“No, and no, and no again,” I said. “I’ll take nothing. Do you refuse?”
He made a spiteful hissing noise and curled himself up unnaturally in the seat of the sleigh, drawing Mirnatius’s legs up and wrapping his arms over them, his head swaying back and forth, like a fire clinging around a log. He muttered, “But she will bring him…she will bring him to me…” and he glared at me again, red-eyed, and hissed, “Agreed! Agreed! But if you bring him not, a feast still I will have, of you and all your loves.”
“Threaten me again, and I’ll go and take them all to live with me in the Staryk lands,” I said, a show of purest bravado, “and you can hunger alone in a winter without an end, until your food vanishes and your fire dwindles to embers and ash. Tomorrow night you will have your Staryk king. Now leave until then. I care for your company even less than his, and that’s saying a great deal.”
It hissed at me, but I’d struck on some threat it didn’t care for, or else it didn’t like my company, either; it shrank back into Mirnatius like a spark dying out, the red gleam gone, and he sank back gasping against the cushions with his eyes shut until he caught his breath. When he had it again, he turned his head to stare at me. “You refused him,” he said to me, almost angrily.
“I’m not a fool, to take gifts from monsters,” I said. “Where do you think its power comes from? Nothing like that comes without a price.”
He laughed, a little shrill and sharp. “Yes, the trick is to have someone else pay it for you,” he said, and shouted ahead to the driver, “Koshik! Find us a house to stop for the night!” and sank back again with his hand over his face.
He hadn’t thought the situation through well enough when rushing us back onto the road, and neither had I, while I was making my grandiose speeches to his demon. The only shelter to be found was a modest boyar’s house, nothing so grand as if we’d stayed with Prince Gabrielius. Naturally the boyar gave up his own bedroom to the tsar and tsarina, and a well-curtained bed in it, but everyone else was crammed in only with difficulty. It was bitterly cold again, enough that all the horses and livestock had to be gotten under cover; no one could sleep outside at all, and there was little enough room in the stables. It meant a few servants had to sleep on the floor in our room, so I couldn’t take flight, and though the demon wasn’t there, my husband still was.
My wedding night had been so long a thing of hideous and unnatural dread that I’d forgotten to be alarmed by the ordinary horror of having to lie down with a stranger. I told myself with relief that at least he didn’t want me, no matter how unpleasant it would be even just to lie in a bed together. When the servants began to undress him, and he noticed I was still there, he also looked over at the bed in a kind of blank resignation. And then, after the candles were put out and we were lying stiffly beside each other with the bedcurtains drawn around us, the winter chill still creeping in around them despite the wooden walls and the fire in the grate, he heaved out an angry breath and turned over towards me, with his mouth tight as a prisoner going to the block.
I stopped him with my hands on his chest, staring at him in the dim rose light with my heart thundering suddenly fast. “Well, my beloved wife?” he said bitterly, and too loud, a mockery of tenderness performed for our audience, and I realized he meant to have me after all. I couldn’t think; I was as blank as a page. There were four servants outside listening: if I said no, if I said not yet, if they heard me—and then his hand bunched my gown and drew the thin fine linen of it up over my thighs, and his fingers trailed over my skin.
It made me jump, an involuntary shiver, and my cheeks went painfully red and hot. Then I said too loudly, “Oh, beloved,” and put my hands on his chest and shoved him back from me, as hard as I could.
He wasn’t expecting it, and he was only propped up in the bed on his arms, so he fell over; he pushed himself up with a half-outraged expression, for all he’d been doing it as a man condemned, and I leaned in and whispered fiercely, “Bounce the bed!”
He stared at me. I moved on the bed myself, enough to make the old wood groan audibly, to demonstrate, and with a half-bewildered look he joined me, until I gave another small cry for the benefit of our audience, and he abruptly seized a pillow and thrust his face into it and began shaking with a laughter so violent I thought for a moment he’d been possessed again into a fit.
And then suddenly he was weeping instead, so stifled I didn’t hear a sound even there behind the curtains with him; only when he had to break away just long enough to snatch one breath between agonies. If they had heard him out in the room, there would have been nothing to make them doubt our theater; he only made the small gasps, all other sound silenced.
I sat there wooden as a doll; I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to feel anything, and at first I only resented it, that he had the bad taste to weep in front of me as if he had the right to expect me to care, but I’d never heard anyone weep so. I had been afraid, and I had been hurt, and I had sorrowed, but I didn’t have cries like that inside me. He would have filled me with them, if he’d fed me to his demon. As he was being devoured himself, perhaps.
His own fault, I would have said, and I did say to myself, fiercely, over and over, as I sat there with his body softening beside me like melting snow as he sank into the limp quietness of exhaustion. But I still felt sorry for him, even though I didn’t want to, as if he was conjuring sympathy out of me. I sat with my knees drawn up under my shift and my arms wrapped around them tight, trying to hold it in, until I thought maybe he was asleep. I risked a look over his shoulder: his eyes were open and dull, but the bloodshot red was fading out of them already, and he closed them and turned his face a little farther into the pillow.
Chapter 18
I was afraid that Stepon and Miryem’s mother would have a hard time walking, after we left the house, with all the snow. But the snow had frozen hard, and we stayed on top of it. Only Sergey fell through, twice, and we beat the snow off his clothes so it didn’t melt and make him cold. And it was not for a long time. We were walking for only half an hour maybe, even with him falling through the snow, when suddenly Sergey said, “I think I see the road,” and he was right. We came out of the trees and there was the river, frozen hard, and the road next to it, with sleigh tracks already in the snow.