“Your kingdom?” he said, glancing down at me, with faint contempt for such a conceit. “You mortals would like to make it so, you who build your fires and your walls to shut me out, and forget winter as soon as it is gone. But still it is my kingdom.”
“Well,” I said, “then it’s mine, now, too,” and had the satisfaction of seeing him frown with displeasure at the gruesome reminder that he’d married me. “But I’ll reword the question if you like: is there snow in the sunlit world today, even though it should be spring?”
“Yes,” he said. “The new snow comes here only when it comes in the mortal world; thus I have labored long to bring it.”
I stared at him, almost too blank at first to feel the horror of it. We knew the Staryk came in winter, that storms made them strong, and they swept out of their frozen kingdom on blizzard winds; we’d known that winter made them powerful. But it hadn’t occurred to me—to anyone I knew—that they could make the winter. “But—everyone in Lithvas will starve, if they don’t freeze first!” I said. “You’ll kill all the crops—”
He didn’t even look at me, that was how little he cared; he was already gazing out again with those clear glittering eyes, gazing with satisfaction on the endless white blanketing his kingdom, where I saw only famine and death. And there was nothing but triumph in his face, as though that was exactly what he’d wanted. My hands clenched into fists. “I suppose you’re proud of yourself,” I said through my teeth.
“Yes,” he said instantly, turning back towards me, and I realized too late it could be taken for a question. “The mountain will bleed no more while the winter holds, and I am justified in pride indeed; I have held true, though the cost was great, and all my hopes are answered.”
Having completed his toll, he turned at once and was about to go sweeping from the room, and then he paused and looked down at me suddenly. “But I have gone this far amiss,” he said abruptly. “Though you are no power either of this world or your own, you are still the vessel of high magic, and I must honor that as it deserves. Henceforth you shall have whatever comforts you desire, and I shall send more fitting attendants, ladies of high station, to serve you.”
It sounded extraordinarily unpleasant: to be surrounded by a flock of those smiling noblewomen, who surely either hated or despised me as much as he did. “I don’t want them!” I said. “My current ones will do. You might tell them they can answer my questions, if you wanted to be kind to me.”
“I do not,” he said, with a faint grimace of distaste as if I’d suggested he might want to kick some small helpless animal. Likely he’d have done that with pleasure. “But you speak as though I had barred them. It was you chose to desire answers of me, when you might have asked nearly any other gift instead. What voice should give them to you now for nothing, when you have put so high a value on them? And how can any low servant dare set you a price?”
I could have thrown up my hands in frustration as he left. But I was just as happy for him to go away. I disliked his satisfaction and pleasure far more than I’d disliked his irritation and cold anger. I sat staring out the window at the heavy blanket of snow he’d flung over the world, even while the little mirror grew dark with night. I didn’t care for the duke’s sake, and I didn’t care for the sake of the townspeople, very much. But I knew what would happen to my people, when the crops all failed, and men with debts grew desperate enough.
I thought of my mother and father alone, snow climbing to the eaves of their house, and the colder hate pressing just as close around them. Would they go to Vysnia, to my grandfather? Would they even be safe there? I’d left behind a fortune that could buy them passage south after all, but I couldn’t make myself believe, now when I most wanted to, that they would forget me that far. They wouldn’t leave without me. Even if my grandfather could tell them where I’d been taken, they would never go; I could send them a letter and fill it full of lies: I’m a queen and I am happy, think no more of me, but they wouldn’t believe it. Or if they did, I’d break their hearts worse than dying, my mother who had wept to see me collect a cloak of fur from a woman who spat in the dust at her feet. She’d think I’d been frozen solid through, to choose to leave them and be a queen to a murderous Staryk, a king who would freeze the world just to make his mountain fortress strong.
The next morning when Flek and Tsop cleared away my breakfast dishes, I announced, “I want to go out driving.” It was a shot in the dark at something a Staryk noblewoman might do, and yet another thin hope of escape. A lucky hit this time; Flek nodded without any hesitation, for once, and led me out of my room onto the long dizzying stair that went back to that great hollow vaulted space in the center of the mountain.
It was much more alarming to go down than up: I felt much more aware of the fragile steps that looked as though they were made of glass, and how far away below the ground was. I saw more clearly than I wanted to the delicate white trees in their perfect rings nestled inside one another, the ones in the center ring tallest and most full of leaves, and the ones on the outer edge barely saplings, some of them bare-limbed.
But at last we reached the ground, and then Flek took me through the grove along what I found a confounding maze of paths, all of them laid smooth as a frozen pond with borders of mosaic made of clear stones. I couldn’t have told one turning from another if I’d had the whole day to work with. Here we passed other Staryk of higher rank, in lighter grey than Flek wore, some even in ivory and near-white, with trailing servants of their own, and they stared at me openly; a few of them with faint curious smiles for my dark hair and dark skin and shining gold: I’d put on my crown again, as it seemed worthwhile to remind anyone who saw me that I was their queen.
On the far side, we followed another tunnel into the mountain wall, but a wide one, easily big enough for a sleigh to travel down, which emerged into another inner meadow where a herd of clawed deer grazed on translucent flowers, and the sleigh stood simply out in the open—they had no need of sheds or stables, I suppose. The same coachman who’d driven us to the mountain was sitting beside it holding a few straps of harness—working on them perhaps, although I didn’t see any tools in his hands. When Flek told him I wished to drive out, he silently rose and went for a pair of the deer and hitched them up swiftly. Then he opened the door of the sleigh for me, just like that.
Which was as much as to say there was no chance of my getting away by driving, and it was a waste of time. But I climbed in anyway. He spoke to the deer and flicked the reins, and they leapt lightly forward and with a lurch we plunged into another tunnel and began racing over the snowbound paths. I gripped the side of the sleigh to hold on. It seemed to me we were going much faster than when we’d come, but maybe it was because we were going down, down into the dark tunnel that led to the silver gates, the hooves of the deer making the low tap-tap-tap feet of dancers on the icy surface, until a dazzling-bright line of light cracked the dark ahead of me as the gates swung open out of our way and we came racing out of the gleaming side of the mountain and down the road into the snowbound forest.
I was still clutching on to the side of the railing, but as the cold air came into my face, I breathed deep and found myself still glad to be moving, to be getting out, even if I wasn’t likely to get anywhere useful at all. It was still worth a try.
“Shofer,” I said. The driver startled just as Flek and Tsop had, glancing around at me as if to make sure I’d been speaking to him. “I want to go to Vysnia.” He stared at me blankly, so I added, “The place where you came for me, before the wedding.”