of a village girl wasn’t worth the chance the Wood might take me to add to its host. He hadn’t told me I was an idiot drunk on success in throwing potions, in pulling flowers from the air, to suddenly think I could save someone the Wood had taken.
The girl is gone. He’d even sounded sorry, in his abrupt way.
I sat with Wensa, numb and cold, holding her hard red callused hand in my lap. It was growing dark outside. If Kasia was still alive, she was in the Wood, watching the sun go down, light dying through the leaves. How long did it take, to hollow someone out from the inside? I thought of Kasia in the grip of the walkers, the long fingers curled around her arms and legs, knowing all the while what was happening, what would happen to her.
I left Wensa sleeping and went downstairs to the library. The Dragon was there, looking through one of the vast ledgers he made records in. I stood in the doorway staring at his back. “I know you held her dear,” he said over his shoulder. “But there’s no kindness in offering false hope.”
I didn’t say anything. Jaga’s book of spells was lying open on the table, small and worn. I’d been studying only spells of earth this week: fulmkea, fulmedesh, fulmishta, solid and fixed, as far from the air and fire of illusion as magic could get. I took the book and slipped it into my pocket behind the Dragon’s back, and then I turned around and went silently down the stairs.
Borys was still outside, waiting, his face long and bleak: he looked up from his blanketed horses when I came out of the tower. “Will you drive me to the Wood?” I asked him.
He nodded, and I climbed into his sleigh and drew the blankets around me as he made the horses ready again. He climbed aboard and spoke to them, jingling his reins, and the sleigh leapt out over the snow.
—
The moon was high that night, full and beautiful, blue light on the shining snow all around. I opened Jaga’s book as we flew, and found a spell for the quickening of feet. I sang it softly to the horses, their ears pricking back to listen to me, and the wind of our passage grew muffled and thick, pressing hard on my cheeks and blurring my sight. The Spindle, frozen over, was a pale silver road running alongside, and a shadow grew in the east ahead of us, grew and grew until the horses, uneasy, slowed and came to a halt without any word or any movement of reins. The world stopped moving. We were stopped under a small ragged cluster of pine-trees. The Wood stood ahead of us across an open stretch of unbroken snow.
Once a year, when the ground thawed, the Dragon took all the unmarried men older than fifteen out to the borders of the Wood. He burned a swath of ground along its edge bare and black, and the men followed his fire, sprinkling the ground with salt so nothing could grow or take root. In all our villages we saw the plumes of smoke rising. We saw them going up also on the other side of the Wood, far away in Rosya, and knew they were doing the same. But the fires always died when they reached the shadow beneath the dark trees.
I climbed down from the sleigh. Borys looked down at me, his face tense and afraid. But he said, “I’ll wait,” although I knew he couldn’t: Wait how long? For what? Wait here, in the Wood’s very shadow?
I thought of my own father, waiting for Marta, if our places had been changed. I shook my head. If I could bring Kasia out, I thought I could get her to the tower. I hoped the Dragon’s spell would let us in. “Go home,” I said, and then I asked him, wanting suddenly to know, “Is Marta well?”
He nodded slightly. “She’s married,” he said, and then he hesitated and said, “There’s a child coming.”
I remembered her at the choosing, five months ago: her red dress, her beautiful black braids, her narrow pale frightened face. It didn’t seem possible we’d ever stood next to each other, just the same: her and me and Kasia in a row. It took my breath, hard and painful, to imagine her sitting at her own hearth, already a young matron, getting ready for childbed.