The glass shattered apart and fell in a chiming shower, dissolving back into blue wisps of smoke as it reached the ground. “Let her be examined further,” Marek shouted over the rising noise of conversation, almost aglow himself with righteousness. “Call any witness: let the Willow come forth, and the archbishop—”
The room was plainly Marek’s for the moment; even I could see a thousand rumors of murder beginning here if the king refused, if he ordered the queen taken away, and put her to death later. The king saw it, too. He looked around at all his courtiers and then gave a short, hard jerk of his chin to his chest; he sat back in the throne. So Marek had managed to force his father’s hand this far, even without sorcery: whether the king had wanted to call a trial or not, the trial was effectively begun.
But I had seen the king three times, now. I would have called him—not pleasant, exactly; there were too many lines drawn deep in his face, frowning, to imagine him gentle or kind. But if I’d been asked to describe him in a word, I would have said worried. Now I would have said angry, cold as a winter storm, and he was still the one who had to pass judgment in the end.
I wanted to run out and break up the trial, to tell Marek to take it back, but it was too late. The Willow had already stepped forward to testify, pillar-straight in a silver gown. “I have found no corruption, but I will not swear there is none,” she said coolly, speaking directly up to the king and ignoring Marek’s clenched jaw and the scrape of his gauntleted hand upon his sword-hilt. “The queen is not herself. She has spoken not a word, and she shows no signs of recognition. Her flesh is wholly changed. There is nothing left of her mortal sinew or bone. And while flesh may be turned to stone or to metal without carrying corruption, this change has certainly been carried out by a corrupt agency.”
“And yet if her altered flesh carried corruption,” the Falcon broke in, “would you not have expected to observe it beneath my spell?”
The Willow didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge him; he had evidently spoken out of turn. She only inclined her head to the king, who nodded once and moved his fingers in a slight gesture to dismiss her.
The archbishop was just as equivocal. He would only say that he had tried the queen on all the holy relics of the cathedral, not that she wasn’t corrupt. They neither of them cared to be proven wrong afterwards, I imagine.
Only a few other witnesses came forward to speak in the queen’s favor, physicians whom Marek had brought to see her. None of them spoke about Kasia at all. She wasn’t even an afterthought to them, but she would live or die on their words. And the queen stood silent and inert next to her. The glow had faded out now and left her blank-faced, empty, for all the court to see.
I looked at Alosha, standing next to me, and Ballo on her other side. I knew when it was their turn, they would stand up and tell the king about that hideous bestiary, sitting back there in the Charovnikov in a thick circle of salt and iron with all the protective spells they could layer over it and the guards posted to watch it close. Alosha would say that the chance shouldn’t be taken; she would tell the king that there was too much risk to the kingdom. And then, if he wanted to, the king could rise and say the laws against corruption were absolute; he could put on a regretful face, and send the queen to death, and Kasia along with her. And looking at him, I thought that he would. He would do it.
He’d sunk back deeply into his great carved chair as if he needed the support for the weight of his body, and his hand covered his unsmiling mouth. Decision was settling over him like snowfall, the first thin dusting that would build and build. The rest of the witnesses would speak, but he wouldn’t hear them. He’d already decided. I saw Kasia’s death in his heavy, grim face, and I looked desperately across the room to catch the Falcon’s eye. Next to him, Marek stood as tense as his fist clenched around his sword.
Solya looked back at me and only spread his hands, subtly, as much as to say I’ve done what I can. He leaned in and murmured something to Marek, and when the last physician had stepped down, the prince said, “Let Agnieszka of Dvernik be called to witness how the queen was freed.”
That’s what I had wanted, after all; this was the reason I’d come and fought to have myself put on the list. Everyone was looking at me, even the king with his lowered brows. But I still didn’t know what to say. What would it matter to the king, to any of these courtiers, for me to say the queen wasn’t corrupt? They certainly wouldn’t care what I said of Kasia.
Maybe Solya would try and cast the Summoning with me, if I asked him to. I thought of doing that, imagined that white light showing the whole court the truth. But—the queen had already been tested beneath Jadwiga’s veil. The court had seen her beneath the Falcon’s sight. The king could see she wasn’t corrupted. This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.
But I could give them something else entirely. I could give them what they really wanted. And then I realized I knew what that was, after all. They wanted to know. They wanted to see what it had been like. They wanted to feel themselves a part of it, of the queen’s rescue; they wanted to be living in a song. That wasn’t truth, anything like it, but it might convince them to spare Kasia’s life.
I closed my eyes and remembered the illusion spell: Easier than real armies, Sarkan had said, and as I began to whisper the spell, I knew that he was right. It was no harder than making a single flower to raise up the whole of that monstrous heart-tree, and it climbed up out of the marble floor with terrible ease. Kasia dragged in a breath; a woman screamed; there was a clatter of a chair falling over somewhere in the room. I shut the noise out. I let the incantation keep rolling singsong off my tongue while I poured out magic and the sick, tight dread that had never left the back of my stomach. The heart-tree kept growing, spreading its great silver branches through the hall, the ceiling fading away into silver rustling leaves and the terrible stench of fruit. My stomach turned over once, and then Janos’s head came rolling by across the grass in front of my feet, and struck against the sprawling roots.
All the courtiers cried out and jerked back against the walls, but even as they did, they were fading away, disappearing. The walls all around us were gone, too, falling away into forest and the ringing clash of steel. Marek turned in sudden startled alarm, raising his sword: the silver mantis was there, lunging towards him. When its claws struck against his shoulders, they scraped against the steel of his brilliant armor. Corpses were staring up from the grass around his feet.
A haze of smoke was drifting across my eyes, the sudden crackle of fire. I turned towards the trunk, and Sarkan was there, too, caught in the tree with silver bark trying to devour him, saying, “Now, Agnieszka,” while fire-heart glowed red between his fingers. Instinctively, I half-reached my hand towards him, remembering dread and anguish, and for a moment—for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.
I put my hands on the tree trunk as the bark curled and split apart like the skin of a too-ripe tomato. Kasia was beside me, real; the trunk was splintering open beneath her pounding hands. She was breaking open the wood of the trunk, and the queen came staggering forward out of it, her hands reaching out to meet ours, groping for help, her face suddenly alive and full of horror. We caught her and pulled her out. I heard the Falcon shouting a spell of fire—and then I realized, he was calling real fire, and we weren’t really in the Wood. We were in the king’s castle—
As soon as I let myself remember that, the illusion spell went slithering straight out of my grasp. The tree burned away into the air; the fire at its roots swept up along the trunk and took all the rest of the Wood along with it. The corpses sank down through the ground, one last glimpse of their faces, all their faces, before the white marble floor closed over them. I watched them with tears running down my face. I hadn’t known I remembered the soldiers well enough to make so many of them. And then the last leaf-shadows cleared, and we were in the palace again, before the throne, with the king standing shocked upon his dais.
The Falcon whirled staring around himself, panting, fire still crackling in his hands and skittering over the marble floors; Marek also swung back looking for an enemy that wasn’t there anymore. His sword was unstained again, his armor bright and undented. The queen stood in the middle of the floor trembling, her eyes wide. All the court was pressed up against the walls and one another, as far from us and the center of the room as they could go. And I, I sank to my knees shaking, my arms wrapped around my stomach, feeling sick. I had never wanted to be back there again, in the Wood.
Marek recovered first. He stepped towards the throne, his chest still heaving. “That is what we reft her from!” he shouted up at his father. “That is the evil we overcame to bring her out, that is what we paid to save her! That is the evil you serve, if you—I won’t see it done! I will—”
“Enough!” the king roared back at him: he was pale beneath his beard.
Marek’s face was flushed and bright with violence, battle-lust. He was still holding his sword. He took a step towards the throne. The king’s eyes widened; red anger flushed into his cheeks, and he beckoned to his guards; there were six of them beside the dais.
Queen Hanna cried out suddenly, “No!”
Marek whirled back to look at her. She took a clumsy lurching step forward, her feet dragging as if she had to make an effort to move them. Marek was staring at her. She took another step and seized his arm. “No,” she repeated. She pulled his arm down, when he would have kept it up. He resisted, but she had turned her eyes up at him, and his face was suddenly a boy’s, looking down at her. “You saved me,” she said to him. “Marechek. You already saved me.”