding on to his hand for balance, looking at all of them, and last at him, to have a picture to hold in my heart when the winter kingdom’s door had closed behind me.
I sat down blinking away tears, and he sat beside me, and the sleigh leapt off over the snow. Almost at once when we came out of the mountain, the white trees unfurled to either side of the shining road before us, icicle drops of silver hanging overhead. We flew down it with cold wind rushing into our faces and the great assembled hunt coming on behind us, blowing the faint high horns that sang clear as a winter bird’s song. The people of Lithvas wouldn’t have to fear that music anymore. The Staryk wouldn’t come among them again as anything other than a whisper beneath the snowy trees that they’d only half remember. Perhaps I’d have a daughter of my own one day, and when I heard that wistful sound through the window on a winter’s night, I’d tell her stories of a mountain of shining glass, and the people who lived within it, and how I’d stood against a demon with their king.
I looked at him sitting beside me. These last months he’d more often worn clothes as rough as any laborer’s, even if they were still of purest white, while he’d worked to reopen deepest chambers and tunnels that had collapsed, healing the mountain’s wounds as he’d healed his people. But he was as splendid today as all the rest of them, and he sat proud and glittering with his hand tight on the railing of the sleigh. He didn’t hold back at all; the journey was over too quickly. It felt as though we’d barely left when a wind bright and fresh with pine came into my face, and the white trees opened wider into a grove where one single tree stood, still only a young tree but beautiful and full of pale white leaves, behind a wooden gate, with a house gently blanketed in snow behind it.