The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Did you hear something?” I said, my voice hushed, and then he climbed down and took out a knife from under his coat, and I realized I’d forgotten to worry about anything else but magic. I scrambled desperately away, shoving the heaped blankets toward him and floundering through the straw and out the other side of the sledge. “Don’t,” I blurted. “Oleg, don’t,” my heavy skirts dragging in the snow as he came around for me. “Oleg, please,” but his face was clenched down, cold deeper than any winter. “This is the Staryk’s gold, not mine!” I cried in desperation, holding the purse out between us.

  He didn’t stop. “None of it’s yours,” he snarled. “None of it’s yours, little grubbing vulture, taking money out of the hands of honest working men,” and I knew the sound of a man telling himself a story to persuade himself he wasn’t doing wrong, that he had a right to what he’d taken.

  I gripped two big handfuls of my skirts and struggled back, my boot heels digging into the snow. He lunged, and I flung myself away, falling backward. The crust atop the snow gave beneath my weight, and I couldn’t get up. He was standing over me, ready to reach down, and then he halted; his arms sank down to his sides.

  It wasn’t mercy. A deeper cold was coming into his face, stealing blue over his lips, and white frost was climbing over his thick brown beard. I struggled to my feet, shivering. The Staryk was standing behind him, a hand laid upon the back of his neck like a master taking hold of a dog’s scruff.

  In a moment, he dropped his hand. Oleg stood blank between us, bloodless as frostbite, and then he turned and slowly went back to the sledge and climbed into the driving seat. The Staryk didn’t watch him go, as if he cared nothing; he only looked at me with his eyes as gleaming as Oleg’s blade. I was shaking and queasy. There were tears freezing on my eyelashes, making them stick. I blinked them away and held my hands tight together until they stopped trembling, and then I held out the purse.

  The Staryk came closer and took it. He didn’t pour the purse out: it was too full for that. Instead he dipped his hand inside and lifted out a handful of shining coins to tumble ringing back into the bag, weighed in his other palm, until there was only one last coin held between his white-gloved fingers. He frowned at it and me.

  “It’s all there, all sixty,” I said. My heart had slowed, because I suppose it was that or burst.

  “As it must be,” he said. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go.”

  But he seemed displeased anyway, although he had set the terms himself: as though he wanted to freeze me but couldn’t break a bargain once he’d made it. “Now go home, mortal maiden, until I call on you again.”

  I looked over helplessly at the sledge: Oleg was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring with his frozen face out into the winter, and the last thing I wanted was to get in with him. But I couldn’t walk home from here, or even to some village where I could hire another driver. I had no idea where we were. I turned to argue, but the Staryk was already gone. I stood alone under pine boughs heavy with snow, with only silence and footprints around me, and the deep crushed hollow where I had fallen, the shape of a girl against the drift.

  Finally I picked my way gingerly to the sledge and climbed back inside. Oleg shook the reins silently, and the mare started trotting again. He turned her head through the trees slightly, away from the road, and drove deeper into the forest. I tried to decide whether I was more afraid to call out to him and be answered, or to get no reply, and if I should try to jump from the sledge. And then suddenly we came through a narrow gap between trees onto a different road: a road as free of snow as summer, paved with innumerable small white pebbles like a mosaic instead of cobblestones, all of them laid under a solid sheet of ice.

  The rails of the sledge rattled, coming onto the road, and then fell silent and smooth. The moon shone, and the road shone back, glistening under the pale light. The horse’s hooves went strange and quickly on the ice, the sledge skating along behind her. Around us, trees stretched tall and birch-white, full of rustling leaves; trees that didn’t grow in our forest, and should have been bare with winter. White birds darted between the branches, and the sleigh bells made a strange kind of music, high and bright and cold. I huddled back into the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut and kept them so, until suddenly there was a crunching of snow beneath us again, and the sledge was already standing outside the gate of my own yard.

  I all but leaped out, and darted through the gate and all the way to my door before I glanced around. I needn’t have run. Oleg drove away without ever looking back at me. The next morning, they found him outside his stables, lying frozen and staring blindly upwards in the snow, his horse and sledge put away.

  I couldn’t forget at all, that week. They buried Oleg in the churchyard, and the bells ringing for him sounded like sleigh bells ringing too-high in a forest that couldn’t be. They would find me frozen like that outside the door, if I didn’t give the Staryk his gold next time, and if I did, then what? Would he put me on his white stag behind him, and carry me away to that pale cold forest, to live there alone forever with a crown of fairy silver of my own? I started up gasping at night with Oleg’s white frozen face looming over me, shivering with a chill inside me that my mother’s arms couldn’t drive away.

  I decided I might as well try something as nothing, so I didn’t wait for the Staryk to come knocking this time. I fled to my grandfather’s house behind the thick city walls, where the streets were layered with dirty ice instead of clean white snow and only a handful of scattered barren trees stood in the lanes. I slept well that Shabbat night, but the next morning the candles had gone out, and that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother, behind me the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and she didn’t lift her head at the noise.

  I slowly put aside my work, and went to the door, and flinched back when I had flung it wide: there was no narrow alleyway behind the Staryk, no brick wall of the house next door and no hardened slush beneath his feet. He stood outside in a garden of pale-limbed trees, washed with moonlight even though the moon hadn’t yet come out, as if I could step across the threshold and walk out of all the world.

  There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a chest made of pale white wood bleached as bone, bound around with thick straps of white leather and hinged and clasped with silver. I knelt and opened it. “Seven days this time I’ll grant you, to return my silver changed for gold,” the Staryk said in his voice like singing, as I stared at the heap of coins inside, enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars. I didn’t doubt that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.

  I looked up at him, and he down at me with his sharp silver eyes, eager and vicious as a hawk. “Did you think mortal roads could run away from me, or mortal walls keep me out?” he said, and I hadn’t really, after all.

  “But what use am I to you?” I said desperately. “I have no magic: I can’t change silver to gold for you in your kingdom, if you take me away.”

  “Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said, as if I was being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he vanished, leaving me with a casket full of silver and a belly full of dismay.

  I hadn’t been able to make sense of it before: What use would a mortal woman be to an elven lord, and if he wanted one, why wouldn’t he just snatch her? I wasn’t beautiful enough to be a temptation, and why should boasting make him want me? But of course any king would want a queen who really could make gold out of silver, if he could get one, mortal or not. The last thing I wanted was to be such a prize.

  Isaac made the crown in a feverish week, laboring upon it in his stall in the marketplace. He hammered out great thin sheets of silver to make the fan-shaped crown, tall enough to double the height of a head, and then with painstaking care added droplets of melted silver in mimic of pearls, laying them in graceful spiraling patterns that turned upon themselves and vined away again. He borrowed molds from every other jeweler in the
market and poured tiny flattened links by the hundreds, then hung glittering chains of them linked from one side of the crown to the other, and fringed along the rest of the wide fan’s bottom edge.

  By the second day, men and women were coming just to watch him work. I sat by, silent and unhappy, and kept them off, until finally despite the cold the crowds grew so thick I became impatient and started charging a penny to stand and watch for ten minutes, so they’d go away; only it backfired, and the basket I’d put out grew so full I had to empty it into a sack under the table three times a day.

  By the fifth day, I had made nearly as much silver as the Staryk had given me in the first place, and the crown was finished; when Isaac had assembled the whole, he turned and said, “Come here,” and set it upon my head to see whether it was well balanced. The crown felt cool and light as a dusting of snow upon my forehead. In his bronze mirror, I looked like a strange deep-water reflection of myself, silver stars at midnight above my brow, and all the marketplace went quiet in a rippling wave around me, silent like the Staryk’s garden.

  I wanted to burst into tears, or run away; instead I took the crown off my head and put it back into Isaac’s hands, and when he’d carefully swathed it with linen and velvet, the crowds finally drifted away, murmuring to one another. My grandfather had sent his two manservants with me that day, and they guarded us to the duke’s palace. We found it full of bustle and noise from the tsar’s retinue and preparations: there was to be a ball that night, and all the household full of suppressed excitement; they knew of the negotiations underway.

  We were put into a better antechamber this time to wait, and then the chaperone came to fetch me. “Bring it with you. The men stay here,” she said, with a sharp, suspicious glare. She took me upstairs to a small suite of rooms, not nearly so grand as the ones below: I suppose a plain daughter hadn’t merited better before now. Irina was sitting stiff as a rake handle before a mirror made of glass. She wore snow-white skirts and a silver-gray silk dress over them, cut much lower this time to make a frame around the necklace; her beautiful dark hair had been braided into several thick ropes, ready to be put up, and her hands were gripped tightly around themselves in front of her.

  Her fingers worked slightly against one another, nervous, as the chaperone pinned up the braids, and I carefully set the crown upon them. It stood glittering beneath the light of a dozen candles, and the chaperone fell silent, her eyes dreamy as they rested on her charge. Irina herself slowly stood up and took a step closer to the mirror, her nervous hand reaching up toward the glass almost as if to touch the woman inside.

  Whatever magic the silver had to enchant those around it either faded with use or couldn’t touch me any longer; I wished that it could, and that my eyes could be dazzled enough to care for nothing else. Instead I watched Irina’s face, pale and thin and transported, and I wondered if she would be glad to marry the tsar, to leave her quiet, small rooms for a distant palace and a throne. As she dropped her hand, our eyes met in the reflection; we didn’t speak, but for a moment I felt her a sister, our lives in the hands of others. She wasn’t likely to have any more choice in the matter than I did.

  After a few minutes, the duke himself came in to inspect her, and paused in the doorway of the room behind her. Irina was still standing before the mirror; she turned and curtsied to her father, then straightened again, her chin coming up a little to balance the crown; she looked like a queen already. The duke stared at her as if he could hardly recognize his own daughter; he shook himself a little, tearing free of the pull, before he turned to me. “You will have your gold, Panovina,” he said. “And if your Staryk wants more of it, you will come to me again.”

  So I had six hundred gold pieces for the casket and two hundred more for the bank, and my sack full of silver pennies besides; a fortune, for what good it would do me. At least my mother and father wouldn’t go cold or hungry again, when the Staryk had taken me away.

  My grandfather’s servants carried it all home for me. He came downstairs, hearing my grandmother’s exclamations, and looked over all the treasure; then he took four gold coins out of the heap meant for the bank, and gave two each to the young men before he dismissed them. “Drink one and save one, you remember the wise man’s rule,” he said, and they both bowed and thanked him and dashed off to revel, elbowing each other and grinning as they went.

  Then he sent my grandmother out of the room on a pretext, asking her to make her cheesecake to celebrate our good fortune; and when she was gone he turned to me and said, “Now, Miryem, you’ll tell me the rest of it,” and I burst into tears.

  I hadn’t told my parents, or my grandmother, but I told him: I trusted my grandfather to bear it, as I hadn’t trusted them, not to break their hearts wanting to save me. I knew what my father would do, and my mother, if they found out: they would make a wall of their own bodies between me and the Staryk, and then I would see them fall cold and frozen before he took me away.

  But my grandfather only listened, and then he said, “Do you want to marry him, then?” I stared at him, still wet-faced. He shrugged. “Sorrow comes to every house, and there’s worse things in life than to be a queen.”

  By speaking so, he gave me a gift: making it my choice, even if it wasn’t really. I gulped and wiped away my tears, and felt better at once. After all, in cold, hard terms it was a catch, for a poor man’s daughter. My grandfather nodded as I calmed myself. “Lords and kings often don’t ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners,” he said. “Think it over, before you turn away a crown.”

  I was tempted more by the power my grandfather had given me than the promise of a crown. I thought of it: to harden my heart a little more and stand straight and tall when the Staryk came, to put my hand in his and make it my own will to go with him, so at least I could say the decision had been mine.

  But I was my father’s daughter also, after all, and I found I didn’t want to be so cold. “No,” I said, low. “No, Grandfather, I don’t want to marry him.”

  “Then you must make it better sense for him to leave you be,” my grandfather said.

  The next morning I rose, and put on my best dress, and my fur cloak, and sent for a sledge to carry me. But as I fastened the cloak around my throat in the sitting room, I heard a high cold jangling of bells drifting faintly in from the street, not the bells of a hired harness. I opened the door, and a narrow elegant sleigh drew up outside, fashioned it seemed entirely out of ice and heaped with white furs; the wolfen stag drew it, legs flashing, and the Staryk held the reins of white leather. The street lay blanketed by a thick, unnatural silence: empty even in midmorning, not another soul or sledge or wagon anywhere in sight, and the sky overhead gray and pearled-over like the inside of oyster shells.

  He climbed out and came to me, leaving long boot prints in the snow down the walk, and came up the stairs. “And have you changed my silver, mortal girl?” he asked.

  I swallowed and backed up to the casket, standing in the room behind me. He followed me inside, stepping in on a winter’s blast of cold air, thin wispy flurries of snow whirling into the room around his ankles. He loomed over me to watch as I knelt down behind the casket and lifted up the lid: a heap of silver pennies inside, all I’d taken in the market.

  He looked maliciously satisfied a moment, and then he stopped, puzzled, when he saw the coins were different: they weren’t fairy silver, of course, though they made a respectable gleam.

  “Why should I change silver for gold,” I said, when I saw I’d caught his attention, “when I could make the gold, and have them both?” And then I untied the sack sitting beside the chest, to show him the heap of gold waiting inside.

  He slowly reached in and lifted out a fistful of gold and let it drop back inside, frowning as he’d frowned each time: as though he didn’t like to be caught by his own promises, however useful a queen would be who could turn silver to gold. What would the other elven lords think, I wondered, if he brought home a mortal girl? Not muc
h, I hoped. I daresay in the story, the king’s neighbors snickered behind their hands, at the miller’s daughter made a queen. And after all, she hadn’t even kept spinning.

  “You can take me away and make me your queen if you want to,” I said, “but a queen’s not a moneychanger, and I won’t make you more gold, if you do.” His eyes narrowed, and I went on quickly, “Or you can make me your banker instead, and have gold when you want it, and marry whomever you like.”

  I put my money in a vault and bought a house near my grandfather’s; we even lent some of the gold back to the duke for the wedding. Isaac was busy for a month making jewelry for all the courtiers and their own daughters, to make a fine show at the celebrations, but he found time to pay visits to my family. I saw Irina once more, when she drove out of the city with the tsar; she threw handfuls of silver out of the window of the carriage as they went through the streets, and looked happy, and perhaps she even was.

  We left the business back home in Wanda’s hands. Everyone was used to giving her their payments by then, and she’d learned figuring; she couldn’t charge interest herself, but as long as she was collecting on our behalf it was all right, and by the time everyone’s debts had been repaid, she would have a handsome dowry, enough to buy a farm of her own.

  I’ve never seen the Staryk again. But every so often, after a heavy snowfall, a purse of fairy silver appears on my doorstep, and before a month is gone, I put it back twice over full of gold.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Naomi Novik: Since I’ve had my daughter, I’ve been reading and thinking about fairy tales a great deal. One of the things I love about them is the sense of justice at their heart: the cruel stepsisters don’t get to marry the prince, and the witch doesn’t get to eat Hansel and Gretel, but if Red Riding Hood strays from the path, the wolf gets his meal. I want that kind of satisfaction from a story, the feeling that the ending is not accurate but true.