“I want to bring back some more aprons,” I said. That afternoon, I made sure the ledger was in good order, and when I finished, I went outside and looked at our house, snug now behind shutters the carpenter had put up for me, with the small flock of chickens and our handful of goats making a clattering mess in the yard, and then I took my basket and walked slowly through town. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a market day, and Wanda had done the rounds. I had nothing to do in town, and nothing had changed, except everyone scowled at me now when I passed, instead of smirking the way they had back in the days when the sight of me in my patched shoes and ragged clothes had been a pleasant reminder of the money in their pockets that they never meant to pay back.
That was why I did it, maybe: I walked all the way to the other end of town and back and when I came home again, I wasn’t sorry to be leaving them. I loved nothing about the town or any of them, even now when it was at least familiar ground. I wasn’t sorry they didn’t like me, I wasn’t sorry I had been hard to them. I was glad, fiercely glad. They had wanted me to bury my mother and leave my father behind to die alone. They had wanted me to go be a beggar in my grandfather’s house, and live the rest of my days a quiet mouse in the kitchen. They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn’t pretend to be a neighbor.
There wasn’t Oleg to hire anymore, so the next morning I went and stood on the market road. When a likely carter came driving past with a big sledge laden with barrels of salt herring from the sea, I waved him down, and offered him five pennies if he would take me all the way to Vysnia. I could have paid more, but I had learned my lesson. This time I had waited for an older man in an older cart, and my good dress with its fur collar and cuffs was hidden: I had put on my father’s old worn-out woolen overcoat, which I had meant to use for rags now that I had bought him a good new one made of fur.
The old carter talked to me as we drove of his granddaughters, and wanted to know my age; he was pleased that his girl a year younger than I was already married when I wasn’t, and asked me if I was going to town to get a husband. “We’ll see,” I said, and then I laughed aloud in sudden real relief, because it was so ridiculous. Me sitting in a fish cart with my muddy boots, scarecrow in my father’s patched overcoat: what would a Staryk lord want with me? I wasn’t a princess, or even a golden-haired peasant girl. I suppose it wouldn’t make any difference to him that I was a Jew, but I was short and bony and sallow, and my nose was humped in the middle and too big for my face. In fact I wasn’t married yet on purpose: my grandfather had told me judiciously to wait another two years to go to the matchmaker, so I would grow a bit fatter, and meanwhile my dowry would plump up alongside me, to help bring me a husband with the good sense to want a wife who brought more to the marriage than beauty, but not so greedy he didn’t care for her appearance at all.
That was the kind of man for me, a clear-eyed sensible man who could want me honestly; I was no prize for an elven lord. Surely the Staryk had only said it as a joke, because he didn’t think I could manage his task at all. He couldn’t mean to marry me really. When I gave him his third sack of gold, he would only stamp himself through the ground in anger—or more likely, I thought, sobering again, he would turn me to ice anyway, for spite that I’d proved him wrong. I rubbed my arms and looked over through the woods: there was no sign of the Staryk road today, only the dark trees and the white snow and the solid ice of the river gliding away under the runners.
I came to my grandfather’s house late, just before sunset. My grandmother said three times how nice it was to see me back again, so soon, and asked a little anxiously after my mother’s health, and whether I had already sold all of my goods. My grandfather didn’t ask any questions at all. He looked at me hard from under his eyebrows and only said, “Well, enough noise. It’s almost time for dinner.”
I put my things away and talked over dinner about the aprons I had sold, and the load of wool that would go with my grandfather’s barge, when the river at last melted: thirty bales, not an enormous amount, but something to make a start with. I was glad to have the brick walls of my grandfather’s house around us, solid and prosaic like our conversation. But that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother in the cozy sitting room, behind us the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and though the noise was loud, my grandmother didn’t lift her head at all. I slowly put aside my own work and got up and went to the door. I pulled it open and flinched back: 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 clearing ringed with pale-limbed trees, and behind him the white ice-road ran away into the distance under a grey sky washed with clear cold light, as if one step across the threshold would carry me out of all the world.
There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a small 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. Silver enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars, and I didn’t doubt for a moment that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.
The Staryk was looking 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. “Think not to escape from me, girl, for in seven days I will come for you, wherever you have fled.”
He said it smiling down at me, cruel and satisfied, as though he was sure he had set me an impossible task, and it made me angry. I stood up and raised my chin and said, coolly, “I will be here, with your gold.”
His face lost its smile, which was satisfying, but I paid for it; he said in answer, “And if you do as you have said, I will take you away with me, and make you my queen,” and it didn’t seem like a joke here, with the stone of my grandfather’s threshold patterned white with frost that crept lacelike out of his grove, and the cold silver light shining out of the chest.
“Wait!” I said, as he began to turn away. “Why would you take me? You must know I have no magic, not really: 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 over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he stepped forward and the heavy door swung shut in my face, leaving me with a casket full of silver coins and a belly full of dismay.
* * *