Not much work was required to uncover the stones and the trapdoor; as soon as we had cleared it off, Irina knocked on it, and a moment later it was swung down and open, and I saw my father-in-law’s face swimming up out of the dark below. He nodded to Irina, and made room for us to bring the Staryk down. He’d been busy to some purpose himself: he’d pickaxed out a round channel in the floor, among the stones, and he’d filled it up with coals. There was another ring of candles burning down around the channel as a second row of fortifications, and more stacked up in a wheelbarrow waiting against the wall to replenish the supply. Everything so very tidily organized.
Timur pulled the Staryk on his leash into the ring of coals, and then climbed back over and tossed the rope back to pool at his feet. The Staryk ignored it; he stood in the circle looking out at us with his cold gleaming icicle of a face, his head high and proud even with the silver chain still wrapped around him, impossibly strange: that was winter we had locked up in the cellar there among us. He didn’t entirely seem a living creature. There was something odd in his face that didn’t stay the same whenever you looked at him twice, as if his edges were constantly melting and re-formed. He wasn’t beautiful, he was terrifying; and then he was beautiful, and then he was both, and I couldn’t decide from one moment to the next which it was.
It made something in my head itch; I would have liked to draw him, to catch him with pen and ink, and not just fire and silver. I looked over at Irina there in the dark pit: some of his cold blue light was reflecting on her face, on her silver crown and the red rubies of her silver gown, and it occurred to me that this was what they saw when they looked at her: they saw her like a Staryk, but close enough to mortal to be touched.
Inside, Chernobog stirred and gave a small internal belch, nothing I’d ever felt before and gruesomely unpleasant, and lashed me a little; I gritted my teeth and flicked my fingers at the circle of coals, and set it glowing red with flame. Timur flinched back from it. The Staryk didn’t quite flinch, but I got the impression he would have rather liked to, if that weren’t far beyond his dignity. I repressed the urge to tell him to enjoy flinching as much as he wanted to. Chernobog never took much notice of anyone’s dignity or lack thereof so far as I’d ever seen. It pleased itself either way.
“Shall we be off?” I said to Irina. “I’m sorry to forsake the manifest charms of this place, but we do have another wedding to attend tomorrow, I believe? A busy season for them.”
Irina turned away from the Staryk. “Yes,” she said somberly. She didn’t seem particularly happy with the final outcome of her excellently laid plans, although as far as I could tell they’d gone off without a hitch. Unless of course there had been a corollary to them she hadn’t shared with me—for instance, one where I had been left tucked safely in the fireplace forever, perhaps chained in gold and ringed with ice; that seemed the poetic mirror. Yes, the more I thought of it, the more I was certain something like that had been on the agenda. Ha, how silly of me—had been. That knife in the back was still very much on its way.
“A trusted man?” the duke said to Irina, gesturing at Timur. She nodded. “Good. He will come up with me and help to cover the door again, and keep guard. Walk straight down the tunnel. Take no turns. It crosses a few old sewers along the way.”
That rather nicely conveyed the prospective scenic quality of our walk. I smiled at Irina with every last ounce of the sincere affection that was blooming in my heart for her, and put out my arm formally. She looked at me, once more dull and expressionless as glass, and set her hand on the curve of my arm. We left the Staryk standing silently and alone behind us in his bonds of flame and silver, and set off together down a stinking impenetrable-dark rat tunnel full of squeaks and dangling-maggot tree roots. I cupped a fire in my hand while we walked, red light dancing over the earthen walls.
“What a convenient bolt-hole this is,” I said. “Shall I keep it in mind if your father ever rebels against the crown? I suppose that’s hardly likely anymore—or is it?” She only looked at me. “I suppose you think I’m an idiot,” I snapped at her. Her silence was more infuriating than her lectures. I hadn’t asked for any of this: I hadn’t wanted to marry her, I hadn’t wanted to help her survive, I hadn’t wanted to be smashed like eggshells for her sake. Chernobog was sitting in my belly like swallowed coals, a thick sated presence, pleased with itself—and her, too, no doubt. I couldn’t even shove her into one of these dark tunnels and run away, leaving her behind.
“Are you all right?” she asked me abruptly.
I laughed; it was so absurd. “What’s a little agony and mortal injury here and there,” I jeered at her. “Really, I don’t mind. I’m delighted to be of service anytime. Hm, delighted—do I mean that, or is there another word for it? I’ll have to give it some thought. What exactly do you expect from me? Should I be grateful to you?”
She paused. After a moment, she said, “The winter will break. Lithvas will—”
“Shut up about Lithvas,” I spat at her. “Are we playacting for the worms now, or is this something you do to keep your hand in for public appearances? As though Lithvas means anything but the lines where the last round of people finished killing each other. What do I care about Lithvas? The nobles would gladly slit my throat, the peasants don’t know who rules them, the dirt doesn’t care, and I don’t owe a thing to any of them or you. I can’t stop you dancing me around the chessboard, but I’m not going to thank you humbly for permitting me to be useful to you, my lady, like that groveling monkey up there. Stop trying to pretend you wouldn’t have been delighted to leave me there in bloody pieces on the floor. Don’t you have the next tsar waiting in the wings? It seems like the sort of thing you’d have ready just in case.”
She fell blessedly silent for a while, but not long enough to suit me. We reached the end of the tunnel and came through an archway cut into a wall of stone: it let us into a small dark cramped closet of a room, with a cleverly designed bit of the wall that swung out into the wine cellars. When we came out and I pushed it shut again, you could hardly even have told that the place was there. I ran my fingers over the bricks and could barely find the edges, and that only because the mortar was missing. Chernobog hummed drowsily in satisfaction: it would go tomorrow, it would feast again…
I turned and found Irina looking at me in the dark; I’d closed my hand on the flame, and there was only a little bit of lamplight shining off the stairs, reflected in the solid black pools of her eyes, to show her face to me.
“You don’t care about any of it,” she said. “And yet you bargained to be tsar anyway, in your brother’s place—”
It was very much like having a monster crush your ribs straight into your heart. Oh, how I hated her. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t have liked Karolis very much, darling girl,” I said, through my teeth. “Who do you think taught me to kill squirrels? No one else had a minute for the witch’s get, until he was—”
I stopped; I still couldn’t be clever about it. Not about that. Chernobog even stirred a bit and put out its tongue through my head, lazily lapping up the unexpected delicious treat of my pain. How nice to know I could still give satisfaction, even when it was so well-fed.
She was staring at me. “You loved him. And you bargained anyway?”
“Oh, no,” I said, thick with rage. “I’ve never had the chance to bargain for a thing. You see, my mother wasn’t as lucky as you, sweet Irina. She didn’t already have a crown, and she didn’t have magical beauty, and she didn’t have a Staryk king to buy them with. So instead she paid for them with a promissory note, and the ink on my contract was dry before I even came wet out of the womb.”
* * *