The king looked down at them, his brow drawn. He seemed more worried than jubilant. We were all silent, waiting. At last he drew breath to speak, and only then the queen stirred. She slowly lifted up her head to look him in the face. He stared at her. She blinked her eyes once, and then she sighed a little and sank in on herself as limply as a sack: Prince Marek had to drag her forward by the arm he held and catch her, or she would have fallen down the stairs.
The king let out his breath, and his shoulders straightened a little as if let off a string, relaxing. His voice carried strongly across the courtyard. “Take her to the Grey Rooms, and let the Willow be sent for.” Servants were already swooping in. They carried her away from us and into the castle as if on a wave.
And just like that—the play was ended. The noise inside the courtyard climbed back up to a roar to match the crowd outside, everyone talking to everyone else, across all three stories of the courtyard. The bright heady feeling ran out of me like I’d been unstoppered and turned over. Too late I remembered I wasn’t here for a triumph. Kasia sat in the wagon in her white prisoner’s shift, alone, condemned; Sarkan was a hundred leagues away, trying to hold the Wood off from Zatochek without me; and I had no idea how I was going to fix either of those things.
I shook my feet out of my stirrups, heaved my leg over, and slithered to the ground inelegantly. My legs wobbled when I put my weight on them. A groom came for my horse. I let him take her away, a little reluctantly: she wasn’t a good horse, but she was a familiar rock in this ocean of strangeness. Prince Marek and the Falcon were going into the castle along with the king. I had already lost sight of Tomasz and Oleg in the crowd, surrounded by others in uniform.
Kasia was climbing out of the back of the wagon, a small company of guards waiting for her. I pushed through the tide of servants and courtiers and got between them and her.
“What are you going to do with her?” I demanded, shrill with worry. I must have looked absurd to them in my dusty ragged peasant clothes, like a sparrow piping at a pack of hunting tomcats; they couldn’t see the magic in my belly, ready to come roaring out of me.
But however insignificant I looked, I was still part of the triumph, of the queen’s rescue, and anyway they weren’t inclined to cruelty. The chief guard, a man with the most enormous mustaches I had ever seen, the tips waxed into stiff curls, said to me kindly enough, “Are you her maid? Don’t fret; we’re to take her to be with the queen herself, in the Grey Tower, with the Willow to look after them. Everything’s to be done right and by the law.”
That wasn’t much comfort: by the law, Kasia and the queen should both have been put to death at once. But Kasia whispered, “It’s all right, Nieshka.” It wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything else to do. The guards put her among them, four men before and four men after, and marched her away into the palace.
I stared after them hollowly for a moment, and then I realized I’d never find her again in this enormous place if I didn’t see where they took her. I jumped and darted after them. “Here, now,” a door guard said to me as I tried to follow them inside, but I told him, “Param param,” humming it like the song about the tiny fly that no one could catch, and he blinked and I was past him.
I trailed after the guards like a dangling thread, keeping my hum going to tell everyone I passed that I was too small to notice, nothing important. It wasn’t hard. I felt as small and insignificant as could be imagined. The corridor went on and on. There were doors everywhere, heavy wood and hung with iron. Servants and courtiers bustled in and out of enormous rooms hung with tapestries, full of carven furniture and stone fireplaces bigger than my front door. Glittering lamps full of magic hung from the ceilings, and in the hallways, racks of tall white candles stood, burning without melting.
Finally the corridor ended in a small iron door, guarded again. The guards nodded to Kasia’s escort, and let them and rag-tag me through into a narrow circling stairway, their eyes sliding over me. We climbed and climbed, my tired legs struggling to push me up each step, until at last we came crowding onto a small round landing. It was dim and smoky: there wasn’t any window, and only an ordinary oil lamp stood set in a rough niche in the wall. It shone on the dull grey of another heavy iron door, a big round knocker upon it shaped like the head of a hungry imp, the knocker’s ring held in its wide open mouth. A strange chill came off the iron, a cold wind lapping at my skin, even though I was pressed up against the wall in the corner behind the tall guards.
The chief guard knocked, and the door swung inward. “We’ve brought the other girl, milady,” he said.
“All right,” a woman’s voice said, crisply. The guards parted to let Kasia through. A tall slim woman stood in the doorway, yellow coiled braids and a golden headdress atop her head, wearing a blue silk gown delicately jeweled at the neck and waist, with a train sweeping the floor behind her, although her sleeves were practical, laced snug from the elbow to the wrist. She stood to one side and waved Kasia in past her with two impatient flicks of her long hand. I had a brief glimpse of a large room beyond, carpeted and comfortable, and the queen sitting upright in a straight-backed chair. She was looking blankly out a window down at the glitter of the Vandalus.
“And what’s this?” the lady said, turning to look at me. All the guards turned and stared, seeing me. I froze.
“I—” the chief guard stammered, going a little red in the face, with a darted look at the two men who’d been last in their party, a look that promised them trouble for not noticing me. “She’s—”
“I’m Agnieszka,” I said. “I came with Kasia and the queen.”
The lady gave me one incredulous stare that saw every snagged thread and every mud-spatter on my skirts, even the ones in back, and was astonished to find that I had the gall to speak. She looked at the guard. “Is this one suspected of corruption as well?” she demanded.
“No, milady, not as I know,” he said.
“Then why are you bringing her to me? I’ve enough to do here.” She turned back into the room, her train swashing along after her, and the door slammed shut. Another cold wave washed over me and back to the imp with its greedy mouth, licking away the last of my concealing spell. It devoured magic, I realized: that must have been why they brought corrupted prisoners here.
“How did you get in here?” the chief guard demanded suspiciously, all of them looming around me.
I would have liked to hide myself away again, but I couldn’t with that hungry mouth waiting. “I’m a witch,” I said. They looked even more suspicious. I brought out the letter I still clutched in my skirt pocket: the paper was more than a little grubbier for wear, but the charred letters of the seal still smoked faintly. “The Dragon gave me a letter for the king.”
Chapter 18
They took me downstairs and put me into a small unused stateroom, for lack of anyplace better. The guards kept watch outside the door while their captain went off, my letter in hand, to find out what ought to be done with me. My legs were ready to give out on me, but there was nothing to sit on but a few alarming chairs pushed up against the wall, delicate fragile-looking confections of white paint and gilt and red velvet cushions. I would have thought any one of them a throne, if there hadn’t been four in a row.
I leaned against the wall for a while instead, and then I tried sitting on the hearth, but the fire hadn’t been lit in here for a long time. The ashes were dead and the stone was cold. I went back to the wall. I went back to the hearth. Finally I decided that no one could put a chair in a room and not mean anyone to sit on it, and I gingerly perched on the edge of one of the chairs, holding my skirts close against me.
The moment I sat, the door opened and a servant came in, a woman in a crisp black dress, something like Danka’s age with a small pursed mouth of disapproval. I sprang up guiltily. Four long gleaming red threads followed me unraveling from the cushion, caught on a burr on my skirt, and a long sharp white-painted splinter snagged in my sleeve and broke off. The woman’s mouth pursed harder
, but she only said, “This way, please,” stiffly.
She led me out past the guards, who didn’t look sorry to see the back of me, and took me back up yet another different staircase—I’d seen half a dozen in the castle already—and showed me to a tiny dark cell of a room on the second floor. It had a narrow window that looked out on the stone wall of the cathedral: a rainspout shaped like a wide-mouthed and hungry gargoyle sneered in at me. She left me there before I could think to ask her what to do next.
I sat down on the cot. I must have slept, because by the next thought I had, I was flat on the cot instead, but it wasn’t a deliberate choice; I didn’t even remember lying down. I struggled up still sore and weary, but too conscious that I had no time to waste, and no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to make anyone pay attention to me, unless I went to the middle of the courtyard and began to lob fire spells at the walls. I doubted that would make the king any more inclined to let me speak at Kasia’s trial.
I was sorry now that I’d given the Dragon’s letter away, my only tool and talisman. How did I know it had even been delivered? I decided to go find it: I remembered the guard captain’s face, or at least his mustache. There couldn’t be many mustaches like that even in all Kralia. I stood up and pulled the door open boldly, walked out into the hallway, and nearly ran straight into the Falcon. He was just raising his hand to the latch on my door. He flowed deftly back out of my way, saving us both, and gave me a small, gentle smile that I didn’t trust at all.
“I hope you’re feeling refreshed,” he said, and offered me his arm.
I didn’t take it. “What do you want?”
He turned the gesture neatly into a long inviting sweep of his hand towards the hallway. “To escort you to the Charovnikov. The king has given orders you’re to be examined for the list.”
I was so relieved that I didn’t quite believe him. I eyed him sidelong, half-expecting a trick. But he kept standing there with his arm and smile, waiting for me. “At once,” he added, “although perhaps you’d care to change first?”
I would have liked to tell him what to do with his mocking little hint, but I looked down at myself: all mud and dust and sweat-stained creases, and underneath the mess a homespun skirt that stopped just below my knee and a faded brown cotton shift, worn old clothes I’d begged off a girl in Zatochek. I didn’t look like one of the servants; the servants were far better dressed than me. Meanwhile Solya had exchanged his black riding clothes for a long robe of black silk with a long sleeveless coat embroidered in green and silver over it, and his white hair spilled over it in a graceful fall. If you had seen him from a mile away, you would have known him for a wizard. And if they didn’t think me a wizard, they wouldn’t let me testify.
“Try and present a respectable appearance,” Sarkan had said.
Vanastalem gave me clothes to match the mood of my sullen muttering: a stiff and uncomfortable gown of rich red silk, endless flounces edged in flame-orange ribbons. I could have used an arm to lean on, at that, trying to negotiate stairs in the enormous skirt without being able to see my feet, but I grimly ignored Solya’s subtly renewed offer at the head of the staircase, and picked my way slowly down, feeling for the edges of the steps with my tight-slippered toes.
He clasped his hands behind his back instead and paced me. He remarked idly, “The examinations are often challenging, of course. I suppose Sarkan prepared you for them?” He threw me a mildly inquiring glance; I didn’t answer him, but I couldn’t quite keep myself from dragging my bottom lip through my teeth. “Well,” he said, “if you do find them difficult, we might provide a—joint demonstration to the examiners; I’m sure they would find that reassuring.”
I only glared at him and didn’t answer. Anything we did, I was sure he’d take the credit for. He didn’t press the matter, smiling on as though he hadn’t even noticed my cold looks: a circling bird high above waiting for any opening. He took me through an archway flanked by two tall young guards who looked at me curiously, and into the Charovnikov, the Hall of Wizards.
I slowed involuntarily coming into the cavernous room. The ceiling was like an opening into Heaven, painted clouds spilling over a blue sky and angels and saints stretched across it. Enormous windows poured in the afternoon sunlight. I stared up, dazzled, and almost ran myself into a table, reaching blindly to catch myself with my hands on the corner and feeling my way around it. All the walls were covered in books, and a narrow balcony ran the full length of the room, making an even taller second level of bookcases. Ladders hung down from the ceiling on little wheels all along it. Great worktables stood along the length of the room, heavy solid oak with marble topping them.
“This is only an exercise in delaying what we all know has to be done,” a woman was saying, somewhere out of sight: her voice was deep for a woman, a lovely warm sound, but there was an angry edge to her words. “No, don’t start bleating at me again about the relics, Ballo. Any spell can be defeated—yes, even the one on holy blessed Jadwiga’s shawl, and stop looking scandalized at me for saying so. Solya’s gone drunk on politics to lend himself to this enterprise in the first place.”
“Come, Alosha. Success excuses all risks, surely,” the Falcon said mildly as we rounded a corner and found three wizards gathered at a large round table in an alcove, with a wide window letting in the afternoon sun. I squinted against it, after the dim light of the palace hallways.
The woman he’d called Alosha was taller even than me, with ebony-dark skin and shoulders as broad as my father’s, her black hair braided tightly against her skull. She wore men’s clothes: full red cotton trousers tucked into high leather boots, and a leather coat over it. The coat and the boots were beautiful, embossed with gold and silver in intricate patterns, but they still looked lived-in; I envied them in my ridiculous dress.
“Success,” she said. “Is that what you call this, bringing a hollow shell back to the court just in time to burn her at the stake?”
My hands clenched. But the Falcon only smiled and said, “Perhaps we’d best defer these arguments for the moment. After all, we aren’t here to judge the queen, are we? My dear, permit me to present to you Alosha, our Sword.”
She looked at me unsmiling and suspicious. The other two were men: one of them the same Father Ballo who’d examined the queen. He didn’t have a single line creasing his cheeks, and his hair was still solidly brown, but he somehow contrived to look old anyway, his spectacles sliding over a round nose in a round face as he peered up and down at me doubtfully. “Is this the apprentice?”
The other man might have been his opposite, long and lean, in a rich wine-red waistcoat embroidered elaborately in gold and a bored expression; his narrow pointed black beard curled up carefully at the tip. He was stretched in a chair with his boots up on the table. There was a heap of short stubby golden bars on the table beside him and a small black velvet bag heaped with tiny glittering red jewels. He was working two bars in his hands, magic whispering out of him; his lips were moving faintly. He was running the ends of the gold together, the bars thinning under his fingers into a narrow strip. “And this is Ragostok, the Splendid,” Solya said.
Ragostok said nothing, and didn’t even lift his head save for one brief glance that took me in from head to feet and dismissed me at once and forever as beneath his notice. But I preferred his disinterest to the hard suspicious line of Alosha’s mouth. “Where exactly did Sarkan find you?” she demanded.
They’d heard some version of the rescue by then, it seemed, but Prince Marek and the Falcon hadn’t bothered with the parts of the story that didn’t suit them, and there was more they hadn’t known. I stumbled through an awkward explanation of how I’d met Sarkan, uncomfortably aware of the Falcon’s eyes on me, bright and attentive. I wanted to say as little as I could about Dvernik, about my family; he already had Kasia as a tool to use against me.
I borrowed Kasia’s secret fear and tried to hint that my family had chosen to offer me to the Dragon; I made sure to say my father
was a woodcutter, which I already knew they would disdain, and I didn’t tell them any names. I said the village headwoman and one of the herdsmen instead of Danka and Jerzy, and made it sound as though Kasia was my only friend, and not just my dearest, before I haltingly told them of her rescue.
“And I suppose you asked nicely, and the Wood gave her back to you?” said Ragostok without looking up from his work: he was pressing the tiny red jewels into the gold with his thumbs, one after another.
“The Dragon—Sarkan—” I found myself grateful for the small lift I felt, from the thunder of his name on my tongue. “—he thought the Wood gave her to me for the chance of setting a trap.”
“So he hadn’t lost his mind entirely by then,” Alosha said. “Why didn’t he put her to death at once? He knows the law as well as anyone.”
“He let—he let me try,” I said. “He let me try to purge her. And then it worked—”
“Or so you imagine,” she said. She shook her head. “And so does pity lead straight to disaster. Well, I’m surprised to hear it of Sarkan; but better men than he have lost their heads over a girl not half their age.”
I didn’t know what to say: I wanted to protest, to say That’s not it, there’s nothing like that, but the words stuck in my throat. “And do you suppose that I lost my head over her as well?” the Falcon said, in amused tones. “And Prince Marek in the bargain?”
She looked at him, an edge of contempt. “When Marek was a boy of eight, he wept for a month demanding his father take the army and every wizard in all Polnya into the Wood to bring his mother back,” she said. “But he’s not a child anymore. He should have known better, and so should you. How many men did this crusade of yours cost us? You took thirty veterans, cavalrymen, every one of them a prime soldier, every one of them carrying blades from my forge—”
“And we brought back your queen,” the Falcon said, a sudden hard bite in his voice, “if that means anything to you?”