Spinning Silver

Miryem’s mother suggests they run, but the ever-practical Miryem knows better. No matter where she goes, the Staryk king will find her. She takes his 60 silver coins back to Vysnia in a hurry; everything must be completed before sundown on Friday, since she doubts the Staryk will respect her need to honor Shabbat. Isaac, the jeweler, is eager for more magic silver and a little alarmed that he had forgotten about it. He decides to make a necklace out of it this time, and they go to the duke’s house to sell it. The power-hungry duke calls for his daughter, Irina, and puts the necklace on her. At once the otherwise plain girl becomes entrancing and compelling—“it was hard even to glance away from her, with winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her dark eyes as she looked at herself in the mirror on the wall there” (85). The duke pays a hundred gold for the necklace and offers a thousand if they will make “a crown fit for a queen” as Irina’s dowry (85).

As entrancing as the Staryk silver necklace may be to everyone else, it is far more thrilling to Irina. When she wears it and looks at her reflection, she does not see herself in her father’s house but in “a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky” (88). Her father intends to use the Staryk silver jewelry’s allure to entice the tsar into marrying Irina for his own political gain. While most young women in the kingdom of Lithvas would be pleased by such a prospect, Irina knows better. The son of a ruthless witch, Mirnatius was cruel even as a child, taking joy from making the bodies of the squirrels he had killed twitch for his amusement. A young Irina asked why he was so cruel only to be met with the threat of death. For her audacity, Mirnatius pointed his arrow at her heart, ready to fire with impunity. After all, no one would speak against the prince. Instead of killing her, he laughed, “all hail the defender of dead squirrels” (90). For the rest of his visit, Irina found dead squirrels awaiting her wherever she played. Though she and her governess, Magreta, fear a marriage to such a man, Irina’s mind is elsewhere. She thinks, “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” (92).

On the way back home, Oleg tries to rob Miryem. He’s prepared to kill her and take the Staryk’s gold, but as he stands over her, knife in hand, he suddenly stops. The Staryk is standing behind him, his hand on the driver’s neck. Frostbitten, Oleg slowly climbs back into the driver’s seat without a word. Miryem gives the purse of gold to the Staryk. Lacking better options, she returns to Oleg’s sledge, which soon drives on the Staryk road. Surrounded by unearthly beauty, Miryem considers how different the Staryk forest is from others she knows:

“Around us, trees stretched tall and birch-white, full of rustling leaves; trees that didn’t grow in our forest, and should have been bare with winter. I saw white birds and white squirrels darting between the branches, and the sleigh bells made a strange kind of music, high and bright and cold” (95).

Suddenly, they are off the Staryk road and arriving outside Miryem’s gate. Still fearful of the man who almost killed her, she darts to her door only to find that Oleg is already driving away without looking back.

Miryem sends Wanda to bring Oleg a receipt, showing the reduction of his debt by a kopek, the agreed price for his transportation to and from the city. Wanda soon learns that Oleg is dead, found frozen solid outside his stables. Wanda considers that Miryem has continued paying both herself and Sergey, though it is apparent that he cannot stop the Staryk. She worries that the powerful Staryk will soon kill Miryem, leaving her generous parents to declare Gorek’s debt paid. In such a case, her father would take her pay and beat her savagely for keeping her money from him.

As much as Miryem fears being turned to ice, she also worries about what will happen to her if she changes the silver to gold a third time: “I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his slave, or frozen into ice” (99). When Wanda pointedly asks whether Miryem can fulfill his request, Miryem replies that she can and asks Wanda to continue working for her parents if she is taken away. Wanda explains her concerns about her father, and Miryem quickly comes to a solution. Wanda is to tell Gorek that they will pay a penny a week in hard coin for Wanda and Sergey’s work, to be paid monthly and up front. She asserts that “once he’s spent them, he’s back in debt and he can’t refuse to send you. And the next month, do it again” (102).

Expecting to succeed in changing the silver and soon become a Staryk queen, Miryem walks the length of the town, feeling reassured that at least she will not miss her hometown or any of its people, as “they would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn’t pretend to be a neighbor” (103). When the Staryk king gives her seven days to change a box of silver into gold, Miryem asks why he would marry her, knowing that she has no magic and cannot change his silver to gold if he takes her away. To her surprise, he insists that she would still be able to do so—“A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so” (106). With that, he disappears.

As agreed, Isaac makes the crown from the Staryk silver, and they deliver it to Irina. Miryem feels a sort of kinship with her, given the similarities in their situations: having no control over their futures and their impending, unwanted marriages to kings. The duke pays them their thousand gold, leaving Miryem with hundreds of zlotek left over for herself. When she returns to her grandparents’ house, she breaks down and tells her grandfather everything. He considers the Staryk king like any other prospective husband, a perspective which she finds reassuring.

The tsar comes, and the duke makes his intentions to marry his daughter to the monarch clear. Irina is meant to wear the ring on the first night to give a hint of intrigue, then add the necklace the following day to build the allure. They expect the crown will not be needed to enrapture the tsar. Though the plan may doom Irina’s future by binding her to a sadistic king, all she cares about is feeling the Staryk silver on her skin once more.

As her cousin Basia’s betrothal is set, Miryem is uneasy about her own unwanted one. The Staryk—her Staryk—soon arrives, resigned to their upcoming nuptials. Overcome by the absurdity of the marriage, which is unwanted on both sides, Miryem bluntly asks why he insists on it, telling him to take his gold and leave her alone. Insulted, the Staryk asserts that he will uphold his word and blames her for the situation:

“You are the one who demanded fair return for a proven gift of high magic; did you think I would degrade myself by pretending to be one of the low, unable to match it? I am the lord of the glass mountain, not some nameless wight, and I leave no debts unpaid. You are thrice proven, thrice true—no matter by what unnatural chance—and I shall not prove false myself, whatever the cost” (120).

Distraught, Miryem points out that she does not even know the Staryk’s name, but this, too, is a mistake. He takes great offense, sneering, “My name? You think to have my name? You shall have my hand, and my crown, and content yourself therewith; how dare you demand still more of me?” (121). When he takes her hand, she finds herself in the Staryk forest with nowhere to run. With no better options, she climbs into his sleigh.

Irina waits in her father’s study to be re-introduced to the tsar, but he soon appears and orders her governess away. Much like Irina, Magreta is powerless to deny their sadistic monarch. The tsar remembers Irina, calling her his “brave grey squirrel” (123). Irina tries to hide the ring to avoid catching Mirnatius’s eye, but when he appears in the study where she is waiting, her blunt statement that she does not want to be his bride catches his interest. She thinks she sees his eyes flash red for a moment, but soon the duke arrives to usher them both downstairs. The tsar tells the duke that he was right in saying there was “something unusual” in Irina and implies that the scheming has been effective: “She is destined for a very particular bridegroom, I think, and I must warn you that he is not inclined to patience” (125).

Wanda grows bolder as she tries to fill the void Miryem left both in the business and the Mandelstam family. When she goes to her own home, Wanda finds herself being sold into marriage for a bottle of alcohol a week, and her careful plans with Miryem are foiled. Emboldened by the confidence she has gained through her time with the Mandelstams, Wanda refuses the marriage and suffers a savage beating from her father. Her brothers both intervene to protect her, but the confrontation ends fatally when Gorek falls into the fire and strikes his head on the kasha pot. Fearing that Sergey will be hanged, Wanda and Sergey decide to take their saved pennies and run after sending Stepon to the Mandelstams. They say goodbye to their mother together. The white tree gently touches each of them and gives Stepon a nut. Wanda and Sergey set off for Vysnia, ostensibly hoping to find work with Miryem’s grandfather but truly running for their lives.

Irina marries the tsar despite his apparent immunity to the Staryk silver. She suspects he only married her for the sadistic joy of marrying the only maiden in the country who did not want to be his bride. Soon enough, the feasting is over, and she is alone and waiting for her husband in their chambers. Looking into the mirror there, Irina sees the Staryk forest once more. When she touches the reflection, she travels through the mirror and into the Staryk woods. Safely away, she sees the room she left in the reflection of the river. Through the reflection, Irina watches her husband search for her, destroying the room in a fit of rage. He shocks her by falling into a seizure, foaming at the mouth, and rising again. As he speaks to the fire, it soon becomes apparent that the red-eyed, hateful creature had not truly been Mirnatius, but someone—something—else in his body. Mirnatius proves to be complicit in the demon’s plans to kill her. Through the fire demon’s power, the tsar magically undoes the damage to the room and plans to torture Magreta to discover Irina’s whereabouts. Unable to live with the prospect of her dear companion suffering for her sake, Irina touches the river and travels back to the room. After a few tests, she discovers that she needs two of the Staryk jewelry items to use the magic to travel to the forest.

Miryem is awed and fearful of the dreamlike majesty of her Staryk’s woods and glass mountain. When she is brought before his court, she notices that for all their ethereal beauty, the Staryk courtiers seem to have no more access to silver or gold than their mortal counterparts. It is clear that they consider Miryem to be altogether unworthy, and when her Staryk begrudgingly announces her as queen, she notices their hateful smiles. Thinking of the other cruel smiles she has seen all her life, she grabs the crown the king is moving to place upon her head. Warmth floods her, and strands of gold emerge from her fingertips, overtaking the silver of the crown. Just like that, she proves the magic that won her the unwanted title in the first place, and she realizes she will never be free. Miryem and the Staryk king place her golden crown on her head together, and she sees her victory in the changing expressions of the court. Miryem observes that “there were no smiles among them now, and the disapproval had gone to wariness. I looked them in their cold faces and I decided I wouldn’t be sorry, all over again” (150).

Aside from the announcement of her title and her crowning, there is no ceremony she associates with weddings, and certainly no vows. When her Staryk leads her to his chambers, she goes to drink the wine clearly meant for her. He knocks it out of her hands, and she realizes he had intended to poison her. He had only promised to wed her, after all, not to keep her alive. When she touches the goblet, she pours her newfound power into it and watches it change to gold. Irritated, her Staryk insists that he does not need another reminder of her power. It soon becomes clear that given their wedded status and his decision not to murder her, he is frustrated yet resigned to giving her the marital rights that she is owed, including “the pleasures of the wedding-bed, so I was getting them, whether I wanted or not” (152).

When her question as to why he desires gold so badly goes unanswered, she desperately tries to avoid the consummation of their marriage. Thinking quickly, she trades away her marital rights for answers, settling on three per night. Miryem proves herself a shrewd negotiator when he tries to skirt the intention of the agreement by giving her useless answers, asserting that “if your answers are useless to me, then tomorrow I won’t ask” (154). With her last question of the evening, she asks what it would take for him to let her go, once again insulting her Staryk husband. He angrily responds to what he considers an outrageous question:

“What have I not already given to have you? My hand and my crown and my dignities, and you ask me to set a higher price upon you still? No. You shall be content with what you have gotten of me already, in return for your gift, and mortal girl, be warned, it is that gift alone that keeps you in your place. Remember it” (155).