Page 82 of Spinning Silver

“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.

“You must draw me out!” he said, and I reached over the scorching-hot ring and snatched the rope and pulled him out over the cloak, just in time; it caught fire under his foot as he stepped off, flames licking up with such fury that the long curling tip of his boot ignited.

The whole thing scorched off his leg in a sudden burst of flame and smoke, and he stumbled into me gasping.

I nearly fell over with his weight, and only just managed to turn him to lean against the wall.

He was shivering, his eyes nearly shut, and gone translucent with pain; faint reddish lines were climbing spiderwebs over his whole foot and up to his knee, where the scorched end of his breeches hung, still smoking faintly.

I seized the silver chain and tried to pull it off over his head, and then I tried to thrust it down, but even with all my weight, it wouldn’t move.

I looked around in desperation; there was a shovel there, thrust into a waiting wheelbarrow full of coals.

I took him by the shoulders and tipped him down lying on the ground so I could set the shovel’s tip onto one of the silver links.

I stepped down onto the blade with my foot like someone digging, trying to push into the ground, catching the link between hardened iron and the stone floor: it was only an inch long, not nearly as thick around as my little finger, but it wouldn’t open: it wouldn’t open, and behind my back I heard a sudden distant shriek of rage.

I didn’t look: what was the use in looking?

I lifted up the shovel and jammed it down again in desperation, and then I dropped it and knelt and seized the silver chain in my hands.

I tried to change it; I shut my eyes and remembered the chests in the storerooms, remembered the feeling of silver sliding into gold under my hands, the world gone slippery in my fingers because I willed it so.

But the chain only grew hot in my hands, almost burning.

There were footsteps running towards us down the tunnel, and the coals all suddenly burst into roaring flame, even the ones in the wheelbarrow, thick black smoke billowing around us.

And then he stirred in my hands and whispered, “The shovel. Quickly. Put the blade on my throat. Kill me, and he cannot devour my people through me.”

I stared at him in horror. I’d wanted him dead, but not bloody under my own hands; I hadn’t wanted to be that much like Judith, hacking off a man’s head. “I can’t!” I croaked out. “I can’t—look down at you and push a shovel through your neck!”

“You said you would save the child!” he said to me accusingly. “You said you would! The fire comes for us, will you go a liar to your death?”

I gasped in a breath of smoke, black charring smoke that burned my mouth and nose and throat, and tears burst from my eyes.

I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to kill; I didn’t want to go to death a murderer with bloody hands.

I wanted that more than I didn’t want to be a liar.

But he was going to die anyway, die worse, and they would all die with him.

There were a thousand ways to die, and not all of them were equally as bad.

I whispered, “Turn over on your face,” and I reached for the shovel again and stood up with it, my eyes running with tears, smoke shrouding him as he turned over—

—and through the smoke a single bright gleam shone from the middle of his imprisoned back: a cold gleam like moonlight, blue on snow, where Irina had used her necklace of Staryk silver to bind the two ends of a broken silver chain together.

I dropped the shovel and reached for it.

A fist suddenly seized my hair from behind and yanked my head back, and I felt flame catch in my hair, a terrible stink of it burning, but I, straining, caught the necklace with a fingertip, and it went to gold at my touch.

The grip let go my hair. I fell to the ground coughing and sick and with my hair still smoldering as another roar of rage went up.

But it went suddenly thin and high-pitched as a shrieking blast of winter wind burst through the room, a cold as bitter as the flames had been, and all around me every fire in the room went out: the coals went dead and black and the candles blew into pitch dark, and the only light left was the dull red shining of two savage eyes above me.