could summon up armor, and then I said, “Rautalem?”—groping, muddling it up with a spell for sharpening kitchen knives—as I grabbed up the old water-dish made of battered tin. I had no very good idea what it would do, but I hoped. Perhaps the magic was trying to save me and itself, because the dish flattened out and turned into an enormous shield, of heavy steel. Kasia and I crouched behind it into a corner as the wolves leapt for us.
She grabbed the axe from me and chopped at their claws and muzzles as they scrabbled around the edges, trying to tear it down or away from us. We were both hanging on to the shield’s handles for life, desperate, and then to my horror one of the wolves—a wolf!—went deliberately to the barred door of the stable, and with its nose it nudged the bar up and open.
The rest of the pack crowded in towards us. There was nowhere else to run, no trick left in my satchel. Kasia and I clung to each other, held on to our shield, and then abruptly the entire wall of the shed ripped away from behind us. We fell backwards into the snow at the Dragon’s feet. The wolf pack leapt for him as one, howling, but he raised a hand and sang out a long impossible line without a pause for breath. All at the same time the wolves broke, in midair, a dreadful sound like snapping twigs. They fell huddled dead into the snow.
Kasia and I were still clinging to each other as the wolf corpses thumped down around us one after another. We stared up at him, and he glared down at me, stiff and furious, and snarled, “Of all the idiotic things you might have done, you monstrously half-witted lunatic of a girl—”
“Look out!” Kasia cried, too late: one last limping wolf, its fur stained orange with pumpkin, flung itself over the garden wall, and though the Dragon snapped out a spell even as he turned, the beast caught his arm with one raking claw as it fell dying. Three bright drops of blood stained the snow crimson at his feet.
He sank to his knees, gripping his arm at the elbow. The black wool of his jerkin was torn and gaping. His flesh was already turning green with corruption around the scratch. The sickly color halted where his fingers gripped the arm, a faint glow of light limning his fingers, but the veins of his forearm were swelling. I fumbled for the elixir in my satchel. “Pour it on,” he said with clenched teeth, when I would have given it to him to drink. I poured the liquid on, all of us holding our breath, but the black stain didn’t recede: it only stopped spreading as quickly.
“The tower,” he said. Sweat had sprung out across his forehead. His jaw was locked almost beyond speech. “Listen: Zokinen valisu, akenezh hinisu, kozhonen valisu.”
I stared: he couldn’t mean to trust me to do it, to spell us back? But he didn’t say anything else. All his strength was too plainly going to hold back the corruption, and I remembered too late what he’d told me, how if the Wood had taken me, untrained and useless witch though I was, it could have made some truly dreadful horror out of me. What would it make of him, the foremost wizard of the realm?
I turned to Kasia and dug out the bottle of fire-heart and pressed it into her hands. “Tell Danka she has to send someone to the tower,” I said, flat and desperate. “If we don’t both come out and say everything’s all right, if there’s any doubt—burn it to the ground.”
Her eyes were full of worry for me, but she nodded. I turned to the Dragon and knelt in the snow beside him. “Good,” he said to me, very briefly, with a quick dart of his eyes towards Kasia. I knew then that my worst fears weren’t wrong. I gripped his arm and closed my eyes and thought of the tower room. I spoke the words of the spell.
Chapter 6
I helped the Dragon stagger down the hall the short distance to my small bedroom, the rope of silk dresses still dangling out the window. There was no hope of getting him down to his own room; he was deadweight even as I lowered him to the bed. He was still gripping his arm, holding back the corruption somehow, but the