“He asked me to help him,” she said. “He said he would speak to me again tomorrow.” She lifted her head and looked at me. “Nieshka, you saved me—could you save Queen Hanna?”
For a moment I was in the Wood again, deep beneath the branches, the weight of its hatred pressing on me and shadows creeping into me with every breath. Fear closed my throat. But I thought also of fulmia, rolling like thunder deep in my belly; of Kasia’s face and another tree grown tall, a face under the bark softened and blurred by twenty years of growth, vanishing like a statue under running water.
The Dragon was in his library, writing and irritated, and not less so when I came down and asked him the same question. “Try not to borrow more folly than you already possess,” he said. “Are you still incapable of recognizing a trap? This is the Wood’s doing.”
“You think the Wood has—Prince Marek?” I asked, wondering if that would explain it; if that was why he’d—
“Not yet it doesn’t,” the Dragon said. “But he’ll hand himself over and a wizard to boot: a magnificent trade for a peasant girl, and how much the better if you threw yourself in as well! The Wood will plant heart-trees in you and Solya, and swallow the valley in a week. That’s why it let her go.”
But I remembered that ferocious resistance. “It didn’t let her go!” I said. “It didn’t let me take her—”
“To a point,” he said. “The Wood might have done whatever it could to preserve a heart-tree, exactly as a general would to preserve a stronghold. But once the tree was lost—and it was surely already too far gone, whether the girl lived or died—then of course it would try to find a way to turn the loss to good account.”
We wrangled it back and forth. It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong; it seemed exactly the twisted sort of thing the Wood would do, turning love into a weapon. But that didn’t mean, I thought, that it wasn’t a chance worth taking. Freeing the queen could end the war with Rosya, could strengthen both nations, and if we destroyed another heart-tree in doing it, might be the chance to break the power of the Wood for a long time.
“Yes,” he said, “and if a dozen angels would only sweep down from above and lay waste to the entire Wood with flaming swords, the situation would be infinitely improved as well.”
I huffed in annoyance and went for the big ledger: I thumped it down on the table between us and opened it to the last pages, full of entries in his careful narrow hand, and put my hands down on it. “It’s been winning, hasn’t it, with all you can do?” His cold silence was enough answer. “We can’t wait. We can’t keep the secret of this locked up in the tower, waiting until we’re perfectly ready. If the Wood is trying to strike, we should strike back, and quickly.”
“There’s a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste,” he said. “What you really mean is you’ve heard too many clandestine ballads of the sad lost queen and the grief-stricken king, and you think you’re living in one of them with the chance to be the hero of the piece. What do you think will even be left of her, after twenty years being gnawed by a heart-tree?”
“More than will be left after twenty and one!” I flared back at him.
“And if there’s enough left of her to know when they put her child into the tree with her?” he said, unsparing, and the horror of the thought silenced me.
“That is my concern, and not yours,” Prince Marek said. We both jerked around from the table: he was standing in the doorway, silent on bare feet in his nightshift. He looked at me, and I could see the spell of false memory crumbling: he remembered me, and abruptly I, too, remembered the way his face had changed when I’d used magic in front of him, his voice when he’d said, “You’re a witch.” All along, he’d been looking for someone who would help him.
“You did this, didn’t you?” he said to me, his eyes gleaming. “I should have known this desiccated old serpent would never have put his neck out, even for so lovely a piece of work. You freed that girl.”
“We—” I stammered, darting a desperate look at the Dragon, but Marek snorted.
He came into the library, came towards me. I could see the faint scar at his hairline, where I’d battered him senseless with the heavy tray; there was a tiger of magic in my belly, ready to come out roaring. But my chest still seized up with involuntary fear. My breath came short as he neared me: if he’d come closer, if he’d touched me, I think I would have screamed—some kind of curse: a dozen of Jaga’s nastier ones were flitting through my head like fireflies, waiting to be snatched up by my tongue.
But he stopped at arm’s length and only leaned towards me. “That girl’s condemned, you know,” he said, looking at my face. “The king takes a dim view of letting wizards claim they’ve cleansed the corrupted: too many of them turn up corrupted themselves in no short order. The law says she must be put to death, and the Falcon certainly won’t testify on her behalf.”
I betrayed myself and knew it, but I couldn’t help flinching anyway. “Help me save the queen,” he added, soft and sympathetic, “and you’ll save the girl into the bargain: once the king has my mother back, he can’t fail to spare them both.”
I understood perfectly well that it was a threat, not a bribe: he was telling me he’d have Kasia put to death if I refused. I hated him even more, and yet at the same time I couldn’t hate him entirely. I had lived three dreadful months with that desperation scrabbling at me from inside; he’d lived with it since he was a child, mother torn from him, told she was gone and worse than dead and forever beyond his reach. I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I understood him.
“And once the world is spun the other way around, the sun can’t fail to rise in the west,” the Dragon snapped. “The only thing you’d accomplish is to get yourself killed, and her with you.”
The prince wheeled to face him and struck the table between them with his clenched fists, a rattling thump of candlesticks and books. “And yet you’d save some useless peasant while you leave the queen of Polnya to rot?” he snarled, the veneer cracking. He stopped and drew a deep breath, forcing his mouth back into a parody of a smile that wavered in and out on his lips. “You go too far, Dragon; even my brother won’t listen to all your whispering counsels after this. For years we’ve swallowed everything you’ve told us about the Wood—”
“Since you doubt me, take your men with you and go inside,” the Dragon hissed back. “See for yourself.”
“I will,” Prince Marek said. “And I’ll take this witch-girl of yours, and your lovely peasant, too.”
“You’ll take no one who doesn’t wish to go,” the Dragon said. “Since you were a child, you’ve imagined yourself a hero out of legend—”
“Better than a deliberate coward,” the prince said, grinning at him with all his teeth, violence like a living thing in the room taking shape between them, and before the Dragon could answer, I blurted out, “What if we could weaken the Wood before we went in?” and they broke their locked gaze and looked at me, startled, where I stood.
Krystyna’s weary face went wide and frozen when she looked past me and saw the crowd of men and wizards, gleaming armor and stamping horses. I said softly, “We’re here about Jerzy.” She gave a jerky nod without looking at me, and backed into the house to let me in.
Knitting lay on the rocking chair, and the baby was sleeping in a cot by the fireplace: big and healthy and ruddy-faced, with a gnawed wooden rattle clutched in one fist. I went to look at it, of course. Kasia came in behind me and looked over at the cradle. I almost called her over, but she turned away, keeping her face out of the firelight, and I didn’t speak. Krystyna didn’t need any more to fear. She huddled into the corner with me, darting looks over my shoulder as the Dragon came in, and she told me in a bare whisper that the baby’s name was Anatol. Her voice died at Prince Marek ducking into the cottage, and the Falcon with his cloak of brilliant white, which showed not a speck of dirt. None of them paid the least attention to the baby, or to Krystyna herself. “Where’s the corrupted man?” the prince said.
Krystyna whispered to me, “He’s in the barn. We put him in the—I thought to have the room back, we didn’t want—I didn’t mean any harm—”
She didn’t need to explain why she hadn’t wanted that tormented face in her house, every night. “It’s all right,” I said. “Krystyna, Jerzy might—what we can try, it might not—it will work. But he might die of it.”
Her hands were gripping the side of the cradle, but she only nodded a little. I think he was already gone in her mind by then: as though he’d been at a battle that had been lost, and she only waited to hear the final word.
We went outside. Seven small rooting pigs and their big-bellied mother looked up snuffling incuriously at our horses from a new-built pen by the side of the house, the wood of the fence still pale brown and unweathered. We rode around it and single-file down a narrow path through the trees, already almost overgrown, to the small grey barn. It stood in tall grass full of eager saplings springing up, a few ragged holes in the thatch where birds had picked it apart for nests and the bar across the door rusted in its hooks. It already had the feeling of a long-abandoned place.
“Open it up, Michal,” the captain of the guard said, and one of the soldiers slid down and went tramping ahead through the grass. He was a young man, and like most of the soldiers he wore his brown hair long and straight, with a long dangling mustache and beard, braided, all of them like pictures in the Dragon’s history books of the old days, the founding of Polnya. He was as strong as a young oak, tall and broad even among the other soldiers; he slid the bar over with one hand and pushed open both of the doors with an easy shove, letting the afternoon sunlight into the barn.