just a madwoman, but Borys was there: Marta’s father, one of the other girls born in my year. He’d been at the choosing. He said, “That’s the Dragon’s girl. That’s Andrey’s daughter.”
None of the chosen girls had ever left the tower before her ten years were up. As desperate as a beacon-fire was, I think at first they would have been happier to be left to deal with whatever the Wood had sent than to have me come bursting in on them, a sure problem and unconvincing as any sort of help.
I told them the Dragon was gone to the Yellow Marshes; I said I needed someone to take me to Dvernik. They unhappily believed the first; very quickly I realized they hadn’t the least intention of doing the second, no matter what I told them about magic lessons. “You’ll come and spend the night in my house, under my wife’s care,” the mayor said, turning away. “Danushek, ride for Dvernik: they need to know they must hold out, whatever it is, and we must find out what help they need. We’ll send a man into the mountains—”
“I’m not spending the night in your house!” I said. “And if you won’t take me, I’ll walk; I’ll still be there quicker than any other help!”
“Enough!” the mayor snapped at me. “Listen, you stupid child—”
They were afraid, of course. They thought I had run away, that I was just trying to get home. They didn’t want to hear me beg them to help me. I think more so because they felt ashamed to give a girl up to the Dragon in the first place; they knew it wasn’t right, and they did it anyway, because they didn’t have a choice, and it wasn’t terrible enough to drive them to rebellion.
I took a deep breath and used my weapon vanastalem again. The Dragon would have been almost pleased with me, I think, for every syllable was pronounced with the sharpness of a fresh-honed blade. They backed from me as the magic went whirling around me, so bright the very fireplace grew dim by comparison. When it cleared I stood inches higher and ludicrously grand, in heeled court boots and dressed like a queen in mourning: a letnik made of black velvet bordered with black lace and embroidered in small black pearls, stark against my skin that hadn’t seen the sun in half a year, the full sleeves caught around my arms with bands of gold. And over it, even more extravagant, a shining coat in gold and red silk, trimmed in black fur around my neck and clasped at the waist by a golden belt. My hair had been caught up in a net of gold cord and small hard jewels. “I’m not stupid, nor a liar,” I said, “and if I can’t do any good, I can at least do something. Get me a cart!”
Chapter 5
It helped, of course, that none of them knew the spell was a mere cantrip, and that none of them had seen much magic done. I didn’t enlighten them. They hitched four horses to the lightest sleigh they had and sped me down the solid-packed river road in my idiotic—but warm!—dress. It was a fast drive, and an uncomfortable one, flying breathlessly over the icy road, but not fast or uncomfortable enough to keep me from thinking about how little hope I had of doing anything but dying, and not even usefully.
Borys had offered to drive me: a kind of guilt I understood without a word. I had been taken—not his girl, not his daughter. She was safe at home, perhaps courting or already betrothed. And I had been taken not four months ago, and here I was already unrecognizable.
“Do you know what’s happened in Dvernik?” I asked him, huddled in the back under a heap of blankets.
“No, no word yet,” he answered over his shoulder. “The beacon-fires were only just lit. The rider will be on the road, if—” He stopped. If there were a rider left to send, he had meant to say. “We’ll meet him halfway, I’d guess,” he finished instead.
With my father’s heavy horses and his big wagon, in summer-time, it was a long day’s drive to Dvernik from Olshanka, with a break in the middle. But the midwinter road was packed with snow a foot deep, frozen almost solid with a thin dusting atop, and the weather was clear, the horses shod in hard ice shoes. We flew on through the night,