He picked up the crown from the cushion at once: moving quickly to get it over with and finish his humiliation. I hardly wanted to be there myself, being smirked at by them all, but I knew what my grandfather would have told me: those faces would smile forever if I let them. I didn’t see how I could ever make them stop. The tall knights with their white cheekbones and icicle beards wore silver swords and daggers at their sides, white bows slung over their shoulders, bows they used to hunt mortal men for pleasure, and I had seen their king steal the living soul out of a man with the touch of his hand. Any one of them could surely have cut me down.
But when the king turned to me, with the crown in his hands and his face cold with discontent, I reached out boldly and took hold of it with him before he could simply plunk it on my head. He glared at me over it, startled at least into some kind of expression, and I glared determination back at him. The old anger was rising in me, but here I didn’t feel cold with it; I felt hot enough for steam to rise from my cheeks, to glow through my palms. Where my hands touched the crown, it began to warm, and all around me the blade-sharp smiles began to melt away as thin lines of gold crept from beneath my fingers and went running through the silver, widening, curling over every fragile twist of lacework, every separate link.
The Staryk king stood unmoving, his mouth a straight line as he watched the silver change, until between our hands the whole crown shone gold as sunrise, strange and vivid beneath that overcast sky. All the crowd sighed together when it was done, a soft whispering noise. He held it in place another moment longer, but then together we put it on my head.
It was far heavier than the silver crown had been; I felt its weight on my neck and in my shoulders, trying to bend me. And I remembered, belatedly, that this was the very power he’d come seeking from me, what he’d wanted me for all along, and now I’d shown them all that I really had it. Surely there was no chance he’d ever let me go now. But I kept my head high and turned back to face all of them. There were no smiles among them now, and the disapproval had gone to wariness. I looked them in their cold faces and I decided I wouldn’t be sorry, all over again.
We didn’t exchange any vows, and there was no feasting and certainly no congratulations. A few cut-glass faces and sidelong eyes glanced at me, but mostly they all just turned and glided away out of the grove from all around us, leaving us there alone at the mound. Even the servant bowed himself away and vanished, and when they were gone, the Staryk king stood there another moment before he turned abruptly and walked away, too, along the glassy polished-mirror of the tiny frozen stream.
I followed him. What else was I to do? As we neared the shining glass wall of that vaulted space, I saw other Staryk stepping into openings, doorways and tunnel mouths, as if they lived within the crystal walls like houses around a meadow. The ice stream widened steadily as we walked alongside it; near the end of the vaulted grove, where we came to the shining wall, the frozen surface of it grew thinner, so I could see water moving deep beneath it, and where it reached the wall, it cracked upon the surface to show moving water beneath before it plunged into a dark tunnel mouth and vanished.
Beside that tunnel mouth a long stairway began, cut into the mountainside. The Staryk king led me up the stairs, a dizzy, leg-aching climb that took us high above the tops of the white trees. When I glanced down by accident—I did my best to avoid it, for fear of tumbling straight off; there was no railing on the stairs—I could see the rings more clearly, and the rest of the meadow spread white around them. I kept my hand on the mountain wall next to me and placed my feet carefully. He had gotten far ahead of me by the time I finally reached the top, but the staircase delivered me to a single large chamber, and he was waiting there with his fists clenched at his sides, his back to me.
It was massively long and the full thickness of the mountain wall: it ended in a thin wall of glass on the other end, perfectly clear, that looked straight out of the mountainside. I went slowly to it and looked far, far down the slope. Below me now, the waterfall was draining directly out of a large fissure in the mountainside, smoky-edged like a glass cracked in a fire. It tumbled down into a misty cloud that was all I could see from above, the half-frozen river emerging to run away into the dark forest, the fir-green trees dusted with white. I couldn’t see the road of white trees anywhere. We had only driven a few hours, but there was no sign of Vysnia in the distance, no sign of any mortal village at all. Only the endless winter forest stretching away in all directions.
I didn’t like seeing it, that enormous dark expanse draped with its white doilies of snow; I didn’t like seeing where Vysnia should have been and wasn’t, and the mortal road going back to my own village from it. Had they missed me, back at home? Or had I simply slipped out of their minds, the way the Staryk had gone out of mine whenever I wasn’t looking at him? Would my mother forget why I hadn’t come home yet, or forget me, forget she had ever had a daughter, who made too much money and bragged of it and so got herself stolen away by a king?
The walls of the chamber were hung with filmy silken hangings that had a shimmer of silver, and there was no comforting hearth, but at regular intervals great stands of icy crystals reared up higher than my head, capturing light and reflecting it inside themselves. There hadn’t been any feasting below, but there was a small table of white stone set and waiting for us, and a pair of goblets already poured, silver and carved, one with a stag and one with a hind. I picked that one up, but before I could drink, the Staryk king turned and took the goblet from my hand and flung it against the wall in a noisy clamor, so hard the metal dented where it rolled away. The wine spilled in a wide puddle across the floor, and where the dregs came dribbling out there was a strange white residue foaming, from something put into the glass.
I stared at it. “You were going to poison me!”
“Of course I was going to poison you!” he said savagely. “Bad enough that I’ve had to marry you, but to submit myself to—” He threw a look of loathing across the room, where I realized now the filmy hangings concealed a kind of bower, a sleeping-place.
“You didn’t have to marry me in the first place!” I said, for the moment almost more bewildered than afraid, but he made another sharp irritated gesture of contempt, as if I were only scraping a place already raw. So honor dictated that he had to marry me, because he’d promised he would, but it wouldn’t stop him murdering me right after? He hadn’t made me any vows of any kind, after all; he’d only said I was his queen, and stuck a crown on my head, no promise made to cherish or protect me.
And then he’d brought me up here to murder me, and he’d only spared me because— Slowly I went and picked up the goblet from the floor. I called back the feeling of the crown changing beneath my hands, the warming glow, and where I squeezed my hand around the stem, gold went spilling out through the silver. I turned to him with it already changed wholly in my hands, and he stared at it, bleak as if I’d shown him his doom instead of a cup of gold. He said harshly, “I do not need a further reminder. You will have your rights of me,” and he reached up and flung off his white fur cloak over the chair. He unfastened his cuffs after, and the throat of his shirt; plainly he meant to undress at once, and—
I nearly said he didn’t have to, but I realized in rising alarm that it wouldn’t be any use: he’d already married me and crowned me because he owed it, no matter that I’d tried to refuse, and though he would gladly have fed me poison, he wouldn’t cheat me. Our marriage entitled me to the pleasures of the wedding-bed, so I was getting them, whether I wanted them or not. It was as though I’d made a wish to some bad fairy for a customer who’d always pay his debts exactly on time.