by Naomi Novik
He still glittered, but he flicked his hand sharply at the servants; they bowed and quickly left the room, and soon a crowd of them came in; shortly they had laid a banquet on the table that I had to exert myself not to find impressive: silver plates and jewel-clear glass, a snowy linen cloth spread out, two dozen dishes offered, all cold, most of them nothing I could recognize, but to my relief, I could still eat them. Sharp spicy pink fish, slices of a pale white fruit with yellow-green skin, a clear jelly holding tiny squares of something hard and salty, a bowl of something that looked like snow but smelled of roses and tasted sweet. I thought I recognized the dish of green peas, but they were tiny and frozen nearly solid. There was venison, too, raw but sliced so thin that you could eat it anyway, served on blocks of salt.
When we finished, the servants cleared the dishes, and then he picked out two of the women and told them they were to be my attendants. They both looked unhappy with the prospect, and I wasn’t much happier. He didn’t tell me their names, either, and I could hardly tell them apart from any of the others; one had very slightly longer hair, with a single very thin braid laced with small crystal beads on the left, and the other had a small white beauty mark beneath her right eye; that was all the difference I could see. Their hair was white and grey, and they wore the same grey clothes as all the other royal servants.
But with silver buttons going down the front, so I went up to them and touched the buttons with my finger, one after another, and turned them to shining gold. All the servants darted looks over as I did it. When I finished and said, coolly, “So everyone will know you’re my servants,” they looked rather more resigned to their fate, and the Staryk king looked displeased, which pleased me. I suppose that was petty, but I didn’t care. “How do I summon you, when I need something?” I asked them, but they said nothing and darted eyes to their lord—and I realized at once, of course he’d told them not to answer my questions, to force me to use mine up with him. I bit my lip and then asked him coldly, “Well?”
He smiled very thinly, satisfied. “With this.” He inclined his head to the one with the beauty mark, who gave me a small bell to ring. Then he dismissed them; when they had left the room, he said to me coldly, “You have one question more.”
I had a thousand practical ones, especially if no one else was going to tell me anything—where was I to bathe, how was I to get clean clothes—but the urgent impractical one swelled out of my throat, the one whose answer I already knew I didn’t really want. “How do I get back to Vysnia? Or my home?”
“You? Make a way from my kingdom to the sunlit world?” His disdain made it clear he thought I had as much chance of getting there as the moon. “You do not, save if I take you there.” And then he was up and sweeping from the chamber, and I went into my bower and pulled the curtains shut against the endless twilight and buried my face into my arms with my teeth clenched and a few hot tears burning behind my eyelids.
But in the morning I got up and rang my bell, determined. My new servants did come at once, and instead of asking them questions, I tried simply issuing demands instead. It served reasonably well: they did bring me a bath, filling up an enormous and gracefully curved silver tub longer than I was tall. It had a rime of ice around the edge, and frost all over the lip of the tub, but when I warily put my hand into it, the water somehow felt just right, so I, a little wincingly, climbed in, expecting every moment to yelp, but evidently whatever the Staryk had done to bring me into his kingdom had made me able to bear the cold of it.
They also brought me food and fresh clothing, all in white and silver—every trace of which I determinedly changed to gold: I meant to go on as I’d started, and put myself in everyone’s faces as much as I could. But even serving me all morning, neither of the women told me their names, and I didn’t mean to give up a question to my lord for that. Instead, when I finally sat down to breakfast, I said to the one with the beauty mark, “I’ll call you Flek, and her Tsop,” after the braid, “unless you’d prefer me to use something else.”
Flek startled so that she nearly spilled the drink she was pouring into my glass, throwing me a look of astonishment, and trading another with Tsop, who was staring at me equally taken aback. I had a moment of alarm that I’d offended them, but they both blushed a faint delicate blue-grey in their faces. Flek said, “We are honored,” dropping her eyes, and she seemed to mean it. I wouldn’t have thought that there was anything very nice in the names I’d given them—I hadn’t tried, since I’d only been fishing for their real names.
Nevertheless, I felt reasonably satisfied, until I was finished eating and my day stretched out ahead of me, empty now except for that chest of silver, waiting in the middle of the floor. I scowled at it, but I had nothing better to do; I had nothing to do at all. And at least the king had met my demands. I didn’t like giving him anything he wanted, much less the gold he coveted with so much greed, but I also saw plainly that this was the bargain that bought my life, and if I didn’t want to make it, I might as well smash open the glass wall and hurl myself down on the waterfall rocks below.
“Tip it all out onto the floor,” I grudgingly told Tsop and Flek. They did it, without any great effort, and set the empty chest back upright at the end of a torrent of silver. Then they bowed, and left me to it.
I picked up one of the silver coins. In my world they had seemed unmarked, but in the strange, brilliant light that filtered in through my walls of crystal, a picture gleamed out in pale tracework lines: one of those slender snow-white trees on one face, and on the other side, the mountain of glass with the silver gates at its base, only in the image there was no waterfall. But in my hand, with only a faint effort of wanting, gold slid over its face, a buttery-yellow glow shining against my fingers.
It made me angry again, or I tried to have it make me angry, the contrast between that sunlit warmth caught like a prisoner in my hand, and the endless cold grey light outside. I threw it into the box, hard, and then another after it, and another. I picked up handfuls of silver coins and amused myself by letting them run out into the chest, each one tumbling into gold as they fell. It wasn’t hard, but I didn’t hurry. He’d only set me to changing another when I was done.
When I had filled perhaps a quarter of the chest, I went to the glass wall and sat there looking over my new kingdom. Still more snow had started falling. The thin black-silver snake of the river, winding away under its rafts of ice, was the only break in the forest anywhere, and soon the snow hid it. No sign of farms or roads or anything else I understood, and the sky was the heavy grey overcast that left no sign of individual clouds. The shining mountain was a solitary island of brightness, as if it caught all of that light reflected off the scattering of snow and ice and gathered it jealously to itself, to make its improbable sides. In the walls a thousand shifting degrees of light softly gleamed and faded, and when I pressed my fingers hard to the cold surface, for a moment they splintered into color around my touch.
“Where—point to where the food comes from,” I said to Flek, after she brought me the midday meal, a simple platter of thin slices of fish and delicate fruit laid one upon the other in a circle. She hesitated with confusion on her face, but when I went to the glass wall and waved out towards the countryside, she darted one quick anxious glance out at the forest and didn’t come to join me; she shook her head and then just pointed straight down.
I frowned and looked at the platter of food. “Take me where the fish come from, then.” I had some half-formed thought of escaping, of swimming down a river through the mountainside, and anyway I wanted to be out of my room. I was a queen, supposedly; I ought to be allowed to go around my domain.
Flek looked very doubtful, but she went to the wall and opened it up for me. I didn’t see anything she did; she touched no lever nor made any gesture nor said a magic word; she only walked towards the wall and turned towards me, and suddenly she was waiting by an archway as if it had always been there. I went out after her into a corridor that might have been
a tunnel; the walls were smooth as glass, and I saw no break where panes had been joined. It sloped downwards steeply, and she led me down it very hesitantly, with many sidelong glances back; we passed chambers as we walked, what I realized were kitchens, though they didn’t have a single flame: long tables with grey-clothed Staryk servants preparing dishes with careful use of knives, out of boxes of pale-colored fruits and silver-skinned fish and slabs of purplish-red meat.
I was halfway glad to see them, because they made a little more ordinary sense of the place to me: at least there were some people here doing something I could understand. But whenever one of them glanced up and saw me, they stared in open astonishment, and looked at Flek, who avoided their gaze. I suppose a queen wasn’t meant to come wandering around the servants’ quarters, and I was making an odd spectacle of myself. I just kept my chin up and marched along in her wake, and after another curving, we passed the last kitchen door and came to an unbroken stretch. Flek paused there and looked back at me, as if she hoped that the kitchens had been enough to satisfy me; but the tunnel traveled onward, and I was curious, so I said, “Keep going,” and she turned and continued on more sharply downwards.
The light in the walls grew steadily dimmer as we went down, until it was only little flickering gleams chasing one another, a dim glow that slightly rose and ebbed, as if we’d gone below the surface of the earth and only reflections of light from above could still reach us. We walked a long time; a few times we went down narrow curving staircases, until abruptly Flek turned out of the tunnel and through another archway into a cavern room, its walls jagged crystal, with a narrow walkway around a deep pool of dark water.
The surface was as smooth and unbroken as a sheet of glass, but nets on long handles rested carefully against the wall, and after I stood looking for several minutes I caught a flickering glimpse of the silver side of some vast blind fish moving deep in the dark before it vanished away again below. I knelt and touched the surface. Even though I could now put my hand in ice-melt and think it bathwater, the water felt painfully cold to my fingertip. I watched ripples spread away from my touch in widening circles: they were the only stirring until they struck the far edge and came back to me again, breaking one another down until they faded back into perfect stillness.
I wondered how many more pools like this there were in the depths, and how many orchard groves growing within the crystal walls; how far it all went, this impossible world contained within the mountain, a fortress of jeweled light. Flek stood silently beside me, waiting. She’d done as I’d commanded, but it hadn’t left me any better off. There was no escape here for me except another death, by drowning, and she wouldn’t answer any of my questions. I stood up. “All right,” I said. “Take me back to my chamber. By another route,” I added: I wanted to see more, if I could.
She hesitated, looking anxious again, but she turned the other way after we left the pool, and led me down, as if she had to go farther in before she could find another way. The light grew even more dim, and we passed archways that looked in on more of those dark pools. Still lower down, where only the barest gleam showed, we passed another pool chamber; but when I glanced in, there was no hint of light on water. I stepped through the archway to look down: there was only an empty shaft of rough crystal going down and down with a large crack along the bottom as if a pool once here had drained away somewhere. When I looked back, Flek was standing by the door, looking at the empty pool with her arms stiff by her sides and her face blank.
We passed a few more dry chambers before we came to a junction between passageways, and Flek turned with swift eagerness into a tunnel that sloped upwards, as if she were glad to be going back above. I was soon sorry myself that I’d made her take me so far down: I had almost no sense of time passing, but my legs noticed the climb, and I was tired long before the light began to brighten in the walls again. And still we had a long way to go. Flek took me along a path running through a chamber so big I couldn’t make out the sides in the dimness, full from one end to the other with a field of odd tiny pale-violet mushrooms, their heads nodding on tall stems like strange wildflowers. We passed two Staryk servants there with gathering-baskets, in clothes a single shade of grey darker than the others I’d seen. They didn’t look at me in surprise; they only darted their eyes for a single look at Flek herself before looking down again. She glanced at them, just as quick, and then kept her face looking straight along the path until we left the chamber.
From there we went into a tall spiraling stair, narrow and turning around and around on a spindle-shaft of crystal. The light grew brighter, so I felt our movement upwards, but nothing else changed, and it seemed as though it might go on forever. “Take us out of this stair if you can,” I said, when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Flek only glanced back at me and lowered her head and kept climbing, but the very next turning brought us onto a landing.
I didn’t know if it had been there ahead of us waiting or not, and I didn’t care; I was just grateful to leave the confines of that stair. But we stepped off into a vineyard grove that first I thought was only another kind of strangeness, and then I understood was dead: narrow trellises of pale ash wood visible under the dry sticks of dark grey vines that had withered to the roots, standing in cracked, parched soil with small hard dark lumps of fruit that had dried on the branches, scattered among the few dark grey papery leaves left clinging. Flek hurried through the dead grove, and I was glad to hurry with her; I felt as though I were walking through a graveyard.
There were three more stairs to climb, none of them so confined, and then finally we were in a brighter passageway that sloped more gently upwards, until we were turning unexpectedly through an archway and back into my room. I’d had no sense we were anywhere near it.
I was glad to stop walking. I felt as tired as though I’d walked all the way out to the farthest villages around my home and back, miles and miles, only here I’d gone up and down instead, all inside the deep fastness of their mountain. But I couldn’t be glad to come back to my chamber. It wasn’t anything but a prison cell, and all this mountain was the dungeon around it. Flek brought me the glass of water that I demanded, and then bowed and left me in a visible hurry, surely glad to get away before I could order her to take me anywhere else foolish and uncomfortable, because I didn’t know where I was going, and couldn’t ask, and couldn’t even be warned when I was demanding to go straight through places they avoided themselves.
A moment after she was gone, there wasn’t a way out of the room anymore. But there wasn’t anywhere to go anyway. I sat next to the chest and picked up handfuls of silver and flung them in as gold, resentfully. I didn’t deliberately work quickly, only with the speed of dull repetition, and I found myself scraping up the last handful of silver coins to drop inside even as Tsop came in, carrying a tray with my dinner. I thought of insisting that the Staryk king come and eat with me again, just to punish him, but I didn’t deserve that punishment, so I sat and ate my meal alone, and he made his appearance only as I was finishing.
He went past the table instantly to the chest and flung open the lid. He said nothing for a long time, only stood there looking down with the sunrise glow reflecting off his glittering-hungry eyes and limning all the lines of his icicle edges with golden light. I finished and pushed back my tray and went over to him. “The servants behaved well, and did everything I commanded,” I told him sweetly: I wanted him to know that I had managed perfectly well for myself, and been comfortable, very little thanks to him.
But he didn’t even look away from the chest, and only said, “As they should have. Ask your questions,” utterly dismissive, and I became instantly aware that I had only made myself more convenient to him. Now he wouldn’t have to even think of me once all day; I would sit here in my room, changing silver to gold and twiddling my thumbs, waited upon out of his sight, and a daily toll of three questions was hardly onerous.
I pressed my lips tight. “What are the duties of a Staryk queen?” I asked coldl
y, after a moment’s thought. Of course I didn’t want to be of any more use to him, but work made one’s place in the world. If I’d improbably become the wife of an archduke, surrounded by servants, I would have had a guess at what there was for me to do—a household to manage, and children when they came; and fine embroidery and weaving and making a court. Here I had no idea what I was even meant to do, and if I didn’t like it, still, I wanted to neglect my duties deliberately, and not just because I was a stupid girl who didn’t know what they were.
“They depend upon her gifts, of which you have but the one,” he said. “Occupy yourself with it.”
“I might get so bored without any variety that I’d stop doing it,” I said. “You may as well tell me what others there are, and leave it to me to decide which ones I’ll try.”
“Will you make a hundred years of winter in a summer’s day, or wake new snow-trees from the earth?” he said, and it was jeering. “Will you raise your hand and mend the mountain’s wounded face? When you have done these things, then truly will you be a Staryk queen. Until then, cease the folly of imagining yourself other than you are.”
There was a deep ringing quality to his voice as he spoke, almost a chanting, and I had the unpleasant feeling he was mocking me with truth rather than nonsense. As if a Staryk queen might take it into her head to make winter in the midst of summer, and make that cracked mountainside whole again with a wave of her hand. And here I sat instead, in the place of some great sorceress or ice-witch, a drab mortal girl with nothing to do but make a vast river of gold for him to gloat over.
I was sure he wanted me to feel small, with his mockery, and I didn’t mean for him to succeed. So when he finished jeering, I said coldly, “As I haven’t yet learned to make the snow fall to suit me, I’ll content myself with being what I am. And my next question is, how do I know when the sun has set, in the mortal world?”
