I took a deep breath. “I’m ready to go,” I said, and almost instantly the glass wall parted and my husband came in: my husband, whom I meant to murder. For just cause and more, but still I felt a little queasy, and I didn’t look him in his face. I’d avoided looking at him before because he’d seemed so terrible and strange, a glittering of icicles brought to life; now I avoided it because he looked suddenly too much like someone, like a person. I had held the hand of that frozen little ice-statue of a girl, and she was my goddaughter now or something close to it, and when I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer, their faces were warmed by the reflection off the gold in the chests at their feet, and they were the faces of my friends, my friends who had helped me, and would help me again if they could. What did it matter that they didn’t speak of kindness, here; they had done me a kindness with their hands. I knew which one of those I would choose.
But they made it suddenly harder to see only winter in his face. He wasn’t my friend; he was all monstrous sharp edges of ice, wanting to cut me open and spill gold out of me while he swallowed up my world. But he was a satisfied monster for the moment: I had cut myself open, and I’d filled him two storerooms of gold, and he had to match my accomplishment to fulfill his own sense of dignity, so he came to me dressed in splendor equal to my own, as if he meant to do courtesy to the occasion, and he bowed to me as courtly as if I really was his queen. “Come, then, my lady, and let us to the wedding,” he said, even suddenly polite to me, now when I most wanted him to be cold and grudging and resentful. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised: he’d never given me anything I wanted unless I’d bound him to it beforehand.
I looked at my friends one last time and inclined my head to them, saying farewell, and walked out beside him. We went down together to the courtyard. The sleigh was waiting, heaped with white furs without a mark. My dress and my crown were so heavy on me that I reached for the sides to haul myself up into it, but before I could, he took me by the waist and lifted me without effort inside before taking his own seat next to me.
The deer leapt away at the twitch of the driver’s reins, and the mountain went flashing away around us. The wind was strong and sweet in my face, not too cold, as we rushed down the passage to the silver gates and back out into the world, the sleigh runners whispering over the road and the hooves of the deer a light drumming. It was only a few minutes before we were running quick towards the forest. The deer and the sleigh flew over the top of the new-fallen snow without leaving more than light tracks, and the half-buried trees looked oddly small as we drove through them.
I watched to see what the Staryk would do, what spell or incantation he’d use to open a path to the sunlit world, but all he did was turn and look back at me in very nearly the same speculating way, as if he was wondering whether I might not fling out some unexpected magic. And then he said to me abruptly, “I will answer no questions for you tonight.”
“What?” My voice nearly cracked with alarm; for an instant I thought he’d guessed, he knew what I’d planned and we weren’t going to any wedding but to my execution. Then I understood what he really meant. “We have a bargain!”
“In exchange for your rights only. You have given me nothing in exchange for mine. I set no value upon them, and now see I bargained falsely—” He cut himself off abruptly, turning to face forward, and then he said slowly, “Is that why you demanded answers to fool’s questions as your return? To show your disdain for my insult?” He sat there for a moment of silence, and before I could correct him, suddenly he laughed, like a chorus full of bells singing a long way over snow, a baffling noise; I’d never even imagined him laughing. I stopped open-mouthed, half startled and half outraged, and then he turned and seized my hand and kissed it, the brush of his lips against my skin something like breathing out onto frostbitten glass.
He took me so much by surprise that I didn’t say anything at first, or even pull my hand free, and then he said to me fiercely, “I will make you amends tonight, my lady, and show you that I have learned better how to value you; I will not require another lesson beyond this one,” with a wave of his arm out of the sleigh, over the wide landscape smothered in the snow.
At first I looked in confusion, wondering what he meant, but there was nothing around us, nothing to be seen, except his depthless winter. A hundred years of winter that had somehow come all at once on a summer’s day, when the Staryk should have been shut up behind the glass walls of their mountain, waiting for the winter to come again. Though the Staryk had never before been able to hold back the spring so long.
A hundred years of winter, on a summer’s day. I said through a throat suddenly choked and tight, “You didn’t make this winter.”
“No, my lady,” he said, still looking at me with all the vast self-congratulation of a man who’d found a treasure hidden in a dirty trough. A treasure of gold, like the Staryk ever coveted; and when they’d begun to raid us more, when they’d begun to come for that gold more often—that was when the winters had begun to grow steadily worse. And now—and now—there were two vast storerooms heaped with shining, sunlit gold; the warmth of the summer sun trapped into cold metal for the Staryk to hoard deep inside his walls, while he buried my home under a wall of winter.
He smiled at me, still holding my hand; he smiled at me, and then turned to the driver and said, “Go!” and with a lurch we were onto the white road; the king’s road, Shofer had called it; the Staryk road I had known and glimpsed in the dark woods all my life. It was running on ahead of us as if it had always been there, and stretched away behind us too, as far as I could see, an endless vaulted passageway. The strange unearthly-white trees lined it on both sides, their limbs hung with clear ice-drops and white leaves, and the surface of it was smooth blue-white ice, clouded. The sleigh flew over it, and all at once a sudden strong smell of pine needles and sap came into my nose, a desperate struggling of life. Through the canopy of white branches overhead, the sky began to change: the grey flushed slowly through on one side with blue, and on the other with golden and orange, a summer evening’s sky over winter woods, and I knew that we’d slid out of his kingdom and back into my own world.
He was still holding my hand in his. I left it there deliberately, thinking of Judith singing in her sweet voice to make Holofernes’s eyes go heavy in his tent, and what else she’d endured there first. I could bear this. I was so angry I had gone cold straight through. Let him think he had me, and could have my heart for the lifting of his finger. Let him think I would betray my people and my home just to be a queen beside him. He could hold my hand the rest of the way if he wanted to, as a fair return for the gift he’d given me, the one thing I’d wanted from him after all: I’d lost even the slightest qualm about killing him.
Chapter 19
There were a few servants who went to the Jewish quarter sometimes: Galina’s maid Palmira, when her mistress wanted some jewelry, would go and look at their stalls. She had been too high to talk to me before with anything but impatience, when my lady was the little-wanted daughter of the wife who’d come before; all the dance that went on in the great ballrooms and bedrooms, we danced over again among ourselves in our narrow halls. But now I was servant to the tsarina, who valued me enough to have sent for me, so when I went knocking at the duchess’s dressing room, Palmira got up from where she sat polishing jewelry and came and kissed me on both cheeks, and asked me if I wasn’t tired from the journey, and had me sit in her own chair next to the wall that was on the other side of the fireplace in the bedroom; she sent the under-maid to bring a cup of tea. I sat gladly before the warm wall and drank the tea: oh, I was tired.