The tower was still standing, barely.The floor of the great hall was a maze of broken flagstones, dead roots and withered vines sprawled over them, charred up like the queen’s body below.Several of the columns had collapsed entirely.There was a hole in the ceiling into the library above, and a chair had fallen partway into it.Sarkan looked up at it as we left, climbing over blocks and rubble.
We had to walk the full length of the walls we’d built to try and keep Marek out.The voices of the old stone whispered sadly to me as we came through the archways.We saw no one living until we came out into the abandoned camp.At least there were a few soldiers there, rummaging through the supplies; a couple of them burst out of the pavilion running away from us, carrying silver cups.I would have gladly paid a dozen silver cups just to hear another mortal voice, to be able to believe that not everyone was dead.But they all fled, or hid from us behind tents or supply-heaps, peering out.We stood in the silent field and after a moment I said, “The cannon-crew,” remembering.
They were still there, a stone company, pushed out of the way, blank grey eyes fixed on the tower.Most of them hadn’t been badly broken.We stood around them, silently.None of us had enough strength to undo the spell.Finally I reached out to Sarkan.He shifted Marisha to his other arm and let me take his hand.
We managed to pool enough magic to undo the spell.The soldiers writhed and jerked as they came loose from the stone, shaking with the sudden return of time and breath.Some of them had lost fingers, or had new pitted scars where their bodies had been chipped, but these were trained men, who managed cannon that roared as terribly as any spell.They edged back from us wide-eyed, but then they looked at Solya: they recognized him, at least.“Orders, sir?”one of them asked him, uncertainly.
He stared back blankly a moment and then looked at us, just as uncertainly.
We walked down to Olshanka together, the road still dusty from so much use yesterday.Yesterday.I tried not to think about it: yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone.They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down.I saw their faces in the dust while we walked.Someone in Olshanka saw us coming, and Borys came out with a wagon to carry us the rest of the way.In the back we swayed with the wheels like sacks of grain.The creaking was every song I’d ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat.All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.
Borys’s wife Natalya put me to sleep in Marta’s old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt.She’d gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her, a warm welcoming place ready to receive me, and Natalya’s hand on my forehead was my mother, telling me to sleep, sleep; the monsters wouldn’t come.I shut my eyes and pretended to believe her.
I didn’t wake again until evening, a warm summer evening with the gentle twilight falling blue.There was a familiar comfortable rising bustle in the house, someone getting supper, others coming in from the day’s work.I sat at the window without moving for a long time more.They were much richer than my family: they had an upstairs part in their house just for the bedrooms.Marisha was running in the big garden with a dog and four other children, most of them older than her; she was in a fresh cotton dress marked up with grass stains, and her hair slipping out of tidy braids.But Stashek was sitting near the door watching them, though one of the others was a boy his age.Even in simple clothes he didn’t look anythinglike an ordinary child, with his shoulders very straight and his face solemn as church.
“We have to take them back to Kralia,” Solya said.Given time to rest, he’d gathered back up some of his outrageous self-assurance, sitting himself down in our company as though he’d been with us all along.
It was dark; the children had been put to bed.We were sitting in the garden with glasses of cool plum brandy, and I felt as though I were pretending to be grown-up.It was too much like my parents taking visitors to sit in the chairs and the shady swinging bench just inside the forest, talking of crops and families, and meanwhile all of us children ran cheerfully amok, finding berries or chestnuts, or just having games of tag.
I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn’t have been able to just sneak up on me.It didn’t seem real even to be sitting here at all, much less talking of thrones and murder, quite seriously, as if those were themselves real things and not just bits out of songs.
I felt even more peculiar, listening to them all argue.“Prince Stashek must be crowned at once, and a regency established,” Solya was going on.“The Archduke of Gidna and the Archduke of Varsha, at least—”
“Those children aren’t going anywhere but to their grandparents,” Kasia said, “if I have to put them on my back and carry them all the way myself.”
“My dear girl, you don’t understand—” Solya said.
“I’m not your dear girl,” Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him.“If Stashek’s the king now, all right; the king’s asked me to take him and Marisha to their mother’s family.That’s where they’re going.”
“The capital is too close in any case.”Sarkan flicked his fingers,impatient, dismissive.“Idounderstand the Archduke of Varsha won’t want the king in the hands of Gidna,” he added peevishly, when Solya drew breath to argue, “and I don’t care.Kralia wasn’t safe before; it won’t be safer now.”
“But nowhere will be safe,” I said, breaking in on them, bewildered.“Not for long.”They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.
After a moment, Sarkan said, “Gidna is on the ocean.The northern castles will be well placed to mount a substantial defense—”
“The Wood will come anyway!”I said.I knew it.I’d looked into the Wood-queen’s face, felt that implacable wrath beating against my skin.All these years, Sarkan had held the Wood back like a tide behind a dam of stone; he’d diverted its power away into a thousand streams and wells of power, scattered throughout the valley.But it was a dam that couldn’t hold forever.Today, next week, next year, the Wood would break through.It would reclaim all those wells, those streams, go roaring up to the mountainside.And fueled with all that new-won strength, it would come over the mountain passes.
There wasn’t going to be any strength to meet them.The army of Polnya was shattered, the army of Rosya wounded—and the Wood could afford to lose a battle or two or a dozen; it would establish its footholds and scatter its seeds, and even if it was pushed back over one mountain pass or another, that wouldn’t matter in the end.It would keep coming.Shewould keep coming.We might hold the Wood off long enough for Stashek and Marisha to grow up, grow old, even die, but what about Borys and Natalya’s grandchildren, running with them in the garden?Or their own children, growing up in the lengthening shadow?
“We can’t keep holding the Wood back with Polnya burning behind us,” Sarkan said.“The Rosyans will come over the Rydva forvengeance, as soon as they know Marek is dead—”
“We can’t hold the Wood back at all!”I said.“That’s whattheytried—that’s what you’ve been doing.We have to stop it for good.We have to stopher.”
He glared at me.“Yes, what a marvelous idea.If Alosha’s blade couldn’t kill her, nothing can.What do you propose to do?”
I stared back and saw the knotting fear in my stomach reflected in his eyes.His face stilled.He stopped glaring.He sank back in his chair, still staring at me.Solya eyed us both in confusion and Kasia watched me with worry in her face.But there wasn’t anything else to do.
“I don’t know,” I said to Sarkan, my voice shaking.“But I’ll do something.Will you come into the Wood with me?”
—
Kasia stood with me irresolute at the crossroads outside Olshanka, unhappy.The sky was still the first pale pink-grey of morning.“Nieshka, if you think I can help you,” she said softly, but I shook my head.I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me.I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a distant shadow but happy anyway.Then the sun came down the road and touched us.We let go and stepped back: she was golden and stern, almost too beautiful to be living, and there was magic in my hands.I took her face in my hands a moment; we leaned our foreheads together, and then she turned away.
Stashek and Marisha were sitting in the wagon, watching anxiously for Kasia, with Solya next to them; one of the soldiers was driving.Some more men had come wandering back into town, those who’d run away from the fighting and the tower before the end, a mix of men from the Yellow Marshes and Marek’s men.They were all going along as escort.They weren’t enemies anymore; they hadn’t really been enemies to begin with.Even Marek’smen had thought they were saving the royal children.They’d all just been put on opposite sides of a chessboard by the Wood-queen, so she could sit to the side and watch them taken off by one another.
The wagon was loaded with supplies from the whole town, goods that would have gone to Sarkan’s tribute later that year.He’d given Borys gold for the horses and the wagon.“They’ll pay you to drive them as well,” he’d said, handing him the purse.“And take your family along; you’d have enough to make a new start of it.”
Borys looked at Natalya.She shook her head a little.He turned back and said, “We’ll stay.”
