They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day’s work to hack it to pieces. The walker broke the child’s arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs. Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy’s body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.
Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope. We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren’t dead, and then had to be hunted down.
“Not Kasia,” I said. “Not Kasia.”
Wensa had bent her head. She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron. “Please, Nieshka. Please.” She spoke hoarsely, without hope. She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better. But she had come to me.
She couldn’t stop weeping. I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her. She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.
The Dragon stood in the doorway watching us. I held up the locket from around Wensa’s neck. “She has a lock of Kasia’s hair.” I knew she’d cut it from Kasia’s head the night before the choosing, thinking she would have nothing left to remember her daughter by. “If I use loytalal—”
He shook his head. “What do you imagine you’re going to find, besides a smiling corpse? The girl is gone.” He jerked his chin at Wensa, whose eyes had drifted shut. “She’ll be calmer after she sleeps. Tell that driver to come back in the morning to take her home.”
He turned and left, and the worst of it was how matter-of-factly he’d spoken. He hadn’t snapped at me, or called me a fool; he hadn’t said the life of a village girl wasn’t worth the chance the Wood might take me to add to its host. He hadn’t told me I was an idiot drunk on success in throwing potions, in pulling flowers from the air, to suddenly think I could save someone the Wood had taken.
The girl is gone. He’d even sounded sorry, in his abrupt way.
I sat with Wensa, numb and cold, holding her hard red callused hand in my lap. It was growing dark outside. If Kasia was still alive, she was in the Wood, watching the sun go down, light dying through the leaves. How long did it take, to hollow someone out from the inside? I thought of Kasia in the grip of the walkers, the long fingers curled around her arms and legs, knowing all the while what was happening, what would happen to her.
I left Wensa sleeping and went downstairs to the library. The Dragon was there, looking through one of the vast ledgers he made records in. I stood in the doorway staring at his back. “I know you held her dear,” he said over his shoulder. “But there’s no kindness in offering false hope.”
I didn’t say anything. Jaga’s book of spells was lying open on the table, small and worn. I’d been studying only spells of earth this week: fulmkea, fulmedesh, fulmishta, solid and fixed, as far from the air and fire of illusion as magic could get. I took the book and slipped it into my pocket behind the Dragon’s back, and then I turned around and went silently down the stairs.
Borys was still outside, waiting, his face long and bleak: he looked up from his blanketed horses when I came out of the tower. “Will you drive me to the Wood?” I asked him.
He nodded, and I climbed into his sleigh and drew the blankets around me as he made the horses ready again. He climbed aboard and spoke to them, jingling his reins, and the sleigh leapt out over the snow.
The moon was high that night, full and beautiful, blue light on the shining snow all around. I opened Jaga’s book as we flew, and found a spell for the quickening of feet. I sang it softly to the horses, their ears pricking back to listen to me, and the wind of our passage grew muffled and thick, pressing hard on my cheeks and blurring my sight. The Spindle, frozen over, was a pale silver road running alongside, and a shadow grew in the east ahead of us, grew and grew until the horses, uneasy, slowed and came to a halt without any word or any movement of reins. The world stopped moving. We were stopped under a small ragged cluster of pine-trees. The Wood stood ahead of us across an open stretch of unbroken snow.
Once a year, when the ground thawed, the Dragon took all the unmarried men older than fifteen out to the borders of the Wood. He burned a swath of ground along its edge bare and black, and the men followed his fire, sprinkling the ground with salt so nothing could grow or take root. In all our villages we saw the plumes of smoke rising. We saw them going up also on the other side of the Wood, far away in Rosya, and knew they were doing the same. But the fires always died when they reached the shadow beneath the dark trees.
I climbed down from the sleigh. Borys looked down at me, his face tense and afraid. But he said, “I’ll wait,” although I knew he couldn’t: Wait how long? For what? Wait here, in the Wood’s very shadow?
I thought of my own father, waiting for Marta, if our places had been changed. I shook my head. If I could bring Kasia out, I thought I could get her to the tower. I hoped the Dragon’s spell would let us in. “Go home,” I said, and then I asked him, wanting suddenly to know, “Is Marta well?”
He nodded slightly. “She’s married,” he said, and then he hesitated and said, “There’s a child coming.”
I remembered her at the choosing, five months ago: her red dress, her beautiful black braids, her narrow pale frightened face. It didn’t seem possible we’d ever stood next to each other, just the same: her and me and Kasia in a row. It took my breath, hard and painful, to imagine her sitting at her own hearth, already a young matron, getting ready for childbed.
“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred: someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t. Even if I came somehow out of the Wood alive again, I’d never have what she had. And Kasia—Kasia might already be dead.
But I wouldn’t go into the Wood with ill-wishing. I took a deep hard breath and made myself say, “I wish her an easy birth and a healthy child.” I even managed to mean it: childbirth was frightening enough, even if it was a more familiar terror. “Thank you,” I added, and turned away to cross over the barren ground, to the wall of great dark trunks. I heard the jingle of the harness behind me as Borys turned the horses and trotted away, but the sound was muffled, and soon faded. I didn’t look around, taking step after step until I stopped just beneath the first boughs.
A little snow was falling, soft and quiet. Wensa’s locket was cold in my hand as I opened it. Jaga had half a dozen different finding spells, small and easy—it seemed she’d had a habit of misplacing things. “Loytalal,” I said softly, to the small coiled braid of Kasia’s hair: good for finding the whole, from a part, the scribbled note on the spell had said. My breath fogged into a small pale cloud and drifted away from me, leading the way into the trees. I stepped between two trunks, and followed it inside the Wood.
I expected it to be more dreadful than it was. But at first it seemed only an old, old forest. The trees were great pillars in a dark endless hall, well apart from one another, their twisting gnarled roots blanketed in dark green moss, small feathery ferns curled up close for the night. Tall pale mushrooms grew in hosts like toy soldiers marching. The snow hadn’t reached the ground beneath the trees, not even now in the deep of winter. A thin layer of frost clung to the leaves and fine branches. I heard an owl calling somewhere distantly as I picked my way carefully through the trees.
The moon was still above, clear white light coming through the bare branches. I followed my own faint breath and imagined myself a small mouse hiding from owls: a small mouse hunting for a piece of corn, a hidden nut. When I went gleaning in the forest, I often daydreamed as I walked: I lost myself in the cool shady green, in the songs of birds and frogs, in the running gurgle of a stream over rocks. I tried to lose myself the same way now, tried to be only another part of the forest, nothing worthy of attention.
But there was something watching. I felt it more and more with every step the deeper I went into the Wood, a weight laid heavily across my shoulders like an iron yoke. I had come inside half-expecting corpses hanging from every bough, wolves leaping at me from the shadows. Soon I was wishing for wolves. There was something worse here. The thing I had glimpsed looking out of Jerzy’s eyes was here, something alive, and I was trapped inside an airless room with it, pressed into a small corner. There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage. I crept on, my shoulders hunched, trying to be small.
Then I came stumbling to a small stream—barely a rivulet, frost thick on both banks and black water running between them, the moonlight coming through the break in the trees. And there was a walker on the other side, its strange narrow stick-head bent to the water to drink, its mouth like a crack open in its face. It lifted its head and looked straight at me, dripping. Its eyes were knots in wood, round dark pouched holes that some small animal might have lived in. There was a scrap of green woolen cloth dangling from one of its legs, caught on a jutting spar at the joint.