I didn’t look up at him, but I said in limpid tones, “Beloved husband, I can want for no companion now that I have you at my side, but I confess I do miss my dear old nurse, who has been with me since my mother died.”
He opened his mouth to tell me he was sending for her, and then he paused. “Well,” he said, even more warily, “when we are settled back in Koron, we will send for her—by and by,” so I had won Magreta that much safety, at least, by making him think that I wanted her. I thanked him very sincerely.
Heavy snow had fallen overnight, keeping us in the house another day, and I took every chance I could to escape my husband’s company the rest of the day: my old catechist would have been shocked at what a difference marriage had made in my religious habits. The duke’s wife looked a little surprised when I asked to go make prayers again after breakfast, but I confided in her that my mother had died in childbirth, and I was asking the Holy Mother’s intercession for me, and then she approved of my solid understanding of my duty.
No one liked, of course, that the tsar didn’t have any sign of an heir yet, especially when he was so delicate-looking. At my father’s table, his guests would shake their heads and say that he should have been married long ago. We could not afford a struggle over succession. If we could, there would already have been one, seven years ago, when the old tsar and his eldest died and left only a thirteen-year-old boy for heir, as suspiciously beautiful as a flower, and all the great archdukes and princes eyeing one another like lions over his head.
A few of them had even come to Vysnia over the years, courting my father’s support, and I had sat silent at my father’s table with my eyes on my plate, listening to his answers. They never spoke straight out, and he never answered so, but he would hand them a platter full of fresh-baked pastries made with the tart, small-berried jam that came from Svetia, and say idly, “We see a great many merchants from Svetia in the markets here. They always complain of the tariffs,” by which he meant the king of Svetia had a great fleet and a hungry eye on our northern port. Or he would say, “I hear that the Khan’s third son sacked Riodna last month, in the east,” by which he meant that the Great Khan had seven sons eager for plunder, all of them proven warriors with large bands of raiders at their command.
Just last year we had gone on a visit ourselves to Prince Ulrich. In the evenings, after Vassilia and her whispering friends left the table, darting pleased glances at me because I wasn’t threatening to be beautiful, I would stay sitting beside my father. Ulrich, whose daughter was not yet married to the tsar even though she should have been, talked of the rising price of salt, which made him rich, and how well his young knights were coming along in their horsemanship. On the last night of our visit, my father reached out his arm across the table to take some hazelnuts from the bowl, and remarked absently, “The Staryk burned a monastery a day’s ride from Vysnia this winter,” as he cracked them open and picked out the nutmeats and left the hollow shells scattered on his plate.
All those lords had understood his meaning: that even victory, which was unlikely to come swiftly, would leave them easy prey for the larger beasts outside our borders, or the enemy within. So far, all of them had taken that advice to heart. Only Archduke Dmitir could maybe have seized the throne without provoking a wider struggle: he had been the ruler of the Eastern Marches and five cities, with a host of Tatar horsemen in his service. But even he had cautiously settled for making himself regent, until Mirnatius was old enough to marry off to his daughter.
Naturally, as soon as an heir had been produced, the delicate tsar would have suffered a regrettable illness, and Dmitir would have gone on being regent with his grandson on the throne. But instead, three days before the wedding, he had died unexpectedly of a blistering fever—a healthy dose of dark magic, I now presumed, and the deaths of the old tsar and his son seemed remarkably convenient as well—and after the funeral, Mirnatius had announced he was too overcome with grief for his beloved regent to contemplate marriage anytime soon. The princess had vanished into a convent and never been heard from again, and the five cities had been given to five different cousins.
Since then, Mirnatius had been ruling in his own right, and no one had yet taken the risk of overthrowing him. But still great lords came to my father’s table, or sent him their invitations, and more frequently of late. It had been four years since the abortive marriage, and Mirnatius hadn’t married Vassilia or anyone else, and whispers said his bed was cold. I’d once heard an indiscreet baron visiting from Koron complain, late and drunk, that there wouldn’t be bastards, even, the way things were going. Of course the lords didn’t know the tsar had a demon to be consulted in the process. But they did know that if Mirnatius wasn’t going to produce an heir, the struggle over succession would happen sooner or later. And there were enough of them willing to have it be sooner.
My father had more than one reason for wanting to see the tsar married: otherwise he would soon have to make a decision where to cast his lot, with all the risk it would entail. He wasn’t the only lord, either, who saw a war on the horizon with very little chance of gain. Duke Azuolas himself was in very much the same position: not strong enough to aim for the throne himself, and too strong to be allowed to sit the struggle out. So no one in his household objected when I made my prayers over and over, and all the women were glad to help me when afterwards I asked them what the best food was to encourage fertility. By the end of the day I had a large basket full of the things that everyone had encouraged me to take from the kitchens. “You need to be fatter, dushenka,” the duke’s mother said, patting my cheek: her selections alone filled half the basket.
It waited next to the mirror as I put my silver on for dinner. I had a crowd of ladies trailing me, and when I put on my crown, I took it off again and complained to them that I had a headache, and that perhaps instead of coming down, I would stay quietly in my room, to be better rested when my husband joined me. They nodded approvingly and went away, and quickly I pulled on my three woolen dresses and my furs and put the crown back on my head. Then I took my basket and stepped through the mirror.
Just in time: Mirnatius had shot upstairs as soon as he’d been told I wasn’t coming down. He had meant not to take his eyes off me from dinner until he’d dragged me into the bedroom with his own hands, I imagine. But I slipped through with my basket just as his key rattled in the lock, and I was safely sitting at the edge of the water with my meal of oysters and brown peasant bread and cherries when he burst through the door and found me gone again.
He looked around the empty room and threw his arms up in frustration. He didn’t go into a howling fit this time, although he went around pushing aside covers and curtains and looking beneath the bed for a few minutes; then he went and stood in the middle of the room staring out the window at the setting sun with his jaw and fists clenched. The last ray of orange sunlight slid off his face, and suddenly his features twisted all at once into wild distorted fury, thwarted rage, and I thought he might smash the bedchamber again.
But he gasped out in a strangled voice, “Will you give me the power to repair it all over again?” He shut his eyes tight and shuddered all over, then abruptly the fire roared up into a loud angry crackling, and Mirnatius sank to his knees and fell forward onto his hands on the floor. He held himself shakily there, gasping, with his head hanging down, and then he, grimacing, pushed himself back up onto his heels and said to the fire, “Is this why you wanted her? She’s a witch?”