Page 34 of Spinning Silver

I had a thousand practical ones, especially if no one else was going to tell me anything—where was I to bathe, how was I to get clean clothes—but the urgent impractical one swelled out of my throat, the one whose answer I already knew I didn’t really want. “How do I get back to Vysnia? Or my home?”

“ You? Make a way from my kingdom to the sunlit world?” His disdain made it clear he thought I had as much chance of getting there as the moon.

“You do not, save if I take you there.” And then he was up and sweeping from the chamber, and I went into my bower and pulled the curtains shut against the endless twilight and buried my face into my arms with my teeth clenched and a few hot tears burning behind my eyelids.

But in the morning I got up and rang my bell, determined.

My new servants did come at once, and instead of asking them questions, I tried simply issuing demands instead.

It served reasonably well: they did bring me a bath, filling up an enormous and gracefully curved silver tub longer than I was tall.

It had a rime of ice around the edge, and frost all over the lip of the tub, but when I warily put my hand into it, the water somehow felt just right, so I, a little wincingly, climbed in, expecting every moment to yelp, but evidently whatever the Staryk had done to bring me into his kingdom had made me able to bear the cold of it.

They also brought me food and fresh clothing, all in white and silver—every trace of which I determinedly changed to gold: I meant to go on as I’d started, and put myself in everyone’s faces as much as I could.

But even serving me all morning, neither of the women told me their names, and I didn’t mean to give up a question to my lord for that.

Instead, when I finally sat down to breakfast, I said to the one with the beauty mark, “I’ll call you Flek, and her Tsop,” after the braid, “unless you’d prefer me to use something else. ”

Flek startled so that she nearly spilled the drink she was pouring into my glass, throwing me a look of astonishment, and trading another with Tsop, who was staring at me equally taken aback.

I had a moment of alarm that I’d offended them, but they both blushed a faint delicate blue-grey in their faces.

Flek said, “We are honored,” dropping her eyes, and she seemed to mean it.

I wouldn’t have thought that there was anything very nice in the names I’d given them—I hadn’t tried, since I’d only been fishing for their real names.

Nevertheless, I felt reasonably satisfied, until I was finished eating and my day stretched out ahead of me, empty now except for that chest of silver, waiting in the middle of the floor.

I scowled at it, but I had nothing better to do; I had nothing to do at all.

And at least the king had met my demands.

I didn’t like giving him anything he wanted, much less the gold he coveted with so much greed, but I also saw plainly that this was the bargain that bought my life, and if I didn’t want to make it, I might as well smash open the glass wall and hurl myself down on the waterfall rocks below.

“Tip it all out onto the floor,” I grudgingly told Tsop and Flek. They did it, without any great effort, and set the empty chest back upright at the end of a torrent of silver. Then they bowed, and left me to it.

I picked up one of the silver coins. In my world they had seemed unmarked, but in the strange, brilliant light that filtered in through my walls of crystal, a picture gleamed out in pale tracework lines: one of those slender snow-white trees on one face, and on the other side, the mountain of glass with the silver gates at its base, only in the image there was no waterfall.

But in my hand, with only a faint effort of wanting, gold slid over its face, a buttery-yellow glow shining against my fingers.

It made me angry again, or I tried to have it make me angry, the contrast between that sunlit warmth caught like a prisoner in my hand, and the endless cold grey light outside.

I threw it into the box, hard, and then another after it, and another.

I picked up handfuls of silver coins and amused myself by letting them run out into the chest, each one tumbling into gold as they fell.

It wasn’t hard, but I didn’t hurry. He’d only set me to changing another when I was done.

When I had filled perhaps a quarter of the chest, I went to the glass wall and sat there looking over my new kingdom.

Still more snow had started falling. The thin black-silver snake of the river, winding away under its rafts of ice, was the only break in the forest anywhere, and soon the snow hid it.

No sign of farms or roads or anything else I understood, and the sky was the heavy grey overcast that left no sign of individual clouds.

The shining mountain was a solitary island of brightness, as if it caught all of that light reflected off the scattering of snow and ice and gathered it jealously to itself, to make its improbable sides.

In the walls a thousand shifting degrees of light softly gleamed and faded, and when I pressed my fingers hard to the cold surface, for a moment they splintered into color around my touch.

“Where—point to where the food comes from,” I said to Flek, after she brought me the midday meal, a simple platter of thin slices of fish and delicate fruit laid one upon the other in a circle.

She hesitated with confusion on her face, but when I went to the glass wall and waved out towards the countryside, she darted one quick anxious glance out at the forest and didn’t come to join me; she shook her head and then just pointed straight down.

I frowned and looked at the platter of food. “Take me where the fish come from, then.” I had some half-formed thought of escaping, of swimming down a river through the mountainside, and anyway I wanted to be out of my room. I was a queen, supposedly; I ought to be allowed to go around my domain.

Flek looked very doubtful, but she went to the wall and opened it up for me.

I didn’t see anything she did; she touched no lever nor made any gesture nor said a magic word; she only walked towards the wall and turned towards me, and suddenly she was waiting by an archway as if it had always been there.

I went out after her into a corridor that might have been a tunnel; the walls were smooth as glass, and I saw no break where panes had been joined.

It sloped downwards steeply, and she led me down it very hesitantly, with many sidelong glances back; we passed chambers as we walked, what I realized were kitchens, though they didn’t have a single flame: long tables with grey-clothed Staryk servants preparing dishes with careful use of knives, out of boxes of pale-colored fruits and silver-skinned fish and slabs of purplish-red meat.

I was halfway glad to see them, because they made a little more ordinary sense of the place to me: at least there were some people here doing something I could understand.

But whenever one of them glanced up and saw me, they stared in open astonishment, and looked at Flek, who avoided their gaze.

I suppose a queen wasn’t meant to come wandering around the servants’ quarters, and I was making an odd spectacle of myself.

I just kept my chin up and marched along in her wake, and after another curving, we passed the last kitchen door and came to an unbroken stretch.

Flek paused there and looked back at me, as if she hoped that the kitchens had been enough to satisfy me; but the tunnel traveled onward, and I was curious, so I said, “Keep going,” and she turned and continued on more sharply downwards.

The light in the walls grew steadily dimmer as we went down, until it was only little flickering gleams chasing one another, a dim glow that slightly rose and ebbed, as if we’d gone below the surface of the earth and only reflections of light from above could still reach us.

We walked a long time; a few times we went down narrow curving staircases, until abruptly Flek turned out of the tunnel and through another archway into a cavern room, its walls jagged crystal, with a narrow walkway around a deep pool of dark water.

The surface was as smooth and unbroken as a sheet of glass, but nets on long handles rested carefully against the wall, and after I stood looking for several minutes I caught a flickering glimpse of the silver side of some vast blind fish moving deep in the dark before it vanished away again below.

I knelt and touched the surface. Even though I could now put my hand in ice-melt and think it bathwater, the water felt painfully cold to my fingertip.

I watched ripples spread away from my touch in widening circles: they were the only stirring until they struck the far edge and came back to me again, breaking one another down until they faded back into perfect stillness.

I wondered how many more pools like this there were in the depths, and how many orchard groves growing within the crystal walls; how far it all went, this impossible world contained within the mountain, a fortress of jeweled light.

Flek stood silently beside me, waiting. She’d done as I’d commanded, but it hadn’t left me any better off.

There was no escape here for me except another death, by drowning, and she wouldn’t answer any of my questions.

I stood up. “All right,” I said. “Take me back to my chamber. By another route,” I added: I wanted to see more, if I could.