His eyes widened. “I am not covering anything!” But when he thought I was looking elsewhere, he surreptitiously touched his own face over with his fingertips, as if he feared an ugly troll hiding somewhere under the mask of his own beauty. It distracted him, at any rate.
“Which of these men is your relation?” I asked, to keep him so, and he irritably pointed out half a dozen cousins. They were mostly of the late tsar’s stamp: big and vigorously bearded with dirty boots and an air of having been grudgingly forced into their court elegance. They were all older than Mirnatius, of course; he’d been the son of his father’s second wife. But there was one pouting and rather splendid young man standing at the side of Mirnatius’s aunt, an old woman in lavish brocade drowsing by the fire. He was very evidently the cosseted child of her age, and if he wasn’t as beautiful as Mirnatius, at least he’d taken his tsar and cousin for a model when it came to dress, and he was tall and broad-shouldered. “Is he married?”
“Ilias? I haven’t the faintest idea,” Mirnatius said, but to give him a little credit, he stood up and took me over to present me to his aunt, who remedied our lack of knowledge very quickly.
“Who is your father?” she asked me loudly. “Erdivilas—Erdivilas—What? Oh, the Duke of Vysnia?” She peered at me a bit dubiously at that—not even an archduke?—but after a moment’s consideration she shook her head and told Mirnatius, “Well enough, well enough. It is high time you married. Perhaps next this one will give his old mother the joy of a wedding,” she added, poking the annoyed Ilias with a ring-encrusted knuckle.
Ilias bowed over my hand with remarkable coldness, despite my silver, which was quite obviously explained when he looked at Mirnatius next. Mirnatius was more interested in a critical examination of the wide panels of Ilias’s coat, which were embroidered with two peacocks with tiny glittering jeweled eyes. “A handsome design,” he told his cousin, who glowed with appreciation, and threw me another look of violent and miserable jealousy.
“He’d be loyal to you, at least,” I said, when we went back to our chairs. That wasn’t a recommendation to me, of course, but his shrewd-eyed mother was: every nobleman of real substance was stopping to pay her his respects, and half of the cousins Mirnatius had pointed out were her sons. Ilias might be unhappy to see Mirnatius fall, but she would be delighted to get her beloved son into Vassilia’s bed—however little he liked it there—and I thought she might well accept her son’s advancement as repayment for her nephew’s fall.
“Why do you imagine so?” Mirnatius said sourly. “No one here is loyal five minutes past their own interest.”
“He is interested,” I said dryly.
I thought he might be offended, but he only flicked his eyes heavenwards in impatience. “They’re all interested in that,” he sneered. It sounded odd to me, and after a moment I realized I’d heard the same thing many times before, but always in a woman’s mouth, and most often a servant’s: two of the younger maids talking as they polished the silver at the cabinet next to the back stairway, which was the easiest way for me to climb to the attic, or another chaperone speaking to Magreta at a ball, the mother of a prettier girl with a less powerful father. There was a resentment in it that didn’t fit with his crown: as if he’d felt the weight of hungry eyes on him and the sense of having to be wary.
But his mother had been executed for her sorcery when he was still young, and his brother had still been alive at the time, a promising young man by court opinion; I vaguely remembered him, a great deal more like those big burly men scattered around the room. Mirnatius would have been a court discard after that, the too-pretty son of a condemned witch—until a convenient wasting fever had carried his father and brother off from one day to the next, and made him the tsar instead. Perhaps he’d had more cause than simple greed to make his bargain, and hand himself over in exchange for his crown.
If so, I could feel a little sympathy for him after all, but only a little. His own father, his brother, too, and Archduke Dmitir: the demon hadn’t taken them for a mere snack. Mirnatius had deliberately bought their deaths, his crown, his comfort. And he’d bought them with all the nameless people he’d fed to the demon in the years since he’d let it crawl down his throat and take up residence inside his belly. I knew with cold certainty that I wasn’t the first meal he’d offered to that seething creature in the fireplace, whining of its endless thirst and hunger.
I rose from my chair while the dancing was still going. With the overcast sky, I couldn’t tell when exactly the sunset was coming. I didn’t want to be another of those meals, and I still didn’t have the demon’s agreement, even if Mirnatius had agreed to the plan. I didn’t particularly trust either of them. “I mean to go and meet with the household before bed—unless you mean to lock me up in our bedchamber yet again?” I said to him, making it sound as though I spoke of a childish folly.
“Yes, very well,” he said very shortly, distracted over his cup of wine. He was staring past me out the tall impractical windows of his ballroom: fresh snowflakes were gently drifting past their length, to add themselves to the frozen white ground.
In the kitchens, I ordered the slightly puzzled but obedient servants to make me a basket of food. I took it with me back into the presentation rooms and found one of them empty, a harp standing alone among velvet divans waiting for an occasion. In the gilt-edged mirror on the wall, I saw the low garden wall and the dark trees beyond, the same place I had left, and I stepped through to the little hut in the woods with my heavy basket on my arm.
It wasn’t snowing, at least for this one moment, but new snow had fallen since I’d gone, here just as in Lithvas: it was creeping up the sides of the house. My feet crunched alone on a thick layer of ice frozen atop the drifts. I stopped in the lonely yard at the edge of the twilight, where it cut the house in half, and on an impulse I took a piece of bread from the basket and crumbled it over the snow. Perhaps there were living things here, and it didn’t seem they would find much more to eat than the squirrels back in Lithvas.
Magreta was sleeping when I came in, deep wrinkles shadowed in her old face and silver lines in her hair. Her hands were lying idle in her lap for once, as if someone had taken her knitting away from her. The fire was very low, but the wood box was still full, at least. As I was adding another log and stirring up the fire, she muttered, “It’s still dark. Go back to sleep, Irinushka,” the way she did when I was a little girl and woke up too early in the morning and wanted to get out of bed. Then she woke up, and scolded me away from the fire, and insisted on herself putting on water to boil for tea, and cutting the cheese and ham. She never liked me to get too close to the fire, or to chance cutting myself with a knife.
I drowsed on the cot through the dark hours again, watching Magreta’s knitting needles move in the firelight the way I had used to as a child in the small room I grew up in, near the top of the house: cold in winter, stifling in summer. The cold of the Staryk kingdom crept into the hut the way it had slid like a knife around the windowsills and under the eaves of my father’s house. I still preferred it to the tsar’s palace.
Chapter 17