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, when 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.