Trying to cure my loneliness, I went down to the kitchens and made myself a small feast-ham and kasha and stewed apples-but when I put together the plate, it still felt so plain and empty that for the first time, I used lirintalem for myself, aching for something that felt like a celebration. The air shimmered, and suddenly I had a lovely platter of roast pork, hot and pink and running with juice; my very favorite wheat porridge cooked thick with a ladleful of melted b.u.t.ter and browned bread crumbs in the middle; a heap of brand-new fresh peas that no one in my village would be eating until spring; and a taigla cake that I had only ever tasted once, at the headwoman's table, the year that it was my family's turn to be her guests at harvest-time: the candied fruits like colored jewels, the knots of sweet dough a perfect golden brown, the hazelnuts small and pale, and all of it glazed and shining with honey-syrup.

But it wasn't Midwinter dinner. There was no eager ache of hunger in my belly from the long day of cooking and cleaning without a pause; there was no joyful noise of too many people crammed in around the table, laughing and reaching for the platters. Looking down at my tiny feast only made me feel more desperately lonely. I thought of my mother, cooking all alone without even my clumsy pair of hands to help her, and my eyes were stinging when I put them into my pillow, with my untouched tray on my table.

I was still heavy-eyed and grieving, more awkward even than usual, two days later. That was when the rider came, an urgent scramble of hooves and a pounding on the gates. The Dragon put down the book he was attempting to teach me from, and I trailed him down the stairs; the doors swung open of their own accord before him, and the messenger nearly fell inside: he wore the dark yellow surcoat of the Yellow Marshes, and his face was streaked with sweat. He knelt, swallowing and pale, but he did not wait for the Dragon to give him permission to speak. "My lord baron begs you to come at once," he said. "There is a chimaera come upon us, out of the mountain pa.s.s-"

"What?" the Dragon said, sharply. "It's not the season. What sort of beast is it exactly? Has some idiot called a wyvern a chimaera, and been repeated by others-"

The messenger was shaking his head back and forth like a weight on a string. "Serpent's tail, bat's wings, goat's head-I saw it with my own eyes, lord Dragon, it's why my lord sent me-"

The Dragon hissed under his breath with annoyance: how dare a chimaera inconvenience him, coming out of season. For my part, I didn't understand in the least why a chimaera would have a season; surely it was a magic beast, and could do as it pleased?

"Try not to be a complete fool," the Dragon said as I trotted at his heels back to the laboratory; he opened a case and ordered me to bring him this vial and that. I did so unhappily, and very carefully. "A chimaera is engendered through corrupt magic, that doesn't mean it's not still a living beast, with its own nature. They're sp.a.w.ned of snakes, mainly, because they hatch from eggs. Their blood is cold. They spend the winters keeping still and lying in the sun as much as they can. They fly in summer."

"So why has this one come now?" I said, trying to follow.

"Most likely it hasn't, and that gasping yokel below frightened himself fleeing a shadow," the Dragon said, but the gasping yokel hadn't looked at all a fool to me, or a coward, and I thought even the Dragon didn't quite believe his own words. "No, not the red one, idiot girl, that's fire-heart; a chimaera would drink it up by the gallon if it had the chance, and become next kin to a real dragon, then. The red-violet, two farther on." They both looked red-violet to me, but I hastily swapped potions and gave him the one he wanted. "All right," he said, closing the case. "Don't read any of the books, don't touch anything in this room, don't touch anything in any room if you can help it, and try if you can not to reduce the place to rubble before I return."

I realized only then that he was leaving me here; I stared at him in dismay. "What am I going to do here alone?" I said. "Can't I-come with you? How long will you be?"

"A week, a month, or never, if I grow distracted, do something particularly clumsy, and get myself torn in half by a chimaera," he snapped, "which means the answer is no, you may not. And you are to do absolutely nothing, so far as possible."

And then he was sweeping out. I ran to the library and stared down from the window: the doors swung shut behind him as he came down the steps. The messenger leapt to his feet. "I'm taking your horse," I heard the Dragon say. "Walk down to Olshanka after me; I'll leave it there for you and take a fresh one." And then he swung up and waved an imperious hand, murmuring words: a small fire blazed up before him in the s...o...b..und road and rolled away like a ball, melting a clear path down the middle for him. He was trotting off at once, despite the horse's flattened-ear unease. I suppose the spell which let him leap to Dvernik and back didn't work over so long a distance, or perhaps he could only use it within his own lands.

I stood in the library and kept watching until he was gone. It wasn't as though he ever made his company pleasant for me, but the tower felt echoingly empty without him. I tried to enjoy his absence as a holiday, but I wasn't tired enough. I did a little desultory sewing on my quilt, and then I just sat by my window and looked out at the valley: the fields, the villages, and the woods I loved. I watched cattle and flocks going to water, wood-sleds and the occasional lone rider traveling the road, the scattered drifts of snow, and at last I fell asleep leaning against the window-frame. It was late when I woke with a start, in the dark, and saw the line of beacon-fires burning in the distance almost the full length of the valley.

I stared at them, confused with sleep. For a moment, I thought the candle-trees had been lit again. I had seen the beacon-fire go up in Dvernik only three times in my life: for the Green Summer; and then once for the snow mares, who came out of the Wood when I was nine; and once for the shambler vines that swallowed up four houses on the edge of the village overnight, the summer when I was fourteen. The Dragon had come all those times; he had flung back the Wood's a.s.sault, and then gone away again.

In rising panic, I counted the beacons back, to see where the message had been lit, and felt my blood run cold: there were nine in a straight line, following the Spindle. The ninth beacon-fire was Dvernik. The call had gone up from my own village. I stood looking out at the fires, and then I realized: the Dragon was gone. He would be well into the mountain pa.s.s by now, crossing to the Yellow Marshes. He wouldn't see the beacons, and even when someone brought him word, first he would have to deal with the chimaera-a week, he had said, and there was no one else- That was when I understood how much a fool I'd been. I'd never thought of magic, of my magic, as good for anything, until I stood there and knew that there was no one else but me; that whatever was in me, however poor and clumsy and untaught, was more magic than anyone else in my village had. That they needed help, and I was the only one left who could give it.

After one frozen moment I turned and flew downstairs to the laboratory. I went in on a gulp of fear and took the grey potion, the one that had turned me to stone. I took the fire-heart potion, too, and the elixir the Dragon had used on the prince to save his life, and one green one that he'd mentioned once was for growing plants. I couldn't guess what use any of them would be, but at least I knew what they did. I didn't even know what any of the others were called, and I didn't dare touch them.

I bundled them back up to my room, and began desperately to rip apart the rest of my heap of dresses, knotting strips of silk together to make myself a rope. When it was long enough-I hoped-I flung it out the window and peered down after it. The night was dark. There was no light below to tell me if my rope reached the ground. But I didn't have a choice except to try and find out.

I had sewed a few silk bags out of dresses, among my small mending projects, and I put the gla.s.s bottles into one of them, well padded with sc.r.a.ps, and slung it over my shoulder. I tried not to think about what I was doing. A knot was swelling at the top of my throat. I gripped the silk rope with both hands and climbed over the sill.

I'd climbed old trees: I loved the big oaks and would scramble up into them with just a sc.r.a.p of worn rope thrown over a branch. This was nothing like that. The stones of the tower were unnaturally smooth, even the cracks between them very fine and filled to the brim with mortar that hadn't been cracked or wormed away by time. I kicked off my shoes and let them fall, but even my bare toes couldn't get any purchase. All my weight was on the silken rope, and my hands were damp with sweat, my shoulders aching. I slithered and scrambled and from time to time just hung on, the sack a swaying, ungainly weight on my back and the bottles sloshing. I kept going because I couldn't do anything else. Going back up would have been harder. I began to have fantasies of letting go, which was how I knew I was close to the end of my strength, and I was halfway to convincing myself it wouldn't be so very bad a fall when unexpectedly my foot jarred painfully, coming down on solid ground straight through half a foot of soft-piled snow, against the tower's side. I dug my shoes out of the snow and ran down the cleared path the Dragon had made towards Olshanka.

They didn't know in the least what to do with me when I first got there. I came staggering into the tavern sweat-stained and frozen at the same time, my hair matted down on my head and frost built up on the loose strands near my face where my breath had gone streaming away. There was no one there I knew. I recognized the mayor, but I'd never said a word to him. They would probably have thought me just a madwoman, but Borys was there: Marta's father, one of the other girls born in my year. He'd been at the choosing. He said, "That's the Dragon's girl. That's Andrey's daughter."

None of the chosen girls had ever left the tower before her ten years were up. As desperate as a beacon-fire was, I think at first they would have been happier to be left to deal with whatever the Wood had sent than to have me come bursting in on them, a sure problem and unconvincing as any sort of help.

I told them the Dragon was gone to the Yellow Marshes; I said I needed someone to take me to Dvernik. They unhappily believed the first; very quickly I realized they hadn't the least intention of doing the second, no matter what I told them about magic lessons. "You'll come and spend the night in my house, under my wife's care," the mayor said, turning away. "Da.n.u.shek, ride for Dvernik: they need to know they must hold out, whatever it is, and we must find out what help they need. We'll send a man into the mountains-"

"I'm not spending the night in your house!" I said. "And if you won't take me, I'll walk; I'll still be there quicker than any other help!"

"Enough!" the mayor snapped at me. "Listen, you stupid child-"

They were afraid, of course. They thought I had run away, that I was just trying to get home. They didn't want to hear me beg them to help me. I think more so because they felt ashamed to give a girl up to the Dragon in the first place; they knew it wasn't right, and they did it anyway, because they didn't have a choice, and it wasn't terrible enough to drive them to rebellion.

I took a deep breath and used my weapon vanastalem again. The Dragon would have been almost pleased with me, I think, for every syllable was p.r.o.nounced with the sharpness of a fresh-honed blade. They backed from me as the magic went whirling around me, so bright the very fireplace grew dim by comparison. When it cleared I stood inches higher and ludicrously grand, in heeled court boots and dressed like a queen in mourning: a letnik made of black velvet bordered with black lace and embroidered in small black pearls, stark against my skin that hadn't seen the sun in half a year, the full sleeves caught around my arms with bands of gold. And over it, even more extravagant, a shining coat in gold and red silk, trimmed in black fur around my neck and clasped at the waist by a golden belt. My hair had been caught up in a net of gold cord and small hard jewels. "I'm not stupid, nor a liar," I said, "and if I can't do any good, I can at least do something. Get me a cart!"

Chapter 5.

It helped, of course, that none of them knew the spell was a mere cantrip, and that none of them had seen much magic done. I didn't enlighten them. They hitched four horses to the lightest sleigh they had and sped me down the solid-packed river road in my idiotic-but warm!-dress. It was a fast drive, and an uncomfortable one, flying breathlessly over the icy road, but not fast or uncomfortable enough to keep me from thinking about how little hope I had of doing anything but dying, and not even usefully.

Borys had offered to drive me: a kind of guilt I understood without a word. I had been taken-not his girl, not his daughter. She was safe at home, perhaps courting or already betrothed. And I had been taken not four months ago, and here I was already unrecognizable.

"Do you know what's happened in Dvernik?" I asked him, huddled in the back under a heap of blankets.

"No, no word yet," he answered over his shoulder. "The beacon-fires were only just lit. The rider will be on the road, if-" He stopped. If there were a rider left to send, he had meant to say. "We'll meet him halfway, I'd guess," he finished instead.

With my father's heavy horses and his big wagon, in summer-time, it was a long day's drive to Dvernik from Olshanka, with a break in the middle. But the midwinter road was packed with snow a foot deep, frozen almost solid with a thin dusting atop, and the weather was clear, the horses shod in hard ice shoes. We flew on through the night, and a few hours before dawn we changed horses at Vyosna village without stopping properly: I didn't even climb out of the sleigh. They didn't ask any questions. Borys said only, "We're on the way to Dvernik," and they looked at me with interest and curiosity but not the least doubt, and certainly no recognition. As they harnessed the fresh horses, the stableman's wife came out to me with a fresh meat pie and a cup of hot wine, clutching a thick fur cloak around herself. "Will you warm your hands, my lady?" she said.

"Thank you," I said, awkwardly, feeling like an imposter and halfway to a thief. I didn't let it keep me from devouring the pie in ten bites, though, and after that I swallowed the wine mostly because I couldn't think what else to do with it that wouldn't be insulting.

It left me light-headed and a little muzzy, the world gone soft and warm and comfortable. I felt a great deal less worried, which meant I had drunk too much, but I was grateful anyway. Borys drove faster, with the fresh horses, and an hour's drive onward with the sun lightening the sky ahead of us, we saw in the distance a man slogging down the road, on foot. And then we drew closer, and it wasn't a man at all. It was Kasia, in boy's clothes and heavy boots. She came straight for us: we were the only ones going towards Dvernik.

She grabbed onto the side of the sleigh, panting, dropped a curtsy, and without a pause said, "It's in the cattle-it's taken all the cattle, and if they get their teeth in a man, it takes him, too. We've got them mostly penned, we're holding them, but it's taking every last man-" and then I had pulled myself forward out of the heap of blankets and reached for her.

"Kasia," I said, choking, and she stopped. She looked at me, and we stared at each other in perfect silence for a long moment, and then I said, "Quick, hurry and get in, I'll tell you as we go."

She climbed in and sat next to me under the pile of sleigh blankets: we made a ridiculously unlikely pair, her in dirty rough homespun, a pig-boy's clothes, with her long hair stuffed up under a cap and a thick sheepskin jacket, and me in my finery: together we looked like the fairy G.o.dmother descending on Masha sweeping cinders from the hearth. But our hands still gripped each other tight, truer than anything else between us, and as the sleigh dashed onwards I blurted out a disjointed set of bits and sc.r.a.ps of the whole story-those early days grubbing miserably, the long fainting weeks when the Dragon had first begun to make me do magic, the lessons since then.

Kasia never let go my hand, and when I at last, haltingly, told her I could do magic, she said, startling the breath out of me, "I should have known," and I gawked at her. "Strange things always happened to you. You'd go into the forest and come back with fruit out of season, or flowers no one else had ever seen. When we were little, you always used to tell me stories the pines told you, until one day your brother sneered at you for playing make-believe, and you stopped. Even the way your clothes were always such a mess-you couldn't get so dirty if you tried, and I knew you weren't trying, you were never trying. I saw a branch reach out and snag your skirt once, really just reach out-"

I flinched away, made a noise of protest, and she stopped. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want her to tell me that the magic had been there all along, and therefore inescapable. "It's not much good for anything besides keeping me a mess, if that's what it does," I said, trying to speak lightly. "I only came because he's gone. Now tell me, what's happened?"

Kasia told me: the cattle had sickened almost overnight. The first few had borne bite marks as if some strange enormous wolves had set teeth to them, although no wolves had been seen anywhere near, all winter. "They were Jerzy's. He didn't put them down right away," Kasia said soberly. I nodded.

Jerzy should have known better-he should have pulled them out of the herd and cut their throats at once, the moment he saw them wolf-bitten and left among the other animals. No ordinary wolf would have done anything like that. But-he was poor. He had no fields, no trade, nothing but his cows. His wife had come and quietly begged flour of us more than once, and whenever I'd come home from the woods with gleanings enough to spare, my mother would send me to their house with a basket. He had struggled for years to save enough to get a third cow, which would mean an escape from poverty, and only two years ago he had managed it. His wife Krystyna had worn a new red kerchief trimmed in lace at the harvest, and he a red waistcoat, both of them with pride. They'd lost four children before their namings; she was expecting another one. So he hadn't put the cattle down quickly enough.

"They bit him and they got into the other cattle," Kasia said. "Now they've all gone vicious, and they're too dangerous to even go near, Nieshka. What are you going to do?"

The Dragon might have known a way to purge the sickness from the cattle. I didn't. "We'll have to burn them," I said. "I hope he'll make it right, after, but I don't know anything else to do." To tell the truth, despite the horror and the waste of it, I was glad, desperately glad. At least this wasn't fire-breathing monsters or some deadly plague, and I did know something I could do. I pulled out the fire-heart potion, and showed Kasia.

No one argued with the idea when we got to Dvernik. Our headwoman Danka was as surprised as Kasia or the men in Olshanka when I came scrambling down from the sleigh, but she had bigger things to worry about.

Every healthy man, and the stronger women, was working in shifts to keep the poor tormented beasts penned up, using pitch-forks and torches, slipping on ice and their hands going numb with cold. The rest of our village were trying to keep them from freezing or starving. It was a race whose strength would give out the first, and our village was losing. They had already tried a burning themselves, but it was too cold. The wood hadn't caught quickly enough before the cattle tore apart the piles. As soon as I told Danka what the potion was, she was nodding and sending everyone not already working around the pen to get ice-picks and shovels, to make a fire-break.

Then she turned to me. "We'll need your father and brothers to haul in more firewood," she said bluntly. "They're at your house: they worked all night. I could send you for them, but it may hurt you and them worse, when you have to go back to the tower after. Do you want to go?"

I swallowed. She wasn't wrong, but I couldn't say anything but yes. Kasia still gripped my hand, and as we ran across the village to my house together, I said, "Will you go in first, and warn them?"

So my mother was already crying when I came through the door. She didn't see the gown at all, only me, and we were crumpled into a heap of velvet on the floor, hugging each other, when my father and brothers came staggering out of the back rooms, confused with sleep, and found us. We wept all together even while we told each other there was no time for weeping, and through my tears I told my father what we were going to do. He and my brothers went dashing out to hitch up our horses, which had thankfully been safe in their own heavy stable next to the house. I s.n.a.t.c.hed those last few moments and sat at the kitchen table with my mother. She smoothed her hands over my face over and over, her own tears still running. "He hasn't touched me, Mamusha," I told her, and didn't say anything about Prince Marek. "He's all right." She didn't answer, just stroked my hair again.

My father put his head in and said, "We're ready," and I had to go. My mother said, "Wait a moment," and vanished into the bedroom. She came out with a bundle made up, my own clothes and things. "I thought someone from Olshanka might take it to the tower for you," she said, "in the spring, when they bring him gifts from the festival." She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go. It did hurt more. It did.

My father went to every house in the village, and my brothers leapt down and robbed every woodshed of every last stick they'd once hauled in, heaving great armloads onto the sled with its tall poles. When it was full, they drove out to the pens, and I saw the poor cattle at last.

They didn't even look like cows anymore, their bodies swollen and misshapen, horns grown huge and heavy and twisted. Here and there one of them sprouted arrows or even a couple of spears, thrust deep into their bodies and jutting out like horrible spikes. Things that came out of the Wood often couldn't be killed, except with fire or beheading; wounds only maddened them worse. Many of them had forelegs and chests blackened where they had stamped out the earlier fires. They were lunging against the heavy wooden fence of the pen, swinging their heavy unnatural horns and lowing in their deep voices, a dreadfully ordinary sound. There was a knot of men and women gathered to meet them, a bristling forest of pitchforks and spears and sharpened stakes, prodding the cattle back.

Some women were already hacking at the ground, mostly bare of snow here near the pens, raking away the dead matted gra.s.s. Danka was overseeing the work; she waved my father over, our horses whuffling uneasily as they drew nearer and smelled the corruption on the wind. "All right," she said. "We'll be ready before noon. We'll heave wood and hay over, in among them, and then light torches with the potion and throw them in. Save as much of it as you can, in case we have to try a second time," she added to me. I nodded.

More hands were coming as people were woken from their rest early to help in the final great effort. Everyone knew the cattle would try and stampede out when they were burning: everyone who could hold even a stick took a place in the line to hold them back. Others began to heave over bales of hay into the pen, the bindings broken so they smashed apart as they landed, and my brothers began throwing over the bundles of firewood. I stood anxiously beside Danka, holding the flask and feeling the magic in it swirling and hot beneath my fingers, pulsing as though it knew soon it would be set loose to do its work. Finally Danka was satisfied with the preparations, and held out to me the first bundle to be fired: a long dry log split halfway down the center, twigs and hay stuffed inside the crack and tied around it.

The fire-heart tried to roar up and out of the bottle as soon as I broke the seal: I found I had to hold the stopper in place. The potion fell back sullenly, and I whipped out the stopper and poured a drop-the least, the slightest drop-on the very end of the bundled log. The log went up in flames so quickly that Danka had scarcely a moment to throw it over the fence, hastily, and afterwards turned and thrust her hand into a s...o...b..nk, wincing: her fingers were already blistered and red. I was busy jamming the stopper back in, and by the time I looked up, half the pen was engulfed, the cattle bellowing furiously.

We were all taken aback by the ferocity of the magic, though we'd all heard tales of fire-heart-it figured in endless ballads of warfare and siege, and also in the stories of its making, how it required a thousandweight of gold to make a single flask, and had to be brewed in cauldrons made of pure stone, by a wizard of surpa.s.sing skill. I carefully hadn't mentioned to anyone that I didn't have permission to take the potions from the tower: if the Dragon was going to be angry with anyone, I meant for him to be angry with me alone.

But hearing stories about it wasn't the same as seeing it in front of our faces. We were unprepared, and the sickened cattle were already in a frenzy. Ten of them clumped together and bore down on the back wall, smashing against it heedless of the waiting stakes and prods. And all of us were terrified of being gored or bitten, even of touching them; the Wood's evil could spread so easily. The handful of defenders fell back, and Danka was shouting furiously as the fence began to give way.

The Dragon had taught me, with endless labor and grim determination, several small spells of mending and fixing and repair, none of which I could cast very well. Desperation made me try: I climbed up onto my father's empty sled and pointed at the fence and said, "Paran kivitash farantem, paran paran kivitam!" I had missed a syllable somewhere, I knew it, but I must have been close enough: the largest bar, splintering, jumped back whole into place and suddenly put out twigs with new leaves, and the old iron cross-braces straightened themselves out.

Old Hanka, who alone had held her ground-"I'm too sour to die," she said afterwards, by way of dismissing credit for her bravery-had been holding only the stump of a rake, the head of it already broken off and jammed between the horns of one of the oxen. Her stubby stick turned into a long sharpened rod of bright metal, steel, and she jabbed it at once straight into the open bellowing maw of the cow pushing on the fence. The spear pierced through and through and came out the back of the cow's skull, and the huge beast fell heavily against the fence and sagged dead to the ground, blocking the others from coming at it.

That proved to be the worst of the fight. We held them everywhere else, for a few minutes longer, and the task grew easier: they were all on fire by then, a terrible stink going up that twisted the stomach. They lost their cunning in panic and became merely animals again, throwing themselves futilely against the fence walls and one another until the fire brought them down at last. I used the mending charm twice more, and by the end was sagging against Kasia, who had climbed into the wagon to hold me up. The older children were running everywhere breathless with buckets of half-melted snow to put out any sparks that fell on the ground. Every last man and woman labored to exhaustion with their prods, faces red and sweaty with heat, backs freezing in the cold air, but together we kept the beasts penned, and neither the fire nor their corruption spread.

Finally the last cow fell. Hissing smoke and fat crackled on inside the fire. We all sat exhausted in a loose ring around the pen, keeping out of the smoke, watching as the fire-heart settled down and burned low, consuming everything down to ashes. Many coughed. No one spoke or cheered. There was no cause for celebration. We were all glad to see the worst danger averted, but the cost was immense. Jerzy wasn't the only one who would be impoverished by the fire.

"Is Jerzy still alive?" I asked Kasia softly.

She hesitated, and then nodded. "I heard he was taken badly," she said.

The Wood-sickness wasn't always incurable-the Dragon had saved others, I knew. Two years ago an easterly wind had caught our friend Trina on the riverbank while she was doing some washing. She came back stumbling and sick, the clothing in her basket coated with a silver-grey pollen. Her mother stopped her coming in. She threw the clothes on the fire and took Trina down to the river and dunked her over and over, while Danka sent a fast rider to Olshanka immediately.

The Dragon had come that night. I remembered I had gone over to Kasia's house and we'd watched together from her backyard. We didn't see him, only a cold blue light, flaring from the upstairs window of Trina's house. In the morning, Trina's aunt told me at the well that she was going to be all right: two days later Trina was up and about, herself again, only a little tired like someone who'd had a bad cold, and even pleased because her father was digging a well by their house, so she wouldn't ever have to go all the way to the river to do the washing again.

But that had only been a single malicious gust of wind, a drift of pollen. This-this was one of the worst takings I remembered. So many cattle sickened, so horribly, and able to spread their own corruption onward so quickly: that was a sure sign that it was very bad.

Danka had heard us speaking about Jerzy. She came over to the wagon and looked in my face. "Is there anything you can do for him?" she asked bluntly.

I knew what she was really asking. It was a slow and dreadful death, if the corruption wasn't purged. The Wood consuming you like rot eating away at a fallen tree, hollowing you out from the inside, leaving only a monstrous thing full of poison, which cared for nothing but to spread that poison onward. If I said there was nothing I could do, if I admitted I knew nothing, if I confessed that I was spent-with Jerzy so badly taken and the Dragon a week and more from coming-Danka would give the word. She would lead a few men to Jerzy's house. They would take Krystyna away to the other side of the village. The men would go inside, and come out again with a heavy shroud, and bring his body back here. They would throw it on the pyre with the burning cattle.

"There are things I can try," I said.

Danka nodded.

I clambered slowly and heavily down from the wagon. "I'll come with you," Kasia said, and linked her arm in mine to support me: she could tell I needed the help, without a word said. We walked slowly together towards Jerzy's house.

Jerzy's house was inconvenient, near the edge of the village farthest from the pens, with the forest crowding close to his small garden. The road was unnaturally quiet for afternoon, with everyone still back at the pens. Our feet crunched in the last snow that had fallen overnight. I floundered awkwardly through the corner drifts in my dress, but I didn't want to spare any strength to change it for something more sensible. As we came near the house we heard him, a snarling gurgled moan that never stopped, louder and louder the closer we came. It was hard to knock on the door.

It was a small house, but there was a long wait. Krystyna finally opened the door a crack, peering out. She stared at me without recognition, herself almost unrecognizable: there were dark purple circles under her eyes, and her belly was enormously swollen with the baby. She looked at Kasia, who said, "Agnieszka's come from the tower to help," and then she looked back at me.

After a long slow moment Krystyna said, "Come in," hoa.r.s.ely.

She had been sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, right next to the door. She'd been waiting, I realized: waiting for them to come and take Jerzy away. There was only one other room, with just a curtain hanging in the doorway. Krystyna went back to the rocking chair and sat down again. She didn't knit or sew, didn't offer us a cup of tea, only stared at the fire and rocked. The moaning was louder inside the house. I gripped Kasia's hand tight and we went to the curtain together. Kasia reached out and drew it aside.

Jerzy was lying in their bed. It was a heavy clumsy thing made of small logs jointed together, but in this case that was all to the better. He had been tied hand and foot to the posts, and ropes were bound over his middle and under the whole bedframe. The ends of his toes were blackened and the nails were peeling off, and there were open sores across him where the ropes rubbed his body. He was pulling on them and making the noise, his tongue swollen and dark and almost filling his mouth, but he stopped when we came in. He lifted his head up and looked straight at me and smiled with his teeth b.l.o.o.d.y and his eyes stained yellow. He started to laugh. "Look at you," he said, "little witch, look at you, look at you," in an awful singsong voice jangling up and down. He jerked his body against the ropes so the whole bed jumped an inch across the floor towards me, while he grinned and grinned at me. "Come closer, come come come," he sang, "little Agnieszka, come come come," like the children's song, horrible, the bed hopping across the floor one lurch at a time, while I pulled open my bag of potions with shaking hands, trying not to look at him. I had never been so close to anyone taken by the Wood before. Kasia kept her hands on my shoulders, standing straight and calm. I think if she hadn't been there I would have run away.

I didn't remember the spell the Dragon had used on the prince, but he'd taught me a charm for healing small cuts and burns when I cooked or cleaned. I thought it couldn't do any harm. I started singing it softly while I poured out one swallow of the elixir into a big spoon, wrinkling my nose against the rotten-fish smell of it, and then Kasia and I went cautiously towards Jerzy. He snapped at me with his teeth and twisted his hands b.l.o.o.d.y against the ropes to try and scratch at me. I hesitated. I didn't dare let him bite me.

Kasia said, "Hold on." She went out to the other room and came back with the poker and the heavy leather glove for stirring up the coals. Krystyna watched her come and go with a dull, incurious expression.

We laid the poker across Jerzy's throat and pressed him down flat to the bed from either side, and then my fearless Kasia put on the glove and reached out and pinched his nose from above. She held on even as he whipped his head back and forth, until finally he had to open his mouth for breath. I tipped in a swallow of the elixir and jumped back just in time; he heaved his chin up and managed to close his teeth on a bit of trailing lace from my velvet sleeve. I ripped free and backed away, still singing my charm in a wavering voice, and Kasia let go and came back to my side.

There wasn't that same blazing glow I remembered, but at least Jerzy's awful chanting stopped. I saw the gleam of the elixir go traveling down his throat. He fell back and lay jerking from side to side, emitting thick groans of protest. I kept on singing. Tears were leaking from my eyes: I was so tired. It was as bad as those early days in the Dragon's tower-it was worse, but I kept singing the charm because I couldn't bear to stop when I thought it might change the horror before me.

Hearing the chanting, Krystyna slowly stood up in the other room and came to the door, a terrible hope in her face. The glow of the elixir was sitting in Jerzy's belly like a hot coal, shining out, and a few of the b.l.o.o.d.y weals across his chest and wrists were closing. But even as I sang on, dark wisps of green drifted over the light, like clouds crossing the face of a full moon. More of them and more drew around it, thickening until the glow was lost. Slowly he stopped jerking about and his body relaxed into the bed. My chanting trailed off into silence. I edged a little closer, still hoping, and then-and then he lifted his head, eyes yellow-mad, and cackled at me again. "Try again, little Agnieszka," he said, and snapped at the air like a dog. "Come and try again, come here, come here!"

Krystyna moaned aloud and slid down the doorframe into a heap on the floor. Tears were stinging my eyes: I felt sick and hollow with failure. Jerzy was laughing horribly and thrashing the bed forward again, thump-thump of the heavy legs on the wooden floor: nothing had changed. The Wood had won. The corruption was too strong, too far advanced. "Nieshka," Kasia said softly, unhappily, a question. I dragged the back of my hand across my nose, and then I dug into my satchel again, grimly.

"Take Krystyna out of the house," I said, and waited until Kasia had helped Krystyna up and out: she was wailing softly. Kasia threw me one last anxious look, and I tried to give her a little smile, but I couldn't make my mouth work properly.

Before I edged closer to the bed, I took off the heavy velvet overskirt of my dress and wound it about my face, covering my nose and mouth three and four times over, until I had nearly smothered myself. Then I drew a deep breath and held it while I broke the seal upon the grey churning flask, and I poured out a little of the stone-spell onto Jerzy's grinning, snarling face.

I thrust the stopper back in and jumped back as quickly as I could. He had drawn in a breath already: the smoke was sliding into his nostrils and his mouth. A look of surprise crossed his face, and then his skin was greying, hardening. He fell silent as his mouth and eyes fixed open, his body stilled, his hands locked into place. The stink of corruption was fading. Stone rolled over his body like a wave, and then it was done, and I was shaking with relief and horror mingled: a statue lay tied down upon the bed, a statue only a madman would have carved, the face twisted with inhuman rage.

I made sure the bottle was sealed again, and put it back into my sack before I went and opened the door. Kasia and Krystyna were standing in the yard, in the ankle-deep snow. Krystyna's face was wet and hopeless. I let them back in: Krystyna went to the narrow doorway and stared at the statue in the bed, suspended out of life.

"He doesn't feel any pain," I said. "He doesn't feel time moving: I promise you. And this way, if the Dragon does know a way to purge the corruption..." I trailed off; Krystyna had sat down limply in her chair, as if she couldn't support her weight anymore, her head bent. I wasn't sure if I'd done her any real kindness, or only spared myself pain. I had never heard of anyone taken so badly as Jerzy being healed. "I don't know how to save him," I said softly. "But-but perhaps the Dragon will, when he comes back. I thought it was worth the chance."

At least the house was quiet now, without the howling and the stink of corruption. The terrible blank distance had left Krystyna's face, as if she hadn't even been able to bear thinking, and after a moment she put her hand on her belly and looked down at it. She was so close to her time that I could even see the baby move a little, through her clothes. She looked up at me and asked, "The cows?"

"Burned," I said, "all of them," and she lowered her head: no husband, no cattle, a child coming. Danka would try and help her, of course, but it would be a hard year in the village for everyone. Abruptly I said, "Do you have a dress you could give me, in trade for this one?" She stared up at me. "I can't bear to walk another step in it." She very doubtfully dug out an old patched homespun dress for me, and a rough woolen cloak. I gladly left the huge velvet and silk and lace confection heaped up next to her table: it was surely worth at least the price of a cow, and milk would be worth more in the village for a while.

It was growing dark when Kasia and I finally went outside again. The bonfire at the pens was burning on, raising a great orange glow on the other side of the village. All the houses were still deserted. The cold air bit through my thinner clothes, and I was drained to the dregs. I stumbled doggedly along behind Kasia, who broke the snow for me, and turned now and then to hold my hand and give me some support. I had one happier thought to warm me: I couldn't get back into the tower. So I would go home to my mother, and stay until the Dragon came for me again: what better place was there for me to go? "He'll be at least a week," I said to Kasia, "and maybe he'll be fed up with me, and let me stay," which I shouldn't have said even inside my own head. "Don't tell anyone," I said hastily, and she stopped and turned and threw her arms around me and squeezed me tight.

"I was ready to go," she said. "All those years-I was ready to be brave and go, but I couldn't bear it when he took you. It felt like it had all been for nothing, and everything going on the same, just as if you had never been here-" She stopped. We stood there together, holding hands and crying and smiling at each other at the same time, and then her face changed; she jerked on my arm and pulled me backwards. I turned.

They came out of the woods slowly, with measured paces and wide-spread paws that stepped without breaking the crust on the snow. Wolves hunted in our woods, quick and lithe and grey; they would take a wounded sheep but fled from our hunters. These were not our wolves. Their heavy white-furred backs rose to the height of my waist, and pink tongues lolled out of their jaws: huge jaws full of teeth crammed in on one another. They looked at us-they looked at me-with pale yellow eyes. I remembered Kasia telling me that the first cattle to fall sick had been wolf-bitten.

The wolf in the lead was a little smaller than the rest. He sniffed the air towards me, and then jerked his head sideways without ever taking his eyes off me. Two more came padding out of the trees. The pack spread out as if he had signaled them, fanning out to either side of me, to block me in. They were hunting; they were hunting me. "Kasia," I said, "Kasia, go, run now," with my heart stuttering. I dragged my arm out of her grip and fumbled in my bag. "Kasia, go!" I shouted, and I pulled the stopper and flung the stone potion at the lead wolf as he sprang.

The grey mist rose up around him, and a great stone statue of a wolf fell like a boulder by my feet, the snarling jaws snapping at my ankle even as they stilled. One other wolf was caught in the edge of the mist, a wave of stone creeping more slowly over its body as it pawed the snow with its front feet for a moment, trying to escape.

Kasia didn't run. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up and back towards the nearest house-Eva's house. The wolves howled with one terrible voice in protest, nosing cautiously at the two statues, and then one of them yelped and they fell in. They turned and came loping at us together.

Kasia pulled us through the gate of Eva's front garden, and slammed it: the wolves leapt the fence as lightly as springing deer. I didn't dare throw fire-heart with no protection against its spreading, not after what I'd seen that day: it would have burned all our village, and maybe all our valley, and certainly the two of us. I drew out the small green vial instead, hoping for enough distraction to get us inside the house. "It grows gra.s.s," the Dragon had said, dismissively, when I'd asked: the warm healthy color of it had looked friendly to me, like none of the other strange cold enchantments in his laboratory. "And an inordinate number of weeds; it's useful only if you've had to burn a field clean." I'd thought I might use it after the fire-heart to renew our grazing meadow. I wrenched open the stopper with shaking hands, and the potion spilled over my fingers: it smelled wonderful, good and clean and fresh, pleasantly sticky like crushed gra.s.s and leaves in spring full of juice, and I threw it out of my cupped hands over the s...o...b..und garden.

The wolves were running at us. Vines erupted like leaping snakes out of the dead vegetable beds, brilliant green, and flung themselves onto the wolves, wrapping thick coils around their legs, and pulled them to the ground scarcely inches away from us. Everything was suddenly growing like a year crammed into a minute, beans and hops and pumpkins sprawling out across the ground and growing absurdly huge. They blocked the way towards us even while the wolves fought and snapped and tore at them. The vines kept growing even larger, sprouting thorns the size of knives. One wolf was crushed in a swelling green twist as thick around as a tree, and a pumpkin fell smashing onto another, so heavy it struck the wolf down to the ground as it burst.