me and only spread his hands, subtly, as much as to say I’ve done what I can. He leaned in and murmured something to Marek, and when the last physician had stepped down, the prince said, “Let Agnieszka of Dvernik be called to witness how the queen was freed.”
That’s what I had wanted, after all; this was the reason I’d come and fought to have myself put on the list. Everyone was looking at me, even the king with his lowered brows. But I still didn’t know what to say. What would it matter to the king, to any of these courtiers, for me to say the queen wasn’t corrupt? They certainly wouldn’t care what I said of Kasia.
Maybe Solya would try and cast the Summoning with me, if I asked him to. I thought of doing that, imagined that white light showing the whole court the truth. But—the queen had already been tested beneath Jadwiga’s veil. The court had seen her beneath the Falcon’s sight. The king could see she wasn’t corrupted. This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.
But I could give them something else entirely. I could give them what they really wanted. And then I realized I knew what that was, after all. They wanted to know. They wanted to see what it had been like. They wanted to feel themselves a part of it, of the queen’s rescue; they wanted to be living in a song. That wasn’t truth, anything like it, but it might convince them to spare Kasia’s life.
I closed my eyes and remembered the illusion spell: Easier than real armies, Sarkan had said, and as I began to whisper the spell, I knew that he was right. It was no harder than making a single flower to raise up the whole of that monstrous heart-tree, and it climbed up out of the marble floor with terrible ease. Kasia dragged in a breath; a woman screamed; there was a clatter of a chair falling over somewhere in the room. I shut the noise out. I let the incantation keep rolling singsong off my tongue while I poured out magic and the sick, tight dread that had never left the back of my stomach. The heart-tree kept growing, spreading its great silver branches through the hall, the ceiling fading away into silver rustling leaves and the terrible stench of fruit. My stomach turned over once, and then Janos’s head came rolling by across the grass in front of my feet, and struck against the sprawling roots.
All the courtiers cried out and jerked back against the walls, but even as they did, they were fading away, disappearing. The walls all around us were gone, too, falling away into forest and the ringing clash of steel. Marek turned in sudden startled alarm, raising his sword: the silver mantis was there, lunging towards him. When its claws struck against his shoulders, they scraped against the steel of his brilliant armor. Corpses were staring up from the grass around his feet.
A haze of smoke was drifting across my eyes, the sudden crackle of fire. I turned towards the trunk, and Sarkan was there, too, caught in the tree with silver bark trying to devour him, saying, “Now, Agnieszka,” while fire-heart glowed red between his fingers. Instinctively, I half-reached my hand towards him, remembering dread and anguish, and for a moment—for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.
I put my hands on the tree trunk as the bark curled and split apart like the skin of a too-ripe tomato. Kasia was beside me, real; the trunk was splintering open beneath her pounding hands. She was breaking open the wood of the trunk, and the queen came staggering forward out of it, her hands reaching out to meet ours, groping for help, her face suddenly alive and full of horror. We caught her and pulled her out. I heard the Falcon shouting a spell of fire—and then I realized, he was calling real fire, and we weren’t really in the Wood. We were in the king’s castle—