Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterwards he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. Then the miller’s despoiled daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels for a dowry, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early. Because that’s what the story’s really about: getting out of paying your debts. That’s not how they tell it, but I knew. My father was a moneylender, you see.

We could have stayed. There was room in my grandfather’s house, and welcome for us. But we always went home, because we loved my father. He was terrible with money, but he was endlessly warm and gentle, and he tried to make up for his failings: he spent nearly all of every day out in the cold woods hunting for food and firewood, and when he was indoors there was nothing he wouldn’t do to help my mother. No talk of woman’s work in my house, and when we did go hungry, he went hungriest, and snuck food from his plate to ours. When he sat by the fire in the evenings, his hands were always working, whittling some new little toy for me or something for my mother, a decoration on a chair or a wooden spoon.

the work he couldn’t bear to do. But even when my mother finally pressed him and he tried, he only came back with a scant handful of coins, and said in apology for them, “It’s a bad winter. A hard winter for everyone,” when I didn’t believe they’d even bothered to make him that much of an excuse. I walked through town the next day to take our loaf to the baker, and I heard women who owed us money talking of the feasts they planned to cook, the treats they would buy in the market. It was coming on midwinter. They all wanted to have something good on the table; something special for the festival, their festival.

I didn’t want to be warmed. I stood on their doorsteps, and I brought out my list, and I told them how much they had borrowed, and what little they had paid, and how much interest they owed besides. They spluttered and argued and some of them shouted. No one had ever shouted at me in my life: my mother with her quiet voice, my gentle father. But I found something bitter inside myself, something of that winter blown into my heart: the sound of my mother coughing, and the memory of the story the way they’d told it in the village square so many times, about a girl who made herself a queen with someone else’s gold, and never paid her debts. I stayed in their doorways, and I didn’t move. My numbers were true, and they and I knew it, and when they’d shouted themselves out, I said, “Do you have the money?”

you have to be cruel to be a good moneylender. But I was ready to be as merciless with our neighbors as they’d been with my father.

“Fur, now? And gold?” I should say that I was properly brought up, and I knew better than to talk back to my own grandfather, but I was already angry that my mother was upset, and that my grandmother wasn’t pleased, and now to have him pick at me, him of all people. “Why shouldn’t I have it, instead of someone who bought it with my father’s money?” I said.

If Wanda didn’t keep to the bargain, I would stop paying her; that was a better guarantee than any other I could have.

They talked all the day it seemed to me: talked or sang or even argued. But there was never shouting or raised hands. They were always touching one another. Her mother would put a hand on Miryem’s cheek or her father would kiss her on the head, whenever she passed nearby. Sometimes when I left their house at the end of the day, once I was down the road and into the fields and out of sight, I would put my hand on the back of my head, my hand that had grown big and heavy and strong, and I tried to remember the feeling of my own mother’s hand. In my house there was only a silence like solid earth.

But my mother’s face was full of misery. We didn’t speak. “Would you rather we were still poor and hungry?” I burst out to her finally, the silence between us heavy in the midst of the dark woods, and she put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “My darling, my darling, I’m sorry,” weeping a little. “Sorry?” I said. “To be warm instead of cold? To be rich and comfortable? To have a daughter who can turn silver into gold?” I pushed away from her. “To see you harden yourself to ice, to make it so,” she 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.” I stopped arguing. My mother said softly, “Two years ago, outside Minask, a band of Staryk went through the countryside to three towns, towns not much bigger than this. They burned the churches and the houses of rich men, and took all the little gold they could find. But they rode past Yazuda village, where the Jews lived, and they did not burn their houses. So the people said the Jews had made a pact with the Staryk. And now there are no Jews in Yazuda. Do you understand, Miryem? You will not speak of the Staryk coming to our house.”

“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?”

“If you’re lucky enough to catch a goose that lays golden eggs,” I bit out, glaring up at the king, “and you’d like them delivered on a regular basis, you’d better see it tended to its satisfaction, if you have any sense: have you?”

then hissed at me in his own human voice, “I don’t know where you’re scurrying away to every night, but don’t think I’ll let you keep on running off.” “You’ll have to forgive me, dear husband,” I said, after a moment, considering carefully: what did I want him to think, or know that I knew? “I made my vows to you, but someone else keeps coming to the bedroom in your place. Squirrels run on instinct when a hunter comes too close.”

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t mirth, it was bitterness. “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”

“You dare,” he said to the wall, not turning to look at me. “You dare set yourself against me, to make a pretense of being my equal—” “You did that, when you put a crown on my head!”

“Why would I trust you? You’ve done nothing since we exchanged vows but try to stuff me down your demon’s gullet.” “As though I had any say in it. Do you really think I wanted to marry you? He wanted you, so off to the altar I went.” “And my father wanted me on a throne, so off to the altar I went. You can’t excuse yourself to me by pleading that you were forced to it.”

And more to the point, I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to try and devour my soul. My expectations for a husband had lowered.

I’d weave a net out of us to hold all Lithvas. Casimir married to me and on the throne would satisfy him. Vassilia married to a nephew of the late tsar would at least balk Ulrich, and I’d put a whisper in his ear that it would be just as well for my dear friend to start having her children at the same time as I had mine, and promise him a grandchild on the throne after all. That would satisfy him and Mirnatius’s kindred both. All I needed to arrange it was a space where Mirnatius now stood, and conveniently, he’d put himself on top of a trapdoor going directly to the bowels of Hell, if I could only find the way to unlatch it.

It became boring, which seems ridiculous to say. I was pouring out magic by the bucketful, turning silver into shining gold with my very fingers, but it quickly stopped being magical.

I was glad for it, to have a place secure again, but after he left the room, Irina still looked at me too thoughtfully, as if she understood why I had come to look after her. Of course I came to love her very soon anyway. I had no one else to love, and even if she was not mine, I had been let to borrow her. But I had never been quite sure what she felt for me. Other little children would go running to their nurses and their mamas with open arms and kisses. She never did. I told myself all these years that it was only her way, cool and quiet as new-fallen snow, but still in my secret heart I had not been truly sure, not until the tsar sent men to bring me to hurt her with, and I saw that it would have worked. Oh, it was a strange way to be happy.

“There was more grass where I got this,” I said. “I will go with him,” Algis said to Panov Mandelstam. He still did not look up. I think he was ashamed he had gotten lost and had not filled the grain bucket, and now he was trying to say he was sorry.

“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.” He flushed. “My court is full of fools,” he snapped. “So it seems she had it the wrong way round.”

The only reason I didn’t yield to the temptation was that I’d have been put to the awkward necessity of explaining just why I had married her. “Because my demon told me to” isn’t a generally accepted reason, even if you have a crown on your head.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have thought for an instant she’d have trouble with the court; a woman who can coolly bargain with a demon that wants to gnaw on her soul is hardly to be intimidated by Lord Reynauld D’Estaigne. Or, more to the point, by her husband. I could already see the freshly hideous future taking shape ahead of me. I was going to be stuck with her. My blasted demon was going to snatch at her offer with both clawed hands, Aunt Felitzja was going to be delighted at the chance to marry Ilias off to a rich princess, my entire court already thought her enchantingly beautiful, and my councillors were really going to adore my having a wife who would listen to them prose on about tax rolls and then come and harangue me for hours in their stead, since I couldn’t send her away. And everyone would love her as absolutely no one did me. Oh, and five minutes from now she’d undoubtedly inform me that she expected me to consummate this relationship, so she could pop out an heir or two to still more general acclaim. After which I wouldn’t be the least surprised to find a knife sticking out of my back some morning. There was a gruesome inevitability to it all. My life has been a sequence of monsters one after another tossing me about to suit their whims; I’ve got a finely tuned sense for when another round of buffeting has arrived.

At last one morning, thin and white, she burst from the chair and ran to the window: a cold wind was blowing in, the first frost of the year, and she cried out, “Winter will be here soon, and I want to go outside,” and wept. My heart broke, but I was not a young girl anymore, afraid of being trapped behind a door forever. I knew the door was safety, I knew the door would not always be closed, and I did not let her out.

I had known that Miryem’s grandfather was rich, but I had not known what rich meant before. Rich meant that this room with three beds and a table and chairs and a window filled with glass was something to say sorry for.

I said to Panova Mandelstam, “We are not any good to you here,” and I almost said, We should go, but I couldn’t, because we didn’t have anywhere to go, unless we did turn into birds and fly away. Panova Mandelstam looked at me surprised. “Wanda!” she said. “After all the help you have been to us? Am I to say, Oh, but what good is she to me now?” She reached out and took my face in her hands and shook me a little back and forth. “You are a good girl with a good heart. So much work you’ve done without a word of complaint. Since you came into my house, I did not have to lift a hand. Before I thought of doing a thing it was done. I was sick, but because you were there helping, I grew well again. And you never ask for a thing. It’s only what we press into your hands that you take. So now you must let me do it.” “What you press in my hands is more than all I have!” I said, because it hurt to hear her saying those things that were not true, as if I had only come and helped her to be good, and not because I wanted silver, and wanted to be safe. “Then you don’t have enough, and I have more than I need,” she said.

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.

“Hush, don’t cry,” she said, and her thumbs were wiping tears from my face, though they were coming faster than she could take them away. “I know you are afraid and worried. But there will be a wedding here today. It is a time to rejoice. For today we don’t let sorrow come into this house. All right? Sit and eat, now. Rest a little while. If you want, when you are not tired, come down and help me. There is still work to be done, and it is happy work. We will raise the canopy for the bride and groom, we will put food on the tables, and we will eat together and dance, and the wolf will not come in. Tomorrow, we will think of other things.” I nodded without saying anything. I couldn’t say anything. She smiled at me, and wiped more of my tears, and then she gave up trying to wipe them and just gave me a handkerchief out of her skirt and touched my cheek again and went out. Sergey and Stepon were sitting at the table staring at the food on it. There was soup, and bread, and eggs, and when I sat next to them, Stepon said, “I didn’t know it was magic, when you brought it home. I thought it was just food.” I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.

“Open-Handed, this is my daughter, who now is your bondswoman, too,” Flek said softly, and touched her shoulder, and the little girl made me a careful leaning bow. She was carrying a small fine necklace of silver across her hands, a simple adornment she evidently hadn’t wanted to put into the box with the rest, and I reached down and touched it first of all. Warm gold blushed through the whole length of it with the slightest push of my will, and the child gave a soft delighted tinkling sigh that made it feel more like magic than all the work I’d done in the treasury below.

She took her small wooden jewel-box and opened it: a heavy silver chain and twelve squat candles of pure white wax lay in the bottom of it, and she put the tablecloth in atop the rest. She touched it with her fingers, but she did not see it really; she was not thinking of tablecloths and thread and the time that made them one. She did not have to. I had let her sleep, and so now she could think of crowns and demons instead, and she had to, or she would die.

The Staryk did not shriek at Wanda again. When he spoke this time, he sounded soft instead, like when deep snow has stopped falling and you go outside and everything is very quiet. “Let go, mortal, let go, and ask a different boon of me,” he said. “I will give you a treasure of jewels or elixir of long life; I will even give you back the spring, in fair return for holding fast. But you reach too far, and dare too high, when you ask me for my queen. Try me thus once again, and know I will lay winter in your flesh and flay your hearts open to freeze in red blood upon that snow: you have no high powers, no gift of magic true, and love alone cannot give you strength to hold me.” When he said that, I knew he was not lying. We all knew it. And Miryem got up on her feet again. She had stopped pulling on his hand where it was around her wrist. She said, “Wanda,” and she meant that we should let the Staryk go. But Wanda looked at Miryem and she said, “No,” and it was the no she had said to our father, in our house, when he wanted to eat her up.

“Oh, how sweet the taste, how the cold lingers!” he said. “Winter king, king of ice, I will suck you until you are so small I can crunch you with my teeth, and what will your name be worth then? Will you not give it to me now and go into the flame while you are still great?” The Staryk trembled all over, and then he said, very faintly, only, “No,” and it was the same as our no had been, it was a no that said no matter what Chernobog did to him, it was not as bad as if the Staryk gave him his name.

When the Staryk finally pushed us into the fireplace and told the demon to stay there, I would have wept with gratitude, with relief, if only he’d done me the kindness of one final parting kick to crush my skull and end the agony. But he left me there. And then my sweet Irina came and put her arms around me like some grotesque parody of comfort. If she’d wanted to comfort me, she could have slit my throat. But she had a use for me, she too had a use for me, I’m so endlessly useful;

The silver chain was wrapped around him tight enough to press imprints into his silver clothing. I still wanted to hate him, but it was hard to hate anyone chained, waiting for that thing down the tunnel.

“Be silent, witch!” the soldier spat at me. “You have done this, you have let him free, to undo the work of our blessed tsarina,” and then he struck my face with his other clenched fist, a perfectly ordinary blow that rattled my teeth and shocked straight through my body. I fell down dazed and sick to my stomach, and he turned to stab the Staryk. And then Sergey, coming out of the dark upon us, grabbed his arm and stopped him. The two of them stood over the Staryk wrestling a moment: Sergey was a tall, strong boy, and oh, I was grateful now for every glass of milk and every egg and every slice of roast chicken my mother had given him. I had grumbled over them in my head, counting pennies, and now too late I wanted to wish myself more generous: if only I hadn’t, if I’d put still more of them on his plate, urged him to eat up, maybe he’d have been strong enough now. But he wasn’t; he was still only a boy, and the soldier was a grown man, in mail, trained to kill for the tsar.

And then he shut his eyes again and lay there still, helpless and wounded and maybe even dying, now just when I’d stopped wanting him to die. So he was determined to remain exactly the same amount of use he’d been to me all along.

the Staryk only kept looking at it desperate and yet without saying a word, as if he couldn’t even imagine how to offer a bargain for it. How could you: what could you give someone that would be a fair price for all their pain, for all those buried years of sorrow? I wouldn’t have taken a thousand kingdoms for my mother.

I was a rabbit, a deer, halted in the trees, trying to be small and still and unseen; I was hiding in a dark cellar behind a secret door, hoping not to be heard. My voice was locked in my throat.

“No!” he shrieked. “No! I promised safety only to you and yours!” “Yes,” Irina said. “And she also is mine. All of them are mine, my people; every last soul in Lithvas. And you will touch none of them again.”

“He is mine, too, Chernobog. You must leave him alone as well.” I looked up in horror: she had put herself in his way. The demon stopped, glaring at her with red light still shining in the tsar’s jewel eyes. “No!” he spat. “No, I will not! He was given me by promise, by fair bargain made, and I need not give him to you!” “But you already have,” Irina said, “when you made him marry me. A wife’s right comes before a mother’s,”

As we drove out of town, there was another cart coming, with one horse. It was empty so the driver pulled off to the side to let us go past because we had a big load, and as we came close and passed him, I saw it was that boy Algis, Oleg’s son, sitting there on the seat. We stopped a moment and looked at him, and he looked back at us. We did not say anything, but then we knew that he had not told anyone where we were. He had just gone home and he had not told anyone he had seen us at all. We nodded to him, and Sergey shook the reins, and we went on. We went home.

And on the wedding contract, before me and my parents and the rabbi, and Wanda and Sergey for our witnesses, in silver ink he signed his name. But I won’t ever tell you what it is.