I’d agreed with Miryem, on the other side: we needed to bring the Staryk king here, and not the other way. On this side of the mirror, I had my father’s name and power at my back, and a tsarina’s crown on my head. If we were lucky, and our two monsters destroyed each other, most likely even Mirnatius’s soldiers would listen to me at first, for lack of anyone else to obey, and my father had two thousand men of his own to stand behind me. He still wouldn’t care what I wanted any more than he ever had, but we would want the same thing, then: to preserve my neck.
I didn’t share those details of my planning with Mirnatius. I only told him a little more, of how the Staryk were stretching the winter to strengthen their own kingdom. “Your demon wants me for my Staryk blood,” I finished. “How much more would it like a pure-blood Staryk, and their king? If it agrees, I’ll bring him to you, and you can save your kingdom and feed your demon all at once.”
“And why precisely should I believe you?”
“Why do you think I keep coming back? It should be clear to you by now that I don’t have to, and that you can’t stop me from going, either. Do you really think piling still more guards on me will do any better? If it would, why would I take the risk?”
He flicked his fingers out long and dismissive into the air. “I have no idea why you would do any of this anyway! Why do you care if the Staryk freeze the kingdom? You’re nearly one of them.”
It was a good question: Magreta had asked it, too. I hadn’t had an answer for her. “The squirrels will starve, too, when the trees die,” I said.
“Squirrels!” He glared at me, but though I’d meant to say it flippantly, the words felt strangely true when they came out of my mouth.
“Yes, squirrels,” I said, and meant it. “And peasants, and children, and old women, and all the people you don’t even see because they’re useless to you, all those who’ll die before you and your soldiers do.” I didn’t know what I was feeling, that made those words come. Angry, I think. I didn’t remember ever being angry before. Anger had always seemed pointless to me, a dog circling after its own tail. What good was it to be angry at my father, or my stepmother, or angry at the servants who were rude to me? People were angry at the weather sometimes, too, or when they stubbed their toe on a stone or cut their hand on a knife, as if it had done it to them on purpose. It had all seemed equally useless to me. Anger was a fire in a grate, and I’d never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed.
Mirnatius was scowling at me exactly as petulantly as he had in the garden seven years ago, when I’d told him to leave the dead squirrels alone. How dare I think they were worth anything next to his pleasure? It made me still more angry, and my voice sharpened. “Do you really care what my reasons are? You’re no worse off than you are now if I’m lying.”
“I might be, if you’re not telling me all the truth, and you aren’t,” he shot back. “You still haven’t told me how you vanish, or where you go—or where you’ve stashed away that old crone of yours. And you certainly aren’t being forthcoming about the details of how you’re going to provide this Staryk lord.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would I trust you? You’ve done nothing since we exchanged vows but try to stuff me down your demon’s gullet.”
“As though I had any say in it. Do you really think I wanted to marry you? He wanted you, so off to the altar I went.”
“And my father wanted me on a throne, so off to the altar I went. You can’t excuse yourself to me by pleading that you were forced to it.”
“What, you didn’t do it all on purpose to save the squirrels and mud-stained peasantry?” he sneered, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and after a moment he said, “Fine. Tonight I’ll ask him if he’ll take a Staryk king, and leave you be in exchange.”
“Good. And in the meantime,” I added, “you’ll write to your dukes and command them all to come and celebrate our wedding with us. And when you write to Prince Ulrich, you’ll make sure to tell him I insist on seeing my dear friend Vassilia. When she comes, I’ll make her my chief lady-in-waiting.”
He frowned at me. “What does that have to do with—”
“We can’t let her marry Casimir,” I reminded him, a little impatient; we’d even spoken of this already.
“If Casimir and Ulrich want to steal my throne, do you think they’ll care that his daughter’s your lady-in-waiting?” he demanded.
“They’ll care that they haven’t a blood tie to bind them together,” I said. “And all the better if there’s one that binds Ulrich to you, instead. We’ll marry her off as soon as she arrives. Do you have any suitable relatives at court—someone young and handsome, if possible? Never mind,” I added, seeing his blankness. He had two aunts, and I knew they’d produced a dozen offspring. I hadn’t met all of them to remember, but at least one of them would hopefully be unmarried or a convenient widower. “I’ll look for someone. You need to present me to the court today anyway.”
“And why, exactly? I assure you that you won’t enjoy the experience. My court has quite an elevated standard of beauty.”
It was plain he hadn’t expected me to last long enough to be presented. Perhaps he still didn’t. “I’m your tsarina, so they’ll have to get used to my deficiencies,” I said. “We need to quash any rumors before they begin. The servants must already have it all over the castle that I vanished during the night, and we can’t afford whispers. The crops are going to be bad this year, even if we do manage to stop the winter. And you’ve already made a great many of your nobles angry.”
He wanted to keep protesting, I could see it, but he glanced uneasily at the snow heaped on the balcony, and said nothing. He wasn’t stupid, after all; only as far as I could tell, he’d never given a moment’s thought to politics. I imagine that all he’d ever wanted were the trappings of rule, the wealth and luxury and beauty, and none of the work of it: he wasn’t ambitious at all.
Of course, if he had ever thought about politics, he’d be asking the far more important question of whom we were going to have Casimir marry. And the answer to that was me—as soon as Mirnatius and his demon had either been frozen solid or burned at the stake or at least exposed to the entire court and forced to flee, and I’d been granted an annulment of my thoroughly unconsummated marriage.
I didn’t particularly like Prince Casimir. He’d come to stay at my father’s house once, and I’d been beneath his notice at the time, so he hadn’t been on his best behavior. He’d made a serving-girl sit upon his lap and smile for him as if she liked it when he squeezed her breast and slapped her rear; but when he’d left three days later, she’d had a necklace of gold she couldn’t have bought on her wages, so at least he’d given her some return for it. He was nearly my father’s age, and a man who lived almost entirely on the surface. But he wasn’t a fool, or cruel. And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.
I’d weave a net out of us to hold all Lithvas. Casimir married to me and on the throne would satisfy him. Vassilia married to a nephew of the late tsar would at least balk Ulrich, and I’d put a whisper in his ear that it would be just as well for my dear friend to start having her children at the same time as I had mine, and promise him a grandchild on the throne after all. That would satisfy him and Mirnatius’s kindred both. All I needed to arrange it was a space where Mirnatius now stood, and conveniently, he’d put himself on top of a trapdoor going directly to the bowels of Hell, if I could only find the way to unlatch it.
But first, I needed his demon to kill a Staryk king for me, or there wouldn’t be any Lithvas to save. I stood up from the divan and paused, frowning slightly, as if I were having a fresh idea. “Wait,” I added abruptly. “We should go back to my father’s house for the celebration. When you write to the princes and archdukes, tell them to come to Vysnia instead of here.”
“Why should—oh, never mind,” he muttered, throwing his hand up in the air, graceful as a bird taking flight, his lace cuff its long feathered tail. I was gratified; I’d had a few excuses ready, but they were a bit thin, and all the better if I didn’t have to use them. I didn’t mean to tell him in advance that the Staryk king would hopefully be in Vysnia in three days’ time himself, to be a guest at a different celebration.
* * *