by Naomi Novik
“He will, given half a chance,” the Dragon said. “It matters too much to him. Keep out of the way, behave like an ordinary serving-girl, and don’t use magic anywhere he or Solya can see you.”
“Kasia’s all right?”
“As well as anyone would be,” he said. “Make that the least of your concerns: she’s a good deal harder to harm now than an ordinary person, and Solya isn’t egregiously stupid. In any case, he knows very well what the prince wants, and all being equal he’d prefer to give it to him. Go get three bottles of milk of fir.”
Well, I didn’t know what the prince wanted, and I didn’t like the idea of him getting it, either, whatever it was. I went up to the laboratory for the milk of fir: it was a potion the Dragon brewed out of fir needles, which somehow under his handling became a milky liquid without scent, although the one time he’d tried to teach me to do it, I’d produced only a wet stinking mess of fir needles and water. Its virtue was to fix magic in the body: it went into every healing potion and into the stone-skin potion. I brought the bottles down to the great hall.
Kasia stood in the center of the room, inside an elaborate double ring drawn on the floor in herbs crushed in salt. They had put a heavy collar around her neck like a yoke for oxen, of black-pitted iron engraved with spell-writing in bright silvery letters, with chains that hung from it to her manacled wrists. She didn’t have so much as a chair to sit on, and it should have bowed her double, but she stood straight up underneath it, easily. She gave me a small smile when I came into the room: I’m all right.
The Falcon looked more weary than she did, and Prince Marek was rubbing his face through an enormous yawn, though he was only sitting in a chair watching. “Over there,” the Falcon said in my direction, waving a hand to his heaped worktable, paying me no more attention than that. The Dragon sat on his high seat, and threw me a sharp look when I hesitated. Mutinous, I put the bottles on the table, but I didn’t leave the room: I retreated to the doorway and watched.
The Falcon infused spells of purification into the bottles, three different ones. He worked with a kind of sharp directness: where the Dragon folded magic into endless intricacies, the Falcon drew a straight line across. But his magic worked in the same sort of way: it seemed to me he was only choosing a different road of many, not wandering in the trees as I did. He handed the bottles across the line to Kasia with a pair of iron tongs: he seemed to have grown more rather than less cautious as he went along. Each one glowed through her skin as she drank it, and the glow lingered, held; by the time she had drunk all three, she lit up the whole room. There was no hint of shadow in her, no small feathery strand of corruption lingering.
The prince sat slouched in his chair, a large goblet of wine at his elbow, careless and easy, but I noticed now that the wine was untouched, and his eyes never left Kasia’s face. It made my hands itch to reach for magic: I would have gladly slapped his face just to keep him from looking at her.
The Falcon stared at her a long time, and then he took a blindfold out of a pocket of his doublet and tied it over his eyes: thick black velvet ornamented with silver letters, large enough that it covered his forehead. He murmured something as he put it on; the letters glowed, and then an eyehole opened in the mask just over the center of his forehead. A single eye was looking out of it: large and oddly shaped, roundish, the ring around the enormous pupil dark enough to make it seem almost entirely black, shot through with small flickers of silver. He came to the very edge of the circle and stared at Kasia with it: up and down, and walking in a circle around her three times.
At last he stepped back. The eye closed, then the eyehole, and he raised shaking arms to take off the blindfold, fumbling at the knot. He took it off. I couldn’t help staring at his forehead: there wasn’t any sign of another eye there, or any mark at all, although his own eyes were badly bloodshot. He sat down heavily into his chair.
“Well?” the prince said, sharply.
The Falcon said nothing for a moment. “I can find no signs of corruption,” he said finally, grudging. “I won’t swear there is none present—”
The prince wasn’t listening. He’d stood up and picked up a heavy key from the table. He crossed the room to Kasia. The shining light was fading from her body, but it had not yet gone; his boots smeared the ring of salt open as he crossed it and unlocked the heavy collar and the manacles. He lifted them off her and to the ground, and then held out his hand, as courtly as if she were a noblewoman, his eyes devouring her. Kasia hesitated—I knew she was worried she would break his hand by accident; myself, I hoped she would—and carefully put her hand in his.
He gripped it tight and turning led her forward, to the foot of the Dragon’s dais. “And now, Dragon,” he said softly, “you will tell us how this was done,” with a shake of Kasia’s arm, raised up in his own. “And then we will go into the Wood: the Falcon and I, if you’re too much a coward to come with us, and we will bring my mother out.”
Chapter 13
I’m not going to give you a sword to fall on,” the Dragon said. “If that’s what you insist on doing, you can do so with considerably less damage to anyone else by using the one you already have.”
Prince Marek’s shoulders clenched, the muscles around his neck knotting visibly; he let go of Kasia’s hand and took a step onto the dais. The Dragon’s face stayed cold and unyielding. I think the prince would have struck him, gladly, but the Falcon pushed himself up from his chair. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness, there’s no need for this. If you recall the enchantment I used in Kyeva, when we captured General Nichkov’s camp—that will serve just as well here. It will show me how the spell was done.” He smiled at the Dragon without teeth, lips drawn tight. “I think Sarkan will admit that even he can’t hide things from my sight.”
The Dragon didn’t deny it, but bit out, “I’ll admit that you’re a far more extravagant fool than I gave you credit for being, if you intend to lend yourself to this lunacy.”
“I would hardly call it extravagant to make every reasonable attempt to rescue the queen,” the Falcon said. “We’ve all bowed our heads to your wisdom before now, Sarkan: there was certainly no sense in taking risks to bring out the queen only to have to put her to death. Yet now here we are,” he gestured to Kasia, “with evidence of another possibility plain before us. Why have you been concealing it so long?”
Just like that, when the Falcon had so plainly come here in the first place expressly to insist that there was no other possibility, and to condemn the Dragon for letting Kasia live at all! I nearly gawked at him, but he showed not the least consciousness of having altered his position. “If there is any hope for the queen, I would call it treason not to make the attempt,” the Falcon added. “What was done, can be done again.”
The Dragon snorted. “By you?”
Well, even I could tell that was hardly the way to induce the Falcon to hesitate. His eyes narrowed, and he turned coldly and said to the prince, “I will retire now, Your Highness; I must recover my strength before I cast the enchantment in the morning.”
Prince Marek dismissed him with a wave of his hand: I saw to my alarm that while I’d been busy watching the sparring, he had been speaking to Kasia, gripping her hand in both of his. Her face still had that unnatural stillness, but I had learned to read it well enough by now to see that she was troubled.
I was about to go to her rescue when he let her hand go and left the hall himself, a quick wide stride, the heels of his boots ringing on the steps as he went upstairs. Kasia came to me, and I caught her hand in mine. The Dragon was scowling at the stairs, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair in irritation.
“Can he do it?” I asked him. “Can he see how the spell was done?”
Drum, drum, drum, went his fingers. “Not unless he finds the tomb,” the Dragon said finally. After a moment he added grudgingly, “Which he may be able to do: he has an affinity for sight magic. But then he’ll have to find a way into it. I imagine it will take him a few weeks,
at least; long enough for me to get a message to the king, and I hope forestall this nonsense.”
He waved me away, and I was glad to go, pulling Kasia all the way up the stairs behind me with a wary eye on the turning up ahead. At the second landing I put my head out and made sure neither the prince nor the Falcon was in the hallway any longer before I drew Kasia across it, and when we came to my room I told her to wait outside until I had flung the door open and looked in: empty. I let her in and shut and barred the door behind us, and pushed a chair beneath the doorknob. I would have liked to seal it with magic, if the Dragon hadn’t warned me against using spells, but as little as I wanted another visit from Prince Marek, I wanted him to remember what had really happened in the last one even less. I didn’t know if the Falcon could notice it if I cast a tiny spell of closing up here in my room, but I had felt his magic from the kitchens, so I didn’t mean to take chances.
I turned to Kasia: she was sitting on the bed heavily. Her back was straight—it was always straight now—but her hands were pressed flat together in her lap, and her head was bowed forward. “What did he say to you?” I demanded, a shudder of anger building in my belly, but Kasia shook her head.
“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 taki
ng 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.
