But her looks were all the magic she had, and I had not even so much as that, only plain brown hair, and my father’s brown eyes, and I shivered like anyone else in the cold. Yet when I looked at my father’s ring, I felt snow falling. My father paused, and looked down at it on his own hand. It was a little small for him. He was wearing it above the knuckle of his index finger, on his right hand, and his thumb rubbed the surface. He had been touching it all through the meal, absently. After a moment he said, “Unusual craftsmanship, that is all,” with the final tone that meant we were not to discuss the matter further. So he had not known that it was magic, did not know any power it had, and did not care for anyone else to know more than he did.
I said nothing more and lowered my eyes and paid careful attention the rest of the meal as he told me flatly what was expected of me during the tsar’s visit—which was nothing. He did not want the expense of buying me several new gowns. So I was to be a little sick and stay upstairs and out of the way, and Galina would have three new gowns instead. He said nothing else about the ring, and also did not mention my earlier distraction.
I was glad to stay out of the tsar’s way, but three new gowns would have been more useful for me than for Galina, if my father had meant to begin offering me around anytime soon. That night I put my candle on the windowsill and watched the snowflakes falling through the candlelight while Magreta brushed my hair; carefully clearing the tangles from the bottom up with the silver comb and brush that she always kept on her in the purse tied at her waist; then there would be seventeen strokes from the roots for good measure, one for every year it had been growing. She tended my hair like a garden, and it rewarded her attention; by now it was longer than I was tall, and I could sit by the window while she brushed the ends from her chair near the fire. “Magra,” I asked, “did my father love my mother?”
She was so surprised she stopped brushing. I knew she had served my mother before I was born, but I had never asked about her before. It had never occurred to me to ask. I had been so young when she died that I only thought of her as of an ancestor a long time gone. My father had told me about her in precise and accurate terms, enough that I understood she had been a failure. He had not made me want to know more.
Magreta said, “Why yes, dushenka, of course he did,” and while she would have said so even if it wasn’t true, she hadn’t hesitated first, which meant she at least believed her own words. “He married her with no dowry, didn’t he?” she added, though, and then it was my turn to look around and be surprised. He had never told me that. It was almost unimaginable.
“He doesn’t speak of her as though he’d loved her,” I said, incautious in my own turn.
Magreta did hesitate then before she said, “Well, there is your stepmama to think of.”
I did not really need Magreta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and that having slipped the hook, he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place. Certainly my stepmother had only come with a fat dowry of gold coins, a heavy chest bigger than I was, which now rested deep in the treasury under the house. My father had not been caught a second time. And likely he had been all the more disappointed in my mother, if she’d had enough magic to enchant him into stupidity but not for anything more.
I dreamed of the ring that night, only it was worn by a woman with a silver lock falling from her forehead—a lock that matched the ring on her hand. Her face wouldn’t come clear in the dream, but she turned away from me and walked through a forest of white and silver trees. I woke thinking not of my mother, but of the ring; I wanted a chance to touch it, to hold it.
Magreta normally kept me well out of my father’s way, but every day she took me down to a corner of the gardens for walking exercise, even in cold weather. That morning I took the turning into the older part of the gardens, away from the house; there was a neglected chapel still there, half buried beneath leafless vines, the grey wood rotting a little, carved points like thorns poking out through the dusting snow on the roof. Magreta stayed below and twittered worry at me, but I climbed the creaking steps up into the empty belfry so I could look out the round window over the garden wall and see into the great courtyard where my father daily drilled his men.
That was a duty he never neglected. He was no longer a young man, but he had been born a boyar and not a duke, and many years ago he had killed three knights in a single day’s battle and broken the walls of Vysnia for the tsar’s father, for the right to make the city his own. He still oversaw the training of his own knights, and took sturdy boys from farmers and made them men-at-arms in the city. Even two archdukes and a prince had deigned to send him their sons to foster, because they knew he would send them back well trained.
I thought perhaps he would have taken the ring off for drill; if so, it might be in his study somewhere, on his desk. I was already making plans. Magreta wouldn’t let me go in there, but I could coax her to step into the library next door to it, and lose her between bookshelves; I might go in and put my hand on it for just a moment.
But when I looked into the courtyard, where the soldiers were going through their paces under his taskmaster voice, my father was bare-handed, though ordinarily he wore heavy gloves or sometimes metal gauntlets. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, the left holding the right wrist. The silver band was shining as if in sunlight, though the sky was dark grey and snow was drifting, as far from my reach as another world.
* * *
The Staryk lord kept coming back into my head even after I was back home again. I didn’t remember him all the time; only in the moments when I was alone somewhere and in the middle of some other task. When I went outside behind the house to tend the chickens, I remembered his footprints there, and was glad to see the snow unmarked. In the shed, feeding the goats in the dim early-morning light, I looked into a corner where a rake stood in shadows and remembered him coming out of the dark trees with his white braids and his cruel smile. When I went out to get a little snow for water, to make tea, my hands grew cold and I thought, What if he comes back. It made me angry, because being angry was better than being afraid, but then I came in with the pail of snow and found myself standing before the fire angry for no reason, and my mother looking at me, puzzled.
She hadn’t asked me anything about the Staryk, only how my grandmother and my grandfather were, and if I’d had a good journey, as if she too had forgotten why I’d gone to Vysnia in the first place. I didn’t have any of the fairy silver left to fix it in my own head, not even the little white purse. I remembered going to the marketplace, and I remembered Isaac working, but I couldn’t see the ring he’d made in my mind’s eye.
But I remembered enough that every morning I went again to look behind the house, and on Monday, Wanda came out to feed the chickens while I was still there. She joined me and looked down at the smooth unbroken surface, and unexpectedly she said, “You paid him, then? He’s gone?”
For a moment I almost said, Whom do you mean, and then I remembered again, and my hands clenched. “I paid him,” I said, and Wanda nodded after a moment, one single jerk of her head, as though she understood that I was saying that was all I knew: he might come back, or he might not.