But the third morning I caught sight of myself in the side of one of the big copper kettles and noticed I was an untidy mess: I hadn’t thought to mutter up some clean clothes for myself, not with the rumbling above and all my worry for Kasia. I didn’t wonder that I’d accumulated spots, stains, tears, and I didn’t mind it, either; but the Dragon hadn’t said anything. He’d come down to the kitchens more than once, to tell me what to go and fetch. I stared at the reflection, and the next time he came down I blurted, “Are you keeping me out of the way?”
He paused, not even off the bottom step, and said, “Of course I’m keeping you out of the way, you idiot.”
“But he doesn’t remember,” I said, meaning Prince Marek. It came out an anxious question.
“He will, given half a chance,” the Dragon said. “It matters too much to him. Keep out of the way, behave like an ordinary serving-girl, and don’t use magic anywhere he or Solya can see you.”
“Kasia’s all right?”
“As well as anyone would be,” he said. “Make that the least of your concerns: she’s a good deal harder to harm now than an ordinary person, and Solya isn’t egregiously stupid. In any case, he knows very well what the prince wants, and all being equal he’d prefer to give it to him. Go get three bottles of milk of fir.”
Well, I didn’t know what the prince wanted, and I didn’t like the idea of him getting it, either, whatever it was. I went up to the laboratory for the milk of fir: it was a potion the Dragon brewed out of fir needles, which somehow under his handling became a milky liquid without scent, although the one time he’d tried to teach me to do it, I’d produced only a wet stinking mess of fir needles and water. Its virtue was to fix magic in the body: it went into every healing potion and into the stone-skin potion. I brought the bottles down to the great hall.
Kasia stood in the center of the room, inside an elaborate double ring drawn on the floor in herbs crushed in salt. They had put a heavy collar around her neck like a yoke for oxen, of black-pitted iron engraved with spell-writing in bright silvery letters, with chains that hung from it to her manacled wrists. She didn’t have so much as a chair to sit on, and it should have bowed her double, but she stood straight up underneath it, easily. She gave me a small smile when I came into the room: I’m all right.
The Falcon looked more weary than she did, and Prince Marek was rubbing his face through an enormous yawn, though he was only sitting in a chair watching. “Over there,” the Falcon said in my direction, waving a hand to his heaped worktable, paying me no more attention than that. The Dragon sat on his high seat, and threw me a sharp look when I hesitated. Mutinous, I put the bottles on the table, but I didn’t leave the room: I retreated to the doorway and watched.
The Falcon infused spells of purification into the bottles, three different ones. He worked with a kind of sharp directness: where the Dragon folded magic into endless intricacies, the Falcon drew a straight line across. But his magic worked in the same sort of way: it seemed to me he was only choosing a different road of many, not wandering in the trees as I did. He handed the bottles across the line to Kasia with a pair of iron tongs: he seemed to have grown more rather than less cautious as he went along. Each one glowed through her skin as she drank it, and the glow lingered, held; by the time she had drunk all three, she lit up the whole room. There was no hint of shadow in her, no small feathery strand of corruption lingering.
The prince sat slouched in his chair, a large goblet of wine at his elbow, careless and easy, but I noticed now that the wine was untouched, and his eyes never left Kasia’s face. It made my hands itch to reach for magic: I would have gladly slapped his face just to keep him from looking at her.
The Falcon stared at her a long time, and then he took a blindfold out of a pocket of his doublet and tied it over his eyes: thick black velvet ornamented with silver letters, large enough that it covered his forehead. He murmured something as he put it on; the letters glowed, and then an eyehole opened in the mask just over the center of his forehead. A single eye was looking out of it: large and oddly shaped, roundish, the ring around the enormous pupil dark enough to make it seem almost entirely black, shot through with small flickers of silver. He came to the very edge of the circle and stared at Kasia with it: up and down, and walking in a circle around her three times.
At last he stepped back. The eye closed, then the eyehole, and he raised shaking arms to take off the blindfold, fumbling at the knot. He took it off. I couldn’t help staring at his forehead: there wasn’t any sign of another eye there, or any mark at all, although his own eyes were badly bloodshot. He sat down heavily into his chair.
“Well?” the prince said, sharply.
The Falcon said nothing for a moment. “I can find no signs of corruption,” he said finally, grudging. “I won’t swear there is none present—”
The prince wasn’t listening. He’d stood up and picked up a heavy key from the table. He crossed the room to Kasia. The shining light was fading from her body, but it had not yet gone; his boots smeared the ring of salt open as he crossed it and unlocked the heavy collar and the manacles. He lifted them off her and to the ground, and then held out his hand, as courtly as if she were a noblewoman, his eyes devouring her. Kasia hesitated—I knew she was worried she would break his hand by accident; myself, I hoped she would—and carefully put her hand in his.
He gripped it tight and turning led her forward, to the foot of the Dragon’s dais. “And now, Dragon,” he said softly, “you will tell us how this was done,” with a shake of Kasia’s arm, raised up in his own. “And then we will go into the Wood: the Falcon and I, if you’re too much a coward to come with us, and we will bring my mother out.”
Chapter 13
I’m not going to give you a sword to fall on,” the Dragon said. “If that’s what you insist on doing, you can do so with considerably less damage to anyone else by using the one you already have.”
Prince Marek’s shoulders clenched, the muscles around his neck knotting visibly; he let go of Kasia’s hand and took a step onto the dais. The Dragon’s face stayed cold and unyielding. I think the prince would have struck him, gladly, but the Falcon pushed himself up from his chair. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness, there’s no need for this. If you recall the enchantment I used in Kyeva, when we captured General Nichkov’s camp—that will serve just as well here. It will show me how the spell was done.” He smiled at the Dragon without teeth, lips drawn tight. “I think Sarkan will admit that even he can’t hide things from my sight.”
The Dragon didn’t deny it, but bit out, “I’ll admit that you’re a far more extravagant fool than I gave you credit for being, if you intend to lend yourself to this lunacy.”
“I would hardly call it extravagant to make every reasonable attempt to rescue the queen,” the Falcon said. “We’ve all bowed our heads to your wisdom before now, Sarkan: there was certainly no sense in taking risks to bring out the queen only to have to put her to death. Yet now here we are,” he gestured to Kasia, “with evidence of another possibility plain before us. Why have you been concealing it so long?”
Just like that, when the Falcon had so plainly come here in the first place expressly to insist that there was no other possibility, and to condemn the Dragon for letting Kasia live at all! I nearly gawked at him, but he showed not the least consciousness of having altered his position. “If there is any hope for the queen, I would call it treason not to make the attempt,” the Falcon added. “What was done, can be done again.”
The Dragon snorted. “By you?”
Well, even I could tell that was hardly the way to induce the Falcon to hesitate. His eyes narrowed, and he turned coldly and said to the prince, “I will retire now, Your Highness; I must recover my strength before I cast the enchantment in the morning.”
Prince Marek dismissed him with a wave of his hand: I saw to my alarm that while I’d been busy watching the sparring, he had been speaking to Kasia, gripping her hand in both of his. Her face still had that unnatural stillness, but I had learned to read it well enough by now to see that she was troubled.
I was about to go to her rescue when he let her hand go and left the hall himself, a quick wide stride, the heels of his boots ringing on the steps as he went upstairs. Kasia came to me, and I caught her hand in mine. The Dragon was scowling at the stairs, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair in irritation.
“Can he do it?” I asked him. “Can he see how the spell was done?”
Drum, drum, drum, went his fingers. “Not unless he finds the tomb,” the Dragon said finally. After a moment he added grudgingly, “Which he may be able to do: he has an affinity for sight magic. But then he’ll have to find a way into it. I imagine it will take him a few weeks, at least; long enough for me to get a message to the king, and I hope forestall this nonsense.”
He waved me away, and I was glad to go, pulling Kasia all the way up the stairs behind me with a wary eye on the turning up ahead. At the second landing I put my head out and made sure neither the prince nor the Falcon was in the hallway any longer before I drew Kasia across it, and when we came to my room I told her to wait outside until I had flung the door open and looked in: empty. I let her in and shut and barred the door behind us, and pushed a chair beneath the doorknob. I would have liked to seal it with magic, if the Dragon hadn’t warned me against using spells, but as little as I wanted another visit from Prince Marek, I wanted him to remember what had really happened in the last one even less. I didn’t know if the Falcon could notice it if I cast a tiny spell of closing up here in my room, but I had felt his magic from the kitchens, so I didn’t mean to take chances.
I turned to Kasia: she was sitting on the bed heavily. Her back was straight—it was always straight now—but her hands were pressed flat together in her lap, and her head was bowed forward. “What did he say to you?” I demanded, a shudder of anger building in my belly, but Kasia shook her head.