The sleigh flew along the frozen river road, stopping to change horses four times, until a little while before dark we stopped for the night with Duke Azuolas. He was a wealthy landlord with vast fields, but his seat was a smaller town walled more for safety against Staryk raiders than any conquest. It was a quiet place that could not accommodate the tsar’s full retinue, and Mirnatius ordered nearly his entire train to go onward and quarter themselves with small boyars and knights along the road, to be gathered up tomorrow. I stood on the steps of the duke’s house while they left, everyone who’d seen me wed, and cold went creeping along my spine. There was room in the house for some of them at least, and a great many of the knights looked sour and indignant about being sent onward. The servants were taking my chest off the sleigh and carrying it into the house. I looked at Mirnatius. It might have been only the sunset, but his eyes looked back at me with a brief red glow.
I went in to dinner with every scrap of my silver glittering in the candlelight: I didn’t remove even the crown, and all around the table, men stared at me with their faces open like children, perplexed and at the same time envious of the tsar, without quite knowing why. I spoke to as many of those silver-dazzled men as I could. But I had barely eaten a few mouthfuls of the final course when Mirnatius made my excuses for me, and ordered me away to the waiting hands of the maidservants, with two of his guards to follow. “Keep close watch on my tsarina’s door. I don’t want her running away,” he said to them, and everyone laughed at his little joke. As I left the table, he turned abruptly and caught my hand and jerked it to his mouth and kissed it, the heat of his lips burning. “I will come for you soon,” he whispered harshly, a hot, devout promise, before he let me go.
The kiss brought a wave of color to my cheeks, and the maidservants waiting for me tittered, thinking me eager for my beautiful bridegroom. I was grateful for their mistake. As soon as the door of my bedchamber was shut, I sent them away, instead of letting them help me undress. “My lord will help me, I think,” I said, lowering my eyes demurely to keep them from seeing that it was fear and not excitement speaking. They all laughed again and slipped away without argument, leaving me alone, still dressed in my heavy gown.
Two days ago, I had said to Galina, “It’s a long, cold way driving to and from Koron, and my old furs are too small.” I knew there would be a mad scramble underway among the courtiers who had come with the tsar and my father’s own boyars and knights, trying to find wedding gifts in a frantic hurry, and I thought it likely they would consult my stepmother. So now I had a beautiful heavy set of ermine furs, splendid enough for a tsarina to wear. I’d left them heaped white and soft in the corner of the room, and almost as soon as the maids had closed the door, I had the fur coat on, and then the heavy cloak, and the muff. I couldn’t wear the fur hat and the crown together, but I didn’t want to leave the hat lying there, making the rest notable for their absence, so I stuffed it into my muff.
Then I went to the tall mirror that hung upon the wall and looked at myself there, standing in the whirling snow of the dark forest. I stepped up to the glass, a bitter cold radiating against my face. I shut my eyes and took a step, terrified of every outcome: to meet only hard glass against the end of my nose, and no escape, or to go through, and find myself alone in the night, in another world, where I might never be able to get back.
But no glass met my face, only winter, biting at my cheeks. I opened my eyes again. I was alone, in a forest of dark pine trees covered with snow, surrounding me endlessly in every direction. The sky was a dark grey overhead, a late-evening twilight without any gleam of stars, and it was so bitterly cold I had to hold my muff against my lips to keep my breath from freezing my face. Thin flakes of snow drifted around me, pricking my skin like tiny needles. It wasn’t merely a cold winter night, or even a blizzard; it was a gnawing, unnatural cold that tried to creep directly to my heart and lungs, that asked what I was doing here.
There was no sign of shelter anywhere—no house where I could ask for refuge. But I turned and saw that I stood on the bank of a deep river frozen almost solid, shining black as glass, and when I looked down at the surface, instead of a reflection I saw the empty room I had fled, as though I was looking in from the mirror’s other side.
The door opened as I watched, and I drew taut as a bowstring, but an instant was enough to be sure: Mirnatius did not see me. He came into the room smiling wide and hungry, and only brightened when he saw the room apparently empty. He shut the door behind him and put his back to it, leaning against it. He reached down with one hand, not even looking, and locked it deliberately, the click coming to me faintly distorted, as though I heard it from underwater. “Irina, Irina, are you hiding from me?” he said softly, hot glee in his voice as he drew out the key and put it into his pocket. “I will find you…”
He began to look for me—behind the fireplace screen, underneath the bed, inside the wardrobe. He even came to the mirror, and I flinched back as he came directly towards me, but he was only looking to see if there was a space behind it. When he drew back, the smile was at last fading; he went to the window and thrust back the curtains, but he had chosen the room carefully: there was only a small window, and it was shut tightly.
He turned back with anger beginning to twist his face. I wrapped my arms around myself, the cold biting at me, while he began to tear apart the room. Finally he stopped, panting, with the curtains torn from the bed and half the furniture overturned, in baffled rage. “Where are you?” he shrieked, a terrible inhuman scraping in his voice. “Come out, and let me see! You are mine, Irina, you belong to me!” He stamped his foot so heavily the massive carved bed trembled. “Or else I’ll kill them, kill them all! Your family, your kin, to me they’ll fall! Unless you come out now…I won’t hurt you…” he added, in a suddenly wheedling tone, as if he really thought I would believe him. He paused, waiting a moment longer, but when I didn’t appear, he burst into a wild thrashing paroxysm, no longer searching, only smashing and tearing things like a mad beast savaging the world and itself at the same time.
It went on and on, until he screamed suddenly in fury and hurled himself into a fit on the floor, beating himself against it, his whole body convulsing with foam around his lips. The violence of it lasted only a moment, and then he just as suddenly went limp upon the floor, his mouth slack and his eyes staring empty. They seemed to look straight at me, unseeing. I stared back at them for what felt like long dragging minutes before they blinked.
Mirnatius rolled onto his belly and pushed himself first to his knees and then wincing climbed to his feet. His clothes were rent and hanging loose from his shoulders, and he looked around himself at the wrecked bed and the room he had torn apart. The hungry light had gone out of his face; he only had a look of wary confusion. “Irina?” he said, and even lifted the torn coverlet to look beneath it as though he thought I might have suddenly appeared in the meantime. He let it fall and even went to the window and looked at it again, as though he didn’t remember having made sure of it only a little while before.
Still with a baffled expression in his face, Mirnatius strode across the room to the fireplace and said out loud in front of it, as though he expected an answer, “Now you’ve really gone and put me in it. A duke’s daughter! And you didn’t even leave a body. What did you do with her?”
The flames roared high and violently, a splash of sparks flung out into the room. He ignored them, and where they fell on his skin, the small scorched marks vanished as quickly as they marred him. “Find her!” the flames said, in a voice all of hiss and crackle and devouring. “Bring her back!”
“What?” Mirnatius said. “She wasn’t here?”
“I must have her!” the fire said. “I will have her! Find her for me!” It rose to the same shrieking note that had come from his lips only a few moments before.
“Oh, splendid. She must have bribed the guards to let her go. What do you want me to do about it? You’re the one who insisted on my marrying the one girl in the world who’d run away from me! I was already going to have enough to do just placating her father for some tragic and unexpected accident; it’s going to be a bit more difficult if she’s vanished.”