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