go missing five years ago, the same day a hydra crawled up out of the palace sewers and attacked the castle: we thought it had eaten him. We had better take poor Georg’s head off the wall in the parade-room.”
“But how did it get here in the first place?” I asked, looking down at the book, the dappled leaves of pale and dark green, the two-headed serpent winking at us with its red eyes.
“Oh—” Ballo hesitated, and then he went down the hall to a shelf full of ledgers, each of them nearly half his own height: he muttered some small dusty spell over them as he drew his fingers along, and one page gleamed out far down the shelf. He lifted out the heavy book with a grunt and brought it to the table, supporting it from beneath with absent practice as he opened to the one illuminated page, with one row shining out upon it. “Bestiary, well-ornamented, of unknown origin,” he read. “A gift from the court of…of Rosya.” His voice trailed off. He was looking at the date, his ink-stained index finger resting upon it. “Twenty years ago, and one of half a dozen volumes gifted at the same time,” he said, finally. “Prince Vasily and his embassy must have brought it with them.”
The malevolent carved book sat in the middle of the table. We stood in silence around it. Twenty years ago, Prince Vasily of Rosya had ridden into Kralia, and three weeks later he had ridden out again in the dead of night with Queen Hanna beside him, fleeing towards Rosya. They had gone too close to the edge of the Wood, trying to evade pursuit. That was the story. But perhaps they’d been caught long before then. Maybe some poor scribe or book-binder had wandered too close to the Wood, and under the boughs pounded fallen leaves into paper, brewed ink out of oak galls and water, and wrote corruption into every word, to make a trap that could creep even into the castle of the king.
“Can we burn it here?” I said.
“What?” Ballo said, jerking up in protest as though he were on a string. I think he recoiled instinctively from burning any book at all, which I thought was all very well, but not when it came to this one.
“Ballo,” Alosha said, and from her expression she felt just as I did.
“I will attempt a purification, to make it safe to examine,” Ballo said. “If that should fail, then we will of course have to consider cruder methods for disposal.”
“This isn’t something to keep, purified or not,” she said grimly. “We should take it to the forge. I’ll build a white fire, and we’ll close it in until it’s ash.”
“We cannot burn it at once, no matter what,” Ballo said. “It is evidence in the queen’s case, and the king must know of it.”
Evidence, I realized too late, of corruption: if the queen had touched this book, if it had led her to the Wood, she had been corrupted even before she was drawn under the boughs. If this were presented at the trial—I looked at Alosha and Ballo in dismay. They hadn’t come here to help me. They’d come to stop me finding anything useful.
Alosha sighed back at me. “I’m not your enemy, though you want to think me so.”
“You want them put to death!” I said. “The queen, and Kasia—”
“What I want,” Alosha said, “is to keep the kingdom safe. You and Marek: all you worry about is your own sorrows. You’re too young to be as strong as you are, that’s the trouble of it; you haven’t let go of people. When you’ve seen a century of your own go by, you’ll have more sense.”
I’d been about to protest at her accusation, but that silenced me: I stared at her in horror. Maybe it was silly of me, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment that I was going to live like Sarkan, like her, a hundred years, two hundred—when did witches even die? I wouldn’t grow old; I’d just keep going, always the same, while everyone around me withered and fell away, like the outer stalks of some climbing vine going up and up away from them.
“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?” Maybe there was some way, I