“Four thousand, too many horses.We overran them,” Savienha repeated, his voice breaking, sagging where he sat.Not all the tracks on his face were sweat.“Marek, forgive me.Marek—your brother is dead.They killed him in the first ambush, when he went to survey the river.”
I backed away from the table as if I could escape from the words.The little boy upstairs holding out his sword,I won’t be any trouble,his round face upturned.The memory jabbed me, knife-sharp.
Marek had gone silent.His face was bewildered more than anything.Solya went on speaking with the general a little longer.I could scarcely bear to hear them go on talking.Finally Solya reached up and drew a heavy cloth down over the mirror.He turned to look at Marek.
The bewilderment was fading.“By God,” Marek said after a moment, “I would rather not have it, than have it so.”Solya only inclined his head, watching him with a gleam in his eye.“But that’s not the choice, after all.”
“No,” Solya agreed softly.“It’s just as well the Magnati are on their way: we’ll hold the confirmation vote at once.”
There was salt in my mouth: I’d been crying without knowing it.I backed up farther.The doorknob came into my hand, the hollows and bumps of its carved hawk’s head pressing into my palm.I turned it and slipped out the door and shut it behind me quietly.I stood trembling in the hallway.Alosha had been right.One trap after another, long-buried under a carpet of thick leaves, finally springing shut.Tiny seedlings pushing grasping branches out of the dirt.
One trap after another.
All at once, I was running.I ran, my boots slapping on stone, past startled servants and the morning sun bright in all the windows.I was panting by the time I rounded the corner to the quarters of the crown prince.The door was shut, but unguarded.A thin grey haze trickled from underneath it into the hallway.The knob was hot under my hand as I threw the door open.
The bedhangings were aflame, and the carpet scorched; the guards were dead huddled heaps on the floor.There were ten men in a silent knot around Alosha.She was burned horribly: half her armor melted onto her skin, and somehow still fighting.Behind her, the princess lay dead, barring the door to the wardrobe withher own body; Kasia was next to her corpse, her own clothes sliced in a dozen places but her skin unmarked.She was holding a chipped sword and swinging it fiercely at two men trying to get past her.
Alosha was holding off the rest with two long knives that sang wildly in the air and left crackles of fire behind them.She’d cut them all to ribbons, blood slick on the floor, but they weren’t falling down.The men wore Rosyan uniforms, but their eyes were green and lost.The room smelled like a fresh birch-tree branch broken open down the middle.
I wanted to scream, to weep.I wanted to drag my hand across the world and wipe it all away.“Hulvad,”I said, my hands pushing, pushing magic out with it.“Hulvad,”remembering how Alosha had pulled that thin cloud of corruption out of Ballo’s apprentice.And wisps of black smoke came streaming out of the men, out of every slash and knife-wound.The smoke blew away through the open window into the sunlight; and then they were only men again, hurt too much to live; they fell to the ground, one after another.
With her attackers gone, Alosha turned and threw her knives at the men trying to kill Kasia.The knives sank deep into their backs, and more of that evil smoke billowed out from around the blades.They fell, one and two.
The room was strangely quiet when they were all dead.The hinges on the wardrobe door squeaked; I jumped at the noise.The door pushed open a crack and Kasia whirled towards it: Stashek was inside trying to look out, his face scared, his small sword gripped in his hand.“Don’t look,” she said.She pulled a cloak out of the wardrobe, long rich red velvet.She covered the children’s heads with it and gathered them into her arms.“Don’t look,” she said, and held them huddled close against her.
“Mama,” the little girl said.
“Bequiet,” the boy told her, his voice trembling.I covered my mouth with both my hands and crammed in a sob.
Alosha was dragging in heavy, labored breaths; blood bubbled on her lips.She sagged against the bed.I stumbled forward andreached for her, but she waved me back.She made a hooking gesture with a hand and said,“Hatol,”and drew the killing sword out of the air.She held the hilt out to me.“Whatever’s in the Wood,” she said, hoarse and whispering, her voice eaten by the fire.“Find it and kill it.Before it’s too late.”
I took it and held it awkwardly.Alosha was sliding to the floor even as she let it go into my hands.I knelt down beside her.“We have to get the Willow,” I said.
She shook her head, a tiny movement.“Go.Get the children out of here,” she said.“The castle’s not safe.Go.”She let her head sink back against the bed, her eyes closing.Her chest rose and fell only in shallow breaths.
I stood up, shaking.I knew she was right.I felt it.The king, the crown prince; now the princess.The Wood meant to kill all of them, Alosha’s good kings, and slaughter Polnya’s wizards, too.I looked at the dead soldiers in their Rosyan uniforms.Marek would blame Rosya again, as he was meant to do.He’d put on his crown and march east, and after he’d spent our army slaughtering as many Rosyans as he could, the Wood would devour him, too, and leave the country torn apart, the succession broken.
I was in the Wood again, underneath the boughs, that cold hateful presence watching me.The momentary silence in the room was only its pause for breath.Stone walls and sunlight meant nothing.The Wood’s eyes were on us.The Wood was here.
Chapter 25
We wrapped ourselves in torn cloaks we took off the dead guards and ran for it, our hems leaving streaks of blood on the floor behind us.I had shoved Alosha’s sword back into its strange waiting-place,hatolopening a pocket in the world for me to put it in.Kasia carried the little girl and I held Stashek’s hand.We went down a tower staircase, past a landing where two men in a hallway glanced over at us, puzzled and frowning; we hurried on down another turning, fast, and came into the narrow hallway to the kitchens, servants going back and forth.Stashek tried to pull back from me.“I want my father!”he said, his voice trembling.“I want Uncle Marek!Where are we going?”
I didn’t know.I was only in flight; all I knew was we had to get away.The Wood had scattered too many seeds, all around us; they’d lain quiet in fallow ground, but now they were all coming to fruit.Nowhere was safe when corruption lived in the king’s castle.The princess had meant to take them to her parents, to Gidna on the northern sea.The ocean is inimical to corruption,Alosha had said.But trees still grew in Gidna, and the Wood would pursue the childrento the shore.
“To the tower,” I said.I didn’t plan on saying it; the words came out of me like Stashek’s cry.I wanted the stillness of Sarkan’s library, the faint spice-and-sulfur smell of his laboratory; those close, narrow hallways, the clean lines and the emptiness.The tower standing tall and lonely against the mountains.The Wood had no foothold there.“We’re going to the Dragon’s tower.”
Some of the servants were slowing, looking at us.There were footsteps on the stairs coming after us; a man called down with authority, “You, there!”
“Hold on to me,” I told Kasia.I put my hand on the castle wall and whispered us through, straight out into the kitchen gardens, one staring gardener kneeling up from the dirt.I ran between rows of beanstakes with Stashek wide-eyed running with me, catching our fear; Kasia ran behind us.We reached the outer wall of heavy brick; I took us through.The castle bells began to clang alarm behind us as we scrambled in a hail of dirt all the way down the steep slope, to the Vandalus running below.
The river rushed quick and deep here around the castle, leaving the city behind, going east.A hunting bird cried high above, a falcon wheeling in wide circles around the castle: was that Solya looking down at us?I snatched up a handful of reeds from the bank, without any incantations or charms: they had all gone out of my head.Instead I pulled a thread out of my cloak and tied the reeds at two ends.I threw the bundle down on the bank, halfway in the water, and flung magic at it.It grew into a long, light boat, and we scrambled in even as the river tugged it off the bank and dragged us along, rushing, bouncing off rocks on either side.There were shouts behind us, guards appearing on the outer walls of the castle high above.
“Down!”Kasia shouted, and pushed the children down flat and covered them with her body.The guards were firing arrows at us.One tore through her cloak and hit her back.Another landed just beside me and stuck into the side of the boat, quivering.I snatchedthe feathers off the arrow-shaft and threw them up into the air above us.They remembered what they’d once been and turned into a cloud of half-birds that whirled and sang, covering us from view for a few moments.I held on to the sides of the boat and called up Jaga’s quickening charm.
We shot forward.In one lurch, the castle and the city blurred back and away, turned into children’s toys.In a second, they had vanished around a curve of the river.In a third, we struck on the empty riverbank.My boat of reeds fell apart around us and dumped us all into the water.
I nearly sank.The weight of my clothes dragged me backwards, down into the murky water, light blurring above me.The cloud of Kasia’s skirts billowed next to me.I thrashed for the surface, blindly grabbing, and found a small hand grabbing back: Stashek put my hand on a tree-root.I pulled myself up coughing and managed to put my feet down in the water.“Nieshka!”Kasia was calling; she was holding Marisha in her arms.
