words, you would have thought she’d just had the idea a moment ago, but as she said them, they sounded rehearsed.
“I don’t want to go to Gidna!” the boy said. “Papa—”
“Enough, Stashek,” the prince said. “Whatever you think best,” he told the princess, and turned to Alosha. “Will you put a blessing on my sword?”
“I’d rather not,” she said grimly. “Why are you lending yourself to this? After we spoke yesterday—”
“Yesterday my father was alive,” Prince Sigmund said. “Today he’s dead. What do you think is going to happen when the Magnati vote on the succession, if I let Marek go and he destroys this Rosyan army for us?”
“So send a general,” Alosha said, but she wasn’t really arguing; I could tell she was only saying it while she searched for another
“I can’t,” he said. “If I don’t ride out at the head of this army, Marek will. Do you think there’s any general I could appoint who would stand in the way of the hero of Polnya right now? The whole country is ringing with his song.”
“Only a fool would put Marek on the throne instead of you,” Alosha said.
“Men are fools,” Sigmund said. “Give me the blessing, and keep an eye on the children for me.”
We stayed and watched him ride away. The two small children knelt up on a footstool, peering over the window-sill with their mother behind them, her hands on their heads, golden and dark. He went with a small troop of guards for escort, his retinue, the eagle flag in red on white billowing out behind him. Alosha watched silently beside me from the second window until they had gone out of the courtyard. Then she turned to me and said dourly, “There’s always a price.”
“Yes,” I said, low and tired. And I didn’t think we were done paying.
Chapter 24
I couldn’t do anything more, just then, but sleep. Alosha told me to lie down right there in the room, despite the princess’s dubious looks, and I fell asleep on the soft wool rug before the fireplace: it was woven in a strange dancing pattern of enormous curved raindrop shapes, or perhaps tears. The stone floor beneath was hard, but I was too tired to care.
I slept the whole evening and night and woke in the early hours of the morning: still tired but my head less thick, and my lightning-scorched palms felt cool to the touch again. Magic ran whispering and slow over rocks, deep inside me. Kasia was sleeping on the rug at the foot of the bed; through the bedcurtains I could see the princess with the two children gathered close to her. There were two guards drowsing on either side of the door.
Alosha was sitting up in a chair by the fire with the hungry sword on her lap, sharpening it with her finger. I could feel the whisper of her magic as she ran the pad of her thumb near the edge of the blade. A thin line of blood welled up on her dark skin, even though she wasn’t actually touching the steel, and it lifted in a faint red mist to sink into the blade. Her chair was turned to have full view of the doors and windows, as though she’d been watching all night.
“What do you fear?” I asked her, softly.
“Everything,” she said. “Anything. Corruption in the palace—the king dead, Ballo dead, the crown prince lured off to a battlefield where anything might happen. It’s late enough to start being cautious. I can miss a few nights’ sleep. Are you better?” I nodded. “Good. Listen to me: we need to root out this corruption in the palace, and quickly. I don’t believe we made an end of it when we destroyed that book.”
I sat up and hugged my knees. “Sarkan thought it might be the queen after all. That she might have been—tortured into helping, instead of corrupted.” I wondered if he was right: if the queen had smuggled out a small golden fruit somehow, plucked up off the ground in the Wood, and now in some dark corner of the palace gardens a thin silver sapling had broken the earth, scattering corruption all around. It was hard for me to imagine the queen so lost to everything she’d been that she would bring the Wood with her, that she’d turn it on her own family and kingdom.
But Alosha said, “She might not have needed much torment to help see her husband dead, after he abandoned her