He paused, surveying me out of one silver-blue eye with his head turned sideways, like a bird looking me over. He put out his gloved hand and took the bag, and he opened it and poured the six gold coins out into the cup of his hand, the faint jingle loud in the silence around us. The coins looked different in his hand, warm and sun-bright, shining against the unnatural cold white of his glove. He looked down at them and seemed surprised and also vaguely disappointed, as though he was sorry I’d managed it. He poured them back into the bag and pulled the drawstring tight around the golden light, like closing away a sunbeam, and the bag vanished beneath his long cloak.
The Staryk road was a wide shining lane behind him, just through the trees. He turned his steed towards it without saying a word, taking those six gold coins I had gotten with my work and fear as though they were only his due, and anger rose up in me. “I’ll need longer next time, if you want more of them changed,” I called after him, throwing my words against the hard icy silence like a shell around us.
He turned his head round and stared at me, as though surprised I’d dared to speak to him, and then the sharp-antlered deer took a step onto the road, and he wasn’t there anymore; Oleg shook himself all over and chirruped to the horse, and we were trotting again. I fell back into the blankets shivering as though the air had grown suddenly much colder; the tips of my fingers where I’d held out the purse were numbed. I pulled off my glove and tucked them underneath my arm to warm them up, wincing as they touched my skin. A feathery snowfall began to come down around us as we drove the rest of the way.
* * *
I noticed the silver ring on my father’s hand that night as his finger beat out his irritation against the side of his goblet, in steady clinks. He commanded me to a formal dinner at his table one night a week; to improve my manner in polite company, he said. My manners did not need improving—Magreta had seen to that—but whatever my father’s real reason, it was certainly not for his own pleasure. He was dissatisfied every time he saw me, as though he’d hoped I might have become more beautiful, more witty, more charming. Alas, no. But I was his only child old enough to bother with yet, as my half brothers were still in the nursery, and my father disliked for anything he owned to be idle.
So I came down to dinner and performed my correct company manners, so Magreta would not come in for punishment, and when he had a knight or boyar or occasionally a visiting baron at his table, I kept my eyes modestly downcast and listened to them talk of armies or tax rolls or borders and politics, glimpses into a wider world as far removed from my narrow upstairs rooms as paradise. I would have liked to think I had a chance of moving in that world someday; my stepmother did, smiling with her open hands to greet our guests, making sure that her table and her hospitality suited each one’s pride and deserts, cutting a fine and jeweled figure at my father’s side when we went visiting ourselves, or hosted nobles of greater rank. She gleaned the truth about the state of their holdings from wives and sisters and daughters, and in the evenings my father would listen to her advice and counsel; she had a voice in her husband’s ears. I would have liked to hope for one myself.
But my father’s irritation told me otherwise. I had been a disappointment to him from the beginning, my mother having taken an excessive number of years to produce me, and shortly afterwards miscarrying the overdue son and dying with him. It had required some few years to settle on the best replacement, and though Galina had done her best, even so he still had nothing to work with yet but me and two little boys in the nursery, just when all the men of his cohort, the ones who had helped the old tsar to his throne, had daughters ready to marry, and sons wanting more beauty and grace in a wife than I could offer, or at least more money than my father would offer to compensate for their lack.
When I was younger, and there was still some chance of my growing into real usefulness, he would sometimes ask me sharp questions about books I had read, or demand that I recite him all the names of every noble in Lithvas from the tsar down to the counts in order of their precedence, but lately he had stopped bothering. My last governess now had begun to teach my older brother his letters, and if I had a book to read, it was because I had managed to slip it off the downstairs shelves myself in a rare chance. And when there was no one else at his table to distract him from my silence and my pallid, narrow face, my father frowned at me and tapped his fingers against his cup.
That night there was no guest at the table. The tsar was coming for a visit soon, and no one else had been invited for months leading up to it, to save for the unavoidable expense. My father meant to spend as little as he could, but even so the waste of it made him more dissatisfied with me than usual. Perhaps it brought home more forcibly to his mind that he would get little return on me, although even if I had been beautiful, surely he would never have been one of the lords who spent themselves into debt hosting the tsar, dangling their daughters like bait and making fools of themselves in hope.
The tsar was not going to marry any of them, however beautiful they were; he would marry Princess Vassilia. She was not beautiful any more than I was, but her father was Prince Ulrich, who ruled over three cities, not one, and had ten thousand soldiers and the great salt mine under his hand, so she did not need to be beautiful to become tsarina. The tsar should have married her already, but he evidently preferred to keep his other nobles hoping for a little longer; a dangerous game to play with Ulrich’s pride, but one that gave the tsar an excuse to travel a great deal and spread the expenditure of his lavish court around, instead of offering hospitality himself.
And my father had a marriageable daughter, in theory, and therefore could be imposed upon. So now I was become an expense beyond my value, especially as my father plainly did not even hope for some secondary benefit—that some useful member of the tsar’s court would think of me for a son or cousin somewhere. I was glad to be beneath the notice of the tsar, who was young and handsome and cruel, but I would have liked to be pretty enough or charming enough that at least someone might want to marry me, instead of only taking me as a codicil to whatever begrudging dowry they could wring out of my father. Or even to be sure that anyone would marry me: my only escape from a life spent between narrow walls. My father’s irritation spoke wordlessly of a dismal fate for me.
But as his ring tapped a faint high chiming against the side of his cup, I watched the cool silver of it catching the light, and I forgot that it was driven by impatience. I thought only of snowflakes falling past a lit window, the silence of the start of winter, standing outside in the garden on a day when the leaves were coated in shining clear ice. I even forgot to listen to what he was saying to me, until he said sharply, “Irina, are you attending?”
I had only the refuge of honesty. “Forgive me, Father,” I said. “I have been looking at your ring. Is it magic?”
That had been another of my mother’s disappointments: her magic, of which she’d had none. Her great-grandmother had been raped by a Staryk knight during a midwinter night’s raiding that killed her husband, and the boy she bore afterwards had silver hair and silver eyes and could walk through blizzards and make things cold with a touch. His children had silver hair, too, although not much of his power, and my father had married my mother on the strength of the legend and her pale eyes and a lock of silver hair that waved back from her forehead.