And with that payment, she would buy us more than spring. She would buy us spring, and summer, and winter, too; a winter where no Staryk road would gleam between the trees and no white-cloaked raiders would come out to steal our gold. Instead our woodsmen and our hunters and our farmers would go into the forest, with axes and traps for the white-furred animals. She’d buy us the forest and the frozen river, and it would all go to crops and timber, and in ten years Lithvas would be a rich kingdom instead of a small, poor one, while somewhere in a dark room far below, Chernobog crunched up the Staryk children in his teeth one bite at a time, to keep all the rest of us warm.
I went back to my grandfather’s house. My mother was waiting for me anxiously outside, sitting on the steps, as if she hadn’t been able to bear having me out of her sight. I went and sat beside her, and she put her arms around me and kissed my forehead and held my head against her shoulder, stroking her hand over my hair. There were many other people going in and out of the house around us: wedding guests leaving with ordinary smiling faces. They were already forgetting a night of dancing under white trees, with all winter and a burning shadow coming into the house among us.
Only my grandfather remembered a little. I’d crept down from the bedroom that morning, leaving my parents asleep, to take a cup of tea and a crust of bread in the kitchen, bewildered and trying to fill the cold hollow inside me. It was still early, and only a couple of servants had been stirring in the house, beginning to put food out on the tables for the guests who would soon be waking up. But after a little while, one of them came and told me my grandfather wanted me. I’d gone up to his study. He was standing by the window frowning out at spring, and he looked me in the face and said abruptly, “Well, Miryem?” the same way he did when I came to show him my books. He was asking if they were clean and balanced, and I had found I couldn’t answer him.
So I’d gone to the duke’s palace, and now I’d come back with no better answer than when I’d gone. It should have been easy. The Staryk himself had told me yes: he’d bowed to me without hatred or even reproach, as though I had the right to do just as he’d done, and set fire to his kingdom for trying to bury mine in ice. And maybe I did, but I wasn’t a Staryk myself. I’d said thank you to Flek and Tsop and Shofer, and I’d named that little girl I didn’t want to think about. She had a claim on me, surely, if no one else in that kingdom did.
“We’ll go home tomorrow,” my mother said softly into my hair. “We’ll go home, Miryem.” It was all I’d wanted, the only hope I’d had to give me courage, but I couldn’t imagine it anymore. It seemed as unreal to me as a mountain of glass and a silver road. Would I really go back to my narrow town and feed my chickens and my goats, with the scowls of the people I’d saved on my back every day? They didn’t have a right to hate me, but they would anyway. The Staryk was a tale for a winter’s night. I was their monster, the one they could see and understand and imagine tearing down. They wouldn’t believe I’d done anything to help them even if they heard a story of it.
And they were right, because I hadn’t done it for them at all. Irina had saved them, and they’d love her for it. I’d done it for myself, and for my parents, and for these people: for my grandfather, for Basia, for my second cousin Ilena coming down the stairs and kissing us on our cheeks before she climbed into the waiting cart to set off for her own home in another narrow village where she lived with seven other houses around hers and every village around them hating them all. I’d done it for the men and women going by in the street in front of my grandfather’s house. Lithvas didn’t mean home to me; it was just the water we lived beside, my people huddled together on the riverbanks, and sometimes the wave came rolling up the slope and dragged some of us down into the depths for the fish to devour.
I didn’t have a country to do it for. I only had people, so what about those people: what about Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, whose lives I’d bound to mine, and a little girl I’d given a Jewish name like a gift, before I’d gone away to destroy her home?
But I’d already done it, and it seemed past my power to undo. I wasn’t anyone here that mattered. I was just a girl, a moneylender from a small town with a little gold in the bank, and what had once seemed a fortune to me now looked like a scant handful of coins, not even a single chest out of my Staryk king’s storeroom. I’d picked up a silver fork that morning and held it in my hand, not sure what I wanted to happen. But what I wanted didn’t matter. Nothing happened. The fork stayed silver, and whatever magic I had was back in that winter kingdom I would never see again. A kingdom that would fade away forever soon, beneath that same rolling wave. And I had nothing left to say about it.
So I went inside with my mother. In our bedroom we made a parcel of the few things my parents had brought from home, and then we went downstairs to help: there were still so many people in the house, people I’d never met, but who were still my family and friends, and there was cooking to be done and dishes to be washed, tables to be laid and cleaned again, children to be fed and crying babies to be held. A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly. I wanted to stop my ears and my eyes and my mouth with it. I could worry about this, whether there was enough food, whether the bread was rising well, whether the beef had cooked long enough, whether there were enough chairs at the table; I could do something about these things.
No one was surprised to see me. No one asked me where I’d been. They all kissed me when they saw me for the first time and told me I’d gotten so tall, and some of them asked me when they’d be dancing at my wedding. They were happy that I was there, and happy I was helping, but at the same time I didn’t really matter. I could have been any of my cousins. There wasn’t anything special about me, and I was glad, so glad, to be ordinary again.
I finally sat down at the tables to fill my own plate, tired out at last with carrying and cooking, tired enough not to think. Guests were leaving as the meal wound to a close, already saying goodbye and flowing out the door. I was still deep underwater, a fish in a school, indistinguishable. But then suddenly the flow was checked. People cleared out of the doorway, and a footman came into it in the livery of the tsar, red and gold and black, and looked around us down his nose with the faint disdain of borrowed superiority.
And when he came in, I stood up. It wasn’t my place, it wasn’t the place of an unmarried girl in my grandfather’s house, but I stood and said to him sharply from across the table, “What are you here for?”
He paused and looked at me and frowned, and then he said, very coolly, “I have a letter for Wanda Vitkus: are you she?”
All that afternoon, Wanda had been swimming alongside me in that crowd of women; she had carried heavy stacks of plates and brought large buckets of water, and we’d barely talked, but we’d looked at each other and we’d been together in the work, the safe and simple work. She was standing in the back of the room, just inside the kitchen, and after a moment she came forward, wiping her wet red hands in her apron, and the footman turned and gave her the letter into her hands: a thick folded sheet of heavy parchment sealed with a great lump of smoke-blackened red wax, with a few runny drops like blood that had trickled away before it hardened.