by Naomi Novik
He began to look for me—behind the fireplace screen, underneath the bed, inside the wardrobe. He even came to the mirror, and I flinched back as he came directly towards me, but he was only looking to see if there was a space behind it. When he drew back, the smile was at last fading; he went to the window and thrust back the curtains, but he had chosen the room carefully: there was only a small window, and it was shut tightly.
He turned back with anger beginning to twist his face. I wrapped my arms around myself, the cold biting at me, while he began to tear apart the room. Finally he stopped, panting, with the curtains torn from the bed and half the furniture overturned, in baffled rage. “Where are you?” he shrieked, a terrible inhuman scraping in his voice. “Come out, and let me see! You are mine, Irina, you belong to me!” He stamped his foot so heavily the massive carved bed trembled. “Or else I’ll kill them, kill them all! Your family, your kin, to me they’ll fall! Unless you come out now . . . I won’t hurt you . . .” he added, in a suddenly wheedling tone, as if he really thought I would believe him. He paused, waiting a moment longer, but when I didn’t appear, he burst into a wild thrashing paroxysm, no longer searching, only smashing and tearing things like a mad beast savaging the world and itself at the same time.
It went on and on, until he screamed suddenly in fury and hurled himself into a fit on the floor, beating himself against it, his whole body convulsing with foam around his lips. The violence of it lasted only a moment, and then he just as suddenly went limp upon the floor, his mouth slack and his eyes staring empty. They seemed to look straight at me, unseeing. I stared back at them for what felt like long dragging minutes before they blinked.
Mirnatius rolled onto his belly and pushed himself first to his knees and then wincing climbed to his feet. His clothes were rent and hanging loose from his shoulders, and he looked around himself at the wrecked bed and the room he had torn apart. The hungry light had gone out of his face; he only had a look of wary confusion. “Irina?” he said, and even lifted the torn coverlet to look beneath it as though he thought I might have suddenly appeared in the meantime. He let it fall and even went to the window and looked at it again, as though he didn’t remember having made sure of it only a little while before.
Still with a baffled expression in his face, Mirnatius strode across the room to the fireplace and said out loud in front of it, as though he expected an answer, “Now you’ve really gone and put me in it. A duke’s daughter! And you didn’t even leave a body. What did you do with her?”
The flames roared high and violently, a splash of sparks flung out into the room. He ignored them, and where they fell on his skin, the small scorched marks vanished as quickly as they marred him. “Find her!” the flames said, in a voice all of hiss and crackle and devouring. “Bring her back!”
“What?” Mirnatius said. “She wasn’t here?”
“I must have her!” the fire said. “I will have her! Find her for me!” It rose to the same shrieking note that had come from his lips only a few moments before.
“Oh, splendid. She must have bribed the guards to let her go. What do you want me to do about it? You’re the one who insisted on my marrying the one girl in the world who’d run away from me! I was already going to have enough to do just placating her father for some tragic and unexpected accident; it’s going to be a bit more difficult if she’s vanished.”
“Kill him!” the fire spat. “She is mine, they gave her to me! Kill them all if they’ve helped her to flee!”
Mirnatius made an impatient gesture. “Don’t be foolish! He was delighted to hand her over in the first place; he won’t have squirreled her away himself. She’s run for it on her own. To the next kingdom by now, most likely. Or a nunnery: that would be marvelous, wouldn’t it.”
The fire made a noise like water splashing on hot coals. “The old woman,” it hissed, and horror caught in my throat. “The old woman, you didn’t want her to see. Fetch her! She knows! She will tell me!”
Mirnatius grimaced, as if in distaste, but he only said, “Yes, yes. It’ll take a day to send for her. Meanwhile I suppose you’ll leave it to me to persuade everyone to believe a story about my darling new wife running away in the middle of the night? And what about this incredible ruin? You’re going to have to give me a month’s worth of power to fix it all, and I don’t care how parched you are.”
The flames roared up so high they filled the fireplace and climbed up into the chimney, orange light leaping over the tsar’s face, but he crossed his arms and glared back at them, and after a moment a grudging tendril of flame broke off from the fire and stretched out towards him. He closed his eyes and tipped back his head, parting his lips, and with a sudden whiplash the tendril plunged down into his throat, a glowing heat illuminating all his body from within, so that for a moment I saw strange shapes lit from inside him and a tracework of lines shining beneath his skin.
He stood tense and shivering beneath the flow of flame, until at last it was severed from the fire and the last trailing end vanished down his throat and the light faded slowly away. He opened his eyes, swaying in a helpless, drunken ecstasy, flushed and beautiful. “Ahh,” he breathed out.
The fire was dying down from that roaring height. “Find her, find her,” it still crackled, but low, like embers crumbling. “I hunger, I thirst . . .” and then it crumbled in on itself and died out into silence, the flames going out and leaving only hot coals in the hearth.
Mirnatius turned back to the room, still smiling a little, heavy-lidded. He raised his arm and lazily swept it in a wide gesture, and everywhere splinters leapt back into smashed furniture and frayed threads began to weave themselves back into whole cloth, all of it dancing and graceful beneath his hand. He was smiling as he watched it all, the way he’d smiled as he prodded the small dead squirrels in the dirt.
When he finally let his hand languidly sink to his side, as smoothly as if he’d been on a stage performing, the room might never have been touched, except by an artist’s hand: the carvings on the bed had grown more intricate, and the mended coverlet had a pattern embroidered in silver and green and gold that the curtains echoed. He looked round with satisfaction and then nodded and went out of the room again, singing softly to himself beneath his breath and rubbing the fingers of his hand lightly against each other, as though he still felt the power coursing there within them.
The room stood empty and silent with him gone. The raging fire had died; there was nothing left but ordinary coals, their warm glow irresistible, even while terror lingered around them. I didn’t want to go back there—how could I be sure that demon-thing wasn’t still lurking in the coals? But my feet were numb in my boots, and only my thumb, with the silver ring upon it, had any feeling. I was shivering, but I wouldn’t be for much longer, and there was nowhere I might go. I had to go back to warm myself for a moment, at least.
I had to, but my hand was trembling as I forced myself to kneel and reach for the smooth glass of the frozen river. My hand dipped through the surface as easily as into the water of a bath, and I saw it coming into the room on the other side. I stopped with just my fingers there, waiting, my eyes on the fire; but I couldn’t wait for long. My hand was warm, so warm that it made the rest of me feel a thousand times more cold, and when no flame at once leapt up and came towards me, I took a breath and tipped myself forward into the water.
I stumbled out of the mirror and down onto the floor into lovely, lovely warmth. I sprang up at once with my hand on the mirror, ready to jump back through, but the fire didn’t crackle or hiss. Whatever that thing had been, it was gone. I crept towards the hearth, and after another wary moment, I took my icy furs off, my hands clumsy and shivering, to let the warmth come back into me. But I did not take off my jewels, my silver, even through the worst of the wracking shivers that worked through me, driven by fear and not just cold. I’d known he meant me nothing good, but I hadn’t imagined this; I hadn’t feared Baba Yaga planning to put me in the oven and eat me up and pick my ver
y bones out of the world. And I had only a cold place to hide.
When at last my body quieted, and then grew even a little too hot in my fine gown, I pressed my still-cool palms to my cheeks and forced myself to be steady, to think. I got up and turned to the room and the horror of its tidy perfection: another lie Mirnatius and his demon were telling the world, covering up the truth of ruined furniture and the torn and scorched hangings beneath this veneer of beauty. He’d taken the key, but I put a chair beneath the doorknob, so I’d at least have a moment’s warning if someone tried to come inside. Then I went back to the mirror.
I took the crown off and put it carefully down on the floor. I could still see the place where I’d just been, the cold riverbank now with a small dented drift of snow where I’d been standing, already being smoothed away with more drifting snow. When I touched the glass, I felt as though I were pushing through heavy curtains, but when I leaned hard into it, at last my hands dipped through, even with only necklace and ring. So the ring and the necklace together were enough. Then I took off the necklace, and tried once more. But this time, my hands stopped at the glass, though I still saw the snow, and felt the cold seeping into the world all round my fingers. The mirror’s surface had a kind of yielding softness instead of a smooth impenetrability, but it wouldn’t let me through. I tried them all, and none of them would let me through alone; I needed two together to cross over. And I could keep a ring on my hand every hour of the day and wear it to bed, too, and no one would wonder, but necklaces and crowns would be odd enough to draw attention. And if Mirnatius guessed how I’d escaped him, he’d make sure I didn’t have another chance.
I went and looked back into the mirror, at the snowy riverbank. I’d warmed myself through again. I could put on all my petticoats, my three new dresses one over another, all my stockings and the thick woolen ones over my boots. I could step through the mirror and be gone again. If I walked along the river, perhaps I would find some shelter. There were a handful of trinkets in my jewel-box, more wedding gifts; I could put them in my pockets, and try to buy help or shelter, if anyone lived in those woods. I didn’t know how the magic would work, but I was ready to risk dying frozen in the snow to be away from that thing in the fire.
But in the morning the tsar would send for Magreta. She would come without hesitating. She’d be so happy, all the way here; her hopeful heart would think that I had persuaded my husband to let me have her for company, and that he must not be very wicked after all, and surely he had fallen in love with me already, and was ready to be kind. And then he would give her to his demon to torture knowledge out of her that she didn’t have, to find out where I had gone.
*
The Staryk’s sleigh took us flying-fast over the silver road. It ran between two ranks of tall white trees, their ash-grey bark fading to lighter branches covered with leaves the color of milk with translucent veins. Small six-pointed flowers like enormous snowflakes drifted down upon our shoulders and into our laps as the hooves of the deer went drumming onward, the road’s surface smooth as a frozen pond. I could see nothing but winter, all around. I tried to break the silence a few times, to ask where we were going and how long the journey would be, but I might as well have tried talking to the deer. The Staryk didn’t even look at me.
But finally, a mountain began to rise up at the end: lost in mist and hard to see at first because of the distance, I thought, but it didn’t get any easier to make it out even as it came nearer and grew great. Light passed through it and glinted on the edges, but only for a moment, and then it found a new part of the mountain to make bright, as if the whole of it was made of cut glass instead of stone and earth, and the road climbed up a ramp to its side to a tall silver gate.
The road turned strangely slow once we saw it. The hooves flashed as quickly and the trees glided as steadily past, but the mountain came no nearer, only standing there cutting out the same portion of the sky. We didn’t seem to draw any closer. Beside me the Staryk sat very still, gazing always straight ahead. Then the driver turned his head just a little: he didn’t look around exactly, but he made a small gesture in that direction, and the Staryk’s lips tightened minutely. He made no other sign and said nothing, but the mountain suddenly began to move towards us again, as if only his will had held it off.
We emerged from the forest, and the canopy of white trees ended. The Staryk road fell in with a river running in the opposite direction, coming from the mountain and covered in a thin creaking layer of ice, large floes outlined in dark water, gradually sliding away downstream. As we came closer, I saw that a narrow waterfall from the mountain fed the river, a long thin veil falling down the side of the glass mountain that ended in a pool of blurring mist before the river ran away. I didn’t understand where the waterfall came from: there was no snow resting on those strange crystalline slopes to melt and feed it, no earth that it might have drained from. But we passed close enough for me to feel a fine spray on my cheek before the road climbed up, and the silver gates swung open for us as we came.
The sleigh plunged inside the mountain without slowing, moving like a blink from one light into another, a strange glimmering that seemed caught in the walls, with twisting lines of silver veined through them, and here and there a flash of brilliant crystal in vivid colors. Darker mouths of branching tunnels split away around us, but our road kept climbing upwards and curving, gathering light until it at last emerged into a vast frost-white meadow. I thought at first we’d gone through the entire mountain and come back outside, but we hadn’t: we were inside a great hollow space near the peak, with shining crystal facets high overhead. The pale endless grey of the sky in here was broken up into jeweled brilliance, thin dazzling rainbow lines sketched across it, and in the center of the meadow beneath that diamond roof, a grove of white trees grew.
Even sick with fear and anger and my own helplessness, the impossible wonder of the place snagged at me. I stared up into the mountain’s vault with my eyes stinging from winter glare, and I almost managed to persuade myself I was dreaming. I couldn’t put myself into the picture of it. I could more easily put myself back into my narrow bed in my grandfather’s house, maybe even sick with a fever. But the picture didn’t let me out. The sleigh slowed and stopped instead, as the driver pulled the deer to a halt outside the ring of trees, and a crowd of Staryk faces turned to look at me from beneath the boughs.
After a single moment, my Staryk stood up and climbed out of the sleigh stiffly. He stood there with his back to me, rigid and unmoving, until I slowly and cautiously climbed out behind him. The ground crunched under my foot a little when I stepped down on it, full of silver-grey grass, crisp with white patterns of frost. It felt too real. He still didn’t give me a word of explanation. He said curtly to the driver, “Take it to the storeroom,” jerking his hand towards the chest of gold still sitting on the back of the sleigh. The driver nodded and turned the heads of the deer and drove away, over the meadow and around the grove of trees until he was gone out of sight. Then the Staryk lord turned and set off instantly into the grove of trees, and I had to scurry to keep up with his long strides.
The white trees of the grove were planted in widening rings, and within those rings, the other Staryk had arranged themselves by rank, or at least by splendor. The ones in the outermost rings, the most crowded, wore grey clothes and touches of silver; a few jewels in deep colors made their appearance in the next rings. As the circles grew smaller, the jewels and the clothes grew steadily lighter, and the ones in the smallest circles dazzled with jewels of palest pink and yellow and cloudy white, their clothing all in white and palest grey.
But only as we walked through the very narrowest circle did I catch even small gleams of gold, and even then, only an edge of gilding upon a cloak clasp or a silver ring, as if it was nearly as rare here as Staryk silver in my own world. Among them all, only my Staryk wore clothing all in white, and clear jewels, and there was a solid band of gold around the base of his silver crown. He led me past all of th
em without stopping to a raised mound at the very center of the grove. A great jagged cluster of frozen spars of ice or clear crystals stood there, shining, and the tiny narrow curling of a frozen stream wound around the base and trickled away as a silver line through the trees.
Next to the cluster, a servant stood so very still he might have been carved from ice, his eyes downcast. He was holding a white cushion, and upon it a tall crown made all of silver, strangely familiar to my eyes: Isaac might have used it for a pattern. The Staryk paused when he came to it, looking down at the delicate, fanciful thing, and when he turned out to face the crowd of his people, his own face had also gone deathly still. He didn’t look at me, and his voice was cold. “Behold my lady, your queen,” he said.
I looked out over that glittering sea, those impossible frozen faces staring back at me expressionless with disapproval: they couldn’t put me into this picture, either, and they didn’t want to. There were some smiles in the nearest circles, cruel and familiar: they were the same smiles I’d grown up with all my life, the ones people had worn when they told me the story of the miller’s daughter, the smiles when I’d knocked on their doors the first time. Only this time, they weren’t even smiling at me: I was too small for that. They were smiling at him, a little incredulous, nobles pleased to see their own king brought low and marrying a brown lump of a mortal girl.
He picked up the crown from the cushion at once: moving quickly to get it over with and finish his humiliation. I hardly wanted to be there myself, being smirked at by them all, but I knew what my grandfather would have told me: those faces would smile forever if I let them. I didn’t see how I could ever make them stop. The tall knights with their white cheekbones and icicle beards wore silver swords and daggers at their sides, white bows slung over their shoulders, bows they used to hunt mortal men for pleasure, and I had seen their king steal the living soul out of a man with the touch of his hand. Any one of them could surely have cut me down.
