“No,” he said, letting the coins run out of his hand to go clinking and jingling among the rest on the floor. “You have changed every coin in this first storeroom. Two storerooms yet remain.” He sounded almost polite about it, and he actually inclined his head to me, which surprised me enough that I only stared after him until he had gone out again. Then with a jerk I scrambled and slid down the golden heap to the door, and ran back upstairs to my own chambers.
But there on my bed I found the mirror he’d made me with sunrise climbing pink and gold inside it. I sat down on the bed with a hopeless thump and stared at it in my hand. I’d spent one whole night or nearly all of it just on the smallest chamber. I could hope to finish the second one, if I didn’t sleep again, but I’d barely be able to change a single coin in the third before my time ran out.
I thought of running away. I could get as far as the hut in the woods, maybe, but what good would that do me? I couldn’t get out of his kingdom. But I didn’t go back downstairs, either. Instead I rang the bell, and told Tsop and Flek to bring me breakfast, and I didn’t hurry over it. I sat resentfully eating platters full of fish and cold fruit as if I didn’t have a care in the world, much less an enormous silver sword hanging over my head. My husband’s politeness had made me even more certain that it was going to mean my death if I didn’t succeed, and Tsop and Flek even traded glances when they thought I wasn’t looking, as if they were wondering what I was doing. But why even try, if all I could do was leave a larger pile of gold behind for him to cut my head off over? Their law didn’t seem to allow for mistakes, and if you couldn’t make what you said true, they’d repair the fault in the world by putting you out of it.
I had been about to tip back another glass of wine—why not be drunk until the end, for that matter—but then I stopped abruptly and put it down again. I stood up and told Tsop and Flek, “Come down to the storerooms with me. And send for Shofer to meet us there. Tell him to get the biggest sledge in the stables, and I want him to bring it there.”
Tsop stared at me. “Into the storeroom?”
“Yes,” I said. “The river’s frozen now, after all. So tell him to just drive the whole way down from the grove until he gets there.”
The deer looked fairly dubious coming out of the tunnel and picking their way delicately between the vast hills of silver: he’d had to come and lead them by their heads. Flek and Tsop and Shofer looked even more dubious than that when I told them what I wanted them to do. I carefully didn’t ask them to do it, just told them. “But…where do you want us to take it?” Tsop said after a moment.
I pointed to the dark mouth of the river tunnel on the other side of the chamber. “Drive the sledge into there and dump it out. Make sure you leave enough room for all of it.”
“Just—leave it?” Flek said. “In the tunnel?”
“Is anyone going to steal it from there?” I asked coolly. They all flinched, and then hurriedly avoided even looking at me, in case I should read an answer in their faces. I didn’t actually care if it was safe. What I cared about was: I had promised to change every piece of silver within these three storerooms. So there had to be a lot less of it in here, very quickly. And if my husband didn’t like the new location of his money, he could move it back after I was done.
After a moment, Shofer silently took three sacks in each hand and tossed them into the sledge. The deer twitched their ears backwards at the thumps. After another moment, Flek and Tsop started helping him.
Once I saw they were really doing it, I turned and went back out into the second room and set to work with my dark cloth again. It was even more tedious than yesterday: I was sore and aching in every limb, and I wasn’t quite as exhausted, so it was more boring as well as more painful. But I kept dumping out one sack after another and changing them silver to gold, silver to gold, and shoving the golden pieces away into the empty aisles while I worked. I didn’t stop to eat or drink again; I’d hung the mirror on its chain around my neck, and the sun was brightening in it with now-alarming speed. There were six enormous racks holding countless chests of silver, and I hadn’t even finished one halfway before the golden brilliance of noon began to fade again. I’d just started the second rack when the first gleam of sunset began to glow orange out of the edge of the glass. The first of my three days was gone.
My husband appeared a few moments later, on his murderous clockwork schedule. He picked up a handful of golden pieces from the messy heap in the doorway and let them run out of his fingers as he looked around at my progress; he compressed his lips and shook his head, as if he was annoyed to see how much was left to do. “At what hour is the wedding?” he demanded of me.
I was concentrating hard—I’d found I could reliably manage the pieces two deep, if I worked at it—but the question interrupted me. I sat back with a huff of breath. “What I promised was to dance at their wedding, and the musicians will be going until midnight,” I said coldly. “I have until then.” For all my bravado, it didn’t feel like very much time: two nights left and two days, to dig my way through a mountain with a spoon.
“You have not finished here, and there is all the third storeroom yet to change,” he said—bitterly, when it was his fault for demanding the impossible in the first place. I was glad that the doors were shut, so he couldn’t see what was going on inside the last room of his treasury. “Well, you will change what you can, before you fail.” I glared at him. If I hadn’t had any prospect of succeeding, I certainly would have stopped even trying that instant.
He ignored my glares and only said coldly, “Ask your questions.”
I wanted time more than answers. I suppose I could have asked him what he would do to me if I didn’t succeed, but I didn’t much want to know, and have something more to fear in advance. “How can I make this go quicker, if you know of any way?” I asked. I didn’t have much hope of it, but he certainly knew more about magic than I did.
“You can only do it as quickly as you can,” he said, eyeing me almost suspiciously, as if the question were so ridiculous he couldn’t quite believe I’d asked it. “Why would I know, if you do not?”
I shook my head in frustration and rubbed the back of my hand across my forehead. “What’s past the edge of your kingdom? Where the light ends.”
“Darkness,” he said.
“I could see that much for myself!” I said with asperity.
“Then why do you ask?” he said, in equal answering irritation.
“Because I want to know what’s in the dark!” I said.
He made an impatient gesture. “My kingdom! My people and our deep strength, that makes the mountain strong. Through ages of your mortal lives we have raised high our shining walls, and together we have won this fastness from the dark, that we may ever dwell in winter. Do you think it is so lightly done, that you can wander blindly past the borders of my realm and find your way into another?” Then he looked around the room and the silver heap in downturned sourness. “Perhaps you now regret your mortal-hasty promise, and wonder where you might flee, from an oath broken in my kingdom? Do not imagine you will find some way into the dwarrowrealms, or that they would shelter you against retribution.”
He sneered it at me, as if I should have been ashamed to flee from him. Well, I would have made a dash for escape without the least hesitation, but I had no more notion how I would find these dwarrowrealms than I did the moon, and I was sure he was entirely right about the welcome I would receive from whoever lived there. But that left me without a question to ask him. I didn’t care about his customs or his kingdom anymore: one way or another, I was leaving it, and the only thing I wanted was to get on with my work. “Is there any use you can be to me at all in this?” I said.
He made an impatient gesture. “None I can see, and if there were, you have naught left to barter for my aid in any case,” he said. “You have pledged your gift too high in folly, and I have little hope you can redeem it.”
He turned and left me, and I looked at the poisonous mountains of silver around me, and thought he was very likely right.
Chapter 15