Page 73 of Spinning Silver

It made something in my head itch; I would have liked to draw him, to catch him with pen and ink, and not just fire and silver.

I looked over at Irina there in the dark pit: some of his cold blue light was reflecting on her face, on her silver crown and the red rubies of her silver gown, and it occurred to me that this was what they saw when they looked at her: they saw her like a Staryk, but close enough to mortal to be touched.

Inside, Chernobog stirred and gave a small internal belch, nothing I’d ever felt before and gruesomely unpleasant, and lashed me a little; I gritted my teeth and flicked my fingers at the circle of coals, and set it glowing red with flame.

Timur flinched back from it. The Staryk didn’t quite flinch, but I got the impression he would have rather liked to, if that weren’t far beyond his dignity.

I repressed the urge to tell him to enjoy flinching as much as he wanted to.

Chernobog never took much notice of anyone’s dignity or lack thereof so far as I’d ever seen. It pleased itself either way.

“Shall we be off?” I said to Irina. “I’m sorry to forsake the manifest charms of this place, but we do have another wedding to attend tomorrow, I believe? A busy season for them.”

Irina turned away from the Staryk. “Yes,” she said somberly.

She didn’t seem particularly happy with the final outcome of her excellently laid plans, although as far as I could tell they’d gone off without a hitch.

Unless of course there had been a corollary to them she hadn’t shared with me—for instance, one where I had been left tucked safely in the fireplace forever, perhaps chained in gold and ringed with ice; that seemed the poetic mirror.

Yes, the more I thought of it, the more I was certain something like that had been on the agenda.

Ha, how silly of me— had been. That knife in the back was still very much on its way.

“A trusted man?” the duke said to Irina, gesturing at Timur. She nodded. “Good. He will come up with me and help to cover the door again, and keep guard. Walk straight down the tunnel. Take no turns. It crosses a few old sewers along the way.”

That rather nicely conveyed the prospective scenic quality of our walk.

I smiled at Irina with every last ounce of the sincere affection that was blooming in my heart for her, and put out my arm formally.

She looked at me, once more dull and expressionless as glass, and set her hand on the curve of my arm.

We left the Staryk standing silently and alone behind us in his bonds of flame and silver, and set off together down a stinking impenetrable-dark rat tunnel full of squeaks and dangling-maggot tree roots.

I cupped a fire in my hand while we walked, red light dancing over the earthen walls.

“What a convenient bolt-hole this is,” I said.

“Shall I keep it in mind if your father ever rebels against the crown? I suppose that’s hardly likely anymore—or is it?

” She only looked at me. “I suppose you think I’m an idiot,” I snapped at her.

Her silence was more infuriating than her lectures.

I hadn’t asked for any of this: I hadn’t wanted to marry her, I hadn’t wanted to help her survive, I hadn’t wanted to be smashed like eggshells for her sake.

Chernobog was sitting in my belly like swallowed coals, a thick sated presence, pleased with itself—and her, too, no doubt.

I couldn’t even shove her into one of these dark tunnels and run away, leaving her behind.

“Are you all right?” she asked me abruptly.

I laughed; it was so absurd. “What’s a little agony and mortal injury here and there,” I jeered at her.

“Really, I don’t mind. I’m delighted to be of service anytime.

Hm, delighted —do I mean that, or is there another word for it?

I’ll have to give it some thought. What exactly do you expect from me? Should I be grateful to you?”

She paused. After a moment, she said, “The winter will break. Lithvas will—”

“Shut up about Lithvas, ” I spat at her.

“Are we playacting for the worms now, or is this something you do to keep your hand in for public appearances? As though Lithvas means anything but the lines where the last round of people finished killing each other. What do I care about Lithvas? The nobles would gladly slit my throat, the peasants don’t know who rules them, the dirt doesn’t care, and I don’t owe a thing to any of them or you.

I can’t stop you dancing me around the chessboard, but I’m not going to thank you humbly for permitting me to be useful to you, my lady, like that groveling monkey up there.

Stop trying to pretend you wouldn’t have been delighted to leave me there in bloody pieces on the floor.

Don’t you have the next tsar waiting in the wings?

It seems like the sort of thing you’d have ready just in case. ”

She fell blessedly silent for a while, but not long enough to suit me.

We reached the end of the tunnel and came through an archway cut into a wall of stone: it let us into a small dark cramped closet of a room, with a cleverly designed bit of the wall that swung out into the wine cellars.

When we came out and I pushed it shut again, you could hardly even have told that the place was there.

I ran my fingers over the bricks and could barely find the edges, and that only because the mortar was missing.

Chernobog hummed drowsily in satisfaction: it would go tomorrow, it would feast again…

I turned and found Irina looking at me in the dark; I’d closed my hand on the flame, and there was only a little bit of lamplight shining off the stairs, reflected in the solid black pools of her eyes, to show her face to me.

“You don’t care about any of it,” she said. “And yet you bargained to be tsar anyway, in your brother’s place—”

It was very much like having a monster crush your ribs straight into your heart.

Oh, how I hated her. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t have liked Karolis very much, darling girl,” I said, through my teeth.

“Who do you think taught me to kill squirrels? No one else had a minute for the witch’s get, until he was—”

I stopped; I still couldn’t be clever about it. Not about that. Chernobog even stirred a bit and put out its tongue through my head, lazily lapping up the unexpected delicious treat of my pain. How nice to know I could still give satisfaction, even when it was so well-fed.

She was staring at me. “You loved him. And you bargained anyway?”

“Oh, no,” I said, thick with rage. “I’ve never had the chance to bargain for a thing.

You see, my mother wasn’t as lucky as you, sweet Irina.

She didn’t already have a crown, and she didn’t have magical beauty, and she didn’t have a Staryk king to buy them with.

So instead she paid for them with a promissory note, and the ink on my contract was dry before I even came wet out of the womb. ”

When Irina came back, I was sewing in the corner of her bedroom, as fast as I could.

I had gone to Palmira and told her that the tsar would not let Irina wear the same dress twice, and if she had a gown I could make over for Irina to wear tomorrow, I would give her the blue with rubies to make over for Galina.

Galina would not know where they came from; Palmira would not.

Better not to know. To them they could be jewels, rich and fine, that someone had bought and paid for with gold and not with blood.

They would have gone far enough away from the cruelty that made them, and then they could be only beautiful.

And I would have work to do during the night, the long night, sitting by a lamp and wondering if Irina would ever come back.

“But it must be splendid,” I said. “Otherwise it won’t do: you see how he dresses!

He will not have her less fine.” So Palmira gave me a gown of deep emerald-green brocade and palest leaf-green silk, embroidered so thickly in silver that I needed to get a young maid to help carry it back to the room, with tiny beads of emeralds knotted upon it: not as valuable as the rubies, but there were so many of them that the gown glittered in the light.

Galina had worn it as a girl, before her first marriage.

It was too small for her now, but still it had been kept put by, for a daughter or a son’s wife.

Not a stepdaughter, before now, but it would fit Irina without too much work.

She was only more narrow in the chest. I was almost done bringing in the bodice when she came back to the room, and her face was white and blind above those shining ruby drops of blood.

The tsar went to the fire and snapped to his servants as they scrambled awake to bring him hot wine, and he held out his arms for them to take off his red coat of velvet, as if nothing much had happened.

I went and tried to take my girl’s thin hands, but she would not let me see them, or open her cloak.

But I put my arm around her and I drew her to my own chair and put her in it.

She was not cold, she did not tremble. But she was as blank as a field of snow, and there was a thick terrible smell of smoke in her hair, and when she sat I saw there was blood on the blue dress, real blood, dried dark, and on her palms and under her nails, as though she had been butchering meat in that gown.

I stroked her head. “I will draw a bath,” I whispered to her.

“I will wash your hair.” She said nothing, so I spoke to the footmen and sent them to bring the bath, and cold water to wash the dress.