The last few shadow-fish were being worn away to wriggling threads, and then they vanished, grown so thin they couldn’t be seen. He slowed the chant, and paused it. The fire banked a little, an inexpressible relief. He demanded, grimly, “Enough?”
I opened my mouth to say yes, to say please. “No,” I whispered, horribly afraid now. I could feel the faint quicksilver trace of the shadows still inside me. If we stopped now, they would curl up deep, hiding in my veins and my belly. They would take root and grow and grow and grow, until they strangled all the rest of me.
He nodded once. He held out his hand, murmured a word, and another flask appeared. I shuddered; he had to help me tip a swallow into my open mouth. I choked it down, and he took up the chant again. The fire rose in me again, endless, blinding, burning.
After three more swallows, each one stoking the fire back up to full height, I was almost sure. I forced myself to one more after that, to be certain, and then finally, almost sobbing, I said, “Enough. It’s enough.” But then he took me by surprise and forced another swallow on me. As I spluttered, he put his hand over my mouth and nose, and used a different chant, one that didn’t burn but closed my lungs. For five horrible heartbeats I couldn’t breathe at all, clawing at him and drowning in the open air: it was worse than everything else had been. I was staring at him, seeing his dark eyes fixed on me, implacable and searching. They began to swallow up all the world; my sight was closing, my hands were going weak; then at last he stopped and my frantic lungs swelled open like a bellows dragging in a rush of air. I yelled with it, a furious wordless shout, and shoved him away from me so he went sprawling back across the floor.
He twisted up, managing to keep the flask from spilling, and we glared at each other, equally angry. “Of all the extraordinary stupidities I have ever seen you perform,” he snarled at me.
“You could have told me!” I shouted, arms wrapped around my body, still shaking with the horror of it. “I stood all the rest, I could have stood that, too—”
“Not if you were corrupted,” he said flatly, breaking in. “If you were taken deep, you would have tried to evade it, if I’d told you.”
“Then you would have known, anyway!” I said, and he pressed his mouth hard, into a thin line, and looked away from me with an odd stiffness.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “I would have known.”
And then—would have had to kill me. He would have had to slay me while I pleaded, maybe; while I begged him and pretended to be—perhaps even thought myself, as I had—untainted. I fell silent, catching my breath in slow, measured, deep drafts. “And am I—am I clean?” I asked finally, dreading the answer.
“Yes,” he said. “No corruption could have hidden from that last spell. If we’d done it sooner, it would have killed you. The shadows would have had to steal the breath from your blood to live.”
I sagged limply in on myself and covered my face. He pulled himself to his feet and stoppered the flask. He murmured, “Vanastalem,” moving his hands, and stepped over to me: he thrust out a neatly folded cloak, heavy silk-lined velvet, deep green, embroidered in gold. I looked at it blankly, and stared up at him, and only when he looked away from me with an annoyed, stiff expression did I realize that the last glowing embers were dying beneath my skin, and I was still naked.
Then I staggered up to my feet abruptly, holding the cloak clutched against me, forgotten. “Kasia,” I said urgently, and turned towards her where she lay beneath the cage.
He didn’t say anything. I looked back at him desperately. “Go and dress,” he said finally. “There’s no urgency.”
He’d seized me the instant I came into the tower: he hadn’t let a moment pass. “There must be a way,” I said. “There has to be a way. They’d only just taken her—she couldn’t have been in the tree for long.”
“What?” he said sharply, and listened with his brows drawing as I spilled out the horror of the clearing, of the tree. I tried to tell him about the dreadful weight of the Wood, watching me; the feeling of being hunted. I stumbled over it all: words didn’t seem enough. But his face grew more dark, until at last I finished with that last staggering rush out into the clean snow.
“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing. No one has gone into the Wood as deep as you and come out whole: not since—” He halted, and I somehow knew without his saying her name that it was Jaga: that Jaga had walked in the Wood, and come out again. He saw my realization, and glared at me. “And at the time,” he said, icily, “she was a hundred years old, and so steeped in magic that black toadstools would spring up where she walked. And even she wasn’t stupid enough to start a great working in the middle of the place, although I will grant that in this case, it’s the only thing that saved you.” He shook his head. “I should have chained you to the wall as soon as that peasant woman came here to weep on your shoulder, I suppose.”
“Wensa,” I said, my dull, exhausted mind latching on to one thing. “I have to go tell Wensa.” I looked towards the hallway, but he cut in.
“Tell her what?” he said.
“That Kasia’s alive,” I said. “That she’s out of the Wood—”
“And that she will surely have to die?” he said, brutally.
Instinctively I backed towards Kasia, putting myself between them, holding my hands up—futile, if he had meant to overcome me, but he shook his head. “Stop mantling at me like a rooster,” he said, more weary than irritated: the tone made my chest clench in dismay. “The last thing we need is any further demonstrations that you’ll go to fool’s lengths for her sake. You can keep her alive as long as we can keep her restrained. But you’ll find it a mercy by the end.”
I did tell Wensa, when she woke a little later that morning. She clutched my hands, wild-eyed. “Let me see her,” she demanded, but that much, the Dragon had flatly forbidden.
“No,” he said. “You can torment yourself if you want to; that’s as far as I’ll go. Make that woman no false promises, and don’t let her come anywhere near. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll tell her the girl is dead, and let her get on with her life.”
But I steeled myself and told her the truth. Better, I thought, to know that Kasia was out of the Wood, that there was an end to her torment, even if there wasn’t a cure. I wasn’t sure if I was right. Wensa wailed and wept and begged me; if I could have, I would have disobeyed and taken her. But the Dragon didn’t trust me with Kasia: he had already taken her away and put her in a cell somewhere, deep beneath the tower. He’d told me he wouldn’t show me the way down until I’d learned a spell of protection, something to guard myself from the Wood’s corruption.
I had to tell Wensa that I couldn’t; I had to swear it to her on my heart, over and over, before she would believe me. “I don’t know where he’s put her,” I cried out finally. “I don’t!”
She stopped begging and stared at me, panting, her hands gripping my arms. Then she said, “Wicked, jealous—you always hated her, always. You wanted her to be taken! You and Galinda, you knew he’d take her, you knew and you were glad, and now you hate her because he took you instead—”
She was shaking me, in jerks, and for a moment I couldn’t stop her. It was too horrible, hearing her say these things to me, like poison spilling out where I’d looked for clean water. I was so desperately tired, ill from the purging and all my strength spent in bringing Kasia out. I wrenched myself loose at last and ran from the room, unable to bear it, and stood in the hallway leaning against the wall crying messily, too spent even to wipe my face. Wensa crept out after me in a moment, weeping herself. “Forgive me,” she said. “Nieshka, forgive me. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.”
I knew she hadn’t meant it, but it was also true, a little, in twisted ways. It dredged up my own secret guilt, my cry: Why didn’t you take Kasia instead? We had been glad all those years, my mother and I, to think I wouldn’t be taken, and I had been miserable afterwards, even if I’d never hated Kasia for it.
I wasn’t sorry when the Dragon sent Wensa home. I didn’t even argue very much when he refused to try and teach me the spell of protection that very day. “Try not to be more of a fool than you can help,” he snapped. “You need rest, and if you don’t, I certainly do before facing the undoubtedly torturous process of drumming the necessary protections into your head. There’s no need for haste. Nothing is going to change.”
“But if Kasia’s infested, as I was,” I started, and stopped: he was shaking his head.
“A few shadows slipped between your teeth; purging you at once kept them from getting a hold on you,” he said. “This isn’t anything like that, nor even some thirdhand infestation, like that luckless cow-herder you turned to stone for no good reason. Do you understand that the tree you saw is one of the heart-trees of the Wood? Where they take root, its borders spread, the walkers are fed on their fruit. She was as deep in the Wood’s power as any person can be. Go to sleep. A few hours won’t make a difference to her, and it may keep you from committing some new folly.”
I was too tired, and I knew it, reluctantly, though I felt argument coiling in my belly. I put it away for later. But if I’d listened to him and his caution in the first place, Kasia would still be there inside the heart-tree, being devoured and rotted away; if I’d swallowed everything he told me of magic, I’d still have been chanting cantrips to my exhaustion. He had told me himself no one had ever been brought out of a heart-tree, no one had ever come out of the Wood—but Jaga had done it, and now I had, too. He could be mistaken; he was mistaken about Kasia. He was.
I was up before first light. In Jaga’s book I found a spell for smelling out rot; a simple chant, Aish aish aishimad, and I worked it down in the kitchens, picking out a place where mold grew on the back of a barrel, a spot of rotting mortar in the walls, bruised apples and one spoiled cabbage that had rolled away under a shelf of wine-bottles. When sunlight finally brightened the stairway, I went up to the library and started banging books off the shelves loudly until he appeared, tired-eyed and irritable. He didn’t chide me; he only looked a brief frown, and then turned away without saying a word. I would have preferred it if he’d shouted.