and a few hours before dawn we changed horses at Vyosna village without stopping properly: I didn’t even climb out of the sleigh. They didn’t ask any questions. Borys said only, “We’re on the way to Dvernik,” and they looked at me with interest and curiosity but not the least doubt, and certainly no recognition. As they harnessed the fresh horses, the stableman’s wife came out to me with a fresh meat pie and a cup of hot wine, clutching a thick fur cloak around herself. “Will you warm your hands, my lady?” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, awkwardly, feeling like an imposter and halfway to a thief. I didn’t let it keep me from devouring the pie in ten bites, though, and after that I swallowed the wine mostly because I couldn’t think what else to do with it that wouldn’t be insulting.
It left me light-headed and a little muzzy, the world gone soft and warm and comfortable. I felt a great deal less worried, which meant I had drunk too much, but I was grateful anyway. Borys drove faster, with the fresh horses, and an hour’s drive onward with the sun lightening the sky ahead of us, we saw in the distance a man slogging down the road, on foot. And then we drew closer, and it wasn’t a man at all. It was Kasia, in boy’s clothes and heavy boots. She came straight for us: we were the only ones going towards Dvernik.
She grabbed onto the side of the sleigh, panting, dropped a curtsy, and without a pause said, “It’s in the cattle—it’s taken all the cattle, and if they get their teeth in a man, it takes him, too. We’ve got them mostly penned, we’re holding them, but it’s taking every last man—” and then I had pulled myself forward out of the heap of blankets and reached for her.
“Kasia,” I said, choking, and she stopped. She looked at me, and we stared at each other in perfect silence for a long moment, and then I said, “Quick, hurry and get in, I’ll tell you as we go.”
She climbed in and sat next to me under the pile of sleigh blankets: we made a ridiculously unlikely pair, her in dirty rough homespun, a pig-boy’s clothes, with her long hair stuffed up under a cap and a thick sheepskin jacket, and me in my finery: together we looked like the fairy godmother descending on Masha sweeping cinders from the hearth. But our hands still gripped each other tight, truer than anything else between us, and as the sleigh dashed onwards I blurted out a disjointed set of bits and scraps of the whole story—those early days grubbing miserably, the long fainting weeks when the Dragon had first begun to make me do magic, the lessons since then.
Kasia never let go my hand, and when I at last, haltingly, told her I could do magic, she said, startling the breath out of me, “I should have known,” and I gawked at her. “Strange things always happened to you. You’d go into the forest and come back with fruit out of season, or flowers no one else had ever seen. When we were little, you always used to tell me stories the pines told you, until one day your brother sneered at you for playing make-believe, and you stopped. Even the way your clothes were always such a mess—you couldn’t get so dirty if you tried, and I knew you weren’t trying, you were never trying. I saw a branch reach out and snag your skirt once, really just reach out—”
I flinched away, made a noise of protest, and she stopped. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want her to tell me that the magic had been there all along, and therefore inescapable. “It’s not much good for anything besides keeping me a mess, if that’s what it does,” I said, trying to speak lightly. “I only came because he’s gone. Now tell me, what’s happened?”
Kasia told me: the cattle had sickened almost overnight. The first few had borne bite marks as if some strange enormous wolves had set teeth to them, although no wolves had been seen anywhere near, all winter. “They were Jerzy’s. He didn’t put them down right away,” Kasia said soberly. I nodded.
Jerzy should have known better—he should have pulled them out of the herd and cut their throats at once, the moment he saw them wolf-bitten and left among the other animals.