The courtesy confused me; I’d been pulling myself together to do battle with him. I stared at him blankly instead. I couldn’t think of a single question. After a moment, I said, “Do I have time to bathe?” I was a bedraggled mess, after three days and three nights more or less entire spent staggering around changing the silver.
“Make ready as you will. You shall have as much time as you require,” he said. It didn’t seem exactly an answer, but if he was that certain, I wouldn’t argue. “Ask twice more.”
I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer and said, “I promised to turn all their own silver to gold for them, in exchange for their help. They accepted, and made return of themselves. Are they my bondsmen now?”
“Yes,” he said, and inclined his head to them, as if he hadn’t the slightest trouble thinking of three servants as nobility, just like that. The three of them had a bit more difficulty with it; they all started to bob low curtseys, and had to stop themselves partway down, and when Flek came back up she seemed to suddenly realize we’d finished, it was all over, and she jerked like a doll and turned around and put her hands over her face with a stifled cry somewhere between agony and relief.
I would have liked to sit down and weep myself. “Do I have time to change their silver for them now?” I asked. I wasn’t planning to come back here if I could help it.
“That you have already asked and been answered,” he said. “Ask again.”
That was annoying, when for once I had been trying to use my questions up. “What does that mean?” I demanded. “Why is it the same whether I want to go take a bath or change their silver, too?”
He frowned at me. “As you have been true, so will I be, and in no lesser degree,” he said, a bit huffily. “I will lay my hand upon the flow of time, if need be, that you shall have however much of it you seek. Go therefore and make ready however you wish, and when you are ready to depart, we shall go.”
He paused to look around the storeroom once more, while I sluggishly puzzled through what he’d said, but by the time I burst out belatedly, “You could have taken me there in time, then, no matter what!” I was saying it to an empty doorway, which cared about as much as he would have, I suppose.
I was glaring at the space where he’d been when Tsop said a little timidly, “But he couldn’t have.”
“What?” I said.
Tsop moved her hand around the storeroom. “You have done a great working. So now he can do another in return. But high magic never comes without a price.”
“Why is it a great working that we shoved more than half his treasure into a tunnel?” I said, exasperated.
“You were challenged beyond the bounds of what could be done, and found a path to make it true,” Tsop said.
“Oh,” I said, and then I realized—“You answered me! Twice!”
“I am bondswoman to you now, Open-Handed,” she said, sounding a little taken aback. “You need not make me bargains.”
“So now you will answer my questions?” I said, trying to understand, and they all three nodded. All when I couldn’t think of anything to ask. Or rather, there were any number of questions I wanted to ask, but they seemed unwise to say out loud, even under the circumstances: how do you kill a Staryk king, what magic does he have, will he win if he fights a demon? Instead I said, “Well, if I have all the time in the world, now, I do want a bath. And then I will change your silver before I go.”
* * *
I wrote the letters to Prince Ulrich and Prince Casimir myself, but Mirnatius did sign them, and he even grudgingly took me down to his own table for dinner—after certain preparations. “You wore that two days ago,” Mirnatius said sharply, when I came out from the dressing alcove, and for a moment my heart stopped. I thought he had finally noticed my Staryk jewels, but then I realized he was complaining of my pale grey gown, the finest work of all my stepmother’s women, which yes, I meant to wear again, without even thinking about it. Not even archduchesses were rich enough to have a gown for every ordinary day.
But he evidently insisted on wearing an entirely new ensemble each and every single day, an extravagance so outrageous he must surely have been spending magic on his councillors just to keep them from howling every time they looked at his accounts. And apparently he now meant me to follow suit. “You should know more about the tax rolls,” I said, while he rummaged scowling through my entire bridal chest, evidently to prove to himself that I only—only—had three suitable gowns, all of which had already seen too much use to be acceptable for his tsarina.
He straightened up and glared at me, and then he abruptly put his hands on my shoulders, and beneath them my dress unfolded itself into green velvet and pale blue brocade like a gaudy butterfly fighting its way out of a grey cocoon, bannered sleeves unfurling all the way to the ground with a silver-tasseled thump. He was wearing pale blue himself, and a cloak lined in deep green, so we made a matched pair as we descended on the court. He was still far from content with my appearance. “At least your hair’s handsome,” he muttered, with a tone of dissatisfaction, looking down at the back of my intricately braided head; he plainly expected to be sniggered at for his choice.
I hadn’t been to Koron in four years, but I’d heard enough grumbles at my father’s table to know what to expect. Mirnatius had made the court his own mirror, as much as he could: of course many of the most powerful nobles of Lithvas kept houses in the city, and they were the most important, but the rest, the courtiers and hangers-on who were there by his sufferance, were one and all the beautiful and the glittering. Half the women were bare-shouldered and collarless, even with a foot of snow on the windowsills outside, and the men all wore silks and velvets as impractical for riding as his own, without the benefit of magic to keep them pristine or change them over again. They eyed one another like hungry wolves looking for something wrong, and I would have felt sorry for any girl Mirnatius had chosen to throw before them, no matter how beautiful.
But they grew less judgmental in the dazzle of Staryk silver. As we made our entrance, they looked me over with their narrowed eyes from all the corners of the room, and first they smirked, and then they looked again, and then they looked puzzled, and then they stared at me lost and half bewildered, and forgot that they had to make polite conversation. Some of the men looked at me like dragons, covetous, and they kept looking at me even when they were speaking to Mirnatius himself. After the fourth one tripped off the royal dais because he couldn’t stop staring, Mirnatius turned his own bewildered look at me. “Are you enchanting them?” he demanded, during a short break between courtesies; there were two callow young noblemen of precisely equal rank arguing violently with the herald over which one of them should be presented to me first.
I didn’t particularly want him thinking of what I might be using to make myself more beautiful. I leaned conspiratorially close. “My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died,” I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third—that fools should recognize neither.”
He flushed. “My court is full of fools,” he snapped. “So it seems she had it the wrong way round.”
I shrugged. “Well, even if I were, surely it’s no more than you’re doing. Witches always lose their looks at the end, don’t they, when their power begins to fade? I’ve always thought that’s how they looked all along, and they only covered it with spells.”