“What?” Solya said, looking up at me. “What is a—”
“It’s from the bestiary!” I said. “We have to find Father Ballo—” I stopped and looked at the beast, the one last filmy staring eye, and suddenly I knew we weren’t going to find him. “We have to find the book,” I whispered.
I was swaying and sick. I scrambled and half-fell over the body getting into the hall. Marek caught my arm and held me up, and with the guards holding spears ready we went down to the Charovnikov. The great wooden doors were hanging askew over the opening, splintered, bloodstained. Marek tipped me against the wall like a wobbly ladder, then jerked a head to one of the guardsmen: together they seized one of the heavy broken doors and lifted it out of the way.
The library was a ruin, lamps broken, tables overturned and smashed, only a few dim lights shining. Bookcases lay toppled over on heaps of the volumes they had held, disemboweled. In the center of the room, the massive stone table had cracked down the middle both ways and fallen in on itself. The bestiary lay open in the very center atop stone dust and rubble, one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages. There were three bodies scattered on the floor around it, broken and discarded, mostly lost in the shadows, but next to me Marek went deeply and utterly still; halted.
And then he sprang forward, shouting, “Send for the Willow! Send for—” sliding to his knees next to the farthest body; he stopped as he turned it over and the light fell on the man’s face: on the king’s face.
The king was dead.
Chapter 23
There were people everywhere shouting: guards, servants, ministers, physicians, all crowding around the body of the king as close as they could get. Marek had set the three guards to watch him and vanished. I was pushed up to the side of the room like flotsam on the tide, my eyes closing as I sagged against a bookcase. Kasia pushed through to my side. “Nieshka, what should I do?” she asked me, helping me to sit on a footstool.
I said, “Go and get Alosha,” instinctively wanting someone who would know what to do.
It was a lucky impulse. One of Ballo’s assistants had survived: he’d fled and pulled himself up into the stone chimney of the library’s great fireplace to escape. A guard noticed the claw marks on the hearth and the ashes of the fire all raked out over the floor, and they found him still up there, shaking and terrified. They brought him out and gave him a drink, and then he stood up and pointed at me and blurted, “It was her! She was the one who found it!”
I was dizzy and ill and still shaking with thunder. They all began shouting at me. I tried to tell them about the book, how it had been hiding in the library all this time; but they wanted someone to blame more than they wanted someone to explain. The smell of pine needles came into my nostrils. Two guards seized me by the arms, and I think they would have dragged me to the dungeons in a moment, or worse: someone said, “She’s a witch! If we let her get her strength back again—”
Alosha made them stop: she came into the room and clapped her hands three times, each clap making a noise like a whole troop of men stamping. Everyone quieted long enough to listen to her. “Put her down in that chair and stop behaving like fools,” she said. “Take hold of Jakub instead. He was here in the middle of it. Didn’t any of you have the wits to suspect he’d been touched with corruption, too?”
She had authority: they all knew her, especially the guards, who went as stiff and formal as if she were a general. They let go of me and caught poor protesting Jakub instead; they dragged him up to Alosha still bleating, “But she did! Father Ballo said she found the book—”
“Be quiet,” Alosha said, taking out her dagger. “Hold his wrist,” she told one of the guards, and had them pin the apprentice’s arm to a table by the wrist, palm up. She muttered a spell over it and nicked his elbow, then held the blade beside the bleeding cut. He squirmed and struggled in their grip, moaning, and then thin black wisps of smoke came seeping out with the blood,