me. Her voice suddenly broke on a sob, an actor in a play moving from one act to the next. She lifted her hands towards me, came a little closer to the fire, her body leaning in. She came a little too close. The smell grew stronger: like greenwood burning, full of sap. “Nieshka—”
“Stop it!” I cried. “Stop it.”
She stopped. For a moment still Kasia stood there, and then it let her arms drop to her sides, and her face emptied out. A wave of rotting-wood smell rolled over the room.
The Dragon raised a hand. “Kulkias vizhkias haishimad,” he said, and a light shone out of his hand and onto her skin. Where it played over her I saw thick green shadows, mottled like deep layers of leaves on leaves. Something looked at me out of her eyes, its face still and strange and inhuman. I recognized it: what looked out at me was the same thing I had felt in the Wood, trying to find me. There was no trace of Kasia left at all.
Chapter 9
He was half-supporting me as he pulled me through the wall and out into the antechamber of the tomb again. When we were through I slid to the floor next to my small heap of pine-needle ashes and stared at them, hollow. I almost hated them for stealing the lie from me. I couldn’t even cry; it was worse than if Kasia were dead. He stood over me. “There’s a way,” I said, looking up at him. “There’s a way to get it out of her.” It was a child’s cry, a plea. He said nothing. “That spell you used on me—”
“No,” he said. “Not for this. The purging spell barely worked even on you. I warned you. Did it try to persuade you to harm yourself?”
I shivered all over horribly, remembering the ashen taste of that horrible thought creeping through my head: Wormwood and yew berries, a quick poison. “You,” I said.
He nodded. “It would have liked that: persuade you to kill me, then find some way to lure you back to the Wood.”
“What is it?” I said. “What is that—thing inside her? We say the Wood, but those trees—” I was abruptly sure of it. “—those trees are corrupted, too, as much as Kasia. That’s where it lives, not what it is.”
“We don’t know,” he said. “It was here before we came. Perhaps before they were,” he added, gesturing to the walls with their strange foreign inscription. “They woke the Wood, or made it, and they fought it awhile, and then it destroyed them. This tomb is all that’s left. There was an older tower here. Little of it remained except bricks scattered on the earth by the time Polnya claimed this valley and roused the Wood again.”
He fell silent. I remained sunk in on myself, curled up around my knees on the floor. I couldn’t stop shivering. Finally he said, heavily, “Are you ready to let me end this? Most likely there’s nothing left of her to rescue.”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted that thing gone, destroyed—the thing that wore Kasia’s face, that used not only her hands but everything in her heart, in her mind, to destroy those she loved. I almost didn’t care if Kasia was in there. If she was, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than to be trapped in her own body, that thing dangling her like a monstrous puppet. And I couldn’t persuade myself to doubt the Dragon anymore when he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.
But I had saved him, when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too. And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another. I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked. “Not yet,” I whispered. “Not yet.”
—
If I had been an indifferent student before, now I was dreadful in a wholly different way. I turned ahead in books and took ones he didn’t give me down from the shelves if he didn’t catch me. I looked into anything and everything I could find. I would work spells out halfway, discard them, and go onward; I would throw myself into workings without being sure I had the strength. I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out of my way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.