The Staryk’s sleigh took us flying-fast over the silver road. It ran between two ranks of tall white trees, their ash-grey bark fading to lighter branches covered with leaves the color of milk with translucent veins. Small six-pointed flowers like enormous snowflakes drifted down upon our shoulders and into our laps as the hooves of the deer went drumming onward, the road’s surface smooth as a frozen pond. I could see nothing but winter, all around. I tried to break the silence a few times, to ask where we were going and how long the journey would be, but I might as well have tried talking to the deer. The Staryk didn’t even look at me.
But finally, a mountain began to rise up at the end: lost in mist and hard to see at first because of the distance, I thought, but it didn’t get any easier to make it out even as it came nearer and grew great. Light passed through it and glinted on the edges, but only for a moment, and then it found a new part of the mountain to make bright, as if the whole of it was made of cut glass instead of stone and earth, and the road climbed up a ramp to its side to a tall silver gate.
The road turned strangely slow once we saw it. The hooves flashed as quickly and the trees glided as steadily past, but the mountain came no nearer, only standing there cutting out the same portion of the sky. We didn’t seem to draw any closer. Beside me the Staryk sat very still, gazing always straight ahead. Then the driver turned his head just a little: he didn’t look around exactly, but he made a small gesture in that direction, and the Staryk’s lips tightened minutely. He made no other sign and said nothing, but the mountain suddenly began to move towards us again, as if only his will had held it off.
We emerged from the forest, and the canopy of white trees ended. The Staryk road fell in with a river running in the opposite direction, coming from the mountain and covered in a thin creaking layer of ice, large floes outlined in dark water, gradually sliding away downstream. As we came closer, I saw that a narrow waterfall from the mountain fed the river, a long thin veil falling down the side of the glass mountain that ended in a pool of blurring mist before the river ran away. I didn’t understand where the waterfall came from: there was no snow resting on those strange crystalline slopes to melt and feed it, no earth that it might have drained from. But we passed close enough for me to feel a fine spray on my cheek before the road climbed up, and the silver gates swung open for us as we came.
The sleigh plunged inside the mountain without slowing, moving like a blink from one light into another, a strange glimmering that seemed caught in the walls, with twisting lines of silver veined through them, and here and there a flash of brilliant crystal in vivid colors. Darker mouths of branching tunnels split away around us, but our road kept climbing upwards and curving, gathering light until it at last emerged into a vast frost-white meadow. I thought at first we’d gone through the entire mountain and come back outside, but we hadn’t: we were inside a great hollow space near the peak, with shining crystal facets high overhead. The pale endless grey of the sky in here was broken up into jeweled brilliance, thin dazzling rainbow lines sketched across it, and in the center of the meadow beneath that diamond roof, a grove of white trees grew.
Even sick with fear and anger and my own helplessness, the impossible wonder of the place snagged at me. I stared up into the mountain’s vault with my eyes stinging from winter glare, and I almost managed to persuade myself I was dreaming. I couldn’t put myself into the picture of it. I could more easily put myself back into my narrow bed in my grandfather’s house, maybe even sick with a fever. But the picture didn’t let me out. The sleigh slowed and stopped instead, as the driver pulled the deer to a halt outside the ring of trees, and a crowd of Staryk faces turned to look at me from beneath the boughs.
After a single moment, my Staryk stood up and climbed out of the sleigh stiffly. He stood there with his back to me, rigid and unmoving, until I slowly and cautiously climbed out behind him. The ground crunched under my foot a little when I stepped down on it, full of silver-grey grass, crisp with white patterns of frost. It felt too real. He still didn’t give me a word of explanation. He said curtly to the driver, “Take it to the storeroom,” jerking his hand towards the chest of gold still sitting on the back of the sleigh. The driver nodded and turned the heads of the deer and drove away, over the meadow and around the grove of trees until he was gone out of sight. Then the Staryk lord turned and set off instantly into the grove of trees, and I had to scurry to keep up with his long strides.
The white trees of the grove were planted in widening rings, and within those rings, the other Staryk had arranged themselves by rank, or at least by splendor. The ones in the outermost rings, the most crowded, wore grey clothes and touches of silver; a few jewels in deep colors made their appearance in the next rings. As the circles grew smaller, the jewels and the clothes grew steadily lighter, and the ones in the smallest circles dazzled with jewels of palest pink and yellow and cloudy white, their clothing all in white and palest grey.
But only as we walked through the very narrowest circle did I catch even small gleams of gold, and even then, only an edge of gilding upon a cloak clasp or a silver ring, as if it was nearly as rare here as Staryk silver in my own world. Among them all, only my Staryk wore clothing all in white, and clear jewels, and there was a solid band of gold around the base of his silver crown. He led me past all of them without stopping to a raised mound at the very center of the grove. A great jagged cluster of frozen spars of ice or clear crystals stood there, shining, and the tiny narrow curling of a frozen stream wound around the base and trickled away as a silver line through the trees.
Next to the cluster, a servant stood so very still he might have been carved from ice, his eyes downcast. He was holding a white cushion, and upon it a tall crown made all of silver, strangely familiar to my eyes: Isaac might have used it for a pattern. The Staryk paused when he came to it, looking down at the delicate, fanciful thing, and when he turned out to face the crowd of his people, his own face had also gone deathly still. He didn’t look at me, and his voice was cold. “Behold my lady, your queen,” he said.
I looked out over that glittering sea, those impossible frozen faces staring back at me expressionless with disapproval: they couldn’t put me into this picture, either, and they didn’t want to. There were some smiles in the nearest circles, cruel and familiar: they were the same smiles I’d grown up with all my life, the ones people had worn when they told me the story of the miller’s daughter, the smiles when I’d knocked on their doors the first time. Only this time, they weren’t even smiling at me: I was too small for that. They were smiling at him, a little incredulous, nobles pleased to see their own king brought low and marrying a brown lump of a mortal girl.