I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t think. My hands were still stinging with lightning and my nose was full of smoke, of burning paper. None of it seemed real to me yet. The king dead, Father Ballo dead. I had seen them barely an hour ago, walking away from the war-conference, whole and healthy. I remembered the moment, too vividly: the small worried crease in Father Ballo’s forehead; the king’s blue boots.
In the library, Alosha had done a purging spell over the king’s body, then the priests had carried him away to the cathedral for vigil, wrapped hastily in a cloth. The boots had been sticking out of the end of the bundle.
The Magnati kept shouting at me. It didn’t help that I felt I was to blame. I’d known something was wrong. If I’d only been quicker, if I’d only burned the book myself when I first found it. I put my stinging hands over my face.
But Marek stood up next to me and shouted the nobles down with the authority of the bloody spear he was still holding. He slammed it down on the council table in front of them. “She slew the beast when it might have killed Solya and another dozen men besides,” he said. “We don’t have time for this sort of idiocy. We march on the Rydva in three days’ time!”
“We march nowhere without the king’s word!” one of the ministers dared to shout back. Lucky for him, he was across the table and out of arm’s reach: even so he shrank back from Marek leaning across the table, mailed hand clenched into a fist, rage illuminating him with righteous wrath.
“He’s not wrong,” Alosha said sharply, putting a hand down in front of Marek, and making him straighten up to face her. “This is no time to be starting a war.”
Half of the Magnati along the table were snarling and clawing at each other; blaming Rosya, blaming me, even blaming poor Father Ballo. The throne stood empty at the head of the table. Crown Prince Sigmund sat to the right of it. His hands were clenched around each other into a single joined fist. He stared at it without speaking while the shouting went on. The queen sat on the left. She still wore Ragostok’s golden circlet, above the smooth shining satin of her black gown. I noticed dully that she was reading a letter: a messenger was standing by her elbow, with an empty dispatch bag and an uncertain face. He’d come into the room just then, I suppose.
The queen stood up. “My lords.” Heads turned to look at her. She held up the letter, a short folded piece of paper; she’d broken the red seal. “A Rosyan army has been sighted coming for the Rydva: they will be there in the morning.”
No one let out a word.
“We must put aside our mourning and our anger,” she said. I stared up at her: the very portrait of a queen, proud, defiant, her chin raised; her voice rang clearly in the stone hall. “This is no hour for Polnya to show weakness.” She turned to the crown prince: his face was turned up towards her just like mine, startled and open as a child’s, his mouth loosely parted over words that weren’t coming. “Sigmund, they have only sent four companies. If you gather the troops already mustering outside the city and ride at once, you will have the advantage in numbers.”
“I should be the one who—!” Marek said, rousing to protest, but Queen Hanna held up her hand, and he stopped.
“Prince Marek will stay here and secure the capital with the royal guard, gathering the additional levies that are coming in,” she said, turning back to the court. “He will be guided by the council’s advice and, I hope, my own. Surely there is nothing else to be done?”
The crown prince stood. “We will do as the queen proposes,” he said. Marek’s cheeks were purpling with frustration, but he blew out a breath and said sourly, “Very well.”
Just that quickly, everything seemed decided. The ministers began at once to take themselves off busily in every direction, glad of order restored. There wasn’t a moment to protest, a moment to suggest any other course; there wasn’t a chance to stop it.
I stood up. “No,” I said, “wait,” but no one was listening. I reached for the last dregs of my magic, to make my voice louder, to make them turn back. “Wait,” I tried to say, and the room swam away into black around me.
I woke up in my room and sat straight up in one jerk, all the hair standing on my arms and my throat burning: Kasia was sitting on the foot of my bed, and the Willow was straightening up away from me with a thin, disapproving expression on her face, a potion-bottle in her hand. I didn’t remember how I’d got there; I looked out the window, confused; the sun had moved.
“You fell down in the council-room,” Kasia said. “I couldn’t stir you.”
“You were overspent,” the Willow said. “No, don’t try to rise. You’d better stay just where you are, and don’t try to use magic again for at least a week. It’s a cup that needs to be refilled, not an endless stream.”
“But the queen!” I blurted. “The Wood—”
“Ignore me if you like and spend your last dregs and die, I shan’t have anything to say about it,” the Willow said, dismissive. I didn’t know how Kasia had persuaded her to come and see to me, but from the cold look they exchanged as the Willow swept past her and out the door, I didn’t think it had been very gently.
I knuckled my eyes and lay there in the pillows. The potion the Willow had given me was a churning, glowing warmth in my belly, like I’d eaten something with too many hot peppers in it.
“Alosha told me to get the Willow to look at you,” Kasia said, still leaning worried over me. “She said she was going to stop the crown prince from going.”
I gathered my strength and struggled up, grabbing for Kasia’s hands. The muscles of my stomach were aching and weak. But I couldn’t keep to my bed right now, whether I could use magic or not. A heaviness lingered in the air of the castle, that terrible pressure. The Wood was still here, somehow. The Wood hadn’t finished with us yet. “We have to find her.”
The guards at the crown prince’s rooms were on high alert; they half-wanted to bar us coming in, but I called out, “Alosha!” and when she put her head out and spoke to them, they let us into the skelter of packing under way. The crown prince wasn’t in full armor yet, but he had on his greaves and a mail shirt, and he had a hand on his son’s shoulder. His wife, Princess Malgorzhata, stood with him holding the little girl in her arms. The boy had a sword—a real sword with an edge, made small enough for him to hold. He wasn’t seven years old. I would have given money that a child that young would cut off a finger within a day—his or someone else’s—but he held it as expertly as any soldier. He was presenting it across his palms to his father with an anxious, upturned face. “I won’t be any trouble,” he said.
“You have to stay and look after Marisha,” the prince said, stroking the boy’s head. He looked at the princess; her face was sober. He didn’t kiss her, but he kissed her hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I’m thinking of taking the children to Gidna once the funeral is over,” the princess said: I knew vaguely it was the name of the city she was from, the ocean port the marriage had opened to Polnya. “The sea air will be healthy for them, and my parents haven’t seen Marisha since her christening.” From the words, you would have thought she’d just had the idea a moment ago, but as she said them, they sounded rehearsed.
“I don’t want to go to Gidna!” the boy said. “Papa—”
“Enough, Stashek,” the prince said. “Whatever you think best,” he told the princess, and turned to Alosha. “Will you put a blessing on my sword?”
“I’d rather not,” she said grimly. “Why are you lending yourself to this? After we spoke yesterday—”
“Yesterday my father was alive,” Prince Sigmund said. “Today he’s dead. What do you think is going to happen when the Magnati vote on the succession, if I let Marek go and he destroys this Rosyan army for us?”
“So send a general,” Alosha said, but she wasn’t really arguing; I could tell she was only saying it while she searched for another answer that she believed in. “What about Baron Golshkin—”
“I can’t,” he said. “If I don’t ride out at the head of this army, Marek will. Do you think there’s any general I could appoint who would stand in the way of the hero of Polnya right now? The whole country is ringing with his song.”
“Only a fool would put Marek on the throne instead of you,” Alosha said.
“Men are fools,” Sigmund said. “Give me the blessing, and keep an eye on the children for me.”
We stayed and watched him ride away. The two small children knelt up on a footstool, peering over the window-sill with their mother behind them, her hands on their heads, golden and dark. He went with a small troop of guards for escort, his retinue, the eagle flag in red on white billowing out behind him. Alosha watched silently beside me from the second window until they had gone out of the courtyard. Then she turned to me and said dourly, “There’s always a price.”
“Yes,” I said, low and tired. And I didn’t think we were done paying.
Chapter 24
I couldn’t do anything more, just then, but sleep. Alosha told me to lie down right there in the room, despite the princess’s dubious looks, and I fell asleep on the soft wool rug before the fireplace: it was woven in a strange dancing pattern of enormous curved raindrop shapes, or perhaps tears. The stone floor beneath was hard, but I was too tired to care.
I slept the whole evening and night and woke in the early hours of the morning: still tired but my head less thick, and my lightning-scorched palms felt cool to the touch again. Magic ran whispering and slow over rocks, deep inside me. Kasia was sleeping on the rug at the foot of the bed; through the bedcurtains I could see the princess with the two children gathered close to her. There were two guards drowsing on either side of the door.