Uprooted. Part 9

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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 taking 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 gra.s.s 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.

"Open it up, Michal," the captain of the guard said, and one of the soldiers slid down and went tramping ahead through the gra.s.s. 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 a.s.sistance?"

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 sc.r.a.ped 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 m.u.f.fled 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 gla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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, our 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 l.u.s.ter 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 m.u.f.fling 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, k.n.o.bbly-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, surrept.i.tiously.

I'd grown up riding my father's big slow draft horses, who would only look around at me in mild surprise if I stood upside down on their broad backs, and refused to have anything to do with trotting, much less a canter. But Prince Marek had put us on spare horses his knights had brought with them, and they seemed like entirely different animals. When I accidentally tugged on the reins in some wrong way, my horse jumped up onto its hind legs and lashed out its hooves, crow-stepping forward while I clung in alarm to its mane. It came down after some time, for reasons equally impenetrable to me, and pranced along very satisfied with itself. At least until we pa.s.sed Zatochek.

There wasn't a single place where the valley road ended. I suppose it had gone on much farther once-on to Porosna, and maybe to some other nameless long-swallowed village beyond it. But before the creak of the mill-house at Zatochek bridge faded behind us, the weeds and gra.s.s began to nibble at the edges, and a mile onward we could barely tell that it was still underfoot. The soldiers were still laughing and singing, but the horses were wiser than we were, maybe. Their pace slowed without any signal from their riders. They whuffed nervously and jerked their heads, their ears p.r.i.c.king forward and back and their skin giving nervous shivers as if flies were bothering them. But there were no flies. Up ahead, the wall of dark trees was waiting.

"Pull up here," the Dragon said, and as if they'd understood him and were glad of the excuse, the horses halted almost at once, all of them. "Get a drink of water and eat something, if you like. Let nothing more pa.s.s your lips once we're beneath the trees." He swung down from his horse.

I climbed down from my own, very cautiously. "I'll take her," one of the soldiers said to me, a blond boy with a friendly round face marred only by a twice-broken nose. He clucked to my mare, cheerful and competent. All the men were taking their horses to drink from the river, and pa.s.sing around loaves of bread and flasks with liquor in them.

The Dragon beckoned me over. "Put on your protection spell, as thickly as you can," he said. "And then try to place it on the soldiers, if you can. I'll lay another on you as well."

"Will it keep the shadows out of us?" I said doubtfully. "Even inside the Wood?"

"No. But it will slow them down," he said. "There's a barn just outside Zatochek: I keep it stocked with purgatives, against a need to go into the Wood. As soon as we're out again, we'll go there and dose ourselves. Ten times, no matter how certain you are that you're clear."

I looked at the crowd of young soldiers, talking and laughing among themselves as they ate their bread. "Do you have enough for all of them?"

He turned a cold certain look over them like the sweep of a scythe. "For however many of them will be left," he said.

I shivered. "You still don't think this is a good idea. Even after Jerzy." A thin plume of smoke still rose from the Wood, where the heart-tree burned: we'd seen it yesterday.

"It's a dreadful idea," the Dragon said. "But letting Marek lead you and Solya in there without me is a still-worse one. At least I have some idea what to expect. Come: we don't have much time."

Kasia silently helped me gather bundles of pine needles for my spell. The Falcon was already building an elaborate shield of his own around Prince Marek, like a shining wall of bricks going up one after another, and when he had raised it above Marek's head, the whole thing glowed as a whole and then collapsed in on him. If I glanced at Marek sideways I could see the faint shimmer of it clinging to his skin. The Falcon put another one on himself. I noticed he didn't lay it on any of the soldiers, though.

I knelt and made a smudge-fire of my pine needles and branches. When the smoke was filling the clearing, bitter and throat-drying, I looked up at the Dragon. "Cast yours now?" I asked. The Dragon's spell settling on my shoulders felt like putting on a heavy coat in front of the fireplace: it left me itchy and uncomfortable, and thinking too much about why I was going to need it. I hummed my protection spell along with his chant, imagining that I was bundling up the rest of the way against the heart of winter: not just coat but mittens, woolen scarf, hat with the ear-covers b.u.t.toned down, knitted pants over my boots, and veils wrapped over it all, everything tucked snugly in, leaving no cracks for the cold air to wriggle through.

"All of you pull up your scarves," I said, without looking away from my smoky fire, forgetting a moment that I was talking to grown men, soldiers; and what was odder still was they did what I said. I pushed the smoke out around me, letting it sink into the wool and cotton of their wraps, carrying protection with it.

The last of the needles crumbled into ash. The fire went out. I climbed a little unsteadily up to my feet, coughing from the smoke, and rubbed my tearing eyes. When I blinked them clear again, I flinched: the Falcon was watching me, hungry and intent, even as he drew a fold of his own cloak up over his mouth and nose. I turned quickly away and went to get a drink from the river myself, and wash the smoke from my hands and face. I didn't like the way his eyes tried to pierce my skin.

Kasia and I shared a loaf of bread ourselves: the endlessly familiar daily loaf from Dvernik's baker, crusty and grey-brown and a little bit sour, the taste of every morning at home. The soldiers were putting away their flasks and wiping off crumbs and getting back on their horses. The sun had broken over the trees.