“Absurd,” the duke growled. I had a struggle to keep from biting my lip, myself: it was rather outrageous.
“Otherwise I must melt it down and make it into rings,” Isaac said, spreading his hands apologetically. I thought that was rather clever: of course the duke would rather no one else had a ring like his.
“Where are you getting this silver from?” the duke demanded. Isaac hesitated, and then looked at me. The duke followed his eyes. “Well? You’re bringing it from somewhere.”
I curtsied, as deeply as I could manage and still get myself back up. “I was given it by one of the Staryk, my lord,” I said. “He wants it changed for gold.”
“And you mean to do it through my purse, I see,” the duke said. “How much more of this silver will there be?”
I had been worrying about that, whether the Staryk would bring even more silver next time, and what I would do with it if he did: the first time six, the second time sixty; how would I get six hundred pieces of gold? I swallowed. “Maybe—maybe much more.”
“Hm,” the duke said, and studied the necklace again. Then he put his hand to one side and took up a bell and rang it; the servant reappeared in the doorway. “Go and bring Irina to me,” he said, and the man bowed. We waited a handful of minutes, and then a woman came to the door, a girl perhaps a year younger than me, slim and demure in a plain gray woolen gown, modestly high-necked, with a fine gray silken veil trailing back over her head. Her chaperone came after her, an older woman scowling at me and especially at Isaac.
Irina curtsied to the duke without raising her downcast eyes. He stood up and took the necklace over to her, and put it around her neck. He stepped back and studied her, and we did too. She wasn’t especially beautiful, I would have said, only ordinary, except her hair was long and dark and thick; but it didn’t really matter with the necklace on her. It was hard even to glance away from her, with all of winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her eyes as they darted sideways to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall there.
“Ah, Irinushka,” the chaperone murmured, approvingly, and the duke nodded.
He turned back to us. “Well, jeweler, you are in luck: the tsar visits us next week. You may have a hundred gold pieces for your necklace, and the next thing you make will be a crown fit for a queen, to be my daughter’s dowry: you will have ten times a hundred gold for it, if the tsar takes her hand.”
I left twenty gold pieces in the bank and carried the swollen purse into the sledge waiting to carry me home. My shoulders tightened as we plunged into the forest, wondering when and if the Staryk would come on me once more, until halfway down the road the sledge began to slow and stop under the dark boughs. I went rabbit-still, looking around for any signs of him, but I didn’t see anything; the horse stamped and snorted her warm breath, and Oleg didn’t slump over, but hung his reins on the footboard.
“Did you hear something?” I said, my voice hushed, and then he climbed down and took out a knife from under his coat, and I realized I’d forgotten to worry about anything else but magic. I scrambled desperately away, shoving the heaped blankets toward him and floundering through the straw and out the other side of the sledge. “Don’t,” I blurted. “Oleg, don’t,” my heavy skirts dragging in the snow as he came around for me. “Oleg, please,” but his face was clenched down, cold deeper than any winter. “This is the Staryk’s gold, not mine!” I cried in desperation, holding the purse out between us.
He didn’t stop. “None of it’s yours,” he snarled. “None of it’s yours, little grubbing vulture, taking money out of the hands of honest working men,” and I knew the sound of a man telling himself a story to persuade himself he wasn’t doing wrong, that he had a right to what he’d taken.
I gripped two big handfuls of my skirts and struggled back, my boot heels digging into the snow. He lunged, and I flung myself away, falling backward. The crust atop the snow gave beneath my weight, and I couldn’t get up. He was standing over me, ready to reach down, and then he halted; his arms sank down to his sides.
It wasn’t mercy. A deeper cold was coming into his face, stealing blue over his lips, and white frost was climbing over his thick brown beard. I struggled to my feet, shivering. The Staryk was standing behind him, a hand laid upon the back of his neck like a master taking hold of a dog’s scruff.
In a moment, he dropped his hand. Oleg stood blank between us, bloodless as frostbite, and then he turned and slowly went back to the sledge and climbed into the driving seat. The Staryk didn’t watch him go, as if he cared nothing; he only looked at me with his eyes as gleaming as Oleg’s blade. I was shaking and queasy. There were tears freezing on my eyelashes, making them stick. I blinked them away and held my hands tight together until they stopped trembling, and then I held out the purse.
The Staryk came closer and took it. He didn’t pour the purse out: it was too full for that. Instead he dipped his hand inside and lifted out a handful of shining coins to tumble ringing back into the bag, weighed in his other palm, until there was only one last coin held between his white-gloved fingers. He frowned at it, and me.
“It’s all there, all sixty,” I said. My heart had slowed, because I suppose it was that or burst.
“As it must be,” he said. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go.”
But he seemed displeased anyway, although he had set the terms himself: as though he wanted to freeze me but couldn’t break a bargain once he’d made it. “Now go home, mortal maiden, until I call on you again.”
I looked over helplessly at the sledge: Oleg was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring with his frozen face out into the winter, and the last thing I wanted was to get in with him. But I couldn’t walk home from here, or even to some village where I could hire another driver. I had no idea where we were. I turned to argue, but the Staryk was already gone. I stood alone under pine boughs heavy with snow, with only silence and footprints around me, and the deep crushed hollow where I had fallen, the shape of a girl against the drift.
Finally I picked my way gingerly to the sledge and climbed back inside. Oleg shook the reins silently, and the mare started trotting again. He turned her head through the trees slightly, away from the road, and drove deeper into the forest. I tried to decide whether I was more afraid to call out to him and be answered, or to get no reply, and if I should try to jump from the sledge. And then suddenly we came through a narrow gap between trees onto a different road: a road as free of snow as summer, paved with innumerable small white pebbles like a mosaic instead of cobblestones, all of them laid under a solid sheet of ice.
The rails of the sledge rattled, coming onto the road, and then fell silent and smooth. The moon shone, and the road shone back, glistening under the pale light. The horse’s hooves went strange and quickly on the ice, the sledge skating along behind her. Around us, trees stretched tall and birchwhite, full of rustling leaves; trees that didn’t grow in our forest, and should have been bare with winter. White birds darted between the branches, and the sleigh bells made a strange kind of music, high and bright and cold. I huddled back into the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut and kept them so, until suddenly there was a crunching of snow beneath us again, and the sledge was already standing outside the gate of my own yard.
I all but leaped out, and darted through the gate and all the way to my door before I glanced around. I needn’t have run. Oleg drove away without ever looking back at me. The next morning, they found him outside his stables, lying frozen and staring blindly upwards in the snow, his horse and sledge put away.
I couldn’t forget at all, that week. They buried Oleg in the churchyard, and the bells ringing for him sounded like sleigh bells ringing too-high in a forest that couldn’t be. They would find me frozen like that outside the door, if I didn’t give the Staryk his gold next time, and if I did, then what? Would he put me on his white stag behind him, and carry me away to that pale cold forest, to live there alone forever with a crown of fairy silver of my own? I started up gasping at night with Oleg’s white frozen face looming over me, shivering with a chill inside me that my mother’s arms couldn’t drive away.