the prince jerked and tried to spit. The elixir was glowing somehow from inside his mouth, so bright that I could see his jaw and teeth outlined like a skull.
I managed to shut the flask again without retching, and then sprang to help: I pinched the prince’s nose shut, and after a moment he finally swallowed. The brilliant glow went down his throat and into his belly. I could make it out still traveling all throughout his body, a light underneath his clothes, thinning out as it branched away into his arms and legs, until at last it died away too dim to see.
The Dragon let go of the prince’s head and stopped chanting the spell. He sagged back against the wall with his eyes shut: he looked drained as I had never seen him before. I stood hovering anxiously over the bed, over both of them, and finally I blurted, “Will he—”
“No thanks to you,” the Dragon said, but that was good enough: I let myself sink to the ground in my heap of cream velvet, and buried my head on the bed in my arms sheathed in embroidered golden lace.
“And now you’re going to blubber, I suppose,” the Dragon said over my head. “What were you thinking? Why did you put yourself into that ludicrous dress if you didn’t want to seduce him?”
“It was better than staying in the one he tore off me!” I cried, lifting my head: not in tears at all; I had spent all my tears by then, and all I had left was anger. “I didn’t choose to be in this—”
I stopped, a heavy fold of silk caught up in my hands, staring at it. The Dragon had been nowhere near; he hadn’t worked any magic, cast any spell. “What have you done to me?” I whispered. “He said—he called me a witch. You’ve made me a witch.”
The Dragon snorted. “If I could make witches, I certainly wouldn’t choose a half-wit peasant girl as my material. I haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he—
While he taught me magic. Still on my knees, I stared up at him, bewildered and yet unwillingly beginning to believe. “But then why would you teach me?”
“I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited.” To my blank look, he scowled. “Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would have been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.”
While I flinched away appalled from this idea, he turned his scowl on the prince, who had just groaned a little and stirred in his sleep: he was beginning to wake, lifting a groggy hand to rub at his face. I scrambled up to my feet and edged away from the bed in alarm, closer towards the Dragon.
“Here,” the Dragon said. “Kalikual. It’s better than beating paramours into insensibility.”
He looked at me expectantly. I stared at him, and at the slowly rousing prince, and back. “If I wasn’t a witch,” I said, “—if I wasn’t a witch, would you let me—could I go home? Couldn’t you take it out of me?”
He was silent. I was used to the contradiction of his wizard’s face by now, young and old together. For all his years, he only had folds at the corners of his eyes, a single crease between his brows; sharp frown lines around his mouth: nothing else. He moved like a young man, and if people grew milder or kinder with age, he certainly hadn’t. But for a moment now, his eyes were purely old, and very strange. “No,” he said, and I believed him.
Then he shook it off and pointed: turning, I found the prince pushing himself up onto his elbow, and blinking at us both: still dazed and unknowing, but even as I looked, the spark of recognition came back into his face, remembering me. I whispered, “Kalikual.”
The power rushed out of me. Prince Marek sank back down against the pillows, eyes closing back into sleep. I staggered over to the wall and slid down it to the floor. The butcher