Flek and Tsop and Shofer had all vanished, mere servants’ work evidently beneath them now, but they’d arranged everything I needed before they went. Shofer had gone to order one of the other drivers to make the sleigh ready for my journey, and a crowd of other servants had been summoned, who obeyed me with a different kind of silence and swiftness, as though some word and whisper had already gone through the kingdom, and changed me in all their sight.
They brought me a gown of heavy white silk with a coat of white brocade embroidered in silver, and a high-necked collar of silver lace and clear jewels to go around my shoulders. They put the heavy golden crown above it all—mismatched at first, but I barely glanced at myself in the mirror and noticed, and gold shot suddenly down every line of silver all the way to the embroidered hem. Around me the women dropped their hands from the silk and their eyes from my face.
I would be far more mismatched at Basia’s wedding, a fantastical doll that someone had imagined unrestrained by cost or sense. But I didn’t tell them to bring another dress. I was bringing a Staryk king as a wedding guest, and hoping to kill him in the midst of the festivities; my clothes would be the least of it. And if I was lucky enough to escape this night with my life and dress intact, I’d sell it to some noblewoman to make a dowry for a real marriage. I didn’t believe silver would turn to gold for me in the sunlit world, but I’d still be a rich woman to the end of my days off the one ensemble.
So I held my head high under the weight of my crown and let the burden of it make me glide with stately pace to the front of the chamber. Tsop and Shofer had come back and were waiting there for me, each of them with a small box full of silver: mostly small pieces of jewelry, a cup or two, some scattered forks and knives and plates and loose coins filling in around them. They had changed their clothing, too, to garments of palest ivory. Tsop had put the gold buttons from her old clothes onto the new ones. The other servants bowed to them and looked at them sideways at the same time.
Then Flek came in, also in ivory and carrying a box of her own, and at her side a little girl followed, a Staryk girl. She was the first child I’d seen here, and even stranger to my eye than the grown Staryk were: she was as thin and reedy as an icicle and almost as translucent, and shades and veins of deep blue were visible beneath her skin, a thin clear layer of ice. Beside her the other Staryk looked like snowy hillsides, and she a frozen core that snow had yet to settle on. She looked up at me with silent wide curiosity.
“Open-Handed, this is my daughter, who now is your bondswoman, too,” Flek said softly, and touched her shoulder, and the little girl made me a careful leaning bow. She was carrying a small fine necklace of silver across her hands, a simple adornment she evidently hadn’t wanted to put into the box with the rest, and I reached down and touched it first of all.
Warm gold blushed through the whole length of it with the slightest push of my will, and the child gave a soft delighted tinkling sigh that made it feel more like magic than all the work I’d done in the treasury below. Slowly, I turned to Flek’s box and touched the top of the small pile of silver inside. Everything blazed into gold at once, the same quick and easy way, as if I’d somehow stretched the muscles of my gift to new lengths—as if now I could have gone and changed three storerooms packed full of silver into gold, without any trick involved. I changed Tsop’s silver and Shofer’s also; neither of them seemed surprised at how easily it went. I finished and then asked them, “Is it permissible to say thank you here, or is that rude somehow?”
“My lady, we would not refuse anything you wished to give us,” Tsop said a little helplessly, after they all three exchanged a look. “But we have always heard that in the sunlit world, mortals give thanks to one another to fill the hollowness where they fail to make return, and you have already given us so much that we shall only answer it with our lives’ service: you have given us names in your voice, and raised us high, and filled our hands with gold. What are your thanks besides that?”
When she put it that way—although I hadn’t thought of the names as a gift I was making them—I had to think about what I would have meant by saying thank you, instead of just the automatic politeness. I had to grope a while; I’d been jolted out of being sleepy, but I still felt dulled, as if my head had been padded with wool inside. “What I mean—what we mean by it is—it’s like credit,” I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. “Gifts, and thanks—we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go. So I do thank you,” I added abruptly, “because you risked all you had to help me, and even if you count the return fair, I’ll still remember the chance you took and be glad to do more for you if I can.”
They stared at me, and after a moment Flek reached out a hand and put it on her daughter’s head and said, “My lady, then I will ask, if you do not think it beyond what you owe: will you give my child her true name?” I must have looked as baffled as I felt; Flek lowered her eyes. “The one who sired her would not accept the burden when she was born, and left her nameless,” she said softly. “And if I ask him again now, he will agree, but he has the right to demand my hand in return, and I no longer wish to give it.”
I didn’t know what the laws among the Staryk were, about marriage, but I knew exactly what I thought of a man who’d sire a child and refuse to own it: I wouldn’t have wanted him, either. “Yes. How do I do it?” I asked, and after she told me, I held out my hand to the little girl, and she came with me to the far end of the balcony, and I bent down and whispered in her ear, “Your name is Rebekah bat Flek,” which I thought would certainly give any Staryk trying to guess it a significant degree of difficulty.
She brightened up all throughout her body, as if someone had lit a flame inside her. She ran back to her mother and said, “Mama, Mama, I have a name! I have a name! Can I tell you?” and Flek knelt and pulled her into her arms and kissed her and said, “Sleep with it in your heart alone tonight, little snowflake, and tell me in the morning.”
It made me glad looking on their joy: I felt in that moment that I had given fair return, even for that day and night of terror they had all lived with me, and if I never saw them again, I still hoped that they’d do well for themselves. I did feel a pang of guilt, because I didn’t know exactly what would happen if my plan succeeded and I left their king’s throne vacant for someone else to claim. Would that mean my own rank had fallen, and theirs with mine? But I hoped that would only put them in some lower rank of nobility at worst. I had to take the chance, anyway, for the sake of my own people, being buried alive under that endless snow outside my window.