wondered wildly, to give away some of that life: maybe I could give some to my family, to Kasia—if they would take it; who would want anything like that, at the price of falling out of the world, taking yourself out of life.
“My dear child, you are growing very distressed,” Ballo said feebly, making a gesture at calming me. I stared at him and the faint fine lines at the corner of his eyes, all his days spent with dusty books, loving nothing else; him and Alosha, who spoke as easily of putting people in the fire as she did books. I remembered Sarkan in his tower, plucking girls out of the valley, and his coldness when I’d first come, as though he couldn’t remember how to think and feel like an ordinary person.
“A nation is people as well,” Alosha said. “More people than just the few you love best yourself. And the Wood threatens them all.”
“I’ve lived seven miles from the Wood all my days,” I said. “I don’t need to be told what it is. If I didn’t care about stopping the Wood, I’d have taken Kasia and run away by now, instead of leaving her to all of you to push her like a pawn from here to there, as if she doesn’t even matter!”
Ballo made startled murmuring noises, but Alosha only frowned at me. “And yet you can speak of letting the corrupted live, as if you didn’t know better,” she said. “The Wood is not just some enclave of evil, lying in wait to catch people who are foolish enough to wander inside, and if you can get someone out of it there’s an end to the harm. We aren’t the first nation to face its power.”
“You mean the people of the tower,” I said slowly, thinking of the buried king.
“You’ve seen the tomb, have you?” Alosha said. “And the magic that made it, magic that’s lost to us now? That should have been enough warning to make you more cautious. Those people weren’t weak or unprepared. But the Wood brought their tower down, wolves and walkers hunted them, and trees choked all the valley. One or two of their weaker sorcerers fled to the north and took a few books and stories with them. The rest of them?” She waved a hand towards the book. “Twisted into nightmares, beasts to hunt their own kind. That’s all the Wood left of that people. There’s something worse than monsters in that place: something that makes monsters.”
“I know it better than you!” I said. My hands still itched, and the book sat there on the table, malevolent. I couldn’t stop thinking about that heavy, monstrous presence looking out of Kasia’s face, of Jerzy’s, the feeling of being hunted beneath the boughs.
“Do you?” Alosha said. “Tell me, if I said to uproot every person living in your valley, to move them elsewhere in the kingdom and abandon it all to the Wood, save them and let it all go; would you come away?” I stared at her. “Why haven’t you already left, for that matter?” she added. “Why do you keep living there, in that shadow? There are places in Polnya that aren’t haunted by evil.”
I fumbled for an answer I didn’t know how to give. The idea was simply foreign. Kasia had imagined leaving, because she’d had to; I never had. I loved Dvernik, the deep soft woods around my house, the long bright running of the Spindle beneath the sun. I loved the cup of the mountains around us, a sheltering wall. There was a peace deep in our village, in our valley; it wasn’t just the Dragon’s light hand on the reins. It was home.
“A home where some misshapen thing might come out of the forest at night and steal away your children,” Alosha said. “Even before the Wood roused fully again, that valley was infested with corruption; there are old tales from the Yellow Marshes that speak of seeing walkers on the other side of the mountain passes, from before we ever pushed our way over the mountains and started to cut down the trees. But men still sought out that valley, and stayed there, and tried to live in it.”
“Do you think we’re all corrupted?” I said in horror: maybe she would rather burn all the valley, and all of us inside it, if given her way.
“Not corrupted,” she said. “Lured. Tell me, where does the river go?”