I was halfway glad to see them, because they made a little more ordinary sense of the place to me: at least there were some people here doing something I could understand. But whenever one of them glanced up and saw me, they stared in open astonishment, and looked at Flek, who avoided their gaze. I suppose a queen wasn’t meant to come wandering around the servants’ quarters, and I was making an odd spectacle of myself. I just kept my chin up and marched along in her wake, and after another curving, we passed the last kitchen door and came to an unbroken stretch. Flek paused there and looked back at me, as if she hoped that the kitchens had been enough to satisfy me; but the tunnel traveled onward, and I was curious, so I said, “Keep going,” and she turned and continued on more sharply downwards.
The light in the walls grew steadily dimmer as we went down, until it was only little flickering gleams chasing one another, a dim glow that slightly rose and ebbed, as if we’d gone below the surface of the earth and only reflections of light from above could still reach us. We walked a long time; a few times we went down narrow curving staircases, until abruptly Flek turned out of the tunnel and through another archway into a cavern room, its walls jagged crystal, with a narrow walkway around a deep pool of dark water.
The surface was as smooth and unbroken as a sheet of glass, but nets on long handles rested carefully against the wall, and after I stood looking for several minutes I caught a flickering glimpse of the silver side of some vast blind fish moving deep in the dark before it vanished away again below. I knelt and touched the surface. Even though I could now put my hand in ice-melt and think it bathwater, the water felt painfully cold to my fingertip. I watched ripples spread away from my touch in widening circles: they were the only stirring until they struck the far edge and came back to me again, breaking one another down until they faded back into perfect stillness.
I wondered how many more pools like this there were in the depths, and how many orchard groves growing within the crystal walls; how far it all went, this impossible world contained within the mountain, a fortress of jeweled light. Flek stood silently beside me, waiting. She’d done as I’d commanded, but it hadn’t left me any better off. There was no escape here for me except another death, by drowning, and she wouldn’t answer any of my questions. I stood up. “All right,” I said. “Take me back to my chamber. By another route,” I added: I wanted to see more, if I could.
She hesitated, looking anxious again, but she turned the other way after we left the pool, and led me down, as if she had to go farther in before she could find another way. The light grew even more dim, and we passed archways that looked in on more of those dark pools. Still lower down, where only the barest gleam showed, we passed another pool chamber; but when I glanced in, there was no hint of light on water. I stepped through the archway to look down: there was only an empty shaft of rough crystal going down and down with a large crack along the bottom as if a pool once here had drained away somewhere. When I looked back, Flek was standing by the door, looking at the empty pool with her arms stiff by her sides and her face blank.
We passed a few more dry chambers before we came to a junction between passageways, and Flek turned with swift eagerness into a tunnel that sloped upwards, as if she were glad to be going back above. I was soon sorry myself that I’d made her take me so far down: I had almost no sense of time passing, but my legs noticed the climb, and I was tired long before the light began to brighten in the walls again. And still we had a long way to go. Flek took me along a path running through a chamber so big I couldn’t make out the sides in the dimness, full from one end to the other with a field of odd tiny pale-violet mushrooms, their heads nodding on tall stems like strange wildflowers. We passed two Staryk servants there with gathering-baskets, in clothes a single shade of grey darker than the others I’d seen. They didn’t look at me in surprise; they only darted their eyes for a single look at Flek herself before looking down again. She glanced at them, just as quick, and then kept her face looking straight along the path until we left the chamber.
From there we went into a tall spiraling stair, narrow and turning around and around on a spindle-shaft of crystal. The light grew brighter, so I felt our movement upwards, but nothing else changed, and it seemed as though it might go on forever. “Take us out of this stair if you can,” I said, when I couldn’t bear it any longer. Flek only glanced back at me and lowered her head and kept climbing, but the very next turning brought us onto a landing.
I didn’t know if it had been there ahead of us waiting or not, and I didn’t care; I was just grateful to leave the confines of that stair. But we stepped off into a vineyard grove that first I thought was only another kind of strangeness, and then I understood was dead: narrow trellises of pale ash wood visible under the dry sticks of dark grey vines that had withered to the roots, standing in cracked, parched soil with small hard dark lumps of fruit that had dried on the branches, scattered among the few dark grey papery leaves left clinging. Flek hurried through the dead grove, and I was glad to hurry with her; I felt as though I were walking through a graveyard.
There were three more stairs to climb, none of them so confined, and then finally we were in a brighter passageway that sloped more gently upwards, until we were turning unexpectedly through an archway and back into my room. I’d had no sense we were anywhere near it.
I was glad to stop walking. I felt as tired as though I’d walked all the way out to the farthest villages around my home and back, miles and miles, only here I’d gone up and down instead, all inside the deep fastness of their mountain. But I couldn’t be glad to come back to my chamber. It wasn’t anything but a prison cell, and all this mountain was the dungeon around it. Flek brought me the glass of water that I demanded, and then bowed and left me in a visible hurry, surely glad to get away before I could order her to take me anywhere else foolish and uncomfortable, because I didn’t know where I was going, and couldn’t ask, and couldn’t even be warned when I was demanding to go straight through places they avoided themselves.
A moment after she was gone, there wasn’t a way out of the room anymore. But there wasn’t anywhere to go anyway. I sat next to the chest and picked up handfuls of silver and flung them in as gold, resentfully. I didn’t deliberately work quickly, only with the speed of dull repetition, and I found myself scraping up the last handful of silver coins to drop inside even as Tsop came in, carrying a tray with my dinner. I thought of insisting that the Staryk king come and eat with me again, just to punish him, but I didn’t deserve that punishment, so I sat and ate my meal alone, and he made his appearance only as I was finishing.
He went past the table instantly to the chest and flung open the lid. He said nothing for a long time, only stood there looking down with the sunrise glow reflecting off his glittering-hungry eyes and limning all the lines of his icicle edges with golden light. I finished and pushed back my tray and went over to him. “The servants behaved well, and did everything I commanded,” I told him sweetly: I wanted him to know that I had managed perfectly well for myself, and been comfortable, very little thanks to him.
But he didn’t even look away from the chest, and only said, “As they should have. Ask your questions,” utterly dismissive, and I became instantly aware that I had only made myself more convenient to him. Now he wouldn’t have to even think of me once all day; I would sit here in my room, changing silver to gold and twiddling my thumbs, waited upon out of his sight, and a daily toll of three questions was hardly onerous.
I pressed my lips tight. “What are the duties of a Staryk queen?” I asked coldly, after a moment’s thought. Of course I didn’t want to be of any more use to him, but work made one’s place in the world. If I’d improbably become the wife of an archduke, surrounded by servants, I would have had a guess at what there was for me to do—a household to manage, and children when they came; and fine embroidery and weaving and making a court. Here I had no idea what I was even meant to do, and if I didn’t like it, still, I wanted to neglect my duties deliberately, and not just because I was a stupid girl who didn’t know what they were.