I decided I might as well try something as nothing, so I didn’t wait for the Staryk to come knocking this time. I fled to my grandfather’s house behind the thick city walls, where the streets were layered with dirty ice instead of clean white snow and only a handful of scattered barren trees stood in the lanes. I slept well that Shabbat night, but the next morning the candles had gone out, and that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother, behind me the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and she didn’t lift her head at the noise.
I slowly put aside my work, and went to the door, and flinched back when I had flung it wide: there was no narrow alleyway behind the Staryk, no brick wall of the house next door and no hardened slush beneath his feet. He stood outside in a garden of pale-limbed trees, washed with moonlight even though the moon hadn’t yet come out, as if I could step across the threshold and walk out of all the world.
There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a chest made of pale white wood bleached as bone, bound around with thick straps of white leather and hinged and clasped with silver. I knelt and opened it. “Seven days this time I’ll grant you, to return my silver changed for gold,” the Staryk said in his voice like singing, as I stared at the heap of coins inside, enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars. I didn’t doubt that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.
I looked up at him, and he down at me with his sharp silver eyes, eager and vicious as a hawk. “Did you think mortal roads could run away from me, or mortal walls keep me out?” he said, and I hadn’t really, after all.
“But what use am I to you?” I said desperately. “I have no magic: I can’t change silver to gold for you in your kingdom, if you take me away.”
“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said, as if I was being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he vanished, leaving me with a casket full of silver and a belly full of dismay.
I hadn’t been able to make sense of it before: What use would a mortal woman be to an elven lord, and if he wanted one, why wouldn’t he just snatch her? I wasn’t beautiful enough to be a temptation, and why should boasting make him want me? But of course any king would want a queen who really could make gold out of silver, if he could get one, mortal or not. The last thing I wanted was to be such a prize.
Isaac made the crown in a feverish week, laboring upon it in his stall in the marketplace. He hammered out great thin sheets of silver to make the fan-shaped crown, tall enough to double the height of a head, and then with painstaking care added droplets of melted silver in mimic of pearls, laying them in graceful spiraling patterns that turned upon themselves and vined away again. He borrowed molds from every other jeweler in the market and poured tiny flattened links by the hundreds, then hung glittering chains of them linked from one side of the crown to the other, and fringed along the rest of the wide fan’s bottom edge.
By the second day, men and women were coming just to watch him work. I sat by, silent and unhappy, and kept them off, until finally despite the cold the crowds grew so thick I became impatient and started charging a penny to stand and watch for ten minutes, so they’d go away; only it backfired, and the basket I’d put out grew so full I had to empty it into a sack under the table three times a day.
By the fifth day, I had made nearly as much silver as the Staryk had given me in the first place, and the crown was finished; when Isaac had assembled the whole, he turned and said, “Come here,” and set it upon my head to see whether it was well balanced. The crown felt cool and light as a dusting of snow upon my forehead. In his bronze mirror, I looked like a strange deepwater reflection of myself, silver stars at midnight above my brow, and all the marketplace went quiet in a rippling wave around me, silent like the Staryk’s garden.
I wanted to burst into tears, or run away; instead I took the crown off my head and put it back into Isaac’s hands, and when he’d carefully swathed it with linen and velvet, the crowds finally drifted away, murmuring to one another. My grandfather had sent his two manservants with me that day, and they guarded us to the duke’s palace. We found it full of bustle and noise from the tsar’s retinue and preparations: there was to be a ball that night, and all the household full of suppressed excitement; they knew of the negotiations underway.
We were put into a better antechamber this time to wait, and then the chaperone came to fetch me. “Bring it with you. The men stay here,” she said, with a sharp, suspicious glare. She took me upstairs to a small suite of rooms, not nearly so grand as the ones below: I suppose a plain daughter hadn’t merited better before now. Irina was sitting stiff as a rake handle before a mirror made of glass. She wore snow-white skirts and a silver-gray silk dress over them, cut much lower this time to make a frame around the necklace; her beautiful dark hair had been braided into several thick ropes, ready to be put up, and her hands were gripped tightly around themselves in front of her.
Her fingers worked slightly against one another, nervous, as the chaperone pinned up the braids, and I carefully set the crown upon them. It stood glittering beneath the light of a dozen candles, and the chaperone fell silent, her eyes dreamy as they rested on her charge. Irina herself slowly stood up and took a step closer to the mirror, her nervous hand reaching up toward the glass almost as if to touch the woman inside.
Whatever magic the silver had to enchant those around it either faded with use or couldn’t touch me any longer; I wished that it could, and that my eyes could be dazzled enough to care for nothing else. Instead I watched Irina’s face, pale and thin and transported, and I wondered if she would be glad to marry the tsar; to leave her quiet, small rooms for a distant palace and a throne. As she dropped her hand, our eyes met in the reflection: 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.
After a few minutes, the duke himself came in to inspect her, and paused in the doorway of the room behind her. Irina was still standing before the mirror; she turned and curtsied to her father, then straightened again, her chin coming up a little to balance the crown; she looked like a queen already. The duke stared at her as if he could hardly recognize his own daughter; he shook himself a little, pulling free of the pull, before he turned to me. “You will have your gold, Panovina,” he said. “And if your Staryk wants more of it, you will come to me again.”
So I had six hundred gold pieces for the casket and two hundred more for the bank, and my sack full of silver pennies besides; a fortune, for what good it would do me. At least my mother and father wouldn’t go cold or hungry again, when the Staryk had taken me away.
My grandfather’s servants carried it all home for me. He came downstairs, hearing my grandmother’s exclamations, and looked over all the treasure; then he took four gold coins out of the heap meant for the bank, and gave two each to the young men before he dismissed them. “Drink one and save one, you remember the wise man’s rule,” he said, and they both bowed and thanked him and dashed off to revel, elbowing each other and grinning as they went.