Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

The tax collector always came the day we brought in the last of the grain harvest, winter and spring. I didn’t know how he always knew, but he knew. After he left, the tax was paid. Whatever he did not take, that was for us to live on. There was never very much.

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.

Relief almost had me agree instantly, but I made myself take three deep breaths to consider, the way I did when someone made me an offer in the market that I wanted very much to accept.

But I made myself think of what my grandfather would have said to me: better to make no bargain than a bad one, and be thought of forever as an easy mark.

When I found him, first I thought that no one would help me, but then I thought maybe I was wrong about that the way I was wrong about other things and so I should at least try.

Of course I didn’t want to be of any more use to him, but work made one’s place in the world.

I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger. For a moment I was back in the snow with Oleg coming at me, his face contorted and his big fists clenched. I wanted to scramble away, to ask for mercy, fear running hot all along my spine. But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.

But what was the use of being afraid of him? For all his magic and all his strength, he couldn’t kill me any more thoroughly than Oleg would have, crushing the breath from my throat in the snow.

I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time; like Scheherazade, humbly asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night. And I knew perfectly well even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.

I didn’t know what I was feeling, that made those words come. Angry, I think. I didn’t remember ever being angry before. Anger had always seemed pointless to me, a dog circling after its own tail. What good was it to be angry at my father, or my stepmother, or angry at the servants who were rude to me? People were angry at the weather sometimes, too, or when they stubbed their toe on a stone or cut their hand on a knife, as if it had done it to them on purpose. It had all seemed equally useless to me. Anger was a fire in a grate, and I’d never had any wood to burn. Until now, it seemed.

It went quicker to do them carefully than to have to check carefully afterwards. Which isn’t to say it went quickly at all.

But what use was it to worry? I could not do anything, an old woman carried so long here and there on life’s stream and washed now to this strange shore; what could I do? I loved her and I had taken care of her as well as I could, but I could not protect her from men or fiends. I braided her hair for her again, and put the crown upon her head, and I let her go. And when she left I did what I could, which was to sit and wait and spin, until my hands grew heavy and I rested them in my lap and shut my eyes for a little while.

She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.

I would have left if I knew where to go.

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies.

That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

There is still work to be done, and it is happy work.

It was an effort to speak, at first. I hadn’t thought that I wanted my father to be proud of me. It had never seemed possible at all, but I hadn’t known it mattered to me.

“What I mean—what we mean by it is—it’s like credit,” I said, suddenly thinking of my grandfather. “Gifts, and thanks—we’ll accept from someone what they can give then, and make return to them when it’s wanted, if we can. And there are some cheats, and some debts aren’t paid, but others are paid with interest to make up for it, and we can all do the more for not having to pay as we go. So I do thank you,” I added abruptly, “because you risked all you had to help me, and even if you count the return fair, I’ll still remember the chance you took and be glad to do more for you if I can.”

All I would ever be able to do about it was what I’d ever been able to do about it: nothing. Nothing but to catch at those scraps of life when they came, and devour them, and lick my greasy fingers, and try to make life endurable when I had the chance.

He wasn’t beautiful, he was terrifying; and then he was beautiful, and then he was both, and I couldn’t decide from one moment to the next which it was.

And last night I did not know if I was strong enough to stop the Staryk, even with a silver chain, even with Sergey and Stepon, even with Miryem’s mother and father. But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing. Afterwards, Stepon put his face in my apron and cried because he was still feeling afraid, and he asked me how I knew the tsarina would make magic and stop the Staryk from killing us, and I had to tell him that I did not know. I only knew the work had to come first.

“If I need help, I’ll need too much. If I don’t, I won’t.”

But the world I wanted wasn’t the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.

I recognized that hunger: a devouring thing that would gulp down lives with pleasure and would only pretend to care about law or justice, unless you had some greater power behind you that it couldn’t find a way to cheat or break, and that would never, never be satisfied.