Page 37 of Spinning Silver

Alone in my chamber of glass and ice, with the sun going down in my mirror, I broke the bread that Flek had left me and drank a swallow of wine.

I couldn’t light a candle; she and Tsop had only looked at me puzzled when I’d told them to bring me one.

I sang the prayers, thin in my ears without my father and mother singing beside me, or my grandparents.

I thought of that last night in Vysnia, the house full of people and everyone so happy around Basia and Isaac.

She would be celebrating tomorrow again with my grandmother and her mother, my female cousins and her friends: the Shabbat before her wedding.

My throat was dry with tears when I lay down.

I had nothing to read and no one to talk to.

I kept Shabbat the next day by telling myself the Torah out loud, as much as I could remember.

I confess I had never been very attached to Torah.

My father loved it, deeply; I think in his heart he had dreamed of being a rabbi, but his parents were poor, and he didn’t read very well; he had to struggle over words and letters, though numbers came easily.

So they had apprenticed him to a moneylender instead, and the moneylender knew Panov Moshel, and his apprentice met Panov Moshel’s youngest daughter, and so went my parents’ story.

Anyway, my father had spent almost every Shabbat reading to us, the words finally made smooth to him by repetition.

But I had mostly spent the time thinking of whatever work I wasn’t allowed to do, or trying to imagine away a little gnaw of hunger, or in better times, coming up with the most difficult questions I could, as a game, to make my father have to work to answer them.

But the memories had stuck deeper than I realized, and when I shut my eyes and tried to hear his voice, and murmur along with it, I found I could more or less stumble my way through.

I was with Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison cell by the time the sun went down again, and Shabbat was over, and my husband came back to me.

I didn’t immediately open my eyes, glad to make him wait, but he surprised me by not saying anything, so I looked up before I’d meant to and found satisfaction in his face.

The change from bitter resignation was remarkable.

It made my jaw tighten. I sat back from the table and asked, “Why are you pleased?”

“The river stands still once more,” he said, but at first that meant nothing to me.

Then I stood up and went to the glass wall.

The crack in the mountainside had been patched thickly over with bulging curves of ice, and the thin waterfall had frozen in its tracks.

Even the river below was a solid shining road, no longer flowing at all.

A heavy snow had fallen, so much of it that the trees of the dark forest were all blanketed beneath it.

I didn’t know why it so pleased him, to have his world frozen, but there was something terrible and ominous in that featureless glittering white.

Something deliberate, in all that green and earth wiped from the world, that made me think of all our long hard winters, of the rye killed in the fields and fruit trees withering, and as he came to stand beside me, I looked at the nearly ecstatic joy upon his face and said slowly, “When it snows in your kingdom—does it also snow in mine ?”

“ Your kingdom?” he said, glancing down at me, with faint contempt for such a conceit. “You mortals would like to make it so, you who build your fires and your walls to shut me out, and forget winter as soon as it is gone. But still it is my kingdom.”

“Well,” I said, “then it’s mine, now, too,” and had the satisfaction of seeing him frown with displeasure at the gruesome reminder that he’d married me. “But I’ll reword the question if you like: is there snow in the sunlit world today, even though it should be spring?”

“Yes,” he said. “The new snow comes here only when it comes in the mortal world; thus I have labored long to bring it.”

I stared at him, almost too blank at first to feel the horror of it.

We knew the Staryk came in winter, that storms made them strong, and they swept out of their frozen kingdom on blizzard winds; we’d known that winter made them powerful.

But it hadn’t occurred to me—to anyone I knew—that they could make the winter.

“But—everyone in Lithvas will starve, if they don’t freeze first! ” I said. “You’ll kill all the crops—”

He didn’t even look at me, that was how little he cared; he was already gazing out again with those clear glittering eyes, gazing with satisfaction on the endless white blanketing his kingdom, where I saw only famine and death.

And there was nothing but triumph in his face, as though that was exactly what he’d wanted.

My hands clenched into fists. “I suppose you’re proud of yourself,” I said through my teeth.

“Yes,” he said instantly, turning back towards me, and I realized too late it could be taken for a question. “The mountain will bleed no more while the winter holds, and I am justified in pride indeed; I have held true, though the cost was great, and all my hopes are answered.”

Having completed his toll, he turned at once and was about to go sweeping from the room, and then he paused and looked down at me suddenly.

“But I have gone this far amiss,” he said abruptly.

“Though you are no power either of this world or your own, you are still the vessel of high magic, and I must honor that as it deserves. Henceforth you shall have whatever comforts you desire, and I shall send more fitting attendants, ladies of high station, to serve you.”

It sounded extraordinarily unpleasant: to be surrounded by a flock of those smiling noblewomen, who surely either hated or despised me as much as he did. “I don’t want them!” I said. “My current ones will do. You might tell them they can answer my questions, if you wanted to be kind to me.”

“I do not, ” he said, with a faint grimace of distaste as if I’d suggested he might want to kick some small helpless animal.

Likely he’d have done that with pleasure.

“But you speak as though I had barred them. It was you chose to desire answers of me, when you might have asked nearly any other gift instead. What voice should give them to you now for nothing, when you have put so high a value on them? And how can any low servant dare set you a price?”

I could have thrown up my hands in frustration as he left.

But I was just as happy for him to go away.

I disliked his satisfaction and pleasure far more than I’d disliked his irritation and cold anger.

I sat staring out the window at the heavy blanket of snow he’d flung over the world, even while the little mirror grew dark with night.

I didn’t care for the duke’s sake, and I didn’t care for the sake of the townspeople, very much.

But I knew what would happen to my people, when the crops all failed, and men with debts grew desperate enough.

I thought of my mother and father alone, snow climbing to the eaves of their house, and the colder hate pressing just as close around them.

Would they go to Vysnia, to my grandfather?

Would they even be safe there? I’d left behind a fortune that could buy them passage south after all, but I couldn’t make myself believe, now when I most wanted to, that they would forget me that far.

They wouldn’t leave without me. Even if my grandfather could tell them where I’d been taken, they would never go; I could send them a letter and fill it full of lies: I’m a queen and I am happy, think no more of me, but they wouldn’t believe it.

Or if they did, I’d break their hearts worse than dying, my mother who had wept to see me collect a cloak of fur from a woman who spat in the dust at her feet.

She’d think I’d been frozen solid through, to choose to leave them and be a queen to a murderous Staryk, a king who would freeze the world just to make his mountain fortress strong.

The next morning when Flek and Tsop cleared away my breakfast dishes, I announced, “I want to go out driving.” It was a shot in the dark at something a Staryk noblewoman might do, and yet another thin hope of escape.

A lucky hit this time; Flek nodded without any hesitation, for once, and led me out of my room onto the long dizzying stair that went back to that great hollow vaulted space in the center of the mountain.

It was much more alarming to go down than up: I felt much more aware of the fragile steps that looked as though they were made of glass, and how far away below the ground was.

I saw more clearly than I wanted to the delicate white trees in their perfect rings nestled inside one another, the ones in the center ring tallest and most full of leaves, and the ones on the outer edge barely saplings, some of them bare-limbed.

But at last we reached the ground, and then Flek took me through the grove along what I found a confounding maze of paths, all of them laid smooth as a frozen pond with borders of mosaic made of clear stones.

I couldn’t have told one turning from another if I’d had the whole day to work with.

Here we passed other Staryk of higher rank, in lighter grey than Flek wore, some even in ivory and near-white, with trailing servants of their own, and they stared at me openly; a few of them with faint curious smiles for my dark hair and dark skin and shining gold: I’d put on my crown again, as it seemed worthwhile to remind anyone who saw me that I was their queen.