None of the chosen girls had ever left the tower before her ten years were up. As desperate as a beacon-fire was, I think at first they would have been happier to be left to deal with whatever the Wood had sent than to have me come bursting in on them, a sure problem and unconvincing as any sort of help.
I told them the Dragon was gone to the Yellow Marshes; I said I needed someone to take me to Dvernik. They unhappily believed the first; very quickly I realized they hadn’t the least intention of doing the second, no matter what I told them about magic lessons. “You’ll come and spend the night in my house, under my wife’s care,” the mayor said, turning away. “Danushek, ride for Dvernik: they need to know they must hold out, whatever it is, and we must find out what help they need. We’ll send a man into the mountains—”
“I’m not spending the night in your house!” I said. “And if you won’t take me, I’ll walk; I’ll still be there quicker than any other help!”
“Enough!” the mayor snapped at me. “Listen, you stupid child—”
They were afraid, of course. They thought I had run away, that I was just trying to get home. They didn’t want to hear me beg them to help me. I think more so because they felt ashamed to give a girl up to the Dragon in the first place; they knew it wasn’t right, and they did it anyway, because they didn’t have a choice, and it wasn’t terrible enough to drive them to rebellion.
I took a deep breath and used my weapon vanastalem again. The Dragon would have been almost pleased with me, I think, for every syllable was pronounced with the sharpness of a fresh-honed blade. They backed from me as the magic went whirling around me, so bright the very fireplace grew dim by comparison. When it cleared I stood inches higher and ludicrously grand, in heeled court boots and dressed like a queen in mourning: a letnik made of black velvet bordered with black lace and embroidered in small black pearls, stark against my skin that hadn’t seen the sun in half a year, the full sleeves caught around my arms with bands of gold. And over it, even more extravagant, a shining coat in gold and red silk, trimmed in black fur around my neck and clasped at the waist by a golden belt. My hair had been caught up in a net of gold cord and small hard jewels. “I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something. Get me a cart!”
Chapter 5
It helped, of course, that none of them knew the spell was a mere cantrip, and that none of them had seen much magic done. I didn’t enlighten them. They hitched four horses to the lightest sleigh they had and sped me down the solid-packed river road in my idiotic—but warm!—dress. It was a fast drive, and an uncomfortable one, flying breathlessly over the icy road, but not fast or uncomfortable enough to keep me from thinking about how little hope I had of doing anything but dying, and not even usefully.
Borys had offered to drive me: a kind of guilt I understood without a word. I had been taken—not his girl, not his daughter. She was safe at home, perhaps courting or already betrothed. And I had been taken not four months ago, and here I was already unrecognizable.
“Do you know what’s happened in Dvernik?” I asked him, huddled in the back under a heap of blankets.
“No, no word yet,” he answered over his shoulder. “The beacon-fires were only just lit. The rider will be on the road, if—” He stopped. If there were a rider left to send, he had meant to say. “We’ll meet him halfway, I’d guess,” he finished instead.
With my father’s heavy horses and his big wagon, in summertime, it was a long day’s drive to Dvernik from Olshanka, with a break in the middle. But the midwinter road was packed with snow a foot deep, frozen almost solid with a thin dusting atop, and the weather was clear, the horses shod in hard ice shoes. We flew on through the night, and a few hours before dawn we changed horses at Vyosna village without stopping properly: I didn’t even climb out of the sleigh. They didn’t ask any questions. Borys said only, “We’re on the way to Dvernik,” and they looked at me with interest and curiosity but not the least doubt, and certainly no recognition. As they harnessed the fresh horses, the stableman’s wife came out to me with a fresh meat pie and a cup of hot wine, clutching a thick fur cloak around herself. “Will you warm your hands, my lady?” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, awkwardly, feeling like an imposter and halfway to a thief. I didn’t let it keep me from devouring the pie in ten bites, though, and after that I swallowed the wine mostly because I couldn’t think what else to do with it that wouldn’t be insulting.
It left me light-headed and a little muzzy, the world gone soft and warm and comfortable. I felt a great deal less worried, which meant I had drunk too much, but I was grateful anyway. Borys drove faster, with the fresh horses, and an hour’s drive onward with the sun lightening the sky ahead of us, we saw in the distance a man slogging down the road, on foot. And then we drew closer, and it wasn’t a man at all. It was Kasia, in boy’s clothes and heavy boots. She came straight for us: we were the only ones going towards Dvernik.
She grabbed onto the side of the sleigh, panting, dropped a curtsy, and without a pause said, “It’s in the cattle—it’s taken all the cattle, and if they get their teeth in a man, it takes him, too. We’ve got them mostly penned, we’re holding them, but it’s taking every last man—” and then I had pulled myself forward out of the heap of blankets and reached for her.
“Kasia,” I said, choking, and she stopped. She looked at me, and we stared at each other in perfect silence for a long moment, and then I said, “Quick, hurry and get in, I’ll tell you as we go.”
She climbed in and sat next to me under the pile of sleigh blankets: we made a ridiculously unlikely pair, her in dirty rough homespun, a pig-boy’s clothes, with her long hair stuffed up under a cap and a thick sheepskin jacket, and me in my finery: together we looked like the fairy godmother descending on Masha sweeping cinders from the hearth. But our hands still gripped each other tight, truer than anything else between us, and as the sleigh dashed onwards I blurted out a disjointed set of bits and scraps of the whole story—those early days grubbing miserably, the long fainting weeks when the Dragon had first begun to make me do magic, the lessons since then.
Kasia never let go my hand, and when I at last, haltingly, told her I could do magic, she said, startling the breath out of me, “I should have known,” and I gawked at her. “Strange things always happened to you. You’d go into the forest and come back with fruit out of season, or flowers no one else had ever seen. When we were little, you always used to tell me stories the pines told you, until one day your brother sneered at you for playing make-believe, and you stopped. Even the way your clothes were always such a mess—you couldn’t get so dirty if you tried, and I knew you weren’t trying, you were never trying. I saw a branch reach out and snag your skirt once, really just reach out—”
I flinched away, made a noise of protest, and she stopped. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want her to tell me that the magic had been there all along, and therefore inescapable. “It’s not much good for anything besides keeping me a mess, if that’s what it does,” I said, trying to speak lightly. “I only came because he’s gone. Now tell me, what’s happened?”
Kasia told me: the cattle had sickened almost overnight. The first few had borne bite marks as if some strange enormous wolves had set teeth to them, although no wolves had been seen anywhere near, all winter. “They were Jerzy’s. He didn’t put them down right away,” Kasia said soberly. I nodded.
Jerzy should have known better—he should have pulled them out of the herd and cut their throats at once, the moment he saw them wolf-bitten and left among the other animals. No ordinary wolf would have done anything like that. But—he was poor. He had no fields, no trade, nothing but his cows. His wife had come and quietly begged flour of us more than once, and whenever I’d come home from the woods with gleanings enough to spare, my mother would send me to their house with a basket. He had struggled for years to save enough to get a third cow, which would mean an escape from poverty, and only two years ago he had managed it. His wife Krystyna had worn a new red kerchief trimmed in lace at the harvest, and he a red waistcoat, both of them with pride. They’d lost four children before their namings; she was expecting another one. So he hadn’t put the cattle down quickly enough.
“They bit him and they got into the other cattle,” Kasia said. “Now they’ve all gone vicious, and they’re too dangerous to even go near, Nieshka. What are you going to do?”
The Dragon might have known a way to purge the sickness from the cattle. I didn’t. “We’ll have to burn them,” I said. “I hope he’ll make it right, after, but I don’t know anything else to do.” To tell the truth, despite the horror and the waste of it, I was glad, desperately glad. At least this wasn’t fire-breathing monsters or some deadly plague, and I did know something I could do. I pulled out the fire-heart potion, and showed Kasia.
No one argued with the idea when we got to Dvernik. Our headwoman Danka was as surprised as Kasia or the men in Olshanka when I came scrambling down from the sleigh, but she had bigger things to worry about.
Every healthy man, and the stronger women, was working in shifts to keep the poor tormented beasts penned up, using pitchforks and torches, slipping on ice and their hands going numb with cold. The rest of our village were trying to keep them from freezing or starving. It was a race whose strength would give out the first, and our village was losing. They had already tried a burning themselves, but it was too cold. The wood hadn’t caught quickly enough before the cattle tore apart the piles. As soon as I told Danka what the potion was, she was nodding and sending everyone not already working around the pen to get ice-picks and shovels, to make a fire-break.
Then she turned to me. “We’ll need your father and brothers to haul in more firewood,” she said bluntly. “They’re at your house: they worked all night. I could send you for them, but it may hurt you and them worse, when you have to go back to the tower after. Do you want to go?”