And of course he was also a master of dark sorcery.Lightning would flash around his tower on a clear night, even in the winter.Pale wisps that he set loose from his windows drifted along the roads and down the river at night, going to the Wood to keep watch for him.And sometimes when the Wood caught someone—a shepherd girl who had drifted too close to its edge, following her flock; a hunter who had drunk from the wrong spring; an unlucky traveler who came over the mountain pass humming a snatch of music that sank claws into your head—well, the Dragon would come down from his tower for them, too; and the ones he took away never came back at all.
He wasn’t evil, but he was distant and terrible.And he was going to take Kasia away, so I hated him, and had hated him for years and years.
My feelings didn’t change on that last night.Kasia and I ate our chestnuts.The sun went down and our fire went out, but we lingered in the clearing as long as the embers lasted.We didn’t have a long way to go in the morning.The harvest feast was usually held in Olshanka, but in a choosing year, it was always held in a village where at least one of the girls lived, to make the travel a little easier for their families.And our village had Kasia.
I hated the Dragon even more the next day, putting on my new green overdress.My mother’s hands were shaking as she braided up my hair.We knew it would be Kasia, but that didn’t mean we weren’t still afraid.But I held my skirts up high off the ground and climbed into the wagon as carefully as I could, looking twice for splinters and letting my father help me.I was determined to make a special effort.I knew it was no use, but I wanted Kasia to know that I loved her enough to give her a fair chance.I wasn’t going to make myself look a mess or squint-eyed or slouching, the way girls sometimes did.
We gathered on the village green, all eleven of us girls in a line.The feasting-tables were set out in a square, loaded too heavilybecause they weren’t really big enough to hold the tribute of the entire valley.Everyone had gathered behind them.Sacks of wheat and oats were piled up on the grass at the corners in pyramids.We were the only ones standing on the grass, with our families and our headwoman Danka, who paced nervously back and forth in front of us, her mouth moving silently while she practiced her greeting.
I didn’t know the other girls much.They weren’t from Dvernik.All of us were silent and stiff in our nice clothes and braided hair, watching the road.There was no sign of the Dragon yet.Wild fantasies ran in my head.I imagined flinging myself in front of Kasia when the Dragon came, and telling him to take me instead, or declaring to him that Kasia didn’t want to go with him.But I knew I wasn’t brave enough to do any of that.
And then he came, horribly.He didn’t come from the road at all, he just stepped straight out of the air.I was looking that way when he came out: fingers in midair and then an arm and a leg and then half a man, so impossible and wrong that I couldn’t look away even though my stomach was folding itself over in half.The others were luckier.They didn’t even notice him until he took his first step towards us, and everyone around me tried not to flinch in surprise.
The Dragon wasn’t like any man of our village.He should have been old and stooped and grey; he had been living in his tower a hundred years, but he was tall, straight, beardless, his skin taut.At a quick glance in the street I might have thought him a young man, only a little older than me: someone I might have smiled at across the feast-tables, and who might have asked me to dance.But there was something unnatural in his face: a crow’s-nest of lines by his eyes, as though years couldn’t touch him, but use did.It wasn’t an ugly face, even so, but coldness made it unpleasant: everything about him said,I am not one of you, and don’t want to be, either.
His clothes were rich, of course; the brocade of his zupan would have fed a family for a year, even without the golden buttons.But he was as lean as a man whose harvest had gone wrong three years out of four.He held himself stiff, with all the nervous energy ofa hunting dog, as though he wanted nothing more than to be off quickly.It was the worst day of all our lives, but he had no patience for us; when our headwoman Danka bowed and said to him, “My lord, let me present to you these—” he interrupted her and said, “Yes, let’s get on with it.”
My father’s hand was warm on my shoulder as he stood beside me and bowed; my mother’s hand was clenched tight on mine on the other side.They reluctantly stepped back with the other parents.Instinctively the eleven of us all edged closer to one another.Kasia and I stood near the end of the line.I didn’t dare take her hand, but I stood close enough that our arms brushed, and I watched the Dragon and hated him and hated him as he stepped down the line and tipped up each girl’s face, under the chin, to look at her.
He didn’t speak to all of us.He didn’t say a word to the girl next to me, the one from Olshanka, even though her father, Borys, was the best horse-breeder in the valley, and she wore a wool dress dyed brilliant red, her black hair in two long beautiful plaits woven with red ribbons.When it was my turn, he glanced at me with a frown—cold black eyes, pale mouth pursed—and said, “Your name, girl?”
“Agnieszka,” I said, or tried to say; I discovered my mouth was dry.I swallowed.“Agnieszka,” I said again, whispering.“My lord.”My face was hot.I dropped my eyes.I saw that for all the care I’d taken, my skirt had three big mud stains creeping up from the hem.
The Dragon moved on.And then he paused, looking at Kasia, the way he hadn’t paused for any of the rest of us.He stayed there with his hand under her chin, a thin pleased smile curving his thin hard mouth, and Kasia looked at him bravely and didn’t flinch.She didn’t try to make her voice rough or squeaky or anything but steady and musical as she answered, “Kasia, my lord.”
He smiled at her again, not pleasantly, but with a satisfied-cat look.He went on to the end of the line only perfunctorily, barely glancing at the two girls after her.I heard Wensa drag in a breath that was nearly a sob, behind us, as he turned and came back to look at Kasia, still with that pleased look on his face.And then hefrowned again, and turned his head, and looked straight at me.
I’d forgotten myself and taken Kasia’s hand after all.I was squeezing the life out of it, and she was squeezing back.She quickly let go and I tucked my hands together in front of me instead, hot color in my cheeks, afraid.He only narrowed his eyes at me some more.And then he raised his hand, and in his fingers a tiny ball of blue-white flame took shape.
“She didn’t mean anything,” Kasia said, brave brave brave, the way I hadn’t been for her.Her voice was trembling but audible, while I shook rabbit-terrified, staring at the ball.“Please, my lord—”
“Silence, girl,” the Dragon said, and held his hand out towards me.“Take it.”
“I—what?”I said, more bewildered than if he’d flung it into my face.
“Don’t stand there like a cretin,” he said.“Take it.”
My hand was shaking so when I raised it that I couldn’t help but brush against his fingers as I tried to pluck the ball from them, though I hated to; his skin felt feverish-hot.But the ball of flame was cool as a marble, and it didn’t hurt me at all to touch.Startled with relief, I held it between my fingers, staring at it.He looked at me with an expression of annoyance.
“Well,” he said ungraciously, “you then, I suppose.”He took the ball out of my hand and closed his fist on it a moment; it vanished as quickly as it had come.He turned and said to Danka, “Send the tribute up when you can.”
I still hadn’t understood.I don’t think anyone had, even my parents; it was all too quick, and I was shocked by having drawn his attention at all.I didn’t even have a chance to turn around and say a last good-bye before he turned back and took my arm by the wrist.Only Kasia moved; I looked back at her and saw her about to reach for me in protest, and then the Dragon jerked me impatiently and ungently stumbling after him, and dragged me with him back into thin air.
I had my other hand pressed to my mouth, retching, when westepped back out of the air.When he let go my arm, I sank to my knees and vomited without even seeing where I was.He made a muttered exclamation of disgust—I had spattered the long elegant toe of his leather boot—and said, “Useless.Stop heaving, girl, and clean that filth up.”He walked away from me, his heels echoing upon the flagstones, and was gone.
I stayed there shakily until I was sure nothing more would come up, and then I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and lifted my head to stare.I was on a floor of stone, and not just any stone, but a pure white marble laced through with veins of brilliant green.It was a small round room with narrow slitted windows, too high to look out of, but above my head the ceiling bent inward sharply.I was at the very top of the tower.
There was no furniture in the room at all, and nothing I could use to wipe up the floor.Finally I used the skirt of my dress: that was already dirty anyway.Then after a little time sitting there being terrified and more terrified, while nothing at all happened, I got up and crept timidly down the hallway.I’d have taken any way out of the room but the one he had used, if there had been any other way.There wasn’t.
He’d already gone on, though.The short hallway was empty.It had the same cold hard marble underfoot, illuminated with an unfriendly pale white light from hanging lamps.They weren’t real lamps, just big chunks of clear polished stone that glowed from inside.There was only one door, and then an archway at the end that led to stairs.
I pushed the door open and looked in, nervously, because that was better than going past it without knowing what was inside.But it only opened into a small bare room, with a narrow bed and a small table and a wash-basin.There was a large window across from me, and I could see the sky.I ran to it and leaned out over the sill.
The Dragon’s tower stood in the foothills on the western border of his lands.All our long valley lay spread out to the east, withits villages and farms, and standing in the window I could trace the whole line of the Spindle, running silver-blue down the middle with the road dusty brown next to it.The road and the river ran together all the way to the other end of the Dragon’s lands, dipping into stands of forest and coming out again at villages, until the road tapered out to nothing just before the huge black tangle of the Wood.The river went on alone into its depths and vanished, never to come out again.
There was Olshanka, the town nearest the tower, where the Grand Market was held on Sundays: my father had taken me there, twice.Beyond that Poniets, and Radomsko curled around the shores of its small lake, and there was my own Dvernik with its wide green square.I could even see the big white tables laid out for the feasting the Dragon hadn’t wanted to stay for, and I slid to my knees and rested my forehead on the sill and cried like a child.
But my mother didn’t come to rest her hand on my head; my father didn’t pull me up and laugh me out of my tears.I just sobbed myself out until I had too much of a headache to go on crying, and after that I was cold and stiff from being on that painfully hard floor, and I had a running nose and nothing to wipe it with.
