Наоми Новик - Spinning Silver

That night there was a brown roast chicken on the table and carrots glazed with fat, and for once my mother dished out the good food without looking as though every bite would poison her. We ate, and afterwards Wanda went home and we settled in together around the fire. My father was reading to himself, his lips moving silently, from the new Bible I had bought him in Vysnia; my mother was crocheting lace from some fine silk thread, a piece that could someday go into a wedding dress, maybe. The golden light shone in their faces, kind and worn, and for a moment I felt the whole world suspended in happiness, in peace, as though I had reached a place I had never been able even to imagine before.

The knocking came on the door, heavy and vigorous. “I’ll get it,” I said, putting my sewing aside. But when I stood, my parents hadn’t even glanced up. I held there frozen in place a moment, but they still didn’t look; my mother was humming softly, her hook swinging in and out of the thread. Slowly I went to the door and opened it, and the Staryk was on the stoop with all of winter behind him, a whirling cloud of snow that wasn’t falling past the windows.

He held another purse out to me, clinking like chains, and spoke with a high thin voice like wind whistling through the eaves. “Three days you may have, this time, before I come to have my own back again,” he said.

I stared at the purse. It was large and heavy with coin, more silver there than I had in gold even if I emptied my vault; far more. Snow was drifting in to melt cold against my cheeks, flecking my shawl. I thought of accepting it in silence, of keeping my head bowed and afraid. I was afraid. He wore spurs on his heels and jewels on his fingers like enormous chips of ice, and the voices of all the souls lost in blizzards howled behind him. Of course I was afraid.

But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?”

His eyes widened and all the color went out of them. The storm shrieked behind him, and a lance of cold air full of snow and ice blew into my bare face, a stinging prickle of pins-and-needles on my cheeks. I expected him to strike me, and he looked as though he wanted to; but instead he said to me, “Thrice, mortal maiden,” in a rhythm almost like a song, “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me, or be changed to ice yourself.”

I felt half ice already, my hands so cold that I imagined I could feel my finger bones aching under the numb flesh. At least I was too cold even to shiver. “And then?” I said, and my voice didn’t shake.

He laughed at me, high and savage, and said, “And then, if you manage it, I will make you my queen,” 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.”

The purse that the Staryk had left was ten times as heavy as before, full of shining coins. I counted them out into smooth-sided towers, trying to put my mind into order along with them. “We’ll leave,” my mother said, watching me build them. I hadn’t told her what the Staryk had promised, or threatened, but she didn’t like it anyway: a fairy lord coming to demand I give him gold. “We’ll go to my father, or somewhere else away,” but I felt sure that wasn’t any good. How far would we have to go to run from winter? Even if there were some country a thousand miles away beyond his reach, it would mean bribes to cross each border, and a new home wherever we found ourselves in the end, and who knew how they’d treat us when we got there. We’d heard enough stories of what happened to our people in other countries, under kings and bishops who wanted their debts forgiven, and to fill their purses with confiscated wealth. One of my great-uncles had come from a summer country, from a house with orange trees inside a walled garden; someone else now picked those oranges, that his family had carefully planted and tended, and they were lucky to have made it here.

And even in a summer country, I didn’t think I could escape forever. One day the wind would blow and the temperature would drop, and in the middle of the night a frost would creep over my threshold. He would come to keep his promise, a final revenge after I’d spent my life running around the world breathless and afraid, and he’d leave me frozen on a desert stoop.

So I put the six towers of coins, ten in each, back into the purse. Sergey had come by then; I sent him to Oleg, to ask him to come round with his sledge and drive me to Vysnia that very night. “Tell him I’ll clear a kopek from his debt, if he’ll take me and bring me back on Saturday night,” I said grimly: that was twice what the cost of the drive should have been, but I needed to go at once. The Staryk might have given me three days, but I had only until sundown on Friday to get the work done; I didn’t think he would take Shabbat as an excuse.

I was in the market at first light the next day, and the instant Isaac saw me in front of his stall, he demanded eagerly, “Do you have any more of the silver?” Then he flushed and said, “That is, welcome back,” remembering he had manners.

“Yes, I have more,” I said, and spilled the heavy purse out in a shining swath on his black velvet cloth; he hadn’t even put out his goods for the day yet. “I need to give back sixty gold this time,” I told him.

He was already turning the coins over with his hands, his face alight with hunger. “I couldn’t remember, ” he said, half to himself, and then he heard what I’d said and gawked at me. “I need a little profit for the work that this will take!”

“There’s enough to make ten rings, at ten gold each,” I said.

“I couldn’t sell them all.”

“Yes, you could,” I said. That, I was sure of: now that the duke had a ring of fairy silver, every wealthy man and woman in the city needed a ring just like it, right away.

He frowned over the coins, stirring them with his fingers, and sighed. “I’ll make a necklace, and see what we can get.”

“You really don’t think you can sell ten rings?” I said, surprised, wondering if I were wrong after all.

“I want to make a necklace,” he said, which didn’t seem very sensible to me, but perhaps he thought it would show his work off and make a name for him. I didn’t really mind as long as I could pay off my Staryk once more, and buy myself some time.

“And it has to be done before Shabbos,” I added.

He groaned. “Why must you ask for impossibilities!”

“Do those look possible, to you?” I said, pointing at the coins, and he couldn’t really argue with that.

I had to sit with him while he worked, and manage the people who came to the stall wanting other things from him; he didn’t want to talk to anyone and be interrupted. Most of the ones who came were busy and irritated servants, some of them expecting goods to be finished; they snapped and glared, wanting me to cower, but I met their bluster and said coolly, “Surely you can see what Master Isaac is working on. I’m sure your mistress or your master wouldn’t wish you to interrupt a patron I cannot name, but who would purchase such a piece,” and I waved to send their eyes over to the worktable, where the full sunlight shone on the silver beneath his hands. Its cold gleam silenced them; they stood staring a little while and then went away, without trying to argue again.

Isaac kept working without a pause until the sun’s rays finally vanished, and began again the next morning at dawn. I noticed that he tried to save a few of the coins aside, while he worked, as though he wanted to keep them to remember. I thought of asking him for one to keep myself; but there was no use. At noon he sighed and took the last of the ones he’d saved and melted it down, and strung a last bit of silver lace upon the design. “It’s done,” he said, afterwards, and picked it up in his hands: the silver hung over his broad palms like icicles, and we stood looking at it silently together for a while.