Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

Yet when I looked at my father’s ring, I felt snow falling.

What I really wanted was the silver necklace, cold around my neck, even though it was bringing my doom; I wanted to put it on and find a long mirror and slip away into a wide dark winter wood.

we didn’t speak, but for a moment I felt her a sister, our lives in the hands of others. She wasn’t likely to have any more choice in the matter than I did.

I could see nothing but winter, all around.

The pale endless grey of the sky in here was broken up into jeweled brilliance, thin dazzling rainbow lines sketched across it, and in the center of the meadow beneath that diamond roof, a grove of white trees grew.

With a demon wanting to devour me, I was feeling inclined to be devout,

even victory, which was unlikely to come swiftly, would leave them easy prey for the larger beasts outside our borders, or the enemy within.

then I lay down on my mountain of gold like an improbable dragon and fell asleep without meaning to do so.

“Why is it a great working that we shoved more than half his treasure into a tunnel?” I said, exasperated.

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.

When I had spoken of politics, I knew just how to tell him a thousand things without saying a single betraying word that anyone else would understand, never fearing that he wouldn’t know what I meant, but not when I spoke of winter lords and demons of flame. They moved through our words like they moved through our world, disasters beyond its boundaries.

I looked back at her for a moment from the door, but she did not look afraid; she stood looking steadily back at him, my cool quiet girl with nothing showing in her face.

The Staryk was a tale for a winter’s night. I was their monster, the one they could see and understand and imagine tearing down.

A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water.

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.

We might leave a song of ourselves, making a war on winter, but the people we left behind couldn’t eat music.

Fire and ice both on the horizon at once, and my little kingdom of squirrels caught in between them.

I put my hand down to touch the last heap of silver standing before me, the coins that were just barely cool enough to touch, the coins that were a part of that whole enormous hoard; and all of it together, every last one, I turned at once to shining gold.

the scullery-maid lurched at once instinctively for the iron bucket of sand and ashes and cinders beside the hearth. She poured it straight down onto the flames, smothering them, and clanged the bucket down on top of it all.

Good for her

I was too busy glaring at him: six months, and he hadn’t so much as said a word to me; because now he was determined to do it all exactly by whatever mad rules undoubtedly governed the formal courting of a lady by a Staryk king.