by Naomi Novik
“You said you would save the child!” he said to me accusingly. “You said you would! The fire comes for us, will you go a liar to your death?”
I gasped in a breath of smoke, black charring smoke that burned my mouth and nose and throat, and tears burst from my eyes. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to kill; I didn’t want to go to death a murderer with bloody hands. I wanted that more than I didn’t want to be a liar. But he was going to die anyway, die worse, and they would all die with him. There were a thousand ways to die, and not all of them were equally as bad. I whispered, “Turn over on your face,” and I reached for the shovel again and stood up with it, my eyes running with tears, smoke shrouding him as he turned over—
—and through the smoke a single bright gleam shone from the middle of his imprisoned back: a cold gleam like moonlight, blue on snow, where Irina had used her necklace of Staryk silver to bind the two ends of a broken silver chain together. I dropped the shovel and reached for it. A fist suddenly seized my hair from behind and yanked my head back, and I felt flame catch in my hair, a terrible stink of it burning, but I, straining, caught the necklace with a fingertip, and it went to gold at my touch.
The grip let go my hair. I fell to the ground coughing and sick and with my hair still smoldering as another roar of rage went up. But it went suddenly thin and high-pitched as a shrieking blast of winter wind burst through the room, a cold as bitter as the flames had been, and all around me every fire in the room went out: the coals went dead and black and the candles blew into pitch dark, and the only light left was the dull red shining of two savage eyes above me.
The next breath I dragged in was clean and cold as the frozen air after a blizzard, and it cooled my singed skin and my burning throat. From out of the dark, the Staryk said, “Your bindings are broken, Chernobog; by high magic and fair bargain I am freed!” His voice was echoing against the stones. “You cannot hold me here and now. Will you flee, or will I put out your flame forever, and leave you buried in the dirt?” And with another choking howl of rage, the red eyes vanished. Heavy footsteps went running away, back down the tunnel, and I closed my eyes and curled against cold stones, gulping fresh winter air.
*
I slept for a while after Magreta coaxed me to lie down again; I felt tired and painfully sore. But I stirred when a sudden rattle of wind came shivering through the open doors of the balcony, and I stood up and went to look out. I couldn’t see anything in the dark past the torches lit on the castle walls, but the wind in my face was cold again, and I was sure suddenly that the Staryk had gotten free. And at once I was also sure that Miryem had done it. I didn’t know how or what she’d done, but I was sure.
I couldn’t find anger in me, only fear. I understood her choice, though it wasn’t mine: she didn’t want to feed the flame. I didn’t, either, but she had unbound winter to keep her hands clean. The snow would come again: if not tonight then in the morning, and everything green that had grown would die.
The other corpses would mount swiftly after. I’d seen the hollowed sides of the animals that had come to me for bread this morning; they hadn’t had much longer to live. Only the sudden bounty of leaves and berries had really made my father’s feast tables tonight worthy of his rank, with all he had been able to do. There had been no whole roast pig or ox brought to the table for display: game and cattle were both too thin to make a fine show. There had probably been twice as many animals butchered as usual to make the same feasting, and I’d seen the musicians dunking their crusts a long time in the thin soup they’d been given, because the bread was stale. This at a duke’s table, for the wedding of a princess. I knew what that meant for the poorer tables outside the city walls.
But I didn’t know what to do. We’d only caught the Staryk king with Miryem’s help, and still he’d nearly defeated us. He wouldn’t make such a fool’s mistake again. I would have liked to believe that Miryem had made a bargain with him, the treaty she’d spoken of to stop the winter—but the snow on the wind said that she hadn’t, and we had no time for negotiations. If the snow came again tomorrow and killed the rye, all the joy in the city today would go to rioting as soon as the streets cleared enough. And if they never did clear again, we’d all starve to death buried in our homes, cottages and palaces alike. Could we make a mirror wide enough for our armies to march through? But Staryk huntsmen with their flashing silver blades cut down mortal men like wheat when they came. We might leave a song of ourselves, making a war on winter, but the people we left behind couldn’t eat music.
Magreta put my fur cloak around my shoulders. I looked down. Her face was sad and afraid. She also felt the cold. “Your stepmother would like it if you paid her the favor of a visit in her rooms,” she said softly.
She meant, let us get out of this room; let us not be here when the tsar comes back. Chernobog would be coming back, of course, hot and savage and angry. Fire and ice both on the horizon at once, and my little kingdom of squirrels caught in between them. But he was also my only hope of finding some way to save it.
“Go to my father,” I said. “Tell him I want him to send Galina and the boys away—tonight, at once, for a holiday in the west. With sleigh runners in the carriage. Tell him I want you to go with them.”
She pressed my hands. “Come.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have a crown. If it means anything, it means this.”
“Then leave it,” she said. “Leave it, Irinushka. It’s only sorrow on sorrow.”
I bent and kissed her cheek. “Help me put it on,” I said softly, and she went and took it with tears in her eyes, and put it back on my head. Afterwards, I pushed her gently towards the door. She hurried away, her shoulders bent.
The cold was mounting swiftly at my back. The fire was dead in the fireplace, but a smell of smoke began to rise anyway, at first like an echo in a room that hadn’t been aired in too long, and then the smell of someone burning too much dry tinder too quickly, before I heard the first heavy footsteps in the hall, running, and the door burst open. Chernobog came into the room only as a half-quenched smoldering, his eyes dark red and faint lines of crackled heat glowing through Mirnatius’s skin; but in a moment the door smashed shut behind him, and then he was roaring at me in full force, a glimpse of yellow flames igniting deep within his throat, “He is gone! He has escaped, gone free! You have broken your promise and let him flee!”
“I haven’t broken any promises,” I said. “I promised to bring him, and I did; he isn’t free by my doing, but against it. I too don’t want him loose to set winter back on Lithvas. How can he be imprisoned again, or stopped? Tell me what can be done.”
“He has fled, run away, where I cannot go! He will lock away his kingdom behind ice and snow, and keep me from my feasting!” Chernobog only crackled at me furiously; he started to roam back and forth across the floor in a slouching, writhing motion, the pacing of a flame. “He is free, and knows my name, and already once he bound me . . . I would have starved on cold stone, I would have fed on nothing but bone . . . I cannot get into his kingdom!” He stopped a moment there, trembling, and then he spat like the breaking of logs in a fire, “I have tasted him deep. He is too strong, he is grown too great. His hands are full of gold. He will smother me with winter, he will quench my flame in endless cold.”
And then he turned on me with his glowing eyes. “Irina,” he crooned, “Irina, sweet and silver-cold, you have failed me. You have not brought me my winter feast.” He took a step towards me. “So I will keep my promise, and my feast will be on you instead; on you and all your loves. If I cannot have the winter king, I will have instead your sweetness on my tongue. You will fill me up with strength!”
“Wait!” I said sharply, as he took another step towards me; I held up my hand. “Wait! If I take you into the Staryk kingdom, can you defeat him there?”
He halted, his eyes brightening like a spark fed with strands of straw. “At last will you tell me your secret, Irina?” he breathed. “Now will you s
how me your road? Open the way, and let me go in; what care I for a single king then? I will feast in his halls until his strength falls, and I will still have them all in the end.”
I drew a breath, looking at the dressing mirror where it stood near me, my last refuge. Once he knew, I’d never have a place of retreat again. But I had only two choices left: I could run through alone, and leave him to feast on everyone behind me, or take him through, and know he could come back for me, hungry. I held out my hand. “Come, then,” I said. “I’ll take you there.”
He reached out his hand as Mirnatius’s hand, the long fine fingers coming to clasp mine, skin warm, with the smoke gathered like a large cuff around the wrist. I turned to the dressing mirror, and when he turned his head he drew a sudden hiss of breath, and I knew he saw what I did: the winter kingdom shining in the glass, snowflakes falling thickly amid dark pine trees. I went to the mirror and drew him along after me, and we stepped through into the snow-heavy forest.
But he came through as a figure of ash and flame, red lines shining bright between his teeth and a blackened tongue behind them, as though Mirnatius were a skin that he could put off, and his whole body was a living coal wreathed in smoke. Cold came surging like a blast into my face, a blizzard wind, and next to me Chernobog gave a small shriek and was blown into dark wet coals and ash by that savage wind. But after a struggling instant, the red heat came glowing again from beneath his skin: he was burning too deep, too hot, to be put out that easily. The cold retreated from around him instead, and a widening place free of falling snow opened around us. We were standing at the back of the little house, the place I’d last left; even as I looked down at the washtub full of water, the ice in it cracked and broke into small pieces that melted swiftly.
Chernobog was drawing in great gulps of the air with a dreamy, gluttonous look in his face. “Oh, the cold,” he sighed. “Oh, the sweet draughts I will drink. What feasts await me here . . . Irina, Irina, let me reward you dear, before I set off on my way!”
“No,” I said, cold with contempt. He seemed to think he could make treachery over and over, and no one would notice. Mirnatius’s mother hadn’t had much good of her bargain with him, even if she’d been buried in the crown she’d bartered her child for. “I’ll still take nothing, but that you leave me and mine alone.”
He made a complaining noise again, but he was too distracted to care: the wind blew a cold shriek into his face like a knife’s edge, and he turned and sprang towards it almost as if he could grab hold of it with his hands. And maybe he could, because as he leapt, he reached out with both his arms stretched out as if to embrace the air, and the wind that came to me where I stood behind him was warm. He rushed away through the trees going towards the river, and his feet left wide-spaced sinking footprints going straight down to green fresh grass buried beneath the snow, the wet smell of spring bursting out of the ground with every step. Even after he had gone out of my sight, the melting footprints kept growing, devouring the snow between them.
CHAPTER 23
The Staryk lifted me in his arms, or maybe a winter wind cradled me; either way I was carried like a blown snowflake up and out of a square trapdoor onto a hillside, with the city wall not a hundred feet distant from us and the city lights aglow on the other side. Whatever was carrying me dropped me again with an ungraceful thump, and I lay gasping and throat-sore on the earth—the warm earth, lush with soft green grass, and though it silvered with frost in a circle around where the Staryk knelt, his skin shone wet and glistening everywhere, as if he were melting.
But he staggered up onto his feet, one still bare, and raised his arms with his eyes shining, and the circle of frost began to spread from around him, the blades of grass curling down and tightening as the crystals of ice covered them, the ground beneath me going hard and cold, as if now that he was free, he could summon back all the winter that had been stripped away. “Wait!” I shouted in protest, getting up on my knees indignantly.
He glanced down at me and said fiercely, “He has already drunk from my people! I will not let—”
He broke off and jerked around an instant too late; I screamed involuntarily as a sword came thrusting through him, the blade piercing him from in front beneath the ribs and coming out his back shining white with frost and breathing a cold fog into the air around it. It was one of the tsar’s guardsmen, the brave one who’d taken the rope to lead the Staryk out of my grandfather’s house. He must have been standing watch outside the tower: he was pale with horror beneath his mustache but determined, his eyes wide and his jaw clenched and both hands wrapped around the hilt of his blade.
He tried to jerk it back out of the Staryk’s body, but it wouldn’t come, and frost was racing white down towards his gloved hands. His fingers sprang away almost of their own accord as it reached them, and the Staryk fell heavily to the ground, his eyes gone clouded and white. The soldier stood staring down at him, shaking, wringing his hands; the fingers of his gauntlets were tipped with white. I was staring too, both of my hands over my mouth, holding in another cry. The sword was all the way through the Staryk’s body. I didn’t see how he could live; it almost didn’t look real, that wound, and a strange blankness filled me; I couldn’t think at all.
But the Staryk, blindly groping, reached for the hilt of the sword where it stood out of his body, and it began to go entirely white beneath his touch, layer on layer of frost building. The whole sword was being frozen. The soldier and I both lurched back into motion; he pulled out a long dagger from his belt, and I shouted, “Wait,” again, in a gasp, and struggled to my feet and grabbed his arm. “Listen to me! We have to stop the demon, not him!”
“Be silent, witch!” the soldier spat at me. “You have done this, you have let him free, to undo the work of our blessed tsarina,” and then he struck my face with his other clenched fist, a perfectly ordinary blow that rattled my teeth and shocked straight through my body. I fell down dazed and sick to my stomach, and he turned to stab the Staryk.
And then Sergey, coming out of the dark upon us, grabbed his arm and stopped him. The two of them stood over the Staryk wrestling a moment: Sergey was a tall, strong boy, and oh, I was grateful now for every glass of milk and every egg and every slice of roast chicken my mother had given him. I had grumbled over them in my head, counting pennies, and now too late I wanted to wish myself more generous: if only I hadn’t, if I’d put still more of them on his plate, urged him to eat up, maybe he’d have been strong enough now. But he wasn’t; he was still only a boy, and the soldier was a grown man, in mail, trained to kill for the tsar. He stamped on Sergey’s poor feet in their straw pattens with his heavy boot, and twisting threw him flat onto the ground, freeing the hand with the dagger.
But then the soldier stopped where he stood. A strange serene pallor came climbing out of his armor and up over his neck and his face. The sword through the Staryk’s chest had broken into rough chunks of frozen steel, scattered blue-white over the grass around him. He lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, his ice-frosted lashes against a kind of pale violet color in his cheeks, but he had reached out and caught the soldier’s leg where it was next to him. Ice was spreading from that touch; it had traveled up over the boot and the soldier’s leg and onward up his entire body, freezing him in place.
The color deepened in the soldier’s face, the skin over his cheekbones splitting and curling away black with frostbite. I hid my face in my hands and didn’t look until it was over and there was nothing left of him but shards of ice everywhere, and the short dagger dropped shining and deadly on the ground.
I crawled back onto my knees, my face aching and tender to the touch. Sergey had sat up wincing also, touching his feet with his hands. The Staryk lay on the ground still glistening. Frost ringed him in a widening circle, delicate feathery patterns climbing over the blades of grass, and he was breathing; the place where the sword had pierced him was covered over thickly with a lump of white-frosted ice, as though he’d packed it hard with snow.
But he didn’t sit up. Sergey stared at him and looked at me. “What do we do?” he asked me, in little more than a whisper, and I stared back at him. I had no idea; what was I to do with him lying on the ground, spreading winter around him like ink through water?
I bent over him, and he opened his eyes and looked at me as vague as fog. “Can you call your road?” I asked him. “Your sleigh? Have them come to take you back?”
“Too far,” he whispered. “Too far. My road cannot run beneath green trees.” And then he shut his eyes again and lay there still, helpless and wounded and maybe even dying, now just when I’d stopped wanting him to die. So he was determined to remain exactly the same amount of use he’d been to me all along. I wanted to shake him, to make him get up, only I was afraid he’d shatter into pieces along the fracture line where the sword had gone through him. Sergey was still looking at me, and I said grimly, “We’ll have to carry him.”
Sergey wouldn’t touch him directly, and I couldn’t really blame him. I took off my wet and ash-stained cloak and laid it on the ground, and carefully one after another lifted the Staryk’s legs onto it, and then his shoulders, and then heaved him the rest of the way onto it from underneath his middle. He didn’t even twitch. “All right,” I said. “Take the top, and I’ll take the bottom,” and then the Staryk stirred, when Sergey went to take the top of the cloak, and tried weakly to lash out at him.
Sergey scrambled back in terror, and I dropped my end of the cloak with a thump. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
He turned his head towards me and whispered, “He comes to my aid unasked, unwanted! Am I to permit this cowering wight, this slinking thief, to put me under an obligation without end, so he may ask whatever he likes of me?”
