bubbled on her lips. She sagged against the bed. I stumbled forward and reached for her, but she waved me back. She made a hooking gesture with a hand and said, “Hatol,” and drew the killing sword out of the air. She held the hilt out to me. “Whatever’s in the Wood,” she said, hoarse and whispering, her voice eaten by the fire. “Find it and kill it. Before it’s too late.”
I took it and held it awkwardly. Alosha was sliding to the floor even as she let it go into my hands. I knelt down beside her. “We have to get the Willow,” I said.
She shook her head, a tiny movement. “Go. Get the children out of here,” she said. “The castle’s not safe. Go.” She let her head sink back against the bed, her eyes closing. Her chest rose and fell only in shallow breaths.
I stood up, shaking. I knew she was right. I felt it. The king, the crown prince; now the princess. The Wood meant to kill all of them, Alosha’s good kings, and slaughter Polnya’s wizards, too. I looked at the dead soldiers in their Rosyan uniforms. Marek would blame Rosya again, as he was meant to do. He’d put on his crown and march east, and after he’d spent our army slaughtering as many Rosyans as he could, the Wood would devour him, too, and leave the country torn apart, the succession broken.
I was in the Wood again, underneath the boughs, that cold hateful presence watching me. The momentary silence in the room was only its pause for breath. Stone walls and sunlight meant nothing. The Wood’s eyes were on us. The Wood was here.
Chapter 25
We wrapped ourselves in torn cloaks we took off the dead guards and ran for it, our hems leaving streaks of blood on the floor behind us. I had shoved Alosha’s sword back into its strange waiting-place, hatol opening a pocket in the world for me to put it in. Kasia carried the little girl and I held Stashek’s hand. We went down a tower staircase, past a landing where two men in a hallway glanced over at us, puzzled and frowning; we hurried on down another turning, fast, and came into the narrow hallway to the kitchens, servants going back and forth. Stashek tried to pull back from me. “I want my father!” he said, his voice trembling. “I want Uncle Marek! Where are we going?”
I didn’t know. I was only in flight; all I knew was we had to get away. The Wood had scattered too many seeds, all around us; they’d lain quiet in fallow ground, but now they were all coming to fruit. Nowhere was safe when corruption lived in the king’s castle. The princess had meant to take them to her parents, to Gidna on the northern sea. The ocean is inimical to corruption, Alosha had said. But trees still grew in Gidna, and the Wood would pursue the children to the shore.
“To the tower,” I said. I didn’t plan on saying it; the words came out of me like Stashek’s cry. I wanted the stillness of Sarkan’s library, the faint spice-and-sulfur smell of his laboratory; those close, narrow hallways, the clean lines and the emptiness. The tower standing tall and lonely against the mountains. The Wood had no foothold there. “We’re going to the Dragon’s tower.”
Some of the servants were slowing, looking at us. There were footsteps on the stairs coming after us; a man called down with authority, “You, there!”
“Hold on to me,” I told Kasia. I put my hand on the castle wall and whispered us through, straight out into the kitchen gardens, one staring gardener kneeling up from the dirt. I ran between rows of beanstakes with Stashek wide-eyed running with me, catching our fear; Kasia ran behind us. We reached the outer wall of heavy brick; I took us through. The castle bells began to clang alarm behind us as we scrambled in a hail of dirt all the way down the steep slope, to the Vandalus running below.
The river rushed quick and deep here around the castle, leaving the city behind, going east. A hunting bird cried high above, a falcon wheeling in wide circles around the castle: was that Solya looking down at us? I snatched up a handful of reeds from the bank, without any incantations or charms: they had all gone out of my head. Instead I pulled a thread out of my cloak and