woodcutter’s cart with a hard expression. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said shortly; I didn’t ask how she’d got the cart. I knew what someone would have thought, seeing her come from the direction of the Wood, looking as she did.
We tried to help her, but she had to do the work mostly alone. She lifted Prince Marek and the two soldiers onto the cart, then heaved the three of us up after them. We sat with our legs dangling out the back. Kasia went to the queen and stepped between her and the trees, breaking the line of her gaze. The queen looked at her with the same blankness. “You aren’t in there anymore,” Kasia said to the queen. “You’re free. We’re free.”
The queen didn’t answer her, either.
—
We were a week in Zatochek, all of us laid out on pallets in the barn on the edge of town. I don’t remember any of it from the moment I fell asleep in the cart until I woke up three days later in the warm quieting smell of hay, with Kasia at my bedside wiping my face with a damp cloth. The dreadful honey-sweet taste of the Dragon’s purging elixir coated my mouth. When I was strong enough to stagger up from my cot, later that morning, he put me through another round of purging, and then made me do another for him.
“The queen?” I asked him, as we sat on a bench outside afterwards, both of us rag-limp.
He jerked his chin forward, and I saw her: she was in the shade on the other side of the clearing, sitting quietly on a stump beneath a willow-tree. She still wore the enchanted yoke, but someone had given her a white dress. There wasn’t a stain or smudge anywhere on it; even the hem was clean, as if she hadn’t moved from the spot since she’d been put into it. Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.
“Well, she’s free,” the Dragon said. “Was it worth the lives of thirty men?”
He spoke savagely, and I hugged my arms around myself. I didn’t want to think about that nightmarish battle, about the slaughter. “Those two soldiers?” I said, a whisper.
“They’ll live,” he said. “And so will our fine princeling: more fortune than he deserves. The Wood’s grip on them was weak.” He pushed himself up. “Come: I’m purging them by stages. It’s time for another round.”
Two days later, Prince Marek was himself again with a speed that made me feel dull and sourly envious: he rose from his bed in the morning and by dinnertime he was wolfing down an entire roast chicken and doing exercises. I could barely taste the few mouthfuls of bread I forced down. Watching him pull himself up and down on a tree-branch made me feel even more like a cloth that had been washed and wrung out too many times. Tomasz and Oleg were awake, too, the two soldiers; I’d learned their names by then, ashamed that I didn’t know any of the ones we’d left behind.
Marek tried to take some food to the queen. She only stared at the plate he held out to her, and wouldn’t chew when he put slivers of meat in her mouth. Then he tried a bowl of porridge: she didn’t refuse, but she didn’t help. He had to work the spoon into her mouth like a mother with an infant just learning how to eat. He kept at it grimly, but after an hour, when he’d barely managed to get half a dozen swallows into her, he got up and hurled the bowl and spoon savagely against a rock, porridge and pottery-shards flying. He stormed away. The queen didn’t even blink at that, either.
I stood in the doorway of the barn, watching and wretched. I couldn’t be sorry to have got her out—at least she wasn’t being tormented by the Wood anymore, devoured to the scraps of herself. But this awful half-life left to her seemed worse than dying. She wasn’t ill or delirious, the way Kasia had been those first few days after the purging. There just didn’t seem to be enough left of her to feel or think.
The next morning, Marek came up behind me and caught me by the arm as I trudged back to the barn with a bucket of well-water; I jumped in alarm and sloshed water over us both, trying to jerk out of his grip. He ignored both the water