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I could fill pages and pages of her, and I have, in ink and charcoal and paint, trying to capture my tsarina, my silver lady. It was as much as I ever had of her; she was forever away at meetings and delegations, producing letters of state or weighty business, managing the kingdom and the household both as neatly as she ever did anything. If she had time left over for me, it was as much as she would have given to any of her little squirrels. I was beginning to feel distinctly neglected.
No matter—I remained as devoted to her as any of her fools. She had saved me, and I was hers; that much was clear enough to me. What I couldn’t understand was why.
We shared a bedchamber. It would have been suspicious, otherwise, and my tsarina would not abide that. But it was decidedly cold; the tsarevitch, if he came, would not be conceived there. Unless of course Irina took her inevitable lover to our bed—while I stood in the corner and had tea, I supposed—which was certainly within the realm of the possible. Perhaps a man ought to have had more pride than that, but I had spent too long being so much less than a man. I suppose I never entirely learned how to be one.
In more ways than one: tonight Irina sent her maids away and came walking towards the bed wearing her white nightgown; I could see her hips moving beneath it, and her pale skin gleaming beneath the filmy fabric, and desire awakened within me. I wanted to be with my wife—surely I was allowed that much? I wanted to show her my devotion, my love, with this body that was created to be beautiful; I wanted, I wanted, I wanted, oh, how useless I was at anything but wanting. She let me pull her into my lap as though something could have changed, since the last time, as though the hands that slid up the hem of her shift could do anything more. Sighed for me, even: a kindness I lapped up and resented in the same heartbeat.
I fought it, when it came, choking down the wave of nausea that washed over me. But there was no point to it, no point to anything I did: in Irina’s face were the faces of all the staring dead I had ever found in my bed, the touch of her warm smooth skin was the touch of a corpse. I flinched back from it, helplessly; I was sick and afraid, I was a child again, cowering and helpless before the fire. I couldn’t stand her touch, nor her look; I was kneeling on the bedspread wide-eyed, shaking in every limb, and I remembered their faces, vividly, as I had never done when I killed them.
It was perhaps stretching matters to say that I had killed them, of course. I believed in allotting blame where it lay, for whatever good it did me. But the dead didn’t seem to feel the difference particularly, and after all it was my body that had done it, and there was no one else to remember their deaths. So of course it fell to me: what a privilege. I didn’t want it, had never asked for it. I didn’t want to make amends, I didn’t want to feel guilt, like a useless dangling limb. I would have amputated it if I could.
But instead I cried out in horror, seeing their faces in the face of my wife, beloved, and pressed my face into the bedspread to escape from it. My body shook with great, heaving sobs that I could do nothing to suppress, my hands making claws in the blankets, as wretched out as I felt within. Irina was silent.
I don’t know what I would have done, if she had given me a kind word, some tender mouthful of pity. I would have hated her, I think. But it would not come to that yet, it seemed: she said nothing. Only afterwards, when I could bear her touch again and came shivering into her arms, she held me gently as I panted, serene as the Pieta, not saying a word.
There used to be a monster in my chest that ate guilt, that ate sadness; I would have been happy to feed it those things again, if only I could be sure it wouldn’t devour me, too. I had never once imagined being free of the demon, except in death, and perhaps not even then: but had my imagination ever stretched so far, I would never have considered that I might trade in a demon’s torture for that of my own conscience. It was a thought to put me in a fine mood by the time I slouched down to meet my court; late again, even by my standards. Of late I had developed a thinning patience for my court and its endless frivolities. It didn’t make me feel any better to know that most of those frivolities had been encouraged by me.
I'd always liked looking at beautiful people, at graceful women and well-built men, but the life that was on display in my court, corsetted and pinned and plumped and well-draped, lush and absurd and driven to a wild frenzy of permissiveness by a spring too long in coming, seemed only garish to my eyes now. I had been to the Staryk lands, to a landscape painted only in strokes of silver and darkness. I had seen their shining knights, in silver swords and silver armor, melting and brave in the red glow of coals. I could see that austere mountain clear in my mind's eye, shining against the darkness. That was beauty, and I had nearly destroyed it.
But Irina joined me before too long: my other ideal of beauty. What a delightful irony! I had finally learned how her magical beauty had worked. It was a downright pleasure, the first time I extended a hand at Lord Reynauld D'Estaigne and watched him stammer, wide-eyed, over my ring. It didn't last very long, of course. Sometimes in passing moments my ring might catch the light unexpectedly—I often found it helpful to hold it very close to my mouth, and part my lips slightly—and everyone in the immediate vicinity, even those who had seen it a thousand times before, would stare and be caught. But that was as much magic as I had anymore, aside from the ordinary boring magic of crown and beauty. Not for Irina, though: her silver crown, when she wore it, still had the power to silence a room, the crowds of the hungry and the damned looking at her as if she were holy, as if she were salvation. Nor did that magic disappear when she took off her silver: it was as if the Staryk magic had only soaked into her skin. Starlight still gleamed off her brow, crown or not, and her dark eyes made you think, inexplicably, of winter.
It made me angry. Irina was my savior, not theirs. She had rescued me from the demon. They had no right to look at her as if she would pull them out of their own personal hells, too. I glowered whenever I caught them staring, but that didn't have the power it once did. There was dancing tonight, and the musicians were new, playing with the vigor of men who had seen the fabled beauty of the tsarina with their own eyes for the first time. Some callow noble in the crowd was moving in a straight line to the royal dais, his eyes set longingly, almost with supplication, on Irina, and I realized with outrage that he meant to ask her to dance.
I grabbed her hand abruptly.
"Surely you wouldn't wish to miss the dancing, my love?" I said, overloud, to make sure everyone knew she was my wife.
Irina, of course, only looked at me with surprise, as if it had never occurred to her that I might like to dance with her.
"If you like, my love," she said, quietly, and stood up to go with me to the ballroom floor.
We were entering mid-dance, with no regard for the flow of the dancers already there, but that sort of thing is one of the very great pleasures afforded of being tsar and tsarina. I shouldered us to a good spot in the center. The musicians had intentionally slowed to give us time to enter the dance, and for a moment I could simply look at her as she stood within the circle of my arms, her eyes modestly downcast. The dark brushstrokes of her eyelashes against the pale canvas of her cheeks felt as though they were painted on my heart.
Then she looked up at me, not so modest, with that direct assessing gaze that I had failed so many times to capture. Was it the way her eyes reflected the light? Was it the shape of them, or the color? I was still studying them, still thinking of which of my pencils would be best, when the music began again and we were off.
We stepped this way and that to the music, like two figures on a music box, a fairy-tale tsar and tsarina: how delightful. The musicians were practically feverish now, sawing away in hopes that Irina would look their way, I imagine. Their bowstrings would be frayed in the morning, but that wasn't a worry of mine. The music rose and fell, guiding our steps. I turned Irina in my arms. She was still eyeing me half-warily, as if trying to guess what I was playing at, but when it came time to go double-pace down the length of the floor and back, she was there with me, holding on hard to my shoulder and hand, a little color in her cheeks for once, from the exercise. I always half-expected to find her cold, but she was warm under my hand, even through the silk layers of her unornamented grey gown, which was threatening to begin a trend among the young women in my court. Every beauty in Koron wanted to look like the tsarina in nothing but a plain modest dress and no jewels; I heartily wished them luck.
I spun her around a final time, my Irina, before the dance came to an end. Her eyes were bright tonight, as if the stars from her crown had come down to live within their dark winter depths. The music stopped, and around us the dancers laughed and clapped, applauding the musicians and each other, but I could only look at her. How ignominious, to be in love. What an appalling loss of dignity. Had Irina ever felt so? Did she feel so now? I couldn't keep myself from wondering, even though I knew it made no difference. I knew that she loved me, just as she loved peasants and old women and squirrels.
She was so impossible to read. I felt that she must know everything about me, as if she had scoured me bare and noted everything down when she forced Chernobog out of me, and in return I was permitted only the most pitiful breadcrumbs of knowledge that she would have fed anyone who was dying of hunger. But what right did I have to know anything? I had only been the skin-puppet of a demon, a convenient body to snatch her up with. She hadn't even wanted to marry me, but she had saved me. She owed nothing; I, everything. That was what hung heavy in my heart, more than guilt, more than sadness.
But her hand was on mine, her slim fingers brushing over my knuckles like she didn't realize that she could reach into my chest, instead, and have my heart for the taking. I caught her fingers in mine, brought them to my lips. Without thinking about it I kissed them, and then I kissed her.
She had closed her eyes when I did it, and now she opened them again, slowly, like waking out of a dream. Around us the courtiers were looking out the corners of their eyes, some amused, no doubt, to see their tsar so foolish in love, and some as jealous as dragons. They were all expecting a tsarevitch from us soon, I knew, but they could wait forever so far as I was concerned. I didn't care about them or any of their speculations or their gossiping concerns, and it meant nothing to me who sat the throne of Lithvas after me, except to pity the poor wretch. I could be the king of my brushes and paints only and be satisfied, if only I thought that if I kissed Irina, she would kiss me back.
But I knew that wasn't to be. Irina only looked at me with her cool eyes, revealing nothing. She touched my cheek, once, and taking my arm made me bring her back to the dais.
Back when I thought I would be shut up in a monastery for the rest of my days—what a naive child I had been—I had once heard some monks say that to illustrate a book, a short one, was two years. It had seemed like an impossibly long time to me at the time, but now it seemed too short. Two years only, out of an entire unexpected lifetime: I could have fifty years left, even, if I did not drink myself to death or have myself conveniently stabbed. My mother had not been twenty-and-five when she was wrapped in the saint-blessed chains and burned: I had not myself expected to live so long. How long could I last, after all, with my dear friend leaving dead footman on every doorstep and snatching any duke's daughter that caught its interest.
Well, I didn't mean to illustrate any books, which I never read anyway, but I cloistered myself in nonetheless, slamming closed all the doors to my bedchamber, keeping only the great windows open for air and light. After a moment's thought I took a chair and smashed all the mirrors, too, letting the glass fragments scatter where they would. I would have no demon magic to fix it all with, but what did that matter? I was finally alone. I set my easel and chair near the balcony, where the light was good, and began to paint.
That was the beginning of a week, an entire blessed week in silence and stillness. I let Irina use her own bedchamber for once, suspicions be damned, and if servants approached I would snarl at them, until by the end of the week only the bravest of them would put food and drink on a tray just inside the door, and escape as quick as they could, as if I were a mad prisoner and not their ruler. I saw no one else in that time. My court and my council wouldn't miss me, of course; they had Irina now to soothe them. And Irina in turn had all LIthvas ready to console her, if she needed consoling.
I painted. I was in a fever. I ate without tasting it. When light faded I slept, and dreamt of brushstrokes: I was up at first light again, taking up a brush in my hand without even washing or changing. Birds came by the balcony, curious. They turned their heads and hopped closer, but their bravery went unrewarded. Their mistress was spreading crumbs on some other balcony, sleeping alone in her own bedchamber. Or perhaps not alone. The birds flew away, and I turned back to the easel, painting and tearing off sheets in a frenzied rush. They settled all around me on the floor, the vast painted leaves of a most unlikely tree.
At the end of a week I staggered upright from the chair. The brush fell from my hand onto the plush carpet, leaving spots, but I was beyond caring. The floor was covered with paintings, overlapping and muddying each other. Some were still wet, faces glistening in some sick parody of life; some had dried unevenly, and were awkwardly hunched. But they were all there. I was finished. I didn't stop to look at them. I went straight to my bed and slept in my clothes.
I suppose I couldn't really be too surprised that Irina had decided that she was tired of no longer having a husband. I woke and found her sitting at the foot of my bed. She had slipped in through the door as quietly and smoothly as she once slipped in between worlds. She was looking at the paintings.
"Good morning, husband," she said, when she noticed I was awake.
"Is it? Why are you here?"
She studied me.
"I'm your wife. Do you want me to go, then?"
I thinned my lips. "No," I ground out, petulant. "I don't want you to go. I don't want anything from you." I got up and paced, paintings crackling under my feet. They were only paper; the paint had bled through and stained the carpet where I'd strewn them. "Are you going to say anything, then? Or are you content to pass judgement on me in silence?"
"I've never been interested in judging you," said Irina. Her voice was cool and steady. "It's hard enough to understand you without considering morality, too."
I had to laugh, at that. "Now I'm the one who's hard to understand? Me? Oh, darling Irina. I doubt that very much."
"Don't call me that."
"What, darling? What about beloved, or my dove, or my sweet? Will none of these do?" I bared my teeth at her. "I don't suppose it makes a difference to you that I mean it, this time around."
Her face was a cipher. She said,
"Neither one of us can slip this hook now. Don't you care at all about how I must feel?"
"What does it matter?" I tried to sneer at her, but it lacked conviction. "It's nothing to me what you think of me, truly. I'm not so absurd that I think all love is returned in full, as if love was handed out by a fair moneylender. There's no such thing as a fair bargain, as I've cause to know. Don't tell me you're already regretting your grand gesture! You might even have found a husband who wouldn't make an embarrassment of you."
"It matters. You know that it matters."
Before I could respond she had plucked a painting up from the floor. "Who is this?"
I ground my teeth. "She was an undermaid. I don't know her name. I sent gold to her parents in the country and they bought a milch cow with it. I'm sure they thought the trade was fair." I added it hoping to nettle her, but Irina was silent, looking at the paintings, the many dozens and dozens of them, and every one of them a portrait. I could see her taking it all in, those indomitable wheels spinning in her head. She picked up another portrait, set it down and then picked up another. I waited, my fists clenched and trembling, but she didn't ask me about any of them. She seemed to look at each one individually, or at least she took an abominably long time to walk around the room, careful as I had not been not to tread them underfoot.
The last portrait, the one still on the easel, was my brother. His visage still came easily to my hand, although I hadn't drawn him in seven years. He had been the first person to sit for me, and I had drawn hundreds of portraits of him back then. All of those were gone now, of course. I had fed them all to the fire when he died. Irina's fingers stretched out, briefly questing along the line of his painted cheek and withdrawing. She turned back to me.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"For what?" I asked, bitterness on my tongue. "As if you had anything to be sorry for. You freed me, or don't you remember? You're the reason all this ended."
"I'm sorry that you suffered, and I'm sorry that you suffer now. I would take it away, if I could."
"And what would you do to take it away, darling Irina?" I spat it at her, or tried to. My voice was swollen. "Would you give me kisses sweeter than honey, and touches sweeter than wine, will you sing songs over my head and do all the things that lovers do? Would you make a fool of yourself for me? Would you tell me that you love me? Would you mean it, sweet Irina?"
"I would," said Irina. "All those things and more."
I was silenced. After a moment she took my hand and pressed it to her heart. Despite the cool serenity of her face, it was beating like a drum beneath my hand. She leaned forward, her lips brushing against my skin, and she whispered love into my ear.