I went inside and put on my silver necklace and my three wool dresses and my furs and came down carrying my own jewel-box: nothing very unusual about that; my own stepmother always kept charge of her own as well, whenever she traveled, and no one was to know that there was nothing inside but my crown, or that all the rest of my trinkets had been stuffed in among my clothes to make the box lighter. I put it between my side and the sleigh. If I had to, I would jump off with the box, and run into the forest to find a reflection of frozen water to flee through.
But the demon-hunger didn’t gleam red in Mirnatius’s eyes as we set off, and I remembered I had never seen it there in daylight, only after night had fallen. Instead he waited until we were well away from the house—all the women of it waving farewells to me with their kerchiefs—and then hissed at me in his own human voice, “I don’t know where you’re scurrying away to every night, but don’t think I’ll let you keep on running off.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, dear husband,” I said, after a moment, considering carefully: what did I want him to think, or know that I knew? “I made my vows to you, but someone else keeps coming to the bedroom in your place. Squirrels run on instinct when a hunter comes too close.”
He stiffened back from me into the corner of the sleigh and settled into a seething watchful silence, his eyes on me. I sat carefully ordinary, relaxed against the cushions and looking straight ahead. We were gliding swiftly through the deep hushed stillness of the forest, the tree branches bowed under the weight of the fresh snow, and I let the steady unchanging landscape soothe me; it might have been cold, but not compared with the winter kingdom where I spent my evenings, and my ring was a chill comfort on my finger.
We drove for a long time, and then abruptly Mirnatius said, “And where do squirrels run to, when they want to hide?”
I looked at him, a little puzzled. I’d just told him that I knew about his possessing demon and its plans for me, so he couldn’t expect me to tell him anything, or cooperate with him at all. But when I didn’t answer, he scowled at me as sulky as a thwarted child, and leaned in and hissed, “Tell me where you go!”
The heat of his power washed over me and flowed into my hungry ring, leaving me untouched. I almost asked him why he was wasting his strength: he already knew it wouldn’t work. But I suppose he’d come to rely so much on his magic that he’d never learned to think. The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father’s house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I’d had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I’d never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life.
But I could tell that if I only sat there saying nothing, Mirnatius was likely to lose his temper. The storm clouds were already gathering on his brow, and even if his demon wasn’t going to put in an appearance until after nightfall, he could still have his perfectly ordinary guards throw me into a prison cell to wait for him. People would be really shocked, of course, if he had his new wife thrown into a cell and she then disappeared without explanation, and my father would undoubtedly make use of it—but Mirnatius was giving me very little reason to think he would look far enough ahead to beware those consequences.
Unless I made him do so. “Why didn’t you marry Vassilia four years ago?” I asked him sharply, even as he opened his mouth to shout at me again.
It did have the useful effect of interrupting the rise of his temper. “What?” he said, blankly, as if even the question made no sense to him.
“Prince Ulrich’s daughter,” I said. “He has ten thousand men and the salt mine, and the king of Niemsk would gladly let him swear fealty if you were killed. You needed to secure him, after you had Archduke Dmitir killed. Why didn’t you marry her?”
Scowling and bafflement were wrestling for control of his face. “You sound like one of those old hens who cluck at me in council.”
“That you never listen to, and enchant into stupors when they pester you too much?” I said, and scowling won; but it wasn’t the same kind of anger: being lectured about politics must have been a familiar annoyance to him. “But they aren’t wrong. Lithvas needs an heir, and if you aren’t going to provide one, you might as well be overthrown sooner than later. And now that you’ve married me, instead of Vassilia, Ulrich might decide to do it before you have the chance.”
“No one’s going to overthrow me,” he snapped, as if I was insulting him.
“How will you stop them?” I asked. “If Ulrich marries Vassilia to Prince Casimir, they aren’t going to come visit you in Koron so you can use magic to order them not to march an army on the city. Can you control their minds from three hundred miles off? Can you stop one of a thousand archers from shooting you across a battlefield, or make ten assassins drop their swords all at once, if they burst into your chamber determined to stab you?”
He stared at me as though he’d never tried to answer any such questions even for himself. Likely he thought all his advisors fools and worrywarts who didn’t know about his magic, which would save him from everything and anything that might threaten. But his demon didn’t seem all-powerful, and his mother’s sorcery hadn’t saved her from the stake. He seemed to feel less invincible himself in the face of a pointed question, and he certainly didn’t say I was wrong about the limits of his power.
“Why should you care?” he threw at me instead, as if he thought I was pretending some sort of deep concern for his welfare. “Surely you’d be delighted.”
“My pleasure would last only until they stabbed me right alongside you,” I said. “Ulrich and Casimir would prefer my father as an ally rather than an enemy, but they don’t have to have him, and they won’t risk me inconveniently producing an heir after they’ve taken your head off. Of course,” I added, “that’s only if you haven’t murdered me first, in some suspicious way, and given all of them together a magnificent excuse to march on you,” which was the point I really wanted to make.
Mirnatius subsided, brooding, back into his corner, but I took it as a small victory that he didn’t sit staring at me anymore, but looked out of the sleigh, frowning over the ideas I’d shoved into his head, which he’d evidently done so well at avoiding before now.
We drove all the long cold day; a few times the coachman stopped to rest the horses, and twice changed them at the stables of one middling boyar or another, people bowing energetically. I made sure to climb out both times and walk around the courtyard and speak kindly to our hosts, saying a few favorable words about the children trotted out to make their bows. I wanted to be memorable to as many people as I could manage, if he was going to try making everyone forget me. Mirnatius held himself aloof and only spent the entire time staring at me with hooded eyes, which did nicely to make me look like a cherished bride.
The night was a long time in coming: strange on such a cold, wintry day, with the unnatural snow so thick on the ground. I was grateful for it, but even so, the setting of the sun was beginning to light the red glow in Mirnatius’s eyes as we drew into the courtyard of his palace in Koron. The walls were bristling with his soldiers, and Magreta was standing on the steps, her hands gripped tight at her breast, small and old in her dark cloak between the guards on either side of her, as if he’d sent men back to Vysnia last night, and had them drag her pell-mell to get here before dark.
When I climbed the steps, she put her arms around me and wept a little, saying, “Dushenka, dushenka.” She did thank me for remembering an old woman and sending for her, but I had been unfair to her: her voice trembled, and her hands gripped too hard at me. She understood that we were in mortal danger.