Page 15 of Spinning Silver

Magreta said, “Why yes, dushenka, of course he did,” and while she would have said so even if it wasn’t true, she hadn’t hesitated first, which meant she at least believed her own words.

“He married her with no dowry, didn’t he?

” she added, though, and then it was my turn to look around and be surprised.

He had never told me that. It was almost unimaginable.

“He doesn’t speak of her as though he’d loved her,” I said, incautious in my own turn.

Magreta did hesitate then before she said, “Well, there is your stepmama to think of.”

I did not really need Magreta to tell me that love had caught my father like an unwilling fish, and that having slipped the hook, he had been glad to forget he had ever been on it in the first place.

Certainly my stepmother had only come with a fat dowry of gold coins, a heavy chest bigger than I was, which now rested deep in the treasury under the house.

My father had not been caught a second time.

And likely he had been all the more disappointed in my mother, if she’d had enough magic to enchant him into stupidity but not for anything more.

I dreamed of the ring that night, only it was worn by a woman with a silver lock falling from her forehead—a lock that matched the ring on her hand.

Her face wouldn’t come clear in the dream, but she turned away from me and walked through a forest of white and silver trees.

I woke thinking not of my mother, but of the ring; I wanted a chance to touch it, to hold it.

Magreta normally kept me well out of my father’s way, but every day she took me down to a corner of the gardens for walking exercise, even in cold weather.

That morning I took the turning into the older part of the gardens, away from the house; there was a neglected chapel still there, half buried beneath leafless vines, the grey wood rotting a little, carved points like thorns poking out through the dusting snow on the roof.

Magreta stayed below and twittered worry at me, but I climbed the creaking steps up into the empty belfry so I could look out the round window over the garden wall and see into the great courtyard where my father daily drilled his men.

That was a duty he never neglected. He was no longer a young man, but he had been born a boyar and not a duke, and many years ago he had killed three knights in a single day’s battle and broken the walls of Vysnia for the tsar’s father, for the right to make the city his own.

He still oversaw the training of his own knights, and took sturdy boys from farmers and made them men-at-arms in the city.

Even two archdukes and a prince had deigned to send him their sons to foster, because they knew he would send them back well trained.

I thought perhaps he would have taken the ring off for drill; if so, it might be in his study somewhere, on his desk.

I was already making plans. Magreta wouldn’t let me go in there, but I could coax her to step into the library next door to it, and lose her between bookshelves; I might go in and put my hand on it for just a moment.

But when I looked into the courtyard, where the soldiers were going through their paces under his taskmaster voice, my father was bare-handed, though ordinarily he wore heavy gloves or sometimes metal gauntlets.

His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, the left holding the right wrist. The silver band was shining as if in sunlight, though the sky was dark grey and snow was drifting, as far from my reach as another world.

The Staryk lord kept coming back into my head even after I was back home again.

I didn’t remember him all the time; only in the moments when I was alone somewhere and in the middle of some other task.

When I went outside behind the house to tend the chickens, I remembered his footprints there, and was glad to see the snow unmarked.

In the shed, feeding the goats in the dim early-morning light, I looked into a corner where a rake stood in shadows and remembered him coming out of the dark trees with his white braids and his cruel smile.

When I went out to get a little snow for water, to make tea, my hands grew cold and I thought, What if he comes back.

It made me angry, because being angry was better than being afraid, but then I came in with the pail of snow and found myself standing before the fire angry for no reason, and my mother looking at me, puzzled.

She hadn’t asked me anything about the Staryk, only how my grandmother and my grandfather were, and if I’d had a good journey, as if she too had forgotten why I’d gone to Vysnia in the first place.

I didn’t have any of the fairy silver left to fix it in my own head, not even the little white purse.

I remembered going to the marketplace, and I remembered Isaac working, but I couldn’t see the ring he’d made in my mind’s eye.

But I remembered enough that every morning I went again to look behind the house, and on Monday, Wanda came out to feed the chickens while I was still there. She joined me and looked down at the smooth unbroken surface, and unexpectedly she said, “You paid him, then? He’s gone?”

For a moment I almost said, Whom do you mean, and then I remembered again, and my hands clenched. “I paid him,” I said, and Wanda nodded after a moment, one single jerk of her head, as though she understood that I was saying that was all I knew: he might come back, or he might not.

I had brought some aprons with me from Vysnia in the new embroidered pattern—aprons instead of dresses, so I could sell them for less than a zlotek without making it seem as though the dresses had been a cheat.

All of them went quickly that market day, and the handkerchiefs I’d also bought.

A woman from a farm out in the country even asked me if I was going back to Vysnia soon, and if I thought I could get a good price for her yarn there.

No one had ever done business with me before, if they could help it, except to buy from me cheap and sell to me dear; usually she would have asked one of the carters instead, Oleg or Petrov, to take it to town if she couldn’t sell it herself at market.

But these last few years all the sheep and goats were growing their coats so thick, in the long cold winters, that the price of wool was falling low, and they couldn’t have gotten her much.

Hers was better than the usual, soft and thick; I could tell she had combed it and washed it and spun it carefully.

I rubbed a strand between my fingers and remembered that my grandfather had said he would be sending some goods south, down the river, when spring came: he had hired a barge.

He meant to pack his goods with straw, but maybe he could pack them with wool instead, and we could sell it for more in the south, where it had not been so cold.

“Give me a sample and I’ll take it the next time I go, and I’ll tell you what I can get” was all that I told her.

“How much of it do you have to sell?” She only had three bags, but I saw others listening as we spoke.

There were many at the market who sold wool for a little income, or even their livelihood, and were being squeezed by the falling prices; I was sure if I came back to the market and told her where others could overhear that I could offer her a good price, many more would come quietly to see me.

By the time I went home from the market that day, it was settled in my head that I had gone to Vysnia for more goods to sell, to make more business for myself.

There were three brand-new goats on a string behind me, bought cheap because of the falling price of wool, and even more plans in my head: I would ask my grandfather to take my profits from the wool and buy me some dresses from the south, in just a little bit of a foreign style, to sell in Vysnia and in the market here, too.

That night there was a brown roast chicken on the table and carrots glazed with fat, and for once my mother dished out the good food without looking as though every bite would poison her.

We ate, and afterwards Wanda went home and we settled in together around the fire.

My father was reading to himself, his lips moving silently, from the new Bible I had bought him in Vysnia; my mother was crocheting lace from some fine silk thread, a piece that could someday go into a wedding dress, maybe.

The golden light shone in their faces, kind and worn, and for a moment I felt the whole world suspended in happiness, in peace, as though I had reached a place I had never been able even to imagine before.

The knocking came on the door, heavy and vigorous.

“I’ll get it,” I said, putting my sewing aside.

But when I stood, my parents hadn’t even glanced up.

I held there frozen in place a moment, but they still didn’t look; my mother was humming softly, her hook swinging in and out of the thread.

Slowly I went to the door and opened it, and the Staryk was on the stoop with all of winter behind him, a whirling cloud of snow that wasn’t falling past the windows.

He held another purse out to me, clinking like chains, and spoke with a high thin voice like wind whistling through the eaves. “Three days you may have, this time, before I come to have my own back again,” he said.

I stared at the purse. It was large and heavy with coin, more silver there than I had in gold even if I emptied my vault; far more.

Snow was drifting in to melt cold against my cheeks, flecking my shawl.

I thought of accepting it in silence, of keeping my head bowed and afraid.

I was afraid. He wore spurs on his heels and jewels on his fingers like enormous chips of ice, and the voices of all the souls lost in blizzards howled behind him. Of course I was afraid.

But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?”

His eyes widened and all the color went out of them.

The storm shrieked behind him, and a lance of cold air full of snow and ice blew into my bare face, a stinging prickle of pins-and-needles on my cheeks.

I expected him to strike me, and he looked as though he wanted to; but instead he said to me, “Thrice, mortal maiden,” in a rhythm almost like a song, “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself.”

I felt half ice already, my hands so cold that I imagined I could feel my finger bones aching under the numb flesh. At least I was too cold even to shiver. “And then?” I said, and my voice didn’t shake.

He laughed at me, high and savage, and said, “And then, if you manage it, I will make you my queen,” mockingly, and threw the purse down at my feet, jingling loud.

When I looked back up from it, he was gone, and my mother behind me said, slow and struggling, as if it was an effort to speak, “Miryem, why are you keeping the door open? The cold’s coming in. ”