“Yes,” I said, wiping my face, taking a deep breath. “She’s all right. She’s worried for you—she’s so worried. I’ll tell her you’re all right—”
“Can I write her a letter?” Kasia asked.
“No,” the Dragon said, and I wheeled on him.
“We can give her a stub of pencil and some paper!” I said angrily. “It’s not too much to ask.”
His face was bleak. “You aren’t this much a fool,” he said to me. “Do you think she was buried in a heart-tree for a night and a day and came out talking to you, ordinarily?”
I stopped, silent, afraid. Jaga’s rot-finding spell hovered on my lips. I opened my mouth to cast it—but it was Kasia. It was my own Kasia, who I knew better than anyone in the world. I looked at her and she looked back at me, unhappy and afraid, but refusing to weep or cower. It was her. “They put her in the tree,” I said. “They saved her for it, and I brought her out before it got a hold—”
“No,” he said flatly, and I glared at him and turned back to her. She smiled at me anyway, a struggling valiant smile.
“It’s all right, Nieshka,” she said. “As long as Mama’s all right. What—” She swallowed. “What’s to happen to me?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. “I’ll find a way to cleanse you,” I said, half-desperate, and didn’t look at the Dragon. “I’ll find a spell to be sure you’re all right—” but those were just words. I didn’t know how I could ever prove to the Dragon that Kasia was well. He plainly didn’t want to be convinced. And if I couldn’t persuade him somehow, he would keep Kasia down here the rest of her life if need be, entombed with this ancient king and without a scrap of sunlight—never to see anyone she loved, never to live at all. He was as great a danger to Kasia as the Wood—he hadn’t wanted me to rescue her at all.
And even before then, it occurred to me in a flash of bitterness, he had meant to steal her for himself—he’d meant to take her as much as the Wood had, to devour her in his own way. He hadn’t cared about uprooting her life before, making her a prisoner in a tower, only to serve him—why would he care now, why would he ever risk letting her out?
He stood a few steps behind me, farther from the fire and from Kasia. His face was closed, yielding nothing, his thin mouth pressed hard. I looked away and tried to smooth out my face and hide my thoughts. If I could find a spell to let me pass through the wall, I would only have to find a way to evade his notice. I could try and put a spell of sleep on him, or I could put something in his cup with his dinner: Wormwood brewed with yew berries, cook the juice down to a paste, put in three drops of blood and speak an incantation, and it will make a quick poison with no taste—
The sudden sharp pungent smell of burning pine needles came back into my nose, and the thought took on a strange bitter edge that made the wrongness of it leap out. I flinched away from it, startled, and I took a step back from the line of fire, trembling. On the other side, Kasia was waiting for me to speak: her face resolute, clear-eyed, full of trust and love and gratitude—and a little fear and worry, but nothing but ordinary human feeling. I looked at her, and she looked back at me anxiously, still herself. But I couldn’t speak. The smell of pine was still in my mouth, and my eyes stung with smoke.
“Nieshka?” Kasia said, her voice wavering with growing fear. I still said nothing. She was staring at me across the line of fire, and her face through the haze seemed to be first smiling and then unhappy, her mouth trembling through one shape and another, trying—trying different expressions. I took another step back, and it grew worse. Her head tilted, eyes fixed on my face, widening a little. She shifted her weight, a different stance. “Nieshka,” she said, not sounding afraid anymore, only confident and warm, “it’s all right. I know you’ll help me.”
The Dragon, beside me, was silent. I dragged in a breath. I still said nothing. My throat was shut. I managed, on a whisper, “Aishimad.”
A pungent, bitter smell rose in the air between us. “Please,” Kasia said to me. Her voice suddenly broke on a sob, an actor in a play moving from one act to the next. She lifted her hands towards me, came a little closer to the fire, her body leaning in. She came a little too close. The smell grew stronger: like greenwood burning, full of sap. “Nieshka—”
“Stop it!” I cried. “Stop it.”
She stopped. For a moment still Kasia stood there, and then it let her arms drop to her sides, and her face emptied out. A wave of rotting-wood smell rolled over the room.
The Dragon raised a hand. “Kulkias vizhkias haishimad,” he said, and a light shone out of his hand and onto her skin. Where it played over her I saw thick green shadows, mottled like deep layers of leaves on leaves. Something looked at me out of her eyes, its face still and strange and inhuman. I recognized it: what looked out at me was the same thing I had felt in the Wood, trying to find me. There was no trace of Kasia left at all.
Chapter 9
He was half-supporting me as he pulled me through the wall and out into the antechamber of the tomb again. When we were through I slid to the floor next to my small heap of pine-needle ashes and stared at them, hollow. I almost hated them for stealing the lie from me. I couldn’t even cry; it was worse than if Kasia were dead. He stood over me. “There’s a way,” I said, looking up at him. “There’s a way to get it out of her.” It was a child’s cry, a plea. He said nothing. “That spell you used on me—”
“No,” he said. “Not for this. The purging spell barely worked even on you. I warned you. Did it try to persuade you to harm yourself?”
I shivered all over horribly, remembering the ashen taste of that horrible thought creeping through my head: Wormwood and yew berries, a quick poison. “You,” I said.
He nodded. “It would have liked that: persuade you to kill me, then find some way to lure you back to the Wood.”
“What is it?” I said. “What is that—thing inside her? We say the Wood, but those trees—” I was abruptly sure of it. “—those trees are corrupted, too, as much as Kasia. That’s where it lives, not what it is.”
“We don’t know,” he said. “It was here before we came. Perhaps before they were,” he added, gesturing to the walls with their strange foreign inscription. “They woke the Wood, or made it, and they fought it awhile, and then it destroyed them. This tomb is all that’s left. There was an older tower here. Little of it remained except bricks scattered on the earth by the time Polnya claimed this valley and roused the Wood again.”
He fell silent. I remained sunk in on myself, curled up around my knees on the floor. I couldn’t stop shivering. Finally he said, heavily, “Are you ready to let me end this? Most likely there’s nothing left of her to rescue.”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted that thing gone, destroyed—the thing that wore Kasia’s face, that used not only her hands but everything in her heart, in her mind, to destroy those she loved. I almost didn’t care if Kasia was in there. If she was, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than to be trapped in her own body, that thing dangling her like a monstrous puppet. And I couldn’t persuade myself to doubt the Dragon anymore when he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.
But I had saved him, when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too. And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another. I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked. “Not yet,” I whispered. “Not yet.”
If I had been an indifferent student before, now I was dreadful in a wholly different way. I turned ahead in books and took ones he didn’t give me down from the shelves if he didn’t catch me. I looked into anything and everything I could find. I would work spells out halfway, discard them, and go onward; I would throw myself into workings without being sure I had the strength. I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out of my way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.
At least every few days I would find something with enough faint promise that I would convince myself it was worth trying. The Dragon took me down to Kasia to try whenever I asked, which was far more often than I managed to find anything really worth trying. He let me tear apart his library, and said nothing when I spilled oils and powders across his table. He didn’t press me to let Kasia go. I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.
She—the thing inside her—didn’t try to pretend anymore. She watched me with bird-bright eyes, and smiled occasionally when my workings did nothing: a horrible smile. “Nieshka, Agnieszka,” she sang softly, over and over, sometimes, if I was trying an incantation, so I had to stumble on through it while listening to her. I would come out feeling bruised and sick to my bones, and climb the stairs again slowly, with tears dripping from my face.
Spring was rolling over the valley by then. If I looked from my window, which I did now only rarely, every day I could watch the Spindle running riotous white with melted ice, and a band of open grass widening from the lowlands, chasing the snow up into the mountains on either side. Rain swept over the valley in silver curtains. Inside the tower I was parched as barren ground. I had looked at every page of Jaga’s book, and the handful of other tomes that suited my wandering magic, and any other books the Dragon could suggest. There were spells of healing, spells of cleansing, spells of renewal and life. I had tried anything with any promise at all.
They held the Spring Festival in the valley before the planting began, the great bonfire in Olshanka a tall heap of seasoned wood so large I could see it plainly from the tower. I was alone in the library when I heard a faint snatch of the music drifting on the wind, and looked out to see the celebration. It seemed to me that the entire valley had burst into life, early shoots prodding their way out of all the fields, the forests bursting into pale and misty green around every village. And far down those cold stone stairs, Kasia was in her tomb. I turned away and folded my arms on the table and put my head down on them and sobbed.