Kajus gasped and ran out of the house while Da was still screaming and thrashing. I burned my hands getting the pot off him and we pulled him out of the ashes, but his hair was on fire and his clothes were on fire. His whole face was blistering and his eyes were swollen like big onions under their lids. We beat out the fires with our clothes. By then he had stopped screaming and moving.
The three of us stood around him. We didn’t know what to do. He didn’t look like a person anymore. His whole head was a big white swelled-up thing except where it was red. He wasn’t saying anything or moving. “Is he dead?” Sergey said finally. Da still didn’t move or say anything, and that was how we knew he was dead.
Stepon turned and looked scared between Sergey and me. His face was still bloody and his nose was all wrong. He wanted to know what we were going to do. Sergey’s face was pale. He swallowed. “Kajus will tell everyone,” he said. “He will tell them…”
Kajus would tell everyone that Sergey had killed our father. The boyar’s men would come and they would take him and hang him. It would not matter that Sergey did not mean to do it. It would not matter that our father had been ready to kill us. You could not kill your father. They might take me too. Kajus would tell everyone I had refused to marry his son, and then Sergey had killed my father to stop him beating me for it. So we had done it together. Anyway, they would hang Sergey for sure. And even if they did not take me and hang me, the boyar would take the farm and give it to somebody else. Stepon was too young to farm it alone, and I was a woman.
“We have to go away,” I said.
We went to the white tree. We dug up the pennies. There were only twenty-two of them, but that was all we had. We looked down at them. I knew now how much twenty-two pennies would buy. It would not buy much food or drink for three people, and we would have to go a long way to get work anywhere.
“Stepon,” I said, “you must go to Panova Mandelstam.” Stepon darted a look at me. He was scared. “You are little. No one will say you did it. She will let you stay.”
“Why will she?” Sergey said. “He can’t help her.”
“He can look after their goats,” I said. But I only said that to make Stepon and Sergey feel better. I knew Miryem’s mother would let him stay, even if he could not do anything. But he would really be a help. Stepon was very good with goats. So even if no one went out collecting money anymore, they would not go hungry. And he would be company for them, all the days Miryem did not come home. After a moment, Stepon rubbed his eyes and nodded. He understood. Sergey and I could walk fast and for a long time. We could do work to be paid for. He couldn’t yet. It would be safer for us all. But it meant saying goodbye, maybe forever. Sergey and I could not come back. And Stepon would not know where we were.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” I said to the tree. The money had made trouble after all. We should have listened to her. There was a sound of wind through the white leaves like a long deep sighing. Then the tree slowly bent three low branches down towards us, each one touching us on our shoulders. It felt like someone putting a hand on my head. And the one on Stepon’s shoulder had a single pale white fruit hanging off it, a ripe nut. He looked at it and at us.
“Take it,” I said. It was only fair. Mama had saved me once, and Sergey, and anyway we two had made this trouble. Stepon had not asked for any of it.
So Stepon picked off the nut and put it in his pocket, and then Sergey asked me, “Where will we go?”
“We will go to Vysnia first,” I said after a moment. “We can find Miryem’s grandfather. Maybe he will give us work.” I knew her grandfather’s name was Moshel, but I didn’t think we could really find Vysnia, or him. But we had to walk towards something. And I remembered that Miryem had talked of sending wool south, when the river melted. If we did that, went south on the river past Vysnia, that would be an end of people looking for us. No one would hunt for us so far away.
Sergey nodded when I told him. We went to our pen and tied up our four thin goats that we had left on a string. Stepon took them and slowly went away down the road with them, looking back at us every few steps until he was out of sight. Then we divided the pennies between us, half and half, and each put our share into our strongest pocket. We didn’t want to go into the house again, because our father was still lying there, but finally we went inside and took my father’s coat from where it hung on the wall, and the empty pot out of the ashes so we could cook. Then we went into the woods.
* * *
Mirnatius and I were married the morning of the third day of his visit, me in my ring and my necklace and my crown. My father had offered the jewels as my dowry, claiming they had been my mother’s. Mirnatius had perfunctorily said, “Yes, that will do,” not caring. I think he would have taken me with nothing at all, but my father was a little thrown off by the ease of his own victory, made uneasy by it; he wanted to believe he had won with his machinations. The court stared at me yearningly as I came into the church, as though I carried all the stars in the world at my throat and on my brow, but the fairy silver might have been brass as far as my bridegroom cared or noticed it. For all his insistence on speed, he said his vows as if they bored him, and afterwards he dropped my hand as quickly as if it were made of coals. I could only guess he found it delightful to have a chance of marrying for spite, a girl who didn’t want him, when all the maidens of the kingdom sighed at him and would have cut off their own toes to be his wife.
We left immediately after. My half-painted bride’s chest was packed in a mad tumble onto the back of a sleigh painted in silver and white—very freshly painted; it was the hasty gift of one of my father’s boyars, who had simply had one of his own done over—and I was packed onto the seat in my turn. There was no one coming with me. Mirnatius had told my father there was no room in his household for another old woman, so Magreta was left behind, wretched and weeping on the stoop, hidden behind all the other ladies of the household.
Mirnatius kissed my father’s cheeks, as fitted a close relative, and climbed in beside me. I was only grateful that I wasn’t shut up with him inside the closed sleigh; it wasn’t big enough for two, if one of them was the tsar of Lithvas. But our sleigh was almost too hot anyway; there were heavy furs piled over us and warmers full of hot stones at our feet and beneath the seats. He reclined back in a lithe sprawl and held out a purse to me. “Throw coins to the people as we go, my beloved, so all may share in our joy,” he drawled. “And look as happy as I know you must be. Smile at them,” he added, another command that traveled into me like the waves of heat rising from the warmers, but the ring sat beneath my gloves, and the silver cooled it out of me. I only reached out warily to take the purse, and threw out handfuls of shining kopeks and pennies over the side of the sleigh without looking; no one in the streets would notice that I didn’t smile at them when there were coins to be snatched up, and I couldn’t make myself take my eyes off him. He frowned and kept watching me, eyes hooded, and said nothing more.