The crowd’s ecstasy was almost worse than the soldiers’ pikes had been. Marek had to shove people out of the way to get the wagon up next to the platform, and lift the queen and Kasia back into it bodily. He abandoned his own horse and jumped into the cart and took the reins. He liberally lashed people away from the heads of the horses with the carter’s whip to make room, and Solya and I had to bring our horses right up to the back of the wagon as the mob closed in again behind us.
They stayed with us all the five miles left towards the city, running alongside and after us, and when any fell off the pace, more came to swell the ranks. By the time we reached the bridge over the Vandalus, grown men and women had abandoned their day’s work to follow, and by the time we reached the outer gates of the castle we were barely moving through a wildly cheering crowd that pressed in on us from all sides, a living thing with ten thousand voices, all of them shouting with joy. The news had traveled already: the queen was saved, the queen was uncorrupted. Prince Marek had saved the queen at last.
We were all living in a song: that was how it felt. I felt it myself, even with the queen’s golden head swaying back and forth with the rocking wagon and making no effort to resist the motion, even knowing how small our real victory had been and how many men had died for it. There were children running beside my horse, laughing up at me—and probably not in any complimentary way, because I was one enormous smudge with tangled hair and a torn skirt—but I didn’t mind. I looked down and laughed with them, too, forgetting my stiff arms and my numb legs.
Marek rode at our head with a nearly exalted expression. I suppose it must have felt to him, too, like his life had become a song. Right then, nobody was thinking about the men who hadn’t come back. Oleg had the stump of his arm still bound up tightly, but he waved the other to the crowd with vigor, and kissed his hand to every pretty girl in sight. Even when we had gone through the gates of the castle, the crowd didn’t abate: the king’s soldiers had come out of their barracks and the noblemen out of their houses, throwing flowers in our path, and the soldiers clashing their swords on their shields in a clamoring applause.
Only the queen paid no attention to it all. They had taken the yoke and chains off her, but she sat no differently, still next thing to a carven figure.
We had to fall into single file to come through the final archway into the inner courtyard of the castle itself. The castle was dizzyingly large, arches rising in three tiers from the ground around me, endless faces leaning over the balconies, smiling down at us. I stared dazzled back up at them, at the embroidered banners in their riot of color everywhere, at the columns and the towers all around. The king himself was standing at the head of a staircase at one side of the courtyard. He wore a mantle of blue clasped at the throat with a great jewel, a red stone in gold with pearls.
The dull roar of cheering was still coming from outside the walls. Inside, the whole court hushed around us like the start of a play. Prince Marek had lifted the queen down from the wagon. He led her forward and up the stairs, courtiers ebbing like a tide before him, and brought her to the king. I found I was holding my own breath.
“Your Majesty,” Marek said, “I restore to you your queen.” The sun was shining brilliantly, and he looked like a warrior saint in his armor and his green cloak, his white tabard. The queen beside him was a tall stiff figure in her plain white shift, her short cloud of golden hair, and her transmuted skin lustrous.
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