by Naomi Novik
Under normal circumstances, when my friend wants itself a meal, it doesn’t usually last long. I just hold my nose and dive deep until the screaming is all over, then cover things over and occasionally send a compensatory purse to the appropriate destination. I have had words with it about snatching up awkward people like noblemen and parents of small children, to a little grudging effect, but that’s only because it’s not very picky. Unless I do something stupid like smile encouragingly at a serving-maid or a well-turned footman, even in broad daylight, in which case I’m sure to find their staring corpse in my bed a few nights later. “Why didn’t you marry Prince Ulrich’s daughter?” indeed. It delights in doing that sort of thing—the added pleasure of surprising the poor fool who thinks they’re about to have an evening’s delight and a handsome reward in the morning. I’m dreading the night Ilias finally gets really enterprising and bribes his way into my bedchamber. My aunt will not be happy in the least. As for Ulrich’s daughter, if I had let my councillors shove me into bed with her, she’d have had a great many objections afterwards, if she didn’t before.
But not sweet innocent Irina, who evidently doesn’t bat an eye at flaming horrors. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have thought for an instant she’d have trouble with the court; a woman who can coolly bargain with a demon that wants to gnaw on her soul is hardly to be intimidated by Lord Reynauld D’Estaigne. Or, more to the point, by her husband.
I could already see the freshly hideous future taking shape ahead of me. I was going to be stuck with her. My blasted demon was going to snatch at her offer with both clawed hands, Aunt Felitzja was going to be delighted at the chance to marry Ilias off to a rich princess, my entire court already thought her enchantingly beautiful, and my councillors were really going to adore my having a wife who would listen to them prose on about tax rolls and then come and harangue me for hours in their stead, since I couldn’t send her away. And everyone would love her as absolutely no one did me.
Oh, and five minutes from now she’d undoubtedly inform me that she expected me to consummate this relationship, so she could pop out an heir or two to still more general acclaim. After which I wouldn’t be the least surprised to find a knife sticking out of my back some morning. There was a gruesome inevitability to it all. My life has been a sequence of monsters one after another tossing me about to suit their whims; I’ve got a finely tuned sense for when another round of buffeting has arrived.
And one was certainly on the way now. I drank half of a bottle of brandy as the sun began coming sideways through the windows of the ballroom, and took the rest of it along with me to my chambers. I hadn’t any idea what the servants thought had become of Irina this time, and I didn’t care, either. She could worry about the rumors she was starting herself, if she cared so much.
Except—a morose realization—the rumors would undoubtedly all end up being about me. I’d be the hobgoblin locking my poor innocent wife in a closet somewhere, and if I refused to lie back and be mounted when she decided it was time to take possession, I’d be the pathetic impotent who couldn’t get a child on what everyone else seemed to think was the most beautiful woman in the world.
I was in a fine mood by the time I reached the privacy of my chambers, and to improve it, I only just had time to down a final gulp of brandy as the fire climbed out of the knot at the base of my skull and jerked me puppetlike to my feet. “Where has she gone?” it hissed with my tongue and throat, clawing through my mind and memories just enough to find that she was gone again, and then it screamed with fury and spun out of me into the open air, a firespout twisting around my body.
“Why did you let her go?” it snarled, and didn’t let me answer. It shoved a flaming brand down my throat, scorching up my screams before they could emerge into the air, and flung me to the floor and beat me savagely with whips of fire, every blow a shock of bright pain against my skin. There was nothing to be done but endure it. Fortunately it had thrown me on my back: I find it helps somewhat to follow the endless up-and-down pattern of the gilt line bordering the ceiling, all the way around the full length of the room. The demon was in fine form tonight: I had gone around five times before the beating finally wound to a halt and it hurled me away with sulky finality onto the floor beneath the fireplace. It went slouching into the crackling flames and spat at me, “What bargain?” So it had picked that much out of my head already, not that it had felt the need to let that get in the way of finishing up a proper thrashing.
I couldn’t so much as twitch without agony, and my throat was raw as though I’d drunk broken glass, but of course that had nothing to do with anything truly being wrong. The demon seems to feel the need to keep the terms of the original bargain for beauty, crown, and power, no matter how the circumstances have changed, and I suppose leaving me festooned with scars wouldn’t fit. But it’s grown quite adept over the years at managing to produce the sensation of lingering damage without leaving any actual marks behind.
“The king of the Staryk, instead of her,” I said, and my voice sounded perfectly normal. A considerable effort was required not to let it waver, but the demon likes tears and misery, so I do my best not to produce them; the last thing I want is to encourage it to extend its entertainments. These days I’ve become more of a boring convenience than an exciting toy. I’ve found the line to tread between servility, which it enjoys too much, and provocation, which makes it fly into rages. It had been almost a year since it had bothered to beat me. Until darling Irina appeared on the scene, that is. If something else drives it into a frenzy, and I’m the nearest target to hand—as I rather inevitably am—then there’s not much I can do about it.
I was more than a little reluctant to risk prodding it further, but Irina’s offer had a remarkable effect: the demon came flowing back out of the fireplace and went coiling around me like a purring cat. Its flames still came licking at my skin, but only incidentally; it wasn’t trying to hurt me anymore. Still, there was nothing to shield me from the stinging tendrils, as it had done very permanent damage to my clothes. Irina had sniffed quite censoriously when I made a point of ensuring she didn’t wear the same gown twice. I suppose she’d rather scatter alms to the poor or endow a bunch of droning monks somewhere; it would go far better with the holier-than-thou drivel she attempted to feed me. But I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure everyone knows that I never appear in the same ensemble twice. The last thing I need is for anyone to start wondering what’s happened to my favorite pair of trousers or those expensive riding boots I wore three days ago. I’d rather be thought a mad spendthrift than a sorcerer—and it would look odd if I didn’t insist on my tsarina matching me for style.
“How?” the demon breathed out over my ear, claws of flame curling around my shoulder, a grip that shot fresh agony down my back. I clenched my teeth down over a howl; it would let go of me in a moment if I didn’t stir up its interest. “How will she give him to me . . . ?”
“She was thin on the details,” I managed to force out. “She says he’s making the winters longer.”
The demon made a low roaring noise in its throat and prowled away from me again, leaving smoking trails in the carpets on its way back to the fireplace. I shut my eyes and breathed a few times before gathering myself to push back up. “She’s certainly lying about any number of things, but she’s been hiding somewhere,” I said. “And two blizzards since Spring Day does rather stretch the bounds of chance.”
“Yes, yes,” it crackled to itself, gnawing idly on a log. “He has locked them away beneath the snow, and there she flees where I cannot go . . . but can she bring him to me?”
As little as I cared to trust Irina’s too-clever explanations—not for a second did I imagine she had my welfare anywhere remotely near at heart—she had made a few excellent arguments. “If she can’t, we’re no worse off for her trying,” I said. “Are you sure you can defeat him, if she does manage it?”
It made its sputtering crackle of laughter. “Oh, I will slake my thirst, I will drink s
o deep,” it muttered. “Only he must be held fast! A chain of silver to bind him tight, a ring of fire to quench his might . . . bring him to me!” it hissed at me. “Bring him to me and make ready!”
“She wants your promise, of course,” I said. Irina seemed rather eager to rely on the word of an unholy creature, for all her cleverness and sanctimony, but then she’d plainly decided that I’d made a bargain with it myself to get the throne, and fair enough, here I was upon it, for all the delights it afforded me. I would have thought my situation rather an object lesson in being careful what you wished for.
“Yes, yes,” the demon said. “She will be tsarina with a golden crown, and whatever she desires will be hers, only let her bring him to me!”
So I’d been quite right: I was going to be stuck with delightful darling Irina for the rest of my days, and much say I was going to get in any aspect of the matter.
*
My Irina went back to the demon in the morning. I had knitted away the night too quickly. After she had gone, I smoothed my hands over the wool, my fingers trembling as they had not done while I worked. I had made flowers and vines, a cover for a wedding-bed, and it seemed to me that whenever I closed my eyes, they kept growing on their own, quicker than my hands could have made them. I drowsed beneath the heavy weight of the cover in my lap by the fire, until the door swung shut and Irina’s hand was on my shoulder again. “Irinushka, you gave me a fright. Is it night again already?” I said.
“No,” she said. “The bargain is made, Magreta. He will leave me alone, and take the Staryk king in my place. Come. We’re leaving for Vysnia right away. We have to be there in two days’ time.”
I left the knitting on the bed when I went with her. Maybe someone else would come to this little house and need it someday. I didn’t argue. Her father was in her face, then, though she did not know it, and I knew there wasn’t any use. He had looked so in the old duke’s study, and he had looked so when he had taken Irina down to the chapel to be married to the tsar: his feet were on a path and he was walking, and if there were turns, he would not take them aside. That was how she looked, now.
I only hoped not to be so cold anymore, when she brought me out into the palace, in a room full of shining mirrors and silence and a golden harp no one was playing. But there was snow high on the windowsills, and there was no fire in that dark room to warm my hands. There was no chance to find another one lit. The household was all in a frenzy when we came out, servants running in the halls, except when they saw Irina, and then they stopped and bowed to her. She asked each one of them their name, and when they were gone she said it over to herself three times—a trick her father used also, whenever new men came to his army. But what good would scullery-maids and footmen do her, with a demon and a devil on either side?
I followed after her to the courtyard: a royal sleigh was made ready, a great chariot of gilt and white painted fresh, perhaps that morning, and the tsar stood beside it in black furs with golden tassels and gloves of red wool and black fur; oh that vain boy, and his eyes were on my girl, and I could not hide her from him anymore.
“Magra, the tsar is a sorcerer,” she had said to me: ten years old, with her hair already a flowing dark river under the silver brush as we sat by the fire in a small room in the old tsar’s palace. “The tsar is a sorcerer,” just in such a way she said it, calmly out loud, as if that were a thing anyone might say at any time with nothing ill to come of it, as if a girl might say it at the dinner table in front of the whole court just as easily as she said it fresh out of her bath to only her old nanusha; a girl who was only the daughter of a duke whose new wife already had a great belly.
But it was even worse than that: after I slapped her cheek with the brush and told her not to say such things, she put her hand up to her cheek where the color was already fading, and stared at me, and said, “But it’s true,” as though that mattered, and added, “He is leaving dead squirrels for me.”
I did not let her out into the gardens again while we were in Koron, though her skin grew even more pale, and she listless and tired from sitting all day by the fire, helping me spin. With those skeins of yarn I bribed the girl who scrubbed our floor to tell me every day when the tsar left the tables: she knew from her sister, who was two years older and trusted to carry plates, and for finespun yarn she would carry away the tsar’s plate and then run up half the stairs quickly and call to her sister, who would run back up to us in the attic rooms, and only then I would take Irina down to eat, in the last minutes of cold food before the platters were taken away.
It was seven weeks like that, seven hard weeks, for the tsar came always very late to the table and lingered there very long; but every morning as we sat hungry and cold waiting upstairs, I brushed Irina’s hair until the serving-girl came and told us he had gone, and every evening I kept her busy carding the wool and giving it to me in clouds, until it was safe to creep downstairs for whatever was left to glean.
At last one morning, thin and white, she burst from the chair and ran to the window: a cold wind was blowing in, the first frost of the year, and she cried out, “Winter will be here soon, and I want to go outside,” and wept. My heart broke, but I was not a young girl anymore, afraid of being trapped behind a door forever. I knew the door was safety, I knew the door would not always be closed, and I did not let her out. That evening her father’s servant came, impatient after climbing the stairs because we were not at the tables for him to find us; he told us sharply the roads had frozen hard, so we would be going in the morning. I thanked the saints after he had gone.
The seven years of safety since then I had won for her, with those seven hard weeks of patience: that was not nothing. But they felt as nothing when I saw him look at her with eyes as hard as stone. Seven years were gone, gone so quickly, and I could not close a door against him anymore. Someone stronger than I had pulled it open. He held out his gloved hand, and she let go of my arm; she murmured to me, “Go in the sledge there with the guards, Magra. They’ll look after you.”
They were young men, soldiers, but she was right anyway; I was an old woman, white-haired, and my lady was their own tsarina now. Those rough boys helped me into the sledge, and put blankets over me and a warmer at my feet, and called me baba kindly, and old nanusha, and paid no attention to me otherwise; they were talking to each other about good places to drink in Vysnia, and grumbling because the duke’s kitchens were not generous, and when they thought I was drowsing they talked of this girl and that.
They prodded and jostled one of them, a strapping young fellow with a mustache, handsome enough that he should have had girls sighing for him, and who did not speak of anyone, until another one laughed and said, “Ah, leave Timur alone, I know where his heart is: in the tsarina’s jewel-box.” They all laughed, but only a little, and they did not keep teasing him; when I sat up and yawned to let them believe I had really been asleep, I saw him, eyes wounded as if he had been caught by an arrow. He was looking ahead past the driver, at the white sleigh in the distance running, and I, too, could see Irina’s dark hair beneath the white fur of her hat.
*
Mirnatius did not speak to me more than he needed to on the journey, his face as close to sour as expression could make it. “Please yourself,” he’d said shortly, when I told him we should leave for Vysnia at once. “And when precisely is this Staryk going to materialize? There isn’t an infinite store of patience to be had, as I trust you realize.”
“Tomorrow night, in Vysnia,” I said.
He grimaced, but didn’t argue. In the sleigh he put me beside him on the seat and looked elsewhere, except when we stopped at another nobleman’s house to break our journey. The household came out and bowed to us, and Prince Gabrielius himself, proud and white-haired. He had fought alongside the old tsar, and he’d had a granddaughter in the running for tsarina, too, so he had ample cause for the cold offended resentment in his face when I was first presented to him, but it faded out as he stood too long with my hand clasp
ed in his, staring at me, and then he said in low tones, “My lady,” and bowed too deeply.
Mirnatius spent all dinner looking at me with angry desperation, as if it was near driving him mad wondering what the rest of the world saw in me. “No, we’re not staying the night,” he said with savage rudeness to the prince afterwards, all but dragging me away to the sleigh in what I suppose looked like a jealous ferment. He threw himself into the corner violently, his jaw clenched, and snapped at the driver to get the horses moving, and as we went he darted quick, half-unwilling glances at me, as if he thought maybe he could surprise my mysterious beauty and catch it unawares before it fled his eyes.
Not quite an hour passed, and then he abruptly called a halt mid-forest and ordered a footman to bring him a drawing-box: a beautiful confection of inlaid wood and gold that folded into a sort of small easel, and a book of fine paper inside. He waved the sleigh onward and opened it. I caught glimpses from within as he turned the pages, designs and patterns and faces glancing back out at me, some of them beautiful and familiar from the dazzle of his court, but on one page a brief flicker of another face went by, strange and terrible. Not even a face, I thought after it had vanished; it was formed only roughly with a few shadows here and there, like wisps of smoke, but that was enough to leave the suggestion of horror.
He stopped at a blank page, near the end. “Sit up and look at me,” he said sharply, and I obeyed without arguing, a little curious myself; I wondered if the magic would hold, when men looked at a picture of me. He drew with a swift sure hand, looking more at me than at his paper. Even while we glided onward, my face took shape quickly on his page, and when he finished, he stared at it and then tore it out with a furious jerk and held it out to me. “What do they see?” he demanded.
I took it and saw myself for the first time with my crown. More myself on the page in his few lines, it seemed to me, than I had ever seen in a mirror. He hadn’t been unkind, though utterly without flattery, and he had put me together somehow out of pieces: a thin mouth and a thin face, my thick brows and my father’s hatchet nose only not twice broken, and my eyes one of them a little higher than the other. My necklace was a scribble in the hollow of my throat and my crown on my head and the thick doubled braid of my hair resting on my shoulder, a suggestion of weight and luster in the strokes. It was an ordinary unbeautiful face, but it was certainly mine and no other’s, though there were only a handful of lines on the page.
