The jeweler was a young man with spectacles and stubby but careful fingers, his beard trimmed short to stay out of his work; he was bent over an anvil in miniature, hammering out a disk of silver with his tiny tools, enormously precise. I stood watching him work for maybe half an hour before he sighed and said, “Yes?” with a faint hint of resignation, as though he’d hoped I would go away, instead of troubling him to do any business. But he seemed to know what he was about, so I brought out my pouch of silver coins and spilled them onto the black cloth he worked upon.
“It’s not enough to buy anything here,” he said, matter-of-factly, with barely a glance; he started to go back to his work, but then he frowned a little and turned around again. He picked one coin up and peered at it closely, and turned it over in his fingers, and rubbed it between them, and then he put it down and stared at me. “Where did you get these?”
“They came from the Staryk, if you want to believe me,” I said. “Can you make them into something? A bracelet or a ring?”
“I’ll buy them from you,” he offered.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“To make them into a ring would cost you two gold coins,” he said. “Or I’ll buy them from you for five.”
“I’ll pay you one,” I said firmly, “or if you like, you can sell the ring for me and keep half the profit,” which was what I really wanted. “I have to give the Staryk back six gold coins in exchange.”
He grumbled a little but finally agreed, which meant he thought he could sell it for a high enough price to make it worthwhile, and then he set about the work. He melted the silver over a hot little flame and ran it into a mold, a thick one made of iron, and when it had half cooled, he took it out with his leathered fingertips and etched a pattern into the surface, fanciful, full of leaves and branches.
It didn’t take him long: the silver melted easily and cooled easily and took the pattern easily, and when it was done, the pattern seemed oddly to move and shift: it drew the eye and held it, and shone even in the midday sun. We looked down at it for a while, and then he said, “The duke will buy it,” and sent his apprentice running into the city. A tall, imperious servant in velvet clothes and gold braid came back with the boy, making clear in every expression how annoyed he was by the interruption of his more important work, but even he stopped being annoyed when he saw the ring and held it on his palm.
The duke paid ten gold coins for the ring, so I put two in the bank, and six back into the little white pouch, and I climbed back into Oleg’s sledge to go home that same evening. We flew through the snow and dark, the horse trotting quickly with only my weight in back. But in the woods the horse slowed, and then dropped to a walk, and then halted; I thought she just needed a rest, but she stood unmoving with her ears pricked up anxiously, warm breath gusting out of her nostrils. “Why are we stopping?” I asked, and Oleg didn’t answer me: he slumped in his seat as though he slept.
The snow crunched behind me once and once again: something picking its way toward the sleigh from behind, step by heavy step. I swallowed and drew my cloak around me, and then I summoned up all the winter-cold courage I’d built inside me and turned around.
The Staryk didn’t look so terribly strange at first; that was what made him truly terrible, as I kept looking and slowly his face became something inhuman, shaped out of ice and glass, and his eyes like silver knives. He had no beard and wore his white hair in a long braid down his back. His clothes, just like his purse, were all in white. He was riding a stag, but a stag larger than a draft horse, with antlers branched twelve times and hung with clear glass drops, and when it put out its red tongue to lick its muzzle, its teeth were sharp as a wolf’s.
I wanted to quail, to cower; but I knew where that led. Instead I held my fur cloak tight at the throat with one hand against the chill that rolled off him, and with my other I held out the bag to him, in silence, as he came close to the sleigh.
He paused, eyeing me out of one silver-blue eye with his head turned sideways, like a bird. He put out his gloved hand and took the bag, and he opened it and poured the six gold coins out into the cup of his hand, the faint jingle loud in the silence around us. The coins looked warm and sun-bright against the white of his glove. He looked down at them and seemed vaguely disappointed, as though he was sorry I’d managed it; and then he put them away and the bag vanished somewhere beneath his own long cloak.
I called up all my courage and spoke, throwing my words against the hard, icy silence like a shell around us. “I’ll need more than a day next time, if you want more of them changed,” I said, a struggle to keep trembling out of my voice.
He lifted his head and stared at me, as though surprised I’d dared to speak to him, and then he wasn’t there anymore; Oleg shook himself all over and chirruped to the horse, and we were trotting again. I fell back into the blankets, shivering. The tips of my fingers where I’d held out the purse were numbed and cold. I pulled off my glove and tucked them underneath my arm to warm them up, wincing as they touched my skin.
One week went by, and I began to forget about the Staryk, about all of it. We all did, the way one forgets dreams: you’re trying to explain the story of it to someone and halfway through it’s already running quicksilver out of your memory, too wrong and ill-fitting to keep in your mind. I didn’t have any of the fairy silver left to prove the whole thing real, not even the little purse. Even that same night I’d come home, I hadn’t been able to describe him to my anxious mother; I’d only been able to say, “It’s all right, I gave him the gold,” and then I’d fallen into bed. By morning I couldn’t remember his face.
But Sunday night the knocking came again at the door, and I froze for a moment. I was standing already, about to fetch a dish of dried fruit from the pantry; with a lurch of my heart I went to the door and flung it open.
A burst of wind came growling through the house, as cold as if it had been shaved directly off the frozen crust of the snow. The Staryk hadn’t abandoned a purse on the stoop this time: he stood waiting outside, all the more unearthly for the frame of wood around his sharp edges. I looked back into the house wildly, to see if they saw him also; but my father was bent over his whittling as though he hadn’t even heard the door opening, and my mother was looking into the fire with a dreamy, vague look on her face. Wanda lay sleeping on her pallet already, and her brother had gone home three days before.
I turned back. The Staryk held another purse out to me, to the very border of the door, and spoke, a high, thin voice like wind whistling through the eaves. “Three days,” he said.
I was afraid of him, of course; I wasn’t a fool. But I had only believed in him for a week, and I had spent all my life learning to fear other things more: to be taken advantage of, used unfairly. “And what in return?” I blurted, putting my hands behind my back.
His eyes sharpened, and I regretted pressing him. “Thrice, mortal maiden,” he said, in a rhythm almost like a song. “Thrice shall I come, and you shall turn silver to gold for my hands, or be changed into ice yourself.”
I felt half ice already, chilled down to my bones. I swallowed. “And then?”
He laughed and said, “And then I will make you my queen, if you manage it,” 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.”
I had never felt sorry for the miller’s daughter before, in the story: I’d been too sorry for my father, and myself. But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who’d as cheerfully have cut off your head if your dowry didn’t match your boasting? I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his servant, or frozen into ice.