I did not let her out into the gardens again while we were in Koron, though her skin grew even more pale, and she listless and tired from sitting all day by the fire, helping me spin. With those skeins of yarn I bribed the girl who scrubbed our floor to tell me every day when the tsar left the tables: she knew from her sister, who was two years older and trusted to carry plates, and for finespun yarn she would carry away the tsar’s plate and then run up half the stairs quickly and call to her sister, who would run back up to us in the attic rooms, and only then I would take Irina down to eat, in the last minutes of cold food before the platters were taken away.
It was seven weeks like that, seven hard weeks, for the tsar came always very late to the table and lingered there very long; but every morning as we sat hungry and cold waiting upstairs, I brushed Irina’s hair until the serving-girl came and told us he had gone, and every evening I kept her busy carding the wool and giving it to me in clouds, until it was safe to creep downstairs for whatever was left to glean.
At last one morning, thin and white, she burst from the chair and ran to the window: a cold wind was blowing in, the first frost of the year, and she cried out, “Winter will be here soon, and I want to go outside,” and wept. My heart broke, but I was not a young girl anymore, afraid of being trapped behind a door forever. I knew the door was safety, I knew the door would not always be closed, and I did not let her out. That evening her father’s servant came, impatient after climbing the stairs because we were not at the tables for him to find us; he told us sharply the roads had frozen hard, so we would be going in the morning. I thanked the saints after he had gone.
The seven years of safety since then I had won for her, with those seven hard weeks of patience: that was not nothing. But they felt as nothing when I saw him look at her with eyes as hard as stone. Seven years were gone, gone so quickly, and I could not close a door against him anymore. Someone stronger than I had pulled it open. He held out his gloved hand, and she let go of my arm; she murmured to me, “Go in the sledge there with the guards, Magra. They’ll look after you.”
They were young men, soldiers, but she was right anyway; I was an old woman, white-haired, and my lady was their own tsarina now. Those rough boys helped me into the sledge, and put blankets over me and a warmer at my feet, and called me baba kindly, and old nanusha, and paid no attention to me otherwise; they were talking to each other about good places to drink in Vysnia, and grumbling because the duke’s kitchens were not generous, and when they thought I was drowsing they talked of this girl and that.
They prodded and jostled one of them, a strapping young fellow with a mustache, handsome enough that he should have had girls sighing for him, and who did not speak of anyone, until another one laughed and said, “Ah, leave Timur alone, I know where his heart is: in the tsarina’s jewel-box.” They all laughed, but only a little, and they did not keep teasing him; when I sat up and yawned to let them believe I had really been asleep, I saw him, eyes wounded as if he had been caught by an arrow. He was looking ahead past the driver, at the white sleigh in the distance running, and I, too, could see Irina’s dark hair beneath the white fur of her hat.
* * *
Mirnatius did not speak to me more than he needed to on the journey, his face as close to sour as expression could make it. “Please yourself,” he’d said shortly, when I told him we should leave for Vysnia at once. “And when precisely is this Staryk going to materialize? There isn’t an infinite store of patience to be had, as I trust you realize.”
“Tomorrow night, in Vysnia,” I said.
He grimaced, but didn’t argue. In the sleigh he put me beside him on the seat and looked elsewhere, except when we stopped at another nobleman’s house to break our journey. The household came out and bowed to us, and Prince Gabrielius himself, proud and white-haired. He had fought alongside the old tsar, and he’d had a granddaughter in the running for tsarina, too, so he had ample cause for the cold offended resentment in his face when I was first presented to him, but it faded out as he stood too long with my hand clasped in his, staring at me, and then he said in low tones, “My lady,” and bowed too deeply.
Mirnatius spent all dinner looking at me with angry desperation, as if it was near driving him mad wondering what the rest of the world saw in me. “No, we’re not staying the night,” he said with savage rudeness to the prince afterwards, all but dragging me away to the sleigh in what I suppose looked like a jealous ferment. He threw himself into the corner violently, his jaw clenched, and snapped at the driver to get the horses moving, and as we went he darted quick, half-unwilling glances at me, as if he thought maybe he could surprise my mysterious beauty and catch it unawares before it fled his eyes.
Not quite an hour passed, and then he abruptly called a halt mid-forest and ordered a footman to bring him a drawing-box: a beautiful confection of inlaid wood and gold that folded into a sort of small easel, and a book of fine paper inside. He waved the sleigh onward and opened it. I caught glimpses from within as he turned the pages, designs and patterns and faces glancing back out at me, some of them beautiful and familiar from the dazzle of his court, but on one page a brief flicker of another face went by, strange and terrible. Not even a face, I thought after it had vanished; it was formed only roughly with a few shadows here and there, like wisps of smoke, but that was enough to leave the suggestion of horror.
He stopped at a blank page, near the end. “Sit up and look at me,” he said sharply, and I obeyed without arguing, a little curious myself; I wondered if the magic would hold, when men looked at a picture of me. He drew with a swift sure hand, looking more at me than at his paper. Even while we glided onward, my face took shape quickly on his page, and when he finished, he stared at it and then tore it out with a furious jerk and held it out to me. “What do they see?” he demanded.
I took it and saw myself for the first time with my crown. More myself on the page in his few lines, it seemed to me, than I had ever seen in a mirror. He hadn’t been unkind, though utterly without flattery, and he had put me together somehow out of pieces: a thin mouth and a thin face, my thick brows and my father’s hatchet nose only not twice broken, and my eyes one of them a little higher than the other. My necklace was a scribble in the hollow of my throat and my crown on my head and the thick doubled braid of my hair resting on my shoulder, a suggestion of weight and luster in the strokes. It was an ordinary unbeautiful face, but it was certainly mine and no other’s, though there were only a handful of lines on the page.
“Me,” I said, and offered it back to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was watching me, and the sun going down was red in his eyes, and as it lowered, he leaned in and said to me in a voice of smoke, “Yes, Irina; you they see, sweet and cold as ice,” caressing and horrible. “Will you keep your promise? Bring me the winter king, and I will make you a summer queen.”
My hands closed, crumpling the paper, and I steadied my voice before I spoke. “I will take you to the Staryk king, and put him in your power,” I said. “And you will swear to leave me be, after, and all those I love as well.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the demon said, sounding almost impatient. “You will have beauty and power and wealth, all three; a golden crown and a castle high; I will give you all you desire, only bring him soon to me…”
“I don’t want your promises or gifts, and I have a crown and a castle already,” I said. “I’ll bring him to you to break the winter, for Lithvas, but my desires I’ll manage on my own once you’ve left me and mine alone.”
He didn’t like it. That glimpse from the notebook, the shadow of horror, looked out of Mirnatius’s face at me scowling, and I had a struggle not to flinch back. “But what will you have, what will I give you in return,” he said, complainingly. “Will you take youth forever, or a flame of magic in your hand? The power to cloud the minds of men and bend them to your will?”