He put his hands around mine, and I squeaked out the words of the oath of fealty, stumbling over them; he answered me with long and easy practice, took his hands back, and nodded for me to go.
A page began making little beckoning motions at me from the side of the throne, but I realized belatedly that this was the first and just as likely only chance I had to ask the king anything.
“Your Majesty, if you please,” I said, trying hard to ignore the looks of puffing indignation from everyone near enough the throne to hear me, “I don’t know if you read Sarkan’s letter—”
One of the tall strong footmen by the throne almost at once got my arm, bowing to the king with a fixed smile on his face, and tried to tug me away. I planted my feet, muttering a sliver of Jaga’s earth spell, and ignored him. “We have a real chance to destroy the Wood, now,” I said, “but he hasn’t any soldiers, and—yes, I’ll go in a moment!” I hissed at the footman, who’d now got me by both my arms and was trying to rock me off the dais. “I only need to explain—”
“All right, Bartosh, stop breaking your back on her,” the king said. “We can give our newest witch a moment.” He was really looking at me now, for the first time, and sounding faintly amused. “We have indeed read the letter. It could have used a few more lines. Not least about you.” I bit my lip. “What would you ask of your king?”
My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask. Let Kasia go! I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.
I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”
“We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.
I tottered away suffused with relief—the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him—and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.
He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.
“When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.
He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.
“But isn’t there—it must start soon?” I tried.
He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”
Chapter 19
Three days later, the trial still hadn’t begun, and I hated everyone around me.
Sarkan had told me there was power to be had here, and I suppose for someone who understood the court there would have been. I could see there was a kind of magic in having my name written down in the king’s book. After speaking to the secretary, I had gone back to my tiny room, baffled and uncertain what to do next, and before I had been sitting on my bed for half an hour the maids had knocked five times carrying cards of invitation to