by Naomi Novik
He made an impatient noise. “There!” he said, “and there,” and pointed to two doors in the walls left and right of the oven.
We all stared: we couldn’t have overlooked them. But the Staryk only turned back to the cupboard and went on throwing cups and handkerchiefs and spoons out of it in frantic haste, and after a moment, Wanda went and pulled open the door to the left. There was another bedroom standing on the other side that couldn’t have fit inside the outside of the house. A big wooden bed hung with curtains stood there with two heavy wardrobes on either side. Behind the other door, there was a faint thumping noise: when my father carefully opened it, on the other side was a storeroom, with ropes of dried-up ancient garlic hanging from the ceiling between bunches of crumbling lavender, and a heavy wooden table standing in the middle with a mortar and a pestle, and the mortar was rolling faintly in the bowl as if it had just been in use, with a faint smell of crushed herbs in the air.
“One person should hold the door,” my mother said, warily, as we went into each one searching. Wanda stayed by the bedroom door to keep it open while we hunted through the wardrobes, and in the wooden chest at the foot of the bed: all of them heaped with the useless ordinary moth-eaten linens and dresses with pockets full of crumbling dust; rotted old boots and cloaks and blankets. But in the pocket of one dress that seemed heavy, I found a handful of smooth black pebbles that shone strangely; I ran out with them, but the Staryk said impatiently, “No! What use is that? I might wander ten thousand years in the goblin depths and never find a way out again; put them away!”
Under the pillow, my mother found an old dull-copper coin, which he rejected by saying, “I cannot dream my way home, either!” In the storeroom we found on a shelf a beautiful little glass jar of perfume, stoppered, that still had a few drops in the bottom; that only made him shrug. “Poison or elixir; what does it matter now?” he said, pulling open another drawer; three grey mice sprang out of it and ran away over the floor and out the door. The sky was growing a little light in the distance, and his bare wounded leg was leaving a wet mark on the wooden boards of the floor where he stood.
“Maybe there isn’t anything!” I said.
His head was drooping, and he stopped and leaned against the door. “There is something!” he said. “There is. I feel the wind of my kingdom on my face, it murmurs in my ears and the corners, though I cannot tell where it has come in. We must find it.”
“I don’t feel anything but hot,” I said, “even though the fire’s almost out.”
He was silent, and then he raised his head again and there was a terrible, stricken look in his face. “Yes,” he said hollowly. “The wind is warm.”
I stared at him. “What does that mean?” I said warily.
“Chernobog is there,” the Staryk said. “He has gotten into my kingdom. He is there!” He turned away abruptly and with a fresh surge of desperation began to tear out the little drawers along the top of the cupboard one by one, flinging them on the ground, half of them breaking, scattering everywhere: marbles, pen-nibs, handkerchiefs, a doll made out of rags, unraveling strings, a handful of pennies, old candy in a bag, lumps of carded wool, a thousand and one untidy things stuffed carelessly in one knothole after another, and none of it from the winter kingdom.
“We can’t find anything else,” my mother said to me softly, coming dusty and tired out of the bedroom again. “We’ve looked three times in every corner, unless he can show us another place to look.”
“It is here!” he said, wheeling on her ferociously. “It is somewhere!”
I threw up my hands, helplessly, as she backed away startled, and then from where he was huddled on top of the oven, Stepon said, very low, “I have this, but I cannot make it grow.”
We turned. Wanda and Sergey had gone very still, looking at him: in his hand, Stepon held a pale-white fruit, the shape of a fresh green walnut. The Staryk saw it and gave a cry, springing forward. “Where came you by this?” he said, accusatory. “Who gave it to you?”
He was reaching out as if to snatch it from his hand. Stepon curled his fingers around it, pulling it back, and Wanda stepped between them and said fiercely, “Mama gave it to him! It came from her, from her in the tree, and it is his, not yours!”
The Staryk stopped, looking at her. “There is not enough breath in a mortal life to bring a snow-tree to fruit!” he said. “Though you fed it with one, with two, with three, you would have barely brought it to leaf. By what blood did you raise this, that you can claim it true?”
“Da buried all five of the babies there,” Wanda said. Her face was white and hard and angry as I had ever seen it. “All five of my brothers who died. And Mama at the end. She gave it to Stepon! It is his!”
The Staryk looked at her, and then at Sergey and Stepon, as if he used them to measure the six lives missing: five brothers never grown and a mother gone besides. Then he dropped his hand to his side. His face gone faded and terrible, he stared at the white nut curled half hidden behind Stepon’s fingers, and whispered, “It is his,” agreeing, only he sounded as if he was agreeing to his own death.
He gave way so completely that Wanda even stopped looking angry. Then we were all standing there together with the white fruit shining in the house with the same pale gleam as his silver, and the Staryk only kept looking at it desperate and yet without saying a word, as if he couldn’t even imagine how to offer a bargain for it. How could you: what could you give someone that would be a fair price for all their pain, for all those buried years of sorrow? I wouldn’t have taken a thousand kingdoms for my mother.
Stepon looked down at it in his hand again, and then silently he held it out. But the Staryk stared at it, at him, stricken; he didn’t reach for it, as if he couldn’t take it even when offered.
And then my mother leaned forward and kissed Stepon on his forehead. “She would be proud of you,” she said to him, and taking it from his hand she turned and held it out to the Staryk. “Take it and save the Staryk children. What better can you do with it?”
He only kept staring at her without moving, until I reached forward and took it, and he turned blank and helpless to me instead. “What do we do?” I asked him. “How do we use it?”
“Lady,” he said, “you must do with it as you will. It is not mine.”
I glared at him in some indignation. “What would you have done, then, if it were yours?”
“I would lay it in the earth and call it forth,” he said, “and open my road beneath its boughs. But that I cannot do. I have no claim upon this seed; it will not answer to my voice. And I know not how you can do it, either. A snow-tree will not take root in spring, and you hold sun-warm gold and not winter in your hands.”
And then he went on gazing at me—expectantly, as if I’d surprised him so often that now he was simply waiting for me to do it again, when I hadn’t the slightest idea of anything to do. “We’ll try to plant it again,” I said, for lack of anything better to do. “Can you come and freeze the ground?”
He inclined his head. But when we opened the door, he shuddered back, almost falling before the wave of warm air that blew in, warmer even than the inside of the house; it smelled of soft wet earth and spring. He struggled out of the house anyway into the face of it, bent like a man turned to force his way with his shoulder into a howling blizzard.
By the side of the door we found the mound of earth where Stepon had tried to plant the nut already, a good place for a tree to grow and shade the house. But when the Staryk touched the earth, only a ghost of frost left his fingers, and vanished quickly as a breath blown over cold glass. I put the nut back in the ground quickly and tried to press it down with his hand; only a brief silvering outline spread around his fingers, and faded away again.
He took his hand away, and we watched the earth a little while, and he shook his head. I dug the nut up again, and held it in my hand, trying to think: it wouldn’t grow in spring. And then I thought suddenly—how had Chernobog come into the Staryk kingdom, now, wh
en he’d only ever been able to breach it from a distance before?
I got up and ran around to the back of the house, to the deep washtub there. I looked down into it. It was only water in a wooden tub, but it might be something more on the other side—if Irina was standing on that other side, with her crown of silver, after she’d taken Chernobog slithering through into the winter kingdom, trying again to save Lithvas from the Staryk king I’d freed.
I didn’t know if she was there, or if she’d even try to help me if she was. And if she was, and would, I couldn’t even explain what I wanted her to do. But I knew I couldn’t do anything more on this side, alone. I thought of doors that opened where they hadn’t been, and rooms and cupboards appearing out of nowhere, and then I shut my eyes and plunged my hand into the water, reaching out for hope, for help.
My knuckles didn’t hit the bottom. I kept reaching down, deep, and for a moment I felt a hand on the other side, reaching back. I caught it and pressed the white nut into it, and then I pulled my arm out of the water and stared at my empty palm. I looked into the tub as well, and the nut was gone. I could see the bottom of the washtub clearly through the water: there was nothing there.
I stared down into the tub another moment, half disbelieving that it had worked, and then I ran back to the front of the house: everyone was in a circle staring at the Staryk, and he was leaning against the wall of the house, gone thin and shining almost as if with sweat, blind agony in his face. I caught him by the arms. “It went through! It went over! What else do I do?”
He opened his eyes, but I didn’t think he saw me; they were filmy and smeared white and blue. He whispered, “Call it forth. Call it forth if you can.”
“How?” I said, but he closed his eyes and said nothing, and I sat blankly.
Then my father said, “Miryem,” slowly. I looked around to him in desperation. “It is the wrong month, but the trees have not been in bloom before, and the fruit is not grown. We can say the blessing.” He looked at Stepon, and at Wanda and Sergey, and added gently, “Some even say it helps those whose souls have returned to the world in fruit or trees, to move onward.”
He held his hand out to me, and his other hand to my mother. We stood up the way we always did in spring in front of the one little apple tree in our yard, and we said it together, “Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, shelo hasair b’olamo kloom, ubara bo briyot tovot v’ilanot tovot, leihanot bahem b’nai adam,” the blessing for fruit trees in bloom. I had always loved saying it: it meant hope, a deep breath of relief; it meant that winter was over, that soon there would be fruit to eat and the world full of plenty. As a little girl, in the early days of spring I’d go into the yard every morning and look over the branches for the first sign of flowering, to run and tell my father when we could say it. But this time I said it more fiercely than ever, trying to hold every word of it tight in my head, imagining them written in letters of silver that turned to gold as I spoke them aloud.
When we finished, we all stood in silence. Nothing happened at first, as far as we saw. But then Stepon suddenly gave a cry and ran away from us towards the gate of the house, waving his hands to chase away a small bird that had just landed on the ground there to peck. He stood staring down with his hands clenched until Wanda and Sergey and then all of us went and joined him. A small white seedling was coming out of the earth, a little soft squirming worm just poking up.
We stared at it. I’d seen seeds pop before, beans come out of the dirt, but this one came quicker, an entire spring going before our eyes in moments: it straightened into a thin white seedling tree and began to lurch up like someone trying to climb a rope, stopping every so often to catch their breath before pulling themselves up a little farther. A crown of tiny white leaves unfurled like flags at the top, ghostly pale, and they began to flap and stretch themselves urgently, pushing upwards. When it was as tall as my knee, it began to put out thin branches that sprang open from its sides like tiny whips, and more of the white leaves opened. We had to back away to give it room, and it was still growing; smoothly now, steadily and rising.
I turned and ran back to the Staryk. He didn’t wake or move; he lay against the house gone very thin and deep blue, as if some core of him were emerging from a shell of ice, and when I touched him my hands were wet, but Wanda came and helped me. Together we pulled him over to the tree, and lay him down beneath it, and suddenly crackling frost was climbing all over the ground beneath him and up the white bark and over his own skin, the deep blue vanishing again under that frozen layer. He breathed out winter air and opened his eyes and looked up at the spreading boughs of the tree, and he wept, although I almost couldn’t tell, because his tears froze into his face at once and there was only a shining coming out of him.
He stood up, and as he stood the tree was tall enough for him to stand beneath it, although it hadn’t seemed quite that large yet a moment before, and when he put both his hands on its trunk, it burst into flowers of silver shot through with gold. He reached up and touched a blossom with his fingertips, looking at it bemused.
“It grew, it grew,” Stepon was saying; he was gulping with sobs himself, crying as if he didn’t know whether he was happy or sad, with my mother kneeling with her arms wrapped around his thin shoulders, stroking his head.
And then the Staryk turned away from it and put his hand on the gate, and when he swung it open, on the other side of it a white road was standing, a white road lined with other white trees, but it didn’t run on forever into winter anymore: there was a darkness at the other end, a cloud of smoke and burning. He looked at it with his face set, and then he stepped through and walked a little way down the road, and a white stag came bounding out of the trees. We had followed him to the gate, but my family all drew back away into the yard when it leapt out. For a moment I saw it with their eyes, the sharp claws and monstrous fangs hanging over its top lip and the red tongue, but it was only one of the deer for me, now. He went towards it, and as he mounted, his foot was no longer bare; a silver boot closed round it, and then he was all in silver, in armor and white fur, looking down.
Then he held his hand out to me, and said, “Chernobog is in my kingdom. As I have promised, so will I do: if he is cast out, and my people made safe, I will not bring back the winter. You asked for alliance to see it done: will you still come and lend your aid, though he is no more in your own world?”
I stared up at him, and wanted to demand, half indignant, what good he thought I would do against a demon of flame in outright battle. There was dirt under my fingernails; my face ached and my cheek was still swollen and red where the soldier had struck me, and I was tired and only a mortal girl who’d bragged too much in his hearing. But I looked at the white tree standing next to me, with its branches high and covered with flowers, and I knew there was no use asking him. He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll come, and do what I can—if you’ll bring me back after!”
“My road still does not run under green trees, lady,” he said, “and you have already made me promise to lift the winter, if we are victorious. But summer will not last forever, even if I lift my hand, and this I much can offer you: on the first day the next snow falls, I will open my road hence, and return you to your family’s home.”
I turned back: my mother and father were standing in the yard, and they weren’t alone. Wanda and Sergey and Stepon were with them, and the house behind them with plenty of room, now. They would be safe, they would all be safe, even if I never came back after a wild leap down a winter road; they had each other to love and live for, and to grieve with, and to help each other on their way.
They seemed somehow far away from me already, a few steps removed, and their faces looked almost dreamlike when they gazed at me. But I ran to them quickly, and kissed them all, and I whispe
red to my mother, “Look for me on the first day of winter,” and her fingers trailed out of mine as I turned back and went through the gate, and took the Staryk king’s hand, for him to pull me up onto the back of his stag behind him.
CHAPTER 24
We rode down the white road with snow and ash blowing together in our faces. The hot flecks stung on my arms, but we were going quickly; the road was blurring silver beneath us with every leap of the stag, going as fast as the Staryk wanted to go, as fast as it could, and with one more leap we were under pine trees burning, a terrible red roaring flame all above our heads, and with another leap after that the road burst out from beneath them and was running next to the river.
But a river in spring, roaring, full of cracked chunks of ice bobbing and smashing against one another as they swept past us downstream. Scattered silver coins were gleaming among them, and the Staryk gave a cry of horror as he saw ahead the waterfall alive again: a roaring torrent, bursting from the side of the mountain and crashing down in clouds of steam. At the base of it, Chernobog danced and twirled with his arms in the air shrieking in delight. He wasn’t burning all over anymore. He’d swelled out of human size and become monstrously large, a towering figure of charcoal covered thickly with ash, laced with deep cracks where glowing red veins of heat showed through, open flames only flaring here and there from his body. He put his face into the falling water and drank in enormous thirsty gulps and grew a little more, as if he were somehow making more of himself to burn. Coins of Staryk silver were shining like a carapace over his face and shoulders, scattered on him by the falls.
He wasn’t standing there alone: a knot of Staryk knights were trying to fight him, flinging silver spears at him from the shore of the spreading waterfall pool, but they couldn’t get close. There was a forest of spears floating on the water, scattered and scorched, and he wasn’t bothering to turn away from his gluttonous drinking. The Staryk king leapt off the stag and cried to me, “The mountain must be held against him, do whatever you can!” and then he drew a silver sword and ran to the pool and put his foot out onto the surface. Where he stepped, ice grew solid underneath him, and he ran straight at the demon on a shining white road. In his ecstatic hunger, Chernobog didn’t see him coming; the Staryk swung the sword into his monstrous leg, carving deep, and Chernobog roared in fury as ice spread in a crackling wave over the surface.
