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 becausehe’sgone.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 wolveshad 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 knowsomethingI 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 withcold.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?”
I swallowed.She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything but yes.Kasia still gripped my hand, and as we ran across the village to my house together, I said, “Will you go in first, and warn them?”
So my mother was already crying when I came through the door.She didn’t see the gown at all, only me, and we were crumpled into a heap of velvet on the floor, hugging each other, when my father and brothers came staggering out of the back rooms, confused with sleep, and found us.We wept all together even while we told each other there was no time for weeping, and through my tears I told my father what we were going to do.He and my brothers went dashing out to hitch up our horses, which had thankfully been safe in their own heavy stable next to the house.I snatched those last few moments and sat at the kitchen table with my mother.She smoothed her hands over my face over and over, her own tears still running.“He hasn’t touched me, Mamusha,” I told her, and didn’t say anything about Prince Marek.“He’s all right.”She didn’t answer, just stroked my hair again.
My father put his head in and said, “We’re ready,” and I had to go.My mother said, “Wait a moment,” and vanished into the bedroom.She came out with a bundle made up, my own clothes and things.“I thought someone from Olshanka might take it to thetower for you,” she said, “in the spring, when they bring him gifts from the festival.”She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go.It did hurt more.It did.
My father went to every house in the village, and my brothers leapt down and robbed every woodshed of every last stick they’d once hauled in, heaving great armloads onto the sled with its tall poles.When it was full, they drove out to the pens, and I saw the poor cattle at last.
They didn’t even look like cows anymore, their bodies swollen and misshapen, horns grown huge and heavy and twisted.Here and there one of them sprouted arrows or even a couple of spears, thrust deep into their bodies and jutting out like horrible spikes.Things that came out of the Wood often couldn’t be killed, except with fire or beheading; wounds only maddened them worse.Many of them had forelegs and chests blackened where they had stamped out the earlier fires.They were lunging against the heavy wooden fence of the pen, swinging their heavy unnatural horns and lowing in their deep voices, a dreadfully ordinary sound.There was a knot of men and women gathered to meet them, a bristling forest of pitchforks and spears and sharpened stakes, prodding the cattle back.
Some women were already hacking at the ground, mostly bare of snow here near the pens, raking away the dead matted grass.Danka was overseeing the work; she waved my father over, our horses whuffling uneasily as they drew nearer and smelled the corruption on the wind.“All right,” she said.“We’ll be ready before noon.We’ll heave wood and hay over, in among them, and then light torches with the potion and throw them in.Save as much of it as you can, in case we have to try a second time,” she added to me.I nodded.
More hands were coming as people were woken from their rest early to help in the final great effort.Everyone knew the cattle would try and stampede out when they were burning: everyone who could hold even a stick took a place in the line to hold them back.Othersbegan to heave over bales of hay into the pen, the bindings broken so they smashed apart as they landed, and my brothers began throwing over the bundles of firewood.I stood anxiously beside Danka, holding the flask and feeling the magic in it swirling and hot beneath my fingers, pulsing as though it knew soon it would be set loose to do its work.Finally Danka was satisfied with the preparations, and held out to me the first bundle to be fired: a long dry log split halfway down the center, twigs and hay stuffed inside the crack and tied around it.
The fire-heart tried to roar up and out of the bottle as soon as I broke the seal: I found I had to hold the stopper in place.The potion fell back sullenly, and I whipped out the stopper and poured a drop—the least, the slightest drop—on the very end of the bundled log.The log went up in flames so quickly that Danka had scarcely a moment to throw it over the fence, hastily, and afterwards turned and thrust her hand into a snowbank, wincing: her fingers were already blistered and red.I was busy jamming the stopper back in, and by the time I looked up, half the pen was engulfed, the cattle bellowing furiously.
We were all taken aback by the ferocity of the magic, though we’d all heard tales of fire-heart—it figured in endless ballads of warfare and siege, and also in the stories of its making, how it required a thousandweight of gold to make a single flask, and had to be brewed in cauldrons made of pure stone, by a wizard of surpassing skill.I carefully hadn’t mentioned to anyone that I didn’t havepermissionto take the potions from the tower: if the Dragon was going to be angry with anyone, I meant for him to be angry with me alone.
But hearing stories about it wasn’t the same as seeing it in front of our faces.We were unprepared, and the sickened cattle were already in a frenzy.Ten of them clumped together and bore down on the back wall, smashing against it heedless of the waiting stakes and prods.And all of us were terrified of being gored or bitten, even of touching them; the Wood’s evil could spread so easily.Thehandful of defenders fell back, and Danka was shouting furiously as the fence began to give way.
The Dragon had taught me, with endless labor and grim determination, several small spells of mending and fixing and repair, none of which I could cast very well.Desperation made me try: I climbed up onto my father’s empty sled and pointed at the fence and said,“Paran kivitash farantem, paran paran kivitam!”I had missed a syllable somewhere, I knew it, but I must have been close enough: the largest bar, splintering, jumped back whole into place and suddenly put out twigs with new leaves, and the old iron cross-braces straightened themselves out.
Old Hanka, who alone had held her ground—“I’m too sour to die,” she said afterwards, by way of dismissing credit for her bravery—had been holding only the stump of a rake, the head of it already broken off and jammed between the horns of one of the oxen.Her stubby stick turned into a long sharpened rod of bright metal, steel, and she jabbed it at once straight into the open bellowing maw of the cow pushing on the fence.The spear pierced through and through and came out the back of the cow’s skull, and the huge beast fell heavily against the fence and sagged dead to the ground, blocking the others from coming at it.
That proved to be the worst of the fight.We held them everywhere else, for a few minutes longer, and the task grew easier: they were all on fire by then, a terrible stink going up that twisted the stomach.They lost their cunning in panic and became merely animals again, throwing themselves futilely against the fence walls and one another until the fire brought them down at last.I used the mending charm twice more, and by the end was sagging against Kasia, who had climbed into the wagon to hold me up.The older children were running everywhere breathless with buckets of half-melted snow to put out any sparks that fell on the ground.Every last man and woman labored to exhaustion with their prods, faces red and sweaty with heat, backs freezing in the cold air, but together we kept the beasts penned, and neither the fire nor their corruptionspread.
Finally the last cow fell.Hissing smoke and fat crackled on inside the fire.We all sat exhausted in a loose ring around the pen, keeping out of the smoke, watching as the fire-heart settled down and burned low, consuming everything down to ashes.Many coughed.No one spoke or cheered.There was no cause for celebration.We were all glad to see the worst danger averted, but the cost was immense.Jerzy wasn’t the only one who would be impoverished by the fire.
“Is Jerzy still alive?”I asked Kasia softly.
She hesitated, and then nodded.“I heard he was taken badly,” she said.
The Wood-sickness wasn’t always incurable—the Dragon had saved others, I knew.Two years ago an easterly wind had caught our friend Trina on the riverbank while she was doing some washing.She came back stumbling and sick, the clothing in her basket coated with a silver-grey pollen.Her mother stopped her coming in.She threw the clothes on the fire and took Trina down to the river and dunked her over and over, while Danka sent a fast rider to Olshanka immediately.
The Dragon had come that night.I remembered I had gone over to Kasia’s house and we’d watched together from her backyard.We didn’t see him, only a cold blue light, flaring from the upstairs window of Trina’s house.In the morning, Trina’s aunt told me at the well that she was going to be all right: two days later Trina was up and about, herself again, only a little tired like someone who’d had a bad cold, and even pleased because her father was digging a well by their house, so she wouldn’t ever have to go all the way to the river to do the washing again.
But that had only been a single malicious gust of wind, a drift of pollen.This—this was one of the worst takings I remembered.So many cattle sickened, so horribly, and able to spread their own corruption onward so quickly: that was a sure sign that it was very bad.
Danka had heard us speaking about Jerzy.She came over to thewagon and looked in my face.“Is there anything you can do for him?”she asked bluntly.
I knew what she was really asking.It was a slow and dreadful death, if the corruption wasn’t purged.The Wood consuming you like rot eating away at a fallen tree, hollowing you out from the inside, leaving only a monstrous thing full of poison, which cared for nothing but to spread that poison onward.If I said there was nothing I could do, if I admitted I knew nothing, if I confessed that I was spent—with Jerzy so badly taken and the Dragon a week and more from coming—Danka would give the word.She would lead a few men to Jerzy’s house.They would take Krystyna away to the other side of the village.The men would go inside, and come out again with a heavy shroud, and bring his body back here.They would throw it on the pyre with the burning cattle.
