it. “Nieshka,” she said, gripping my hands too hard, strangling the feeling out of them and her nails digging into my skin. “Nieshka, I had to come.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“They took her this morning, when she went for water,” Wensa said. “Three of them. Three walkers,” her voice breaking.
It was a bad spring when even one of the walkers came out of the Wood, and went plucking people out of the forests like fruit. I’d seen one once, a long way off through the trees: like an enormous twig-insect, at once almost impossible to see among the underbrush and jointed wrong and dreadful, so when it moved I had shuddered back from it, queasy. They had arms and legs like branches, with long twiggy stalk-fingers, and they would pick their way through the woods and find places near foot-paths and near water, near clearings, and wait in silence. If someone came in arm’s reach, there was no saving them, unless you had a great many men with axes and fire nearby. When I was twelve, they caught one half a mile past Zatochek, the tiny village that was the last in the valley, the last before the Wood. The walker had taken a child, a little boy, bringing a pail of water to his mother for the washing; she’d seen him snatched and screamed. There had been enough women nearby to raise the alarm, and slow it down.
They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day’s work to hack it to pieces. The walker broke the child’s arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs. Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy’s body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.
Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope. We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren’t dead, and then had to be hunted down.
“Not Kasia,” I said. “Not Kasia.”
Wensa had bent her head. She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron. “Please, Nieshka. Please.” She spoke hoarsely, without hope. She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better. But she had come to me.
She couldn’t stop weeping. I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her. She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.
The Dragon stood in the doorway watching us. I held up the locket from around Wensa’s neck. “She has a lock of Kasia’s hair.” I knew she’d cut it from Kasia’s head the night before the choosing, thinking she would have nothing left to remember her daughter by. “If I use loytalal—”
He shook his head. “What do you imagine you’re going to find, besides a smiling corpse? The girl is gone.” He jerked his chin at Wensa, whose eyes had drifted shut. “She’ll be calmer after she sleeps. Tell that driver to come back in the morning to take her home.”
He turned and left, and the worst of it was how matter-of-factly he’d spoken. He hadn’t snapped at me, or called me a fool; he hadn’t said the life