“So you are well, then,” the priest had said dryly, and they at last allowed themselves to believe, and the mayor had handed over the fire-heart with great relief.
But of course my father and brothers hadn’t been allowed to come; nor had anyone from my village, who would have grieved to see me burn.And the men whohadcome, they’d looked at me standing beside the Dragon, and I didn’t know how to name what was in their faces.I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik.It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first.They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn’t belong in their lives at all.I flinched from those looks.I was glad to go back into the tower.
That was the day I had taken Jaga’s book down to the library, and demanded that the Dragon stop pretending I had any more gift for healing than I did for any other sort of spell, and let me learn the kind of magic that I could do.I hadn’t tried to write a letter, even though I suppose the Dragon would have let me send one.What would I say?I had gone home, and I had even saved it, but it wasn’t my place anymore; I couldn’t go and dance in the village square among my friends, any more than six months ago I could have marched into the Dragon’s library and sat down at his table.
When I saw Wensa’s face, though, even from the library window, I didn’t think of any of that.I left my working hanging in the air, unfinished, as he’d so often ordered me never to do, and flung myself down the stairs.He shouted after me, but his voice couldn’t reach me: because Wensa wouldn’t be here if Kasia could have come.I jumped down the last few steps into the great hall, and at the doors I halted only a moment:“Irronar, irronar,”I cried: it was only a charm for untying snarled knots of thread, and slurred besides, but I flung profligate magic behind it, as though I’d determined to hack my way through a thicket with an axe instead of taking the time to find a way around.The doors jumped as if startled and opened for me.
I fell through them onto suddenly weak knees—as the Dragon delighted in telling me, caustically, there was good reason that the more powerful spells were also the more complicated—but I staggered up and caught Wensa’s hands as she raised them to knock.Her face, seen close, was wrung with weeping; her hair was hanging down her back, clouds of it pulling out of the long thick plait, and her clothing was torn and stained with dirt: she was wearing her nightshift and a smock flung over it.“Nieshka,” she said, gripping my hands too hard, strangling the feeling out of them and her nails digging into my skin.“Nieshka, I had to come.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“They took her this morning, when she went for water,” Wensa said.“Three of them.Three walkers,” her voice breaking.
It was a bad spring when even one of the walkers came out of the Wood, and went plucking people out of the forests like fruit.I’d seen one once, a long way off through the trees: like an enormous twig-insect, at once almost impossible to see among the underbrush and jointed wrong and dreadful, so when it moved I had shuddered back from it, queasy.They had arms and legs like branches, with long twiggy stalk-fingers, and they would pick their way through the woods and find places near foot-paths and near water, near clearings, and wait in silence.If someone came in arm’s reach, there was no saving them, unless you had a great many men with axes and fire nearby.When I was twelve, they caught one half a mile past Zatochek, the tiny village that was the last in the valley, the last before the Wood.The walker had taken a child, a little boy, bringing a pail of water to his mother for the washing; she’d seen him snatched and screamed.There had been enough women nearby to raise the alarm, and slow it down.
They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day’s work to hack it to pieces.The walker broke the child’s arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs.Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy’s body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.
Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky.We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed.They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible.And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream.If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, andit could only be a hope.We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren’t dead, and then had to be hunted down.
“Not Kasia,” I said.“Not Kasia.”
Wensa had bent her head.She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron.“Please, Nieshka.Please.”She spoke hoarsely, without hope.She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better.But she had come to me.
She couldn’t stop weeping.I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her.She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.
The Dragon stood in the doorway watching us.I held up the locket from around Wensa’s neck.“She has a lock of Kasia’s hair.”I knew she’d cut it from Kasia’s head the night before the choosing, thinking she would have nothing left to remember her daughter by.“If I useloytalal—”
He shook his head.“What do you imagine you’re going to find, besides a smiling corpse?The girl is gone.”He jerked his chin at Wensa, whose eyes had drifted shut.“She’ll be calmer after she sleeps.Tell that driver to come back in the morning to take her home.”
He turned and left, and the worst of it was how matter-of-factly he’d spoken.He hadn’t snapped at me, or called me a fool; he hadn’t said the life of a village girl wasn’t worth the chance the Wood might take me to add to its host.He hadn’t told me I was an idiot drunk on success in throwing potions, in pulling flowers from the air, to suddenly think I could save someone the Wood had taken.
The girl is gone.He’d even sounded sorry, in his abrupt way.
I sat with Wensa, numb and cold, holding her hard red callused hand in my lap.It was growing dark outside.If Kasia was stillalive, she was in the Wood, watching the sun go down, light dying through the leaves.How long did it take, to hollow someone out from the inside?I thought of Kasia in the grip of the walkers, the long fingers curled around her arms and legs, knowing all the while what was happening, what would happen to her.
I left Wensa sleeping and went downstairs to the library.The Dragon was there, looking through one of the vast ledgers he made records in.I stood in the doorway staring at his back.“I know you held her dear,” he said over his shoulder.“But there’s no kindness in offering false hope.”
I didn’t say anything.Jaga’s book of spells was lying open on the table, small and worn.I’d been studying only spells of earth this week:fulmkea, fulmedesh, fulmishta,solid and fixed, as far from the air and fire of illusion as magic could get.I took the book and slipped it into my pocket behind the Dragon’s back, and then I turned around and went silently down the stairs.
Borys was still outside, waiting, his face long and bleak: he looked up from his blanketed horses when I came out of the tower.“Will you drive me to the Wood?”I asked him.
He nodded, and I climbed into his sleigh and drew the blankets around me as he made the horses ready again.He climbed aboard and spoke to them, jingling his reins, and the sleigh leapt out over the snow.
—
The moon was high that night, full and beautiful, blue light on the shining snow all around.I opened Jaga’s book as we flew, and found a spell for the quickening of feet.I sang it softly to the horses, their ears pricking back to listen to me, and the wind of our passage grew muffled and thick, pressing hard on my cheeks and blurring my sight.The Spindle, frozen over, was a pale silver road running alongside, and a shadow grew in the east ahead of us, grew and grew until the horses, uneasy, slowed and came to a halt without any word or any movement of reins.The world stopped moving.We were stopped under a small ragged cluster of pine-trees.The Wood stood ahead of us across an open stretch of unbroken snow.
Once a year, when the ground thawed, the Dragon took all the unmarried men older than fifteen out to the borders of the Wood.He burned a swath of ground along its edge bare and black, and the men followed his fire, sprinkling the ground with salt so nothing could grow or take root.In all our villages we saw the plumes of smoke rising.We saw them going up also on the other side of the Wood, far away in Rosya, and knew they were doing the same.But the fires always died when they reached the shadow beneath the dark trees.
I climbed down from the sleigh.Borys looked down at me, his face tense and afraid.But he said, “I’ll wait,” although I knew he couldn’t: Wait how long?For what?Wait here, in the Wood’s very shadow?
I thought of my own father, waiting for Marta, if our places had been changed.I shook my head.If I could bring Kasia out, I thought I could get her to the tower.I hoped the Dragon’s spell would let us in.“Go home,” I said, and then I asked him, wanting suddenly to know, “Is Marta well?”
He nodded slightly.“She’s married,” he said, and then he hesitated and said, “There’s a child coming.”
I remembered her at the choosing, five months ago: her red dress, her beautiful black braids, her narrow pale frightened face.It didn’t seem possible we’d ever stood next to each other, just the same: her and me and Kasia in a row.It took my breath, hard and painful, to imagine her sitting at her own hearth, already a young matron, getting ready for childbed.
“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy.It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred: someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars.But they meantlife:she was living, and I wasn’t.Even if I camesomehow out of the Wood alive again, I’d never have what she had.And Kasia—Kasia might already be dead.
