We were afraid to stay, but now we were also afraid to go away and leave the work undone. It seemed we were meant to do what we had promised. Anyway, it was still snowing. So Sergey began on the frame while I worked on the mats.
By the morning the snow was two feet deep again. At least we had food and the house was warm. Sergey worked on the bed and I wove six big mats like the chair seat to rest on them. We heaped them with straw and clean wool. Then I thought at last we were finished, and we could go if we wanted to. All that day it had been sunny again and more snow melted. Sergey and I agreed we would go the next day.
The next morning we went outside to look for some more food in the garden to take with us and we found a whole patch of strawberries. The plants were dying from the frost, and the berries were frozen solid, but they would still be good to eat. I went inside and looked for something to carry them in, and on a shelf in a dark corner next to the oven, I found some old jars that I hadn’t noticed before, though I was almost sure I had looked there. One big one was empty and just right to hold the strawberries. One was full of salt and one had a little bit of honey that still tasted all right.
That was bad enough, but on the shelf next to the biggest jar, there was an old wooden spindle and some knitting needles. So that meant we weren’t done, because now I could spin the wool and knit the yarn I made, and that meant we could make a real mattress like the one that had been on the bed and rotted away. I showed it to Sergey. “How long will it take?” he asked me, uneasily. I shook my head. I didn’t know.
I spent all the rest of that day spinning yarn while Sergey washed some more wool for me. I made six big balls of yarn, as fast as I could, but I thought it would take more to make a mattress cover. Then Sergey went out and got more firewood. He got a lot, and I made a big pot of porridge, so the next day we would not have to go out at all. We could just eat from the pot all day. Then we went to sleep on the oven again.
“Wanda,” Sergey said the next morning. He was looking at the table. I looked at it, too. Everything seemed all right. The table was cleared off. The chair was neatly tucked in against it to keep it out of the way. Then I thought, but we had put it against the wall yesterday. Maybe we had moved it back before we went to bed. But I did not think we had. “Let’s eat,” I said, finally.
The pot of porridge was still warm in the oven. I took off the lid and I stopped, looking inside. I had made the whole pot full. It was not a very big pot and we would eat all of it in one day. But someone had already eaten a big helping of it. I couldn’t even think to myself that maybe they hadn’t, or maybe Sergey had taken some, because there was a big wooden spoon sticking in the pot, and last night I had thought to myself, I wish I had a big spoon, and there had not been a spoon like that anywhere in the house.
* * *
When I said “Stop!” Shofer pulled the deer to a halt, but he looked back in alarm over his shoulder at the two figures on the riverbank, and he said, urgent and low, “Only wights would come to this place.”
But I knew who she was, the girl standing there in her white furs with the familiar crown of silver on her head, the crown that had brought me my own: Irina, the duke’s daughter. And if she had found a way here, there was a way back. “Go to them, or answer me, why can’t we?” I said, ruthlessly, and after a moment Shofer reluctantly turned us back around and drove along the river until we drew up beside them. Irina wore the crown, and the necklace gleaming, and her silver ring on her finger, and her breath didn’t frost in the air. She had her arms around the other, an old woman who was shivering terribly though she had a heavy fur wrapped all around her, her breath hanging in thick mists around her head.
“How did you get here?” I demanded.
Irina looked up at me, without any recognition in her face. “We mean no trespass,” she said. “Will you give us shelter? My nurse cannot stand in the cold.”
“Come in the sleigh,” I said, though Shofer flinched, and I put out my hand. Irina hesitated only a moment, glancing down at the river, then she urged the old woman up into the sleigh and climbed up after her. I took off my own cloak, and put it over the old woman like a blanket. She was trembling even more, and her lips were going blue. “Take us to the nearest shelter,” I told Shofer.
He flinched again, but after a moment he turned the deer and drove up over the bank and into the dark trees. On our left there was solid night, and on the right the pale twilight brightened in the distance, as if we were on the very border of the dark. Irina had turned her head to look behind at the river disappearing behind us, and then she looked at me. Her long dark hair was stark against the white of her furs and beneath the silver crown, and snowflakes drifted onto it from the trees and gleamed on its length like small clear jewels. The twilight behind her caught in her pale skin, and she gleamed with it so I realized suddenly she must have Staryk blood, somewhere in her line; in her glittering silver she could have changed places with me, and fit into this kingdom as though it were her own. “How did you get here?” I asked her again.
But she was staring back at me, frowning, and she said slowly, “I know you. You’re the jeweler’s wife.”
Of course she didn’t know better: no one would have told her my name, or Isaac’s. She was a princess, and we didn’t matter. I wished bitterly that I still didn’t, that she was right; that I was home in Basia’s place or in my own. “No,” I said. “I only gave him the silver. My name is Miryem.”
Shofar flinched on the seat ahead of me, his eyes darting back shocked a moment. Irina only nodded a little, still frowning in thought, and she reached up to touch the necklace at her throat. “Silver from here,” she said.
“That’s how,” I said, understanding. “The silver brought you?”
“Through the mirror,” Irina said. “It saved me, saved us—” but then she was leaning over the old woman. “Magra! Magra, don’t fall asleep.”
“Irinushka,” the old woman muttered. Her eyes were half closed, and she had stopped shivering.
The sleigh jerked to a halt: Shofer had pulled hard on the reins, and the deer threw their heads up, restive. He was staring ahead of us, his back very straight and his shoulders rigid. We’d come to a low garden wall, almost buried in the snow, and on the other side I saw a faint, familiar orange glow: the flickering of an oven’s fire from inside a house, warm and welcoming. From his face it might have been the coming of an angry mob.
“Who lives there?” I asked without thinking, but Shofer only threw me an anguished look, and anyway I didn’t see what else there was for it; the old woman was sinking quickly. “Help us get her out,” I said, and with enormous reluctance he hooked the reins over the seat and climbed down. He lifted Magra as easily as if she were a small child, although she whimpered at his touch even through the layers of her clothing and fur.
He walked away with her, lightly, over the top of the snow, but Irina and I both floundered through the crust and into the deep drifts beneath. We struggled on after him until suddenly it thinned as we came to the wall of the garden. It was only a very little house, barely a peasant’s hut and nearly all oven, but there was a smell of warm porridge cooking and the oven’s glow was coming through thin cracks in the window covers and the door. Shofer had stopped well back from the hut, and his fear made me wary, but Irina went straight to the door and pushed it open without hesitation: it was only a thin panel of slats and straw woven over them, to keep out the wind, and it fell in onto the floor with a bang.