The Dragon took in the scene, looked at me, and said, “You idiot, what have you done now?”
We heaved the prince onto my narrow bed together. His face was already blackening with bruises: the tray upon the floor was dented badly with the curve of his skull. “Splendid,” the Dragon said through his teeth, inspecting him—the prince’s eyes were staring and strange, dull, when he lifted their lids, and his arm, lifted, fell limply back to the cot and dangled off the side.
I stood watching, panting against the bodice, my desperate fury gone and only horror left. As strange as it may sound, I wasn’t only afraid of what would happen to me; I didn’t want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who’d just been pawing at me. “He’s not—he’s not—”
“If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly,” the Dragon snapped. “Go down to the laboratory and bring me the yellow elixir in the clear flask from the shelf in the back. Not the red one, and not the violet one—and try if possible not to break it as you bring it up the stairs, unless you want to try and persuade the king that your virtue was worth the life of his son.”
He laid his hands on the prince’s head and began to chant softly, words that shivered along my spine. I ran for the stairs clutching my skirts up against me. I brought the elixir back up in only moments, panting with haste and the confinement of my stays, and found the Dragon still working: he didn’t interrupt his chanting, only held a hand out towards me impatiently, beckoning sharply; I lay the flask in his hand. With the fingers of one hand, he worked out the cork and tipped a swallow into the prince’s mouth.
The smell of it was horrible, like rotting fish; I nearly choked with nausea just from standing nearby. The Dragon shoved the flask and cork back at me without even looking, and I had to hold my breath to close it. He was clamping the prince’s jaw shut with both hands. Even unconscious and wounded, the prince jerked and tried to spit. The elixir was glowing somehow from inside his mouth, so bright that I could see his jaw and teeth outlined like a skull.
I managed to shut the flask again without retching, and then sprang to help: I pinched the prince’s nose shut, and after a moment he finally swallowed. The brilliant glow went down his throat and into his belly. I could make it out still traveling all throughout his body, a light underneath his clothes, thinning out as it branched away into his arms and legs, until at last it died away too dim to see.
The Dragon let go of the prince’s head and stopped chanting the spell. He sagged back against the wall with his eyes shut: he looked drained as I had never seen him before. I stood hovering anxiously over the bed, over both of them, and finally I blurted, “Will he—”
“No thanks to you,” the Dragon said, but that was good enough: I let myself sink to the ground in my heap of cream velvet, and buried my head on the bed in my arms sheathed in embroidered golden lace.
“And now you’re going to blubber, I suppose,” the Dragon said over my head. “What were you thinking? Why did you put yourself into that ludicrous dress if you didn’t want to seduce him?”
“It was better than staying in the one he tore off me!” I cried, lifting my head: not in tears at all; I had spent all my tears by then, and all I had left was anger. “I didn’t choose to be in this—”
I stopped, a heavy fold of silk caught up in my hands, staring at it. The Dragon had been nowhere near; he hadn’t worked any magic, cast any spell. “What have you done to me?” I whispered. “He said—he called me a witch. You’ve made me a witch.”
The Dragon snorted. “If I could make witches, I certainly wouldn’t choose a half-wit peasant girl as my material. I haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he—
While he taught me magic. Still on my knees, I stared up at him, bewildered and yet unwillingly beginning to believe. “But then why would you teach me?”
“I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited.” To my blank look, he scowled. “Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would have been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.”
While I flinched away appalled from this idea, he turned his scowl on the prince, who had just groaned a little and stirred in his sleep: he was beginning to wake, lifting a groggy hand to rub at his face. I scrambled up to my feet and edged away from the bed in alarm, closer towards the Dragon.
“Here,” the Dragon said. “Kalikual. It’s better than beating paramours into insensibility.”
He looked at me expectantly. I stared at him, and at the slowly rousing prince, and back. “If I wasn’t a witch,” I said, “—if I wasn’t a witch, would you let me—could I go home? Couldn’t you take it out of me?”
He was silent. I was used to the contradiction of his wizard’s face by now, young and old together. For all his years, he only had folds at the corners of his eyes, a single crease between his brows; sharp frown lines around his mouth: nothing else. He moved like a young man, and if people grew milder or kinder with age, he certainly hadn’t. But for a moment now, his eyes were purely old, and very strange. “No,” he said, and I believed him.
Then he shook it off and pointed: turning, I found the prince pushing himself up onto his elbow, and blinking at us both: still dazed and unknowing, but even as I looked, the spark of recognition came back into his face, remembering me. I whispered, “Kalikual.”
The power rushed out of me. Prince Marek sank back down against the pillows, eyes closing back into sleep. I staggered over to the wall and slid down it to the floor. The butcher knife was still there lying on the ground where it had fallen down. I picked it up and at last used it: to cut through the dress and the laces of my stays. My dress gaped open all along my side, but at least I could breathe.
I lay back against the wall with my eyes shut for a moment. Then I looked up at the Dragon, who had turned away in impatience from my fatigue: he was looking down at the prince with irritation. “Won’t his men ask for him in the morning?” I said.
“Did you imagine you were going to keep Prince Marek locked up fast asleep in my tower indefinitely?” the Dragon said over his shoulder.
“But then, when he wakes,” I said, then stopped and asked, “Could you—can you make him forget?”
“Oh, certainly,” the Dragon said. “He won’t at all notice anything peculiar if he wakes up with a splitting headache and an enormous gap in his memory to go with it.”
“What if—” I struggled back up to my feet, still clutching the knife, “—what if he remembered something else? Just going to bed in his own room—”
“Try not to be stupid,” the Dragon said. “You said you didn’t seduce him, so he came up here of his own intention. When was that intention formed? Merely tonight as he already lay in his bed? Or was he thinking of it along the road—a warm bed, welcoming arms—yes, I realize yours weren’t; you’ve provided sufficient evidence to the contrary,” he snapped, when I would have protested. “For all we know, he meant to do it even before he set out—a calculated sort of insult.”
I remembered the prince speaking of the Dragon’s “usual line”—as though he had thought of it beforehand, as though he’d planned it almost. “To insult you?” I said.
“He supposes I take women to force them to whore for me,” the Dragon said. “Most of those courtiers do: they’d do as much themselves if they had the chance. So I imagine he thought of it as cuckolding me. He would have been delighted to spread it around the court, I’m sure. It’s the sort of thing the Magnati waste their time caring about.”
He spoke disdainfully, but he’d certainly been angry enough when he came storming into the room. “Why would he want to insult you?” I timidly asked. “Didn’t he come to—to ask you for some magic?”
“No, he came to enjoy the view of the Wood,” the Dragon said. “Of course he came for magic, and I sent him about his business, which is hacking at enemy knights and not meddling in things he scarcely understands.” He snorted. “He’s begun to believe his own troubadours: he wanted to try and get back the queen.”
“But the queen is dead,” I said, confused. That had been the start of the wars. Crown Prince Vasily of Rosya had come to visit Polnya on an embassy, nearly twenty years ago now. He’d fallen in love with Queen Hanna and they’d run away together, and when the king’s soldiers had drawn near on their trail they’d fled into the Wood.
That was the end of the story: no one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves. Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.
The queen and Prince Vasily hadn’t come out at all. The king of Polnya blamed Rosya’s heir for abducting her, the king of Rosya had blamed Polnya for his heir’s death, and since then we’d had one war after another, broken only by occasional truces and a few short-lived treaties.
Here in the valley, we shook our heads over the story; everyone agreed it had all been the Wood’s doing from the start. The queen, with two small children, to run away? To start a war with her own husband? Their own courtship had been famous; there had been a dozen songs of their wedding. My mother had sung me one of them, the parts she remembered; none of the traveling singers would perform them anymore, of course.