Chapter Text
(Starts midway into the novel, after Miryem has accepted the King's challenge to turn all the silver in his three storerooms into gold.)
As the daylight dwindled to dusk, the King paced his icy chambers in growing rage. What had he not given—his hand, his crown, his pride before his people—and what would he not have given more still, even her rightful place in his bed—to wed this mortal maiden for her gift of gold. And here, in one, fell, mortal-hasty swoop, his wife had entered a fool’s bargain that would undo all his work. Certain, she would change much of his hoard from silver to gold, winning him more time to save his people and seal the mountain. But it would still not be enough to fulfil her promise—and then she would be forsworn, and he himself would have to be his own wife’s executioner.
And though he had been ready and willing enough to play that part not so long ago, every part of his ice-cold being thawed as at a summer’s day to do so now, and stormed against her folly for bringing them both into this hateful position.
Why?
A thin, quiet voice pierced his pacing, and his inability to give answer stopped him in his tracks. Why care so now, about a mortal girl’s death, which he himself had desired not so long ago? His own sneering mockery echoed back at him, ringing against the cold halls of memory: You have but one gift—occupy yourself with it. He had wanted to humble her, to put her back into her place—she who had disrupted every one of the carefully ordered laws of his world and querulously disturbed his peace.
But she had neither cowered, nor stepped back. Instead, she had dared to raise her chin at him, as though she were no mere mortal but his equal indeed, and spoken with an ice that matched his own, word for word: As I haven’t yet learned to make the snow fall to suit me, I’ll content myself with being what I am.
And as he glared down at the anger in her dark eyes, there was a glint of something hard and bright, yet also molten gold, as though he gazed about the sun refracting off a thousand ice crystals. As though, if she had truly wanted, she could bend the world to her ways, and make a hundred years of winter in a summer’s day, or wake new snow-trees from the earth, or even mend the mountain’s wounded face—if it so pleased her. And she only did not, because every bristling line of that body—that mortal shell that should have been so soft and easy to break to his will—was not pleased with him, and would not please him unless he forced her into a bargain.
Because for all his strength and elven might, this unnatural mortal had matched him, wit for wit, barter for barter, task for task—until this last time, where, for reasons that still failed him, she had promised too much and too swiftly, and disappointed him.
Disappointed—why?
Had he not been trying to entrap her, time and again? To catch her out on overpromising, to reveal her foolish boast? Should he not have celebrated her mortal folly, which would free them both of this unhappy and humiliating arrangement? But then, perhaps he, too, was caught in a trap not unlike her own, for all his strength and might and crown: his people were in peril, and if he could not procure more gold, then all the land would fall.
Yes, this, he told himself, was why he raged at her now—why he thawed in anger and anguish at the prospect of losing her, his “golden goose,” as she herself had sneered at him. Yet it was not the cold, clean fury of contempt with which he had whisked the girl away from the sunlit worlds, determined to fulfill his word, no matter the humiliation.
There was an edge of something else he could not name that churned the ice in his veins into something terrible and burning and even—though he loathed to admit it—afraid to lose her.
And so, all that final afternoon before her downfall, he paced the room in rage.
Again and again, he told himself a golden goose was all she was to him: her gift, and nothing more—no matter that gleam of something else in her eye.
And yet again and again, that gleam of her eye flickered in his mind and caught at his heart like the shimmering of frost blown off the first snowfall of winter.
*
Scene from the novel:
He had a grim anger-clenched look on his face that fell away instantly. He stopped open-mouthed, gazing on his emptied storeroom. I was shaking with weariness and reaction, but I dragged myself straight and said with hoarse defiance, “There, I have changed every coin within your storerooms to gold.”
*
She had done it.
It had been impossible, yet she had made it possible.
And as he gazed around his empty storeroom at the weary faces of his servants, now ladies and lords, he realized she had done it through means he could not have even imagined: she had struck alliances struck with her servants, and stretched herself beyond even the limits of his challenge, which he had not even offered in earnest, because he had expected—he had come to expect—her to bargain him down from lofty heights, until he, the Lord of the Mountain and White Forest, stood eye to eye with the mortal maiden he had made his wife.
Half in wonder, half in disbelief, he crossed the room in nine long strides and took the coin from her and split it into two. It gleamed back at him, bright and golden and true, as the gleam in her eyes—which were now glaring at him.
“It’s gold all the way through!” she snapped at him.
“Yes,” he murmured, gazing back at her, stunned. “It is.” And in the glittering depths of her eyes, he could see that she was indeed bright and golden and true, all the way through.
Again, the irony of his own words echoed back at him: If your imagination fails you, that is no sign I have failed to answer the question.
She had shown him the limitations of his imagination, and in doing so, she challenged his own knowledge: everything he thought he knew about his world and hers. He was Lord of the Glass Mountain and King of the White Forest, and yet she had swept through his known world and emptied it out as completely as his cavernous storeroom once full of his silver coins.
*
Afterward, he went straight to the crack in the mountain, that wide and terrible maw of broken glass that had been gnawing at his soul for the past seven years since it had first broken. It was still there, with its blunted teeth gaping at him. But there was a fresh dusting of frost, and even as he stood there, a chill wind whistled through the gap bringing it with the taste of new snow.
He climbed up to its peak, and when he thrust his head through the opening, his face was caught up in a flurry of snow—beautiful, buffeting snow.
On a clear day, he could see the entire sweep of his kingdom from this peak: its vast, hard-won crystalline expanse that swept away the darkness. But even from this height, with his hawk-sharp sight, he could not see past the mountain itself because the world had become a whirlwind of sweet, glorious snow, falling more thickly and swiftly every moment. It was as though the entire sky had opened up its storehouses of snow, and the blizzard was growing stronger—even as he felt a new and miraculous strength rising up through the storehouses that she had filled with sunlit gold.
He laughed, a burst of unexpected joy rising up to meet the snow that was kissing his cheeks, his brows, his lips; then he wept, a swell of relief surging from his soul, as he raised his arms to embrace the saving storm swirling all around him.
He stood there for many timeless moments, laughing and weeping with relief and wonder, as that strange, fresh sweetness settled all around him. And when he at last returned inside, it was still with him—that strange, fresh sweetness had settled deep into his heart, like the magic of a first snowfall.
And he had thought he had been waiting for it all these seven years, but he saw now that he was wrong again: this was something else, something he had not known, because it was beyond the limits of his imagination, and he had been waiting for it his entire immortal life.
*
When the King returned to his chambers, he had his attendants run him a bath and then leave him.
Then he laid his hand upon the flow of time. To be true to his word and for his lady’s sake, to be sure, but also for his own need. He needed time to be alone, to be quiet, and to think.
For this—this something else—required time, and thought, and care.
And he had given her none of those things.
As he stripped off his clothing and eased himself into the water with a sigh of pleasure, his muscles relaxed for the first time in a long time. He let himself enjoy the stolen stillness, knowing that she too would require time to rest and refresh herself, and then to turn her bondspeople’s silver to gold. And for the first time, he delighted to give her what she wanted—not only because her feat of high magic had enabled his own to rise, nor even because she had given him the gold he wanted.
Why?
It was there again, that question unfurling into the quiet. Before, when he had paced his room in helpless rage, he had not wanted to answer it. What good would it do, when everything would unravel anyway—all his labors and sacrifice and planning. He had answered her true, when she asked him if he could help. He could not have helped her, even if he had wanted to.
Yet long after he had left her, the question rang forth in his head like a bell tolling in a high tower. Whether there was anyway he could help her. And then: why he wanted to. Until he had slapped his hand to its clapper and silenced it—because there was no hope that she could redeem her pledge. Better not to probe his own heart further with foolish questions, when he had never been able to do what he wanted from their first encounter: he was as bound by his duties to his people, as she was to that mortal-hasty and foolish pledge of hers.
He saw now that it was not she, but he, who had been hasty and foolish from the very first. He had heard her boast, and thought her foolish and false like the humans who had crowned the Devourer. Even after she had proven her gift true, he had not given a thought for who she was, but only what she could do for him. So, he had swept her up on his stag, against her protestations that she did not want him—and thought that even more foolish and insulting, that this poor mortal maid should not want a Staryk king, whom any other Staryk lady in the land would have leapt to have.
But want had nothing to do with it, neither his nor hers, so he took her anyway, because he had a kingdom to save, and a promise to keep. Even after she had reminded him of her worth, thrust that golden crown and then that golden goblet into his face, and whittled him down with bargain after bargain, he had scorned her and treated her with contempt.
Every night, he answered her questions, because he did not want to yield her conjugal rights, or to regard her as his equal.
Want had nothing to do with it, until suddenly it did.
This miraculous maiden, and now it seemed that the true miracle that she was his Queen.
He thought of her now, in her chambers on the other side of the mountain, which he had chosen to be as far away from his own as possible. He thought of her stepping out of her own clothes, unbraiding her hair and letting it fall against her breasts. He thought of her sinking with a sigh into her own bath, and her long, loose hair flowing into the cool water, and he began to tremble: icicles pricked at his shoulders, and sharpened along his hips, and a bright shiver stiffened along the whole hard length of him, as he thought of his wife.
But then he remembered the disdain in her face, as she spat at him, I don’t call it a reward to be dragged from my home and my family. The frenetic haste with which she bargained away her rights, as though she could not bear to imagine bedding him. As though she had seen through him as a fool from the very first, even as he had failed to see through her as true gold until now.
The joy went out of his heart, and despair thawed at him.
He had stolen her, insulted her, and tried to murder her, and she was no fool. No wonder that she hated him. For all of his folly, he could not deny that she loathed him now—and rightly so. He had been a fool, and he cursed himself for it. It seemed impossible that he might redeem himself, either to match her feats of high magic, or to equal her own shining self.
Impossible, and yet—had she not shown him that it was possible to create a magic that stretched yourself and the world beyond its known limits? To make some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then step inside and somehow grow to fill it?
She had taught him her worth thrice now, the limitless height and breadth and depth of her magic, and he would do his utmost to match it or die trying. For he now saw that she was like the pearl of great worth in the mortal holy texts of old, which once discovered required the man who found it to sell all he had to acquire it. And who was he then? He had been like a man who had discovered and acquired this priceless treasure, and then thrown it before pigs to be trampled underfoot. Oh, he had been a fool, and a pig, but he would not be one now.
He would make his amends: this he swore to himself, and would swear to her at his next chance. For she was still his lady, however unwillingly, and he would prove himself to her.
Now, it was time to make himself ready to escort her to her cousin’s wedding.
And so, determined to do his utmost, he bathed himself until he was sparkling and clean and fresh as a clear winter’s day. He called his attendants, and he adorned himself in his finest clothes, and when he looked in the mirror, all the splendor of winter dazzled back at him. So though his heart still trembled with doubt, he straightened with determination—the determination and dignity that his lady had shown she deserved, and that he eagerly hoped to prove himself equal to.
She was ready, and he as ready as he ever could be.
And so he went, swift and eager and brightening with every step, to meet his matchless lady.