Mirnatius arrived in a vast closed sleigh painted in black and gold, drawn by four black horses steaming and stamping in the cold air, with soldiers hanging on the back and more of them riding in crisp martial ranks around it. There must have been other people, too, other sleighs, but it was hard to pay attention to anyone else when he flung open the door and climbed down in a gust of air that fogged in the cold. He wore black also, with delicate embroidery in gold thread gleaming all over the wool panels of his heavy coat. His black hair was long and curling, and everyone turned towards him a little, moths eager for the flame.
He greeted my father, perfunctorily, and when asked about his journey said something mildly complaining about the vigor of the winter, and how thin and weak the game was grown. The remark would have neatly diminished my father’s entertainment, if he had then spent the tsar’s visit on hunting—which of course he had intended to do, and Mirnatius plainly meant to needle him for it. But instead my father bowed and said, “Indeed, the hunting has grown sadly dull, Your Majesty, but I hope the hospitality of my hall will not disappoint you,” and the tsar paused.
I was almost entirely hidden behind a curtain, but I drew back anyway when the tsar looked up and swept his gaze across the windows of the house like a hawk going over a field, trying to flush out some prey. Fortunately he looked at the main floor of the house, and not at my high-up little window. My father had not given me new chambers. There were many guests in the tsar’s company whom he wanted to impress, and anyway he hoped I would be leaving soon.
Then Mirnatius smiled at my father, with the pleasure of a man who expects to be richly amused at someone else’s expense, and said, “I hope so as well. Tell me, Erdivilas, how are your family? Little Irina must be a woman grown by now. A beauty, I have heard, surely?” It was more mockery: he had heard nothing of the sort, of course. I had traveled with my father; the court and his advisors knew I was nothing out of the ordinary, and hardly a girl to turn a young tsar’s head—if he had been in any danger of turning his head at all, except perhaps all the way round like an owl.
“They all are well, and Irina is healthy, Sire, that is all a father can ask of God,” my father said. “I would not name her a beauty to other men. But I will not lie: I think she has something in her more than most girls. You will see her while you are here, and tell me if you agree. I would welcome your counsel, for she is of an age to marry, and I would find a man worthy of her if I can arrange it.”
A blunt declaration that, almost crude by the standards of court conversation, where it was a point of honor always to speak to the side and not the heart of the thing, but it served my father’s purpose: Mirnatius lost his look of easy malice. He followed my father into the house with a thoughtful frowning look instead. He had understood the message—that my father meant seriously to offer me as a bride, despite the extremely bad politics of the match, and also was not a fool who thought to sneak an ugly girl into the tsar’s bed as a beauty with the help of dim lights and strong liquor; therefore, something unusual was in the offing.
Then they were all gone inside, to be greeted by my stepmother and the household, out of the cold. I stood behind the curtain without moving while the rest of the tsar’s retinue were disposed of, soldiers and courtiers and servants flowing away into all the nooks and crannies of the house and stables. There was nothing more to see, and in my small crowded rooms the other women who had gone to cluster around the other window all went back to their seats and their frantic sewing, and the scullery-maids with their buckets went back to emptying out the washtubs still sitting before the fire: one to wash me and a second one just to wash my hair.
“Pardon, milady,” one of them said to me timidly, by way of asking if she could use the window I was standing by, which had a useful eave below it that would catch the runoff, so it didn’t just rain down onto the windows below. I stepped back, making room for her. My hair was still damp, draped all over my shoulders, long and loose down my back. It smelled faintly of myrtle, because Magreta had put branches of it in the water. “They say it protects against ill-wishing and sorcery,” she had said, in a businesslike tone, “but really it’s just a nice smell.”
The fire had been built up, roaring to keep the chill off me, so all the other women were sweating and red-faced while they sewed urgently. I stood apart from their excited bustle. They were all half strangers to me; I knew their faces and their names, but nothing really of them. My stepmother made it her business to hire all the women of the house and know them and speak to them, so they would do good work for her, but she had never brought me into supervising the work of the household. She might have had a daughter of her own, after all.
But she had never been unkind to me; she had even sent her own best women to help with my sewing, although she would have liked to have the tsar’s visit as an excuse for new gowns for herself. Of course, she saw the value of having me settled in such a place—if it could be managed. As the other women went back to their seats, from peeping at the tsar, they had all glanced at me and looked dubious. I wished I could have felt so, myself. But they hadn’t seen me in the necklace, the crown. Only Magreta had, and she wrung her hands when she thought I didn’t see, and gave me bright encouraging smiles when she thought I did.
The women were working on linens now. My own gowns were already finished and waiting for me, in three shades of grey, like a winter’s sky. My father had ordered them made almost without ornament, of fine silk, with only a little touch of white embroidery. I had been wearing one of them for the last fitting yesterday when the jeweler’s woman had brought me the crown; she had given it to Magreta, who had set it on my head, and in the mirror I had become a queen in a dark forest made of ice. I had reached towards the glass and felt cold biting at the tips of my fingers with sharp teeth. I wondered if I really could do it, run away into the white world in the mirror. The cold on my fingers felt like a warning; it didn’t seem to me anything mortal could live in that frozen place.
When I had turned away, longing and afraid, the jeweler’s woman—who was only my age or a bit older, although thin and hard-faced—was staring at me as if she knew what I had seen in the mirror. I would have liked to ask her a thousand questions—how the crown had been made, where the silver had come from—but why would she have known? She was only a servant. My father came in then to inspect me, and I could not have talked to her anyway. He paid her without any haggling, but then, a throne would be cheap at the price; he had not spent half of that big chest my stepmother had brought with her.