The fire hissed, “No! She is like the ones of winter, cold and sweet; like a well, she runs so deep. I will drink a long time before I come to the end of her…I want her! Find her!”
“What do you expect me to do?” Mirnatius demanded. “How is she disappearing if she’s not a witch? The men on the door weren’t bribed, either last night or now. There’s no other way out of here—or in again, for that matter.”
The fire crackled muttering to itself. “I do not know, I cannot see,” it hissed. “The old woman, did you get her for me?”
“No,” the tsar said after a moment, warily. “Irina wanted me to send for her. What if she’s the one who taught her all these clever tricks?”
“Do it!” the fire said. “Bring her! And if Irina still is fled, I will drink the old woman in her stead…but oh, I do not want her! She is old, she is frail, she will go so quick! I want Irina!”
Mirnatius scowled. “And then you’ll leave me to explain how my wife and her old nurse both died mysteriously within a day of each other? Will you see reason? I can’t make everyone just forget them!”
Then he jerked back, terrified, as the fire came roaring out of the hearth. A face took horrible shape out of it, hollow mouth and eye sockets, and it swelled across the room and thrust itself towards him. “I want her!” it shrieked in his face, and then became a solid club of flame that lashed him violently from side to side like some monstrous big cat batting around a mouse before it withdrew again and sank back into the burning logs, leaving the tsar flung to the ground with his clothes smoking and charred away where the fire had touched him.
The fire died down slowly, hissing and muttering. Mirnatius lay there huddled and still, an arm over his head, curled protectively around himself. When at last the fire fell into dull silent embers, and he moved, it was slowly, wincingly, like someone badly beaten. But he was still perfectly beautiful: the ruins of his clothes crumbled off his skin into ash and rag-scraps as he stood up, and there wasn’t a single mark upon him. The demon liked to preserve appearances all around, I suppose. He swayed with weakness, though, and after a moment looking at the door, he crawled instead into the bed—my bed—and fell almost at once into sleep.
On the bank of the river, I closed my hands tight around each other. My body wasn’t as cold as I had been the night before, thanks to my layers of dresses and the basket of food. I’d worried it would all freeze almost at once, but instead with every bite a memory came to me like a gentle touch on the mind of the woman giving it to me, all their whispered advice and encouragement, and each taste warmed me all the way through. But it couldn’t touch the ice of fear in my belly. Tomorrow Mirnatius would send for Magreta, no matter what clever things I said at the breakfast table, and I still didn’t have a way to save her, or myself.
* * *
For a long time after the Staryk king left me, I paced my new bedchamber in anger and in fear. The dented golden cup stood on the table, taunting me with the reminder he’d given me unnecessarily. This was what my life was to be from now on: trapped among these ice-hearted people, filling their king’s treasure-chests with gold. And if I ever refused him—there would be another cup of poison for me soon enough, surely.
I slept uneasily behind the fine silken curtains that whispered eerily when they rustled against one another, and in the morning I realized I hadn’t asked the most important question after all: I didn’t know how to get out of my room. The walls had no sign of any door at all. I was sure I’d come in opposite the wall of glass, and that he’d left the same way, but I ran my hands over every scrap of the surface and couldn’t find a trace of any opening. I had no way to get anything to eat or drink, and no one came to me.
The only cold comfort I had was that he lusted after gold enough to marry me for it, so he wouldn’t leave me here to starve to death; and I’d stipulated him answering my questions every night, but he might still leave me to be uncomfortable for a long time. And when would it be night? I paced the room in bursts until I grew tired, and then I went and sat by the wall of glass and stared out at the endless forest, waiting, but hours passed, or I thought they did, and the light outside never changed. Only a little snow was still drifting down; the blanket laid over the pines had grown thicker overnight.
I grew ever more hungry and thirsty, until I drank the liquor in his abandoned goblet, which left me light-headed and cold and furious when he finally did appear, through a doorway that hadn’t been there a moment before—and I was sure it wasn’t in the same place as where we’d come in yesterday. There were two servants following him, carrying a substantial chest that jingled as they set it down at my feet. But I put my foot up onto the lid when they would have opened it and folded my arms. “If you’re lucky enough to catch a goose that lays golden eggs,” I bit out, glaring up at the king, “and you’d like them delivered on a regular basis, you’d better see it tended to its satisfaction, if you have any sense: have you?”
The servants both flinched away in alarm, and he stiffened to a jagged looming height, glittering all over with anger of his own: icicles came prickling out of his shoulders like gleaming daggers, and his cheekbones went sharp-faceted as cut stone. But I stiffened my back with anger and kept my chin up, and abruptly he strode past me to the glass wall. He stood there looking out at the forest with his hands clenched at his sides, as if he were mastering his temper, and then he turned and said icily, “Yes—if its demands were reasonable.”
“At the moment, what I demand is dinner,” I snapped. “At your side, served as you are served, as though I were a treasured queen you were overjoyed to marry. As difficult as it may be to stretch your imagination that far.”
He still glittered, but he flicked his hand sharply at the servants; they bowed and quickly left the room, and soon a crowd of them came in; shortly they had laid a banquet on the table that I had to exert myself not to find impressive: silver plates and jewel-clear glass, a snowy linen cloth spread out, two dozen dishes offered, all cold, most of them nothing I could recognize, but to my relief, I could still eat them. Sharp spicy pink fish, slices of a pale white fruit with yellow-green skin, a clear jelly holding tiny squares of something hard and salty, a bowl of something that looked like snow but smelled of roses and tasted sweet. I thought I recognized the dish of green peas, but they were tiny and frozen nearly solid. There was venison, too, raw but sliced so thin that you could eat it anyway, served on blocks of salt.
When we finished, the servants cleared the dishes, and then he picked out two of the women and told them they were to be my attendants. They both looked unhappy with the prospect, and I wasn’t much happier. He didn’t tell me their names, either, and I could hardly tell them apart from any of the others; one had very slightly longer hair, with a single very thin braid laced with small crystal beads on the left, and the other had a small white beauty mark beneath her right eye; that was all the difference I could see. Their hair was white and grey, and they wore the same grey clothes as all the other royal servants.