by Naomi Novik
“Open it up, Michal,” the captain of the guard said, and one of the soldiers slid down and went tramping ahead through the grass. He was a young man, and like most of the soldiers he wore his brown hair long and straight, with a long dangling mustache and beard, braided, all of them like pictures in the Dragon’s history books of the old days, the founding of Polnya. He was as strong as a young oak, tall and broad even among the other soldiers; he slid the bar over with one hand and pushed open both of the doors with an easy shove, letting the afternoon sunlight into the barn.
Then he jerked back with a wordless choked noise in his throat, hand moving towards his sword-belt, and almost stumbled over his own feet backing away. Jerzy was propped against the back wall, and the light had shone full onto the snarl of his twisted face. The statue’s eyes were looking straight out at us.
“What a hideous grimace,” Prince Marek said in an offhand tone. “All right, Janos,” he added to the chief of his guard, sliding off his horse, “Take the men and the horses to the village green, and get them under some sort of cover. The beasts won’t sit still for a lot of magic and howling, I imagine.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Janos said, and jerked his head to his second.
The soldiers were as happy as the horses to be out of it. They took our mounts, too, and went eagerly, a few of them glancing sidelong through the barn doors. I saw Michal look back over his hunched shoulders several times, the ruddy color gone out of his face.
None of them understood, really, about the Wood. They weren’t men from the valley—as I’ve said, the Dragon didn’t need to levy a troop to send to the king’s army—and they weren’t from anywhere nearby, either. They carried shields marked with a crest of a knight upon a horse, so they were all from the northern provinces around Tarakai, where Queen Hanna had come from. Their idea of magic was a lightning-strike on a battlefield, deadly and clean. They didn’t know what they were riding to face.
“Wait,” the Dragon said, before Janos turned his own horse to follow the rest of them. “While you’re there: buy two sacks of salt and divide it into pouches, one for each man; then find scarves to cover all their mouths and noses, and buy every axe that anyone will spare you.” He looked at the prince. “There won’t be any time to waste. If this even works, the best we’ll have won is the briefest opportunity—a day, two at most, while the Wood recovers from the blow.”
Prince Marek nodded to Janos, confirming the orders. “See to it everyone gets a little rest, if they can,” he said. “We’ll ride straight for the Wood as soon as we’re done here.”
“And pray that the queen isn’t deep inside it,” the Dragon added, flatly; Janos darted a glance at him and back to the prince, but Marek only slapped the flank of Janos’s horse and turned away, a dismissal; Janos followed the other men away, down the narrow path and out of sight.
We were left alone just inside the barn, the five of us. Dust floated through the sunlight, the warm sweet smell of hay, but with a faint choking undercurrent of rotting leaves beneath. I could see a broken jagged-edged hole gaping in the side of the wall: where the wolves had come through, not to eat the cattle but to savage and corrupt them. I hugged myself. The day was growing late: we’d ridden straight across the valley to Dvernik since before the morning light, only stopping long enough to let the horses rest. Wind stirred through the doors and blew against my neck, a cold touch. The sun was orange on Jerzy’s face, his wide unseeing stone eyes. I remembered the cold, still feeling of being stone: I wondered if Jerzy could see out of his own fixed gaze, or if the Wood had closed him into darkness.
The Dragon looked at the Falcon and made a wide mocking sweep of his arm towards Jerzy. “Perhaps you’d care to be of some assistance?”
The Falcon gave him a thin, smiling bow and went to stand before the statue with upraised hands. The words to lift the stone spell came ringing off his tongue, beautifully enunciated, and as he spoke Jerzy’s fingertips curled in with a twitch as the stone drained out of them. The stiffened claws of his hands were still outstretched to either side of him, and the rusting chains hanging from his wrists had been nailed to the wall. The metal links scraped against one another as he started to move. The Falcon backed away a little, still smiling, as the stone retreated slowly down from the crown of Jerzy’s head and his eyes began to roll and dart from side to side. A shrill faint thread of laughter wheezed out of him as his mouth came loose; then the stone freed his lungs, and the smile slid off the Falcon’s face as it rose and rose to a shrieking pitch.
Kasia moved against me, clumsily, and I gripped her hand. She stood beside me like a statue herself, rigid and remembering. Jerzy howled and laughed and howled, over and over, as though he was trying to make up for all the howls that had been closed up inside his stone chest. He howled until he was out of breath, and then he lifted his head and grinned at us all with his blackened and rotting teeth, his skin still mottled green. Prince Marek was staring at him, his hand clenched on his sword; the Falcon had backed away to his side.
“Hello, princeling,” Jerzy crooned to him, “do you miss your mother? Would you like to hear her scream, too? Marek!” Jerzy shrilled suddenly, in a woman’s voice, high and desperate. “Marechek, save me!”
Marek flinched bodily as if something had struck him in the gut, three inches of his sword-blade coming out of its sheath before he stopped. “Stop it!” he snarled. “Make it be silent!”
The Falcon raised a hand and said, “Elrekaduht!” still staring and appalled. Jerzy’s wide-mouthed cackles went muffled as if he’d been closed up inside a thick-walled room, only a faint distant whine of “Marechek, Marechek” still coming through.
The Falcon whirled towards us. “You can’t possibly mean to cleanse this thing—”
“Ah, so now you’re feeling squeamish?” the Dragon said, cold and cutting.
“Look at him!” the Falcon said. He turned back and said, “Lehleyast palezh!” and swept his opened hand down through the air as though he were wiping down a pane of glass covered in steam. I recoiled, Kasia’s hand clenching painfully on mine; we stared in horror. Jerzy’s skin had gone translucent, a thin greenish onion-skin layer, and beneath it nothing but black squirming masses of corruption that boiled and seethed. Like the shadows I’d seen beneath my own skin, but grown so fat they’d devoured everything there was inside him, even coiling beneath his face, his stained yellow eyes barely peering out of the grotesque, seething clouds.
“And yet you were prepared to ride blithely into the Wood,” the Dragon said. He turned. Prince Marek was staring at Jerzy, grey as a mirror; his mouth was a narrow bloodless line. The Dragon said to him, “Listen to me. This?” He gestured at Jerzy. “This is nothing. His corruption is thrice-removed, less than three days old thanks to the stone spell. If it were only four times removed instead, I could have cleansed him with the usual purgative. The queen’s been held in a heart-tree for twenty years. If we can find her, if we can bring her out, if we can purge her, none of which is remotely certain, she’ll still have lived twenty years in the worst torment the Wood can devise. She won’t embrace you. She won’t even know you.
“We have a true chance against the Wood here,” he added. “If we succeed in purging this man, if we destroy another heart-tree doing it, we shouldn’t use that opening to make a foolish headlong charge deep into the bowels of the Wood, risking everything. We should begin at the nearest border, cut a road into the Wood as deep as we can from sunrise to sunset, and then set fire-heart in the forest behind us before we retreat. We could reclaim twenty miles of this valley, and weaken the Wood for three generations.”
“And if my mother burns with it?” Prince Marek said, wheeling on him.
The Dragon nodded towards Jerzy. “Would you rather live like that?”
“Then if she doesn’t burn!” Marek said. “No.” He heaved a breath like there were iron bands around his chest. “No.”
The Dragon’s mouth compressed. “If we were able to so weaken the Wood, o
ur chances of finding her—”
“No,” Marek said, a slash of his hand, cutting him off. “We’ll bring my mother out, and as we go we’ll lay waste as much of the Wood as we can. Then, Dragon, when you’ve purged her and burned the heart-tree that held her, I swear you’ll have every man and axe that my father can spare you, and we won’t just burn the Wood back twenty miles: we’ll burn it all the way to Rosya, and be rid of it for good.”
He straightened as he spoke, his shoulders going back; he’d planted himself still more firmly. I bit my own lip. I trusted Prince Marek not at all, except to please himself, but I couldn’t help feeling that he had the right of it. If we cut the Wood back even twenty miles, it would be a great victory, but only a temporary one. I wanted all of it to burn.
I’d always hated the Wood, of course, but distantly. It had been a hailstorm before harvest, a swarm of locusts in the field; more horrible than those things, more like a nightmare, but still just acting according to its nature. Now it was something else entirely, a living thing deliberately reaching out the full force of its malice to hurt me, to hurt everyone I loved; looming over my entire village and ready to swallow it up just like Porosna. I wasn’t dreaming of myself as a great heroine, as the Dragon had accused me, but I did want to ride into the Wood with axe and fire. I wanted to rip the queen out of its grasp, call up armies on either side, and raze it to the ground.
The Dragon shook his head after a moment, but silently; he didn’t argue any further. Instead it was the Falcon who made a protest, now; he didn’t look nearly as certain as Prince Marek. His eyes still lingered on Jerzy, and he had a corner of his white cloak pressed over his mouth and nose, as though he saw more than we did, and feared to breathe in some sickness. “I hope you’ll forgive my doubts: perhaps I’m merely woefully inexperienced in these matters,” he said, the tense sarcastic edge of his voice coming clearly even through the cloak. “But I would have called this a truly remarkable case of corruption. He’s not even safe to behead before burning. Perhaps we’d best make sure you can free him, before you choose among grandiose plans none of which can even be begun.”
“We agreed!” Prince Marek said, wheeling around to him in urgent protest.
“I agreed it was a risk worth taking, if Sarkan had really found some way to purge corruption,” the Falcon said to him. “But this—?” He looked again at Jerzy. “Not until I’ve seen him do it, and I’ll look twice even then. For all we know, the girl was never corrupted in the first place, and he put the rumor about himself, to add still more luster to his reputation.”
The Dragon snorted disdainfully and didn’t offer him any other answer. He turned and pulled a handful of hay stalks from one of the old falling-apart bales and began to murmur a charm over them as his fingers quickly bent them together. Prince Marek seized the Falcon’s arm and dragged him aside, whispering angrily.
Jerzy was still singing to himself behind the muffling spell, but he had begun to swing himself in the chains, running forward until his arms were stretched as far as they could go behind him, held taut by the chains and straining, flinging himself against them and lunging his head forward to snap and bite at the air. He let his tongue hang out, a grossly swollen blackened thing as though a slug had crawled into his mouth, and waggled it and rolled his eyes at us all.
The Dragon ignored him. In his hands, the hay stalks thickened and grew into a small, knobbly-legged table, barely a foot wide, and then he took the leather satchel he’d brought with him and opened it up. He drew the Summoning out carefully, the sunset making the golden embossed letters blaze, and he laid it upon the small table. “All right,” he said, turning to me. “Let’s begin.”
I hadn’t really thought about it until then, with the prince and the Falcon turning towards us, that I would have to take the Dragon’s hand in front of all of them, join my magic to his while they watched. My stomach shriveled like a dried plum. I darted a look at the Dragon, but his face was deliberately aloof, as though he was only mildly interested by anything we were doing.
I reluctantly went to stand beside him. The Falcon’s eyes were on me, and I was sure there was magic in his gaze, predatory and piercing. I hated the thought of being exposed before him, before Marek; I hated it almost worse to have Kasia there, who knew me so well. I hadn’t told her much about that night, about the last time the Dragon and I had tried a working together. I hadn’t been able to put it into words; I hadn’t wanted to think about it that much. But I couldn’t refuse, not with Jerzy dancing on his chains like the toy my father had whittled me long ago, the funny little stick-man who jumped and somersaulted between two poles.
I swallowed and put my hand on the cover of the Summoning. I opened it, and together the Dragon and I began to read.
We were stiff and awkward beside each other, but our workings joined as though they knew the way by now without us. My shoulders eased, my head lifted, I drew a deep glad breath into my lungs. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t care if all the world was watching. The Summoning flowed around us easily as a river: his voice a rippling chant that I filled with waterfalls and leaping fish, and the light dawned bright and brilliant as an early sunrise around us.
And in Jerzy’s face, the Wood looked out, and snarled at us with soundless hatred.
“Is it working?” Prince Marek asked the Falcon, behind us. I didn’t hear his answer. Jerzy was lost in the Wood just as Kasia had been, but he had given up: he was sitting slumped against the trunk of a tree, his bleeding feet stretched out in front of him, the muscles of his jaw slack, staring blankly down at his hands in his lap. He didn’t move when I called him. “Jerzy!” I cried. Dully he lifted his head, dully looked at me, and then put it down again.
“I see—there is a channel,” the Falcon said; when I glanced at him, I saw he’d put his blindfold mask on again. That strange hawk’s-eye was peering out of his forehead, its black pupil wide. “That’s the way the corruption travels out from the Wood. Sarkan, if I cast the purging-fire down along it now—”
“No!” I said in quick protest. “Jerzy will die.” The Falcon threw me a dismissive look. He didn’t care anything if Jerzy lived or died, of course. But Kasia turned and dashed out of the barn, down the pathway, and a little while later she brought a wary Krystyna back to us, the baby cuddled in her arms. Krystyna shrank back from the magic, from Jerzy’s writhing, but Kasia whispered to her urgently. Krystyna clutched the baby tighter and slowly took one step closer, then another, until she could look into Jerzy’s face. Her own changed.
“Jerzy!” she called, “Jerzy!” and stretched her hand towards him. Kasia held her back from touching his face, but deep within, I saw him lift his head again, and then, slowly, push up onto his feet.
The light of the Summoning was no more forgiving to him. I felt it at a distance this time, not something that touched me directly, but he was bared to us, full of anger: the small graves of all the children, and Krystyna’s mutely suffering face; the pinch of hunger in his belly and his sour resentment of the small baskets of charity he pretended not to see in the corners of his house, knowing she’d gone begging. The simple raw desperation of seeing the cows turned, his last grasping clutch at a way out of poverty torn away. He’d half wanted the beasts to kill him.
Krystyna’s face was vivid with her own sluggish desperation, helpless dark thoughts: her mother had told her not to marry a poor man; her sister in Radomsko had four children and a husband who wove cloth for a living. Her sister’s children had lived; her sister’s children had never been cold and starving.
Jerzy’s mouth pulled wide with shame, trembling, teeth clenched. But Krystyna sobbed once and reached for him again, and then the baby woke and yelled: an awful noise but somehow wonderful by comparison, so ordinary and uncomplicated, nothing but a raw demand. Jerzy took one step.
And then it was suddenly much easier. The Dragon was right: this corruption was weaker than Kasia’s had been, for all it had looked so dreadful. Jerzy wasn’t deep in the Wood, as
she had been. Once he began moving, he came stumbling towards us quickly, and though branches threw themselves in his way, they were only thin slapping things. He put his arms in front of his face and began to run towards us, pushing through them.
“Take the spell,” the Dragon said to me as we came to the very end, and I set my teeth and held the Summoning with all my might while he drew his magic free from mine. “Now,” he said to the Falcon, “as he emerges,” and as Jerzy began to crowd forward into his own face they raised their hands side by side and spoke at the same time: “Ulozishtus sovjenta!”
Jerzy screamed as he pushed forward through the purging fire, but he did come through: a few tarry stinking drops squeezed out of the corners of his eyes and ran out of his nostrils and fell to the ground, smoking, and his body fell limply sagging in his chains.
Kasia kicked some dirt over the drops, and the Dragon stepped forward to grip Jerzy’s face by the chin, holding him up as I finished reading the Summoning at last. “Look now,” he said to the Falcon.
The Falcon put his hands to either side of Jerzy’s face and spoke: a spell like an arrow. It snapped away from him in the final terrible blaze of light from the Summoning. On the wall between the chains, above Jerzy’s head, the Falcon’s spell opened a window, and we all saw for one moment a tall old heart-tree, twice the size of the one Kasia had been inside. Its limbs were thrashing wildly in a crackling blaze of fire.
Chapter 14
The soldiers were laughing to one another gaily as we left Dvernik in the hush before dawn the next morning. They had armed themselves, and were all very splendid looking in their bright mail, their nodding plumed helms and long green cloaks, their painted shields hung on their saddles. They knew it, too; they marched their horses proudly through the dark lanes, and even the horses held their necks arched. Of course thirty scarves weren’t easily come by out of a small village, so most of the men were wearing thick itchy woolen ones meant for winter, wrapped haphazardly around their necks and faces as the Dragon had ordered. They kept breaking their careful poise and involuntarily reaching beneath to scratch every so often, surreptitiously.
