(eng) Naomi Novik by Spinning Silver

Author:Spinning Silver [Silver, Spinning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

It was so cold in that little house after Irina left, and outside the white trees seemed to have crept closer to the windows, as if they wanted to reach their branches in. I kept the heavy fur rug clutched around my shoulders and dragged the chair to the oven and sat there shivering while I ate another helping of the porridge, my bones sore so that I could feel them rub one against the other at every joint, a little pain every time I moved. But worst of all was to be there alone, with the terrible winter outside. I put another stick on the fire and stirred it to have a brighter flame leaping, like a little bit of company, and to chase away that cold dark outside that would not change. It was no place for an old woman to be, a tired old woman. “Stay out of the woods or the Staryk will snatch you, and take you away to their kingdom,” my mother would say, when I was a little girl. And now here I was hiding in their kingdom like a mouse, and what when the fire went out, and what when the porridge was gone? At least there was a great deal of wood in the box next to the oven.

It was a peculiar housekeeper who lived there. While Irina had talked to that strange Jew girl, I found strawberries and honey and salt and oats, and six enormous balls of rough yarn, uneven as lumpy porridge, beside an old-fashioned spindle. It caught on my fingers, but the wool underneath was good; it had only been spun without carding or care, by someone in too much of a hurry to do it properly. My lady the duchess would have cracked my hand across the knuckles with her stick if I had made such a mess in her sight. Not the duchess now, of course—Galina was a good manager, but she spun very indifferent; nor Irina’s mother before her, who when she would spin at all made thread that shone like alabaster off her spindle while she stared out the window and sang softly to herself, and never looked at the work of anyone else’s hands. But the duchess that was, before either of them.

She had gone to the convent long ago, of course; ten years dead now I had heard, God keep her in his sight. I had seen her last on that terrible day when Irina’s father broke the city wall, in the battle that had made him the duke and helped to put the tsar’s father on his throne. We watched the smoke of the fighting together from the palace, all of us her women close together, until the smoke began to move into the city. Then she turned away from the window and said, “Come,” to me and to the other girls, the six of us not married, and took us down into the cellars to a little room far in the back, with a door fitted out of the stones of the wall, and locked us into it.

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