He caught me staring at him indignantly. I was too young to have learned to be cautious. “Why are you staring so?” he said. “It’s only a little life still left in them. It’s not witchcraft.”
He might well have known the difference: his mother had been a witch, who seduced the tsar after his first tsarina died. Nobody approved of the marriage, of course, and after only a few years she was put to death by flame when she was caught trying to have the first tsarina’s son killed, to make her own son the heir. But now the tsar and the eldest prince had died of fever, and so the witch’s son had become tsar anyway, which, as Magreta used to say, was a lesson to everyone that being a witch was not the same thing as being wise.
I too was not wise at the time, although I had the excuse of being a young girl. Even though he was the tsar, I said, “You’ve already killed them. Why can’t you leave them alone?” Which was not very coherent, but I knew what I meant: I didn’t like him mauling the little bodies around, making them flinch for his pleasure.
His beautiful green eyes narrowed pig-small and angry, and he raised the bow and aimed an arrow at me. I was old enough to understand that was death looking at me. I wanted to run, but instead I simply froze, my whole body stopped in place and my heart with it, and then he laughed and lowered the bow and said mockingly, “All hail the defender of dead squirrels!” and made me a great formal bow like at a wedding before he strolled away. All the rest of that week, whenever I played in the garden, I was sure to come across a dead squirrel—always tucked away somewhere out of the gardeners’ sight, and yet my ball would roll to it, or if I ran to hide and seek with Magreta, I would crouch into a bush only to find one cut open, lying there in wait for me.
I thought of telling on him: I was sure everyone would have believed me, because Mirnatius was so beautiful, and because of his mother. People even whispered about him already. But I told Magreta first, and when she got the whole story out of me, she told me that trouble came to those who made it, as the squirrels should have shown me, and I wasn’t to stir up any more. And then she kept me indoors in our room, spinning yarn all the rest of our visit, except for hasty meals.
We’d never spoken of it since, but I knew Magreta hadn’t forgotten any more than I had. We had gone back to Koron, four years ago, for Archduke Dmitir’s lavish funeral. Mirnatius had commanded the attendance of most of the nobility, presumably to make clear that he no longer had nor required a regent, and he’d made them all swear fealty over again to him personally. We’d been there for two weeks. Magreta kept me very close throughout, and never let me leave my rooms without my veil over my face, even though I wasn’t a woman yet, and she brought me all my meals from the kitchens with her own hands. Mirnatius had stood as chief mourner: he’d been sixteen then, tall and full-grown and even more beautiful, with his black hair and light eyes that looked like jewels shining out of his Tatar-dark skin, and his mouth full of even white teeth, and with the crown and his golden robes he might have been a statue, or a saint. I watched him through the faint haze of my fine veil, until his head turned in my direction, and then I quickly dropped my eyes and made sure I was small and insignificant in the third row of princesses and dukes’ daughters.
But in two weeks’ time, he would come to my father’s house, and there would be no camouflage. My father would not give him three good dinners and take him boar hunting in the dark woods and minimize his expense. Instead he would make an extravagant feasting that would last all three days, with jugglers and magicians and dancers to keep the tsar and his court entertained indoors, and he would give me three new dresses after all, and make an offering of me. It seemed my father did mean to try and catch the tsar for his daughter, with a ring and a necklace and a crown of magic silver to bait his trap.
I looked at my face in the window’s reflection and wondered what my father’s hard eyes had seen, with that necklace around my throat, to make him think it a chance worth taking. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see my own face when I wore it. But I didn’t have the comfort of thinking him a fool.
I was still standing by the window, my hands resting on the cold stone and my sewing abandoned, when Magreta came back to the room still twittering, to press a cup of hot sweet tea into my hands. She had even brought up a thick slice of my favorite poppy-seed cake, which she must have coaxed out of the cook; I did not get such treats every day. A maid was trailing her with a few extra logs for the fire. I let her draw me back to the hearth, grateful for what she was trying to do, and I didn’t tell her that it was all wrong. What I really wanted was the silver necklace, cold around my neck, even though it was bringing my doom; I wanted to put it on and find a long mirror and slip away into a wide dark winter wood.
* * *
It was Saturday night after sundown when I climbed back into Oleg’s sledge. I had put twenty gold pieces more into my grandfather’s vault, and I carried the Staryk’s swollen white purse with me, the leather straining with the weight of the gold. My shoulders tightened as we plunged into the forest, and I wondered with every moment when and if the Staryk would come upon me once more, until somewhere deep in the woods, the sledge began to slow and came to a stop under the dark boughs. I went rabbit-still, looking around for any signs of him, but I didn’t see anything; the horse stamped and snorted her warm breath, and Oleg didn’t slump over, but hung his reins on the footboard.
“Did you hear something?” I said, my voice hushed, and then he climbed down and took out a knife from under his coat as he came towards me, and I realized I’d forgotten to worry about anything else but magic. I shoved the heaped blankets and straw towards him as a too-fragile barricade as I scrambled 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. “It’s not my gold!” I cried in desperation, holding the purse out between us. “It’s not mine, I have to pay it back—”
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,” every word out of his mouth familiar as a knife: it was the story again, only a little different; a story Oleg had found to persuade himself he wasn’t doing wrong, that he had a right to what he’d take or cheat, and I knew he wouldn’t listen to me. He would leave my body for the wolves, and go home with the gold hidden under his coat, and say I had been lost in the woods.
I dropped the purse and gripped two big handfuls of my skirts and struggled back, floundering through the deep snow, higher than my thighs. He lunged, and I flung myself away, falling backwards. The crust atop the snow gave beneath my weight, and branches out of the underbrush clawed my cheek. I couldn’t get up. He was standing over me, his knife in one hand and the other reaching down to grab me, and then he halted; his arms sank down to his sides.
He wasn’t showing me 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 back 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.