He flinched back from me, and straightened glittering and said coldly, “No, lady. I will not give you that promise.”
I stared at him. I’d thought out my questions carefully, all that way in the dark. One to make him end the winter, one to make him leave me be, one to make him promise to stop the raiding forevermore. I had as good a bargaining position as I could have. It hadn’t even occurred to me as a chance to consider that even now—he was bound, bound to his death, to all their deaths, and he still wouldn’t—“So you want us all dead so badly,” I choked out, in horror, “even more than you want to save your own people—you hate us so that you would rather die here, feasted on—”
“To save my people?” he said, his voice rising. “Do you think I have spent my strength, spent the treasure of my kingdom to the last coin, and given my hand to as I thought an unworthy mortal,” and even angry, he paused and inclined his head to me as if in fresh apology, “for any lesser cause than that?”
I stopped talking. My throat had closed on words. He glared at me and added bitterly, “And after all this that I have done, now you come and ask me a coward’s question, if I will buy my life, with a promise to stand aside and let him take them all instead? Never,” and he was snarling it, hurling the words at my head like stones. “I will hold against him as long as my strength lasts, and when it fails, when I can no longer hold the mountain against his flames, at least my people will know that I have gone before them, and held their names in my heart until the end.” He shook his head savagely. “And you speak to me of hate. It was your people who chose this vengeance against us! It was you who crowned the devourer, named him your king! Chernobog had not the strength to break our mountain without you behind him!”
“We didn’t know!” I burst out, horror bringing my voice out again. “None of us knew that the tsar had bargained with a demon!”
“Are your people such fools, then, to unwitting give Chernobog power over you?” he said contemptuously. “You will be well served for it. Do you think he will be true? He clings to the forms for protection, but when he sees a chance to slake his thirst, he abandons them again without hesitation. When he has drained us to the dregs, he will turn on you, and make your summer into desert and drought, and I will rejoice to think that you have brought yourselves low with me and mine.”
I put my hands on my temples, pressed my palms flat against them, my head pounding with smoke and horror. “We aren’t fools!” I said. “We’re mortals, who don’t have magic unless you ram it down our throats. Mirnatius was crowned because his father was the tsar, and his brother died; he was next in line, that’s all. We can’t see a demon hiding in a tsar; there’s no high magic protecting us, whether we’re true or not! You didn’t need my name to threaten me and drag me from my home. And you thought that made me unworthy, instead of you.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him, and went sharp and jagged-edged in his prison. “You have thrice shown me wrong,” he said after a moment, through a grinding of his teeth like floes of ice scraping against one another. “I cannot call you liar now, however I want to. But still I hold to my answer. No. I will not promise.”
I tried to think, desperately. “If I let you go,” I said finally, “will you promise to stop the winter once Chernobog is off the throne, and help us find a way to throw him down? The tsarina will help!” I added. “She wants him gone herself; you saw she wouldn’t take anything from him. She’ll help as long as it doesn’t mean all of us frozen into ice! All the lords of Lithvas will, to have an end to winter. Will you help us fight him, instead of just killing us to starve him of his prey?”
He couldn’t move, inside the silver chain; so instead he stamped his foot and burst out, “I had defeated him! I had thrown him down and bound him with his name! It is by your act that he was unleashed again!”
“Because you tried to drag me away screaming to make more winter for you the rest of my life, and threatened to murder everyone I love!” I shouted back at him. “Don’t you dare try to say it’s my fault—don’t you dare say any of it is our fault! The tsar was only crowned seven years ago. But you’ve been sending your knights to steal gold ever since mortals came here to live in the first place, and who cared if they murdered and raped for their amusement while they were at it: we weren’t strong enough to stop you, so you looked down your nose from your glass mountain and decided we didn’t matter! You deserve to be bound here and eaten by a demon, and so here you are! But Flek’s daughter doesn’t deserve it! I’ll save you for her sake, if you’ll help me save the children here!”
He was about to answer, and then he hesitated, and looked towards the tunnel. I looked back in the pitch depths: there was a faint red glow down there coming nearer, a fire building, and he turned to me and said, “Very well! Free me, and this I will promise, not to hold the winter once Chernobog is thrown down and my people safe from his hunger, and to aid you to defeat him. But until that is done, I give no word!”
“Fine!” I snapped. “And if I free you, will you promise—” and then I stopped, realizing suddenly I had only one question left, not two. Hastily I changed it, and finished, “will you promise for yourself and all the Staryk to leave me and all my people—to leave Lithvas—alone? No more raiding, no more coming out to rape and murder us for gold or any other cause—”
He looked at me, and then he said, “Free me, and this I will promise: there will be no more hunting your people in winter wind; we will come, and ride the forest and the snow-driven plains, and hunt the white-furred beasts that are ours, and if any are fool enough to come in our way or trespass on the woods, they may be trampled; but we will seek no mortal blood and take no treasure, not even sun-warmed gold, save in just vengeance for equal harm given first, and we shall take no woman unwilling who has refused her hand.”
“Not even you,” I added pointedly.
“So I have said!” He looked towards the door again, and the light was getting brighter, red and leaping on the walls. It was coming quickly now. “Break the rings of fire!”
I bent down and tried to blow out one of the candles, but the flame only jumped and wouldn’t go out. It was melted so thickly to the ground I couldn’t even pry it off. I had to run to the tunnel mouth and scrape up dirt with my hands and pour it down, smothering it like a kitchen fire of hot oil, and it burned my hands at the last before it went out. But the coals were so hot that all the dirt I could hold in my two hands together did nothing to stop them burning, so instead I took off my cloak and folded it over so the damp part was on the bottom, and I threw it down over the ring.