Наоми Новик: Spinning Silver

The numbers were all tidy and clean, and all the right amounts had come in. My grandfather had asked me about my servant, and whether she was good; he hadn’t thought I was foolish to have promised to pay Wanda in money. “A servant is easy to make dishonest when they bring you coin and never touch any themselves,” he said. “Let her feel that her fortune rises with yours.”

I was a little wary of my own fortune rising, even with fourteen gold coins in the heavy vault in my grandfather’s bank. I knew that money was not really from my own lending work; it was my mother’s dowry, coming back to us at last. My father had lent it out so quickly after they were married, it was all gone into other pockets almost before I was born, and so little had ever been paid back that every one of our neighbors for miles around was still in our debt. They had fixed their houses and their barns, they had bought cattle and they had bought seed grain, they had married their daughters and started their sons in the world, and meanwhile my mother had gone hungry and my father had been chased out of their yards. I meant to get back every coin and all the interest besides.

But I had already gathered the easy money. Some of it would never come back. Some who had borrowed from my father had died, or gone away so far I did not have their direction. I was already having to take more than half my payments in goods or work or something else, and turning those into coin wasn’t easy. Our house was snug now, and we had a flock of chickens as big as we could manage. People had offered me a sheep or a goat, too, but we didn’t know anything about keeping them. I could sell them on again, but that was difficult, and I knew better than to try and give any of my debtors one penny less in credit than the full amount I got for their goods in the market. They would call it cheating, even though it was my time spent on the work of selling it.

I was lending new money only to those who had some reasonable hope of having it to repay, and in small and cautious amounts, but that only brought in an equally cautious stream of payments, and I didn’t know how many would yet default before their full debt was paid. But even so, looking at my accounts with all the tidy amounts brought in, I decided I would start to pay Wanda now: each day she would clear half a penny of her father’s debt, and take half a penny home, and have real coin to keep, so she and her father would feel that she was earning money; it wouldn’t just be a number written in my books.

I had just settled with myself that I would tell her this afternoon, before she went home, when the door banged open and she rushed back in with the basket clutched against her chest, still full of grain. She said, “They’ve been outside the house!”

I didn’t know who she meant at first, but I stood up in alarm anyway; her face was white and afraid, and she wasn’t given to startling. My father said, “Show me,” and took the iron poker from the fireplace.

“Is it burglars?” my mother said in a low voice: my own first thought, too, as soon as I had one. I was glad I had taken my money away and put it in the bank. But then we followed my father outside, around the back of the house where the chickens were still squawking loudly in disappointment, waiting for their food, and Wanda showed us the marks. It wasn’t burglars at all.

The hoofprints were barely a shallow impression in the top dusting of fresh snow. They hadn’t broken through the ice crust beneath, but they were very large, the size of horse hooves, except cloven like deer, and with spiky indentations at the front ends. They came right to the wall of the house, and then someone had climbed down and looked through our window: someone wearing strange boots with a long pointed toe.

I didn’t quite believe in it, at first. It was certainly something strange, but I thought someone was playing a trick on us, like the village boys who had thrown rocks at me sometimes when I was little. Someone had come creeping over to leave the marks to scare us, or maybe something even more malicious: to make an excuse for a robbery they planned. But before I opened my mouth to say so, I realized no one could have made the marks without breaking the snow themselves, unless they had leaned down somehow with a stick from the roof. But the roof was unmarred, and the cloven hoofprints made a long trail across our yard and all the way back into the forest, where under the trees they vanished. And when I looked in that direction, I saw the silver road gleaming between the trees still there.

I didn’t say anything, and neither my mother or my father said anything either, all of us looking into the woods at the road, and only Wanda said, flatly, “It’s the Staryk. The Staryk came here.”

But the Staryk didn’t belong in the yard with our chickens, peering in through the window into our big room. I bent down to look through myself: there was nothing to see over my narrow bed but the fireplace with its small cooking pot, the cupboard my father had made as a present for my mother, the sacks of grain in our pantry. My home looked so ordinary and so plain it only made the idea more ridiculous, and I straightened up and stared at the prints again, half expecting them to go away and stop making the world untidy and absurd.

And then my father took the poker and stirred it right into the prints, and trudged along the line of them dragging it through, all the way to the forest’s edge, and then he came back walking over them. He came up to us and said, “Let’s not hear any more talk like that. Who knows who made it, probably just some children making a stupid joke. Go back to your chores, Wanda.”

I stared at him. I had never heard my father sound so hard. I didn’t know he could speak so. Wanda hesitated. She looked where the prints had been, but then she slowly stepped over the trampled snow and began to feed the chickens. My mother was standing silently by with her shawl wrapped tight, her lips pressed tight, her hands clenched tight. She said, “Come back in the house, Miryem, I need your help with the potatoes.” I followed my mother back to the house, and as we did, she glanced down the road towards the town. But everyone else had all gone to their chores and into their houses; no one was still outside watching.

When we were inside, my father went to the window over my bed with a narrow stick out of the woodpile and measured its length and width with cuts of his knife, and then he took his coat and his small axe and his hat and went out again, carrying the stick. I watched him go, and then I looked at my mother, who was peering out the back at Wanda already busy sweeping the yard.

“Miryem,” my mother said, “I think it would be good for your father to have a young man’s help. We will ask Wanda’s brother to come stay with us at night, and pay him.”

“Pay someone just to sleep in the house? What good would he even do, if one of the Staryk did come?” I laughed even as I said it out loud: the idea of it was so ridiculous. I couldn’t quite remember why I had ever thought it was anything but a joke. I had a feeling as though I’d just been having a dream, and it was already fading.

But my mother said sharply, “Don’t speak of such things. I don’t want you to say anything like that again. And don’t talk of the Staryk to anyone, anywhere in town.” I understood that even less. Everyone would be talking of the Staryk, with the road there in the woods, and tomorrow was market day. “Then you won’t go,” she said, after I said so, and when I protested I had goods from Vysnia to take and sell, she took me by the shoulders and said, “Miryem. We will pay Wanda’s brother to stay at night, so she won’t say to anyone that the Staryk are visiting our house. And you will not say to anyone that they have come near.”