cared that it was the fault of the bestiary. Prince Vasily had kidnapped the queen and given her to the Wood. Everyone was as angry as if he’d done it yesterday, and instead of marching on the Wood, they wanted to march on Rosya.
I’d tried to speak to Marek already: a waste of time. Not two hours after the queen had been pardoned, he was in the barracks courtyard exercising horses, already choosing which ones he’d take to the front. “You’ll come with us,” he said as though it was unquestioned, without even taking his eyes off the flashing legs as he sent a tall bay gelding around him in a circle, one hand on the lead and the other on the long-tailed whip. “Solya says you can double the strength of his workings, perhaps more.”
“No!” I said. “I’m not going to help you kill Rosyans! It’s the Wood we need to fight, not them.”
“And so we will,” Marek said easily. “After we take the eastern bank of the Rydva, we’ll come south over their side of the Jaral Mountains and surround the Wood from both sides. All right, we’ll take this one,” he said to his groom, tossing over the lead; he caught up the dangling tail of the whip with an expert flick of his wrist and turned to me. “Listen, Nieshka—” I glared at him speechlessly; how dare he put a pet name on me? But only he put an arm around my shoulders, too, and sailed straight onward. “If we take half the army south to your valley, they’ll come pouring over the Rydva themselves while our backs are turned, and sack Kralia itself. That’s probably why they leagued with the Wood in the first place. They wanted us to do just that. The Wood doesn’t have an army. It’ll stay where it is until we’ve dealt with Rosya.”
“No one would ever be in league with the Wood!” I said.
He shrugged. “If they aren’t, they’ve still deliberately used it against us,” he said. “What comfort do you think it is to my mother if that dog Vasily died, too, after he handed her over to that endless hell? And even if he was corrupted beforehand, you must see it doesn’t matter. Rosya won’t scruple to take advantage of the opening if we turn south. We can’t turn on the Wood until we’ve protected our flank. Stop being shortsighted.”
I jerked away from his hand and his condescension both. “I’m not the one being shortsighted,” I told Kasia, fuming, as we hurried across the courtyard to seek Alosha out at her forge.
But Alosha only said, “I warned you,” grim but without heat. “The power in the Wood isn’t some blind hating beast; it can think and plan, and work towards its own ends. It can see into the hearts of men, all the better to poison them.” She took the sword from her anvil and plunged it into the cold water; steam billowed in great gusts like the breath of some monstrous beast. “If there wasn’t any corruption, you might have guessed there was something else at work.”
Sitting next to me, Kasia raised her head. “Is—is there something else at work in me?” she asked, unhappily.
Alosha paused and glanced at her. I found myself holding my breath, silent; then Alosha shrugged. “Isn’t this bad enough? You freed, then the queen freed, and now all of Polnya and Rosya ready to go up in flames? We can’t spare the men they’re sending to the front,” she added. “If we could, they would already have been there. The king is stripping the kingdom bare, and Rosya will have to do the same to meet us. It’ll be a bad harvest this year for all of us, win or lose.”
“And that’s what the Wood wanted, all along,” Kasia said.
“One of the things it wanted,” Alosha said. “I’ve no doubt it would gladly have eaten Agnieszka and Sarkan if it had the chance, and then it could have devoured the rest of the valley overnight. But a tree isn’t a woman; it doesn’t bear a single seed. It scatters as many of them as it can, and hopes for some of them to grow. That book was one; the queen was one. She should have been sent away at once, and you with her.” She turned back to the forge. “Too late to mend that now.”
“Maybe we should just go straight home,” I said to Kasia, and tried to ignore the longing