by turning yourself into an enormous bat? Like Baba Jaga—”
I was glad to talk about Jaga, about anything besides the Wood, and even more glad to find someone other than Solya willing to show me how to go on. By the time we finished dinner, I had agreed to go with Lady Alicja to a breakfast and a card party and a dinner the next day. I spent the next two days almost entirely in her company.
I didn’t think us friends, exactly. I wasn’t in a mood to make friends. Every time I trudged back and forth from the castle to yet another party, I had to pass by the barracks of the royal guard, and in the middle of their courtyard stood the stark iron block, scorched and black, where they beheaded the corrupted before they burned their corpses. Alosha’s forge stood nearby, and more often than not her fire was roaring, her silhouette raising showers of orange sparks with a hammer made of shadow.
“The only mercy you can give the corrupted is a sharpened blade,” she had said, when I’d tried to persuade her to at least visit Kasia once herself. I couldn’t help but think maybe she was working on the headman’s axe right then, while I sat in stuffy rooms and ate fish eggs on toast with the crusts cut off, and tea sweetened with sugar, and tried to talk to people I didn’t know.
But I did think Lady Alicja was kind, taking a clumsy peasant girl under her wing. She was only a year or two older than me, but already married to a rich old baron who spent most of his days at card-parties. She seemed to know everyone. I was grateful, and determined to be grateful, and I felt half-guilty for not being better company or understanding the manners of the court. I didn’t know what to say when Lady Alicja insisted on paying me loud and intensely fervent compliments on the excessive lace on my gown, or on the way I mangled the steps of a courtly dance when she persuaded some poor goggle-eyed young nobleman to take me on, much to the dismay of his toes and the amused stares of the room.
I didn’t realize she was mocking me all the time until the third day. We’d planned to meet at an afternoon music party held at the house of a baroness. There was music at all the parties, so I didn’t understand what made this one especially a music party; Alicja had just laughed when I’d asked her. But I dutifully tramped over after lunch, trying my best to hold up my long silver-frost train and balance the matching headdress, a long curved heavy swoop over my head that wanted to fall either backwards or forwards, either way as long as it didn’t stay in place. Coming into the room, I caught the train in the doorway and stumbled, and the headdress went sliding back over my ears.
Alicja caught sight of me and crossed the room in a dramatic rush to clasp my hands. “Dearest,” she said urgently, breathlessly, “what a brilliantly original angle—I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
I blurted out, “Are you—are you trying to be rude?” As soon as the idea occurred to me, all the odd things she’d said and done came together and made a strange malicious sense. But I couldn’t believe it at first; I didn’t understand why she would have. No one had made her talk to me, or be in my company. I couldn’t understand why she would have gone to the trouble just to be unpleasant.
Then I couldn’t doubt it anymore: she put on a wide-eyed, surprised expression that plainly meant yes, she was trying to be rude. “Why, Nieshka,” she began, as though she thought I was an idiot, too.
I pulled my hands free from hers with a jerk, staring at her. “Agnieszka will do,” I said, startled and sharp, “and since you like my style so much, katboru.” Her own curved headdress tipped backwards down her head—and took with it the elaborate lovely curls to either side of her face, which were evidently false. She gave a small scream and clutched at them, and ran out of the room.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Worse was the titter that went all around the room, from men I’d seen her dance with and women she’d called her intimate friends. I jerked off my own head-dress and hurried over to