Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.”

But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.

“My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died,” I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. “The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third—that fools should recognize neither.”

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

“My hands don’t feel clean, either, after last night. But I won’t wash them in my people’s blood.

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.

A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp.”

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.

You didn’t need my name to threaten me and drag me from my home. And you thought that made me unworthy, instead of you.”

I didn’t want to go to death a murderer with bloody hands. I wanted that more than I didn’t want to be a liar.

He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.