It was a poor peddler’s cart, covered in dull tin pots, and Staryk knights only ever came riding for gold. One time, we heard the hooves behind us as they came off their road, a sound like ice cracking, and the driver beat the horses quick to get the cart behind a tree, and we all huddled there in the well of the wagon among the sacks, my mother’s arm wrapped around my head holding it down so I couldn’t be tempted to take a look. “Don’t look, Miryem,” my mother would tell me, but I always kept watching it out of the corner of my eyes, hoping to keep it near, because whoever was driving the cart would slap the horses and hurry them up until it vanished again. Sometimes we caught glimpses of the other road through the trees, the one that belonged to the Staryk, gleaming like the top of the river in winter when the snow had blown clear. Mama often took me on visits, when she could afford a few pennies to pay someone to let us ride along at the back of a peddler’s cart or a sledge, five or six changes along the way. He lived in Vysnia, forty miles away by the pitted old trading road that dragged from village to village like a string full of small dirty knots. My mother’s father was a moneylender, too, but he was a very good one. And everyone else liked it that way, even though they knew they ought to be ashamed of themselves, so they told the story often, even or especially when I could hear it. So all his money, most of which had been my mother’s money, her dowry, stayed in other people’s houses. And if there was money in the house and someone asked to borrow, he hated to say no, even if we didn’t really have enough ourselves. Only if our cupboards were really bare, or our shoes were falling off our feet, and my mother spoke quietly with him after I was in bed, then he’d go, unhappy, and knock on a few doors, and make it sound like an apology when he asked for some of what they owed. If someone didn’t pay him back on time, he never so much as mentioned it to them. Then the miller’s despoiled daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels for a dowry, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early.īecause that’s what the story’s really about: getting out of paying your debts. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterwards he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard.

The spinning silver