"Spinning Silver"

[fiefoe]

I gave up on Naomi Novak's "Uprooted" pretty early on (why?) but this one snuck into my affection by the time Wanda came on the scene. Along with Miryem and Irinushka, the three girls make wonderful role models. Lisa Flanagan's narration grew on me too and towards the end, I couldn't imagine voices that are better suited for this wintery tale.

• But the world I wanted wasn't the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever. <> But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.
• “So the fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice. We should put them in a room together and let them make us both widows.”
• Because that’s what the story’s really about: getting out of paying your debts.
• That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.
• Of course I was afraid. But I had learned to fear other things more: being despised, whittled down one small piece of myself at a time, smirked at and taken advantage of. I put my chin up and said, as cold as I could be in answer, “And what will you give me in return?
• The only thing that had ever done me any good in my father's house was thinking: no one had cared what I wanted, or whether I was happy. I'd had to find my own way to anything I wanted. I'd never been grateful for that before now, when what I wanted was my life.
• I recognized that hunger: a devouring thing that would gulp down lives with pleasure and would only pretend to care about law or justice, unless you had some greater power behind you that it couldn’t find a way to cheat or break, and that would never, never be satisfied.
• A crowd of women around me doing the ocean of women’s work that never subsided and never changed and always swallowed whatever time you gave it and wanted more, another hungry body of water. I submerged into it like a ritual bath and let it close over my head gladly. I wanted to stop my ears and my eyes and my mouth with it. I could worry about this, whether there was enough food, whether the bread was rising well, whether the beef had cooked long enough, whether there were enough chairs at the table; I could do something about these things.
• But in the pocket of one dress that seemed heavy, I found a handful of smooth black pebbles that shone strangely; I ran out with them, but the Staryk said impatiently, “No! What use is that? I might wander ten thousand years in the goblin depths and never find a way out again; put them away!” Under the pillow, my mother found an old dull-copper coin, which he rejected by saying, “I cannot dream my way home, either!”
• “Da buried all five of the babies there,” Wanda said. Her face was white and hard and angry as I had ever seen it. “All five of my brothers who died. And Mama at the end. She gave it to Stepon! It is his!” The Staryk looked at her, and then at Sergey and Stepon, as if he used them to measure the six lives missing: five brothers never grown and a mother gone besides. Then he dropped his hand to his side. His face gone faded and terrible, he stared at the white nut curled half hidden behind Stepon’s fingers, and whispered, “It is his,” agreeing, only he sounded as if he was agreeing to his own death.
• all standing there together with the white fruit shining in the house with the same pale gleam as his silver, and the Staryk only kept looking at it desperate and yet without saying a word, as if he couldn’t even imagine how to offer a bargain for it. How could you: what could you give someone that would be a fair price for all their pain, for all those buried years of sorrow? I wouldn’t have taken a thousand kingdoms for my mother.
• He would only shrug and look at me expectantly again, waiting for high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.
• And amid all the work, I found more than enough to make a place for me. The Staryk didn’t know anything of keeping records: I suppose it was only to be expected from people who didn’t take on debts and were used to entire chambers wandering off and having to be called back like cats.