slain. The pages were thick with entries. I reached out and turned the pages back, the parchment unyellowed, the ink still dark: there was a faint clinging magic of preservation on them. The years grew thinner and the numbers smaller as I went back. There had been more incidents lately, and larger ones.
“It swallowed Porosna the night the Raven died,” the Dragon said. He reached out and turned a thick sheaf of pages to where someone else, less orderly, had been keeping the records: each incident was merely written out like a story, the writing larger and the lines a little shaky.
Today a rider from Porosna: they have a fever there with seven sick. He did not stop in any towns. He was sickening, too. A woodbane infusion eased his fever, and Agata’s Seventh Incantation was effective at purifying the root of the sickness. Sevenweight of silver worth of saffron consumed in the incantation, and fifteen for the woodbane.
It was the last entry in that hand.
“I was on my way back to the court by then,” the Dragon said. “The Raven had told me the Wood was growing—she asked me to stay. I refused, indignantly; I thought it beneath me. She told me there was nothing to be done for the count, and I resented it; I told her grandly I would find a way. That whatever the Wood’s magic had done, I could undo. I told myself she was an old weak fool; that the Wood was encroaching because of her weakness.”
I hugged myself as he spoke, staring down at the implacable ledger, the blank page beneath that entry. I wished now he would stop speaking: I didn’t want to hear any more. He was trying to be kind, baring his own failure to me, and all I could think was Kasia, Kasia, a cry inside me.
“So far as I could learn, afterwards—a frantic messenger caught me on the road—she went to Porosna, taking her stores with her, and wore herself out healing the sick. That, of course, was when the Wood struck. She managed to fling a handful of children to the next town—I imagine your baker’s grandmother was among them. They told a story of seven walkers coming, carrying a seedling heart-tree.
“I was still able to make it through the trees when I came, half a day later. They had planted the heart-tree in her body. She yet lived, if you can call it that. I managed to give her a clean death, but that was all I could do before I had to flee. The village was gone, and the Wood had pushed its borders out.
“That was the last great incursion,” he added. “I halted the advance by taking her place, and I’ve held it since then—more or less. But it’s always trying.”
“And if you hadn’t come?” I said.
“I’m the only wizard in Polnya strong enough to hold it back,” the Dragon said, without any particular arrogance: a statement of fact. “Every few years it tests my strength, and once a decade or so makes a serious attempt—like this last assault on your own village. Dvernik is only one village out from the edge of the Wood. If it had managed to kill or corrupt me there, and establish a heart-tree—by the time another wizard came, the Wood would have swallowed up both your village and Zatochek, and been on the doorstep of the eastern pass to the Yellow Marshes. And it would continue on from there, if given the chance. If I’d allowed them to send a weaker wizard when the Raven died, by now the whole valley would have been taken over.
“That’s what’s happening on the Rosyan side. They’ve lost four villages in the last decade, and two before that. The Wood will reach the southern pass to Kyeva Province in the next, and then—” He shrugged. “We’ll learn whether it can spread itself over a mountain pass, I suppose.”
We sat in silence. In his words I saw a vision of the Wood marching slow but implacable over my home, over all the valley, over all the world. I imagined looking down from the tower windows at endless dark trees, besieged; a whispering hateful ocean in every direction, moving with the wind, not another living thing in sight. The Wood would strangle all of them, and drag them down under its roots. Like it had with Porosna. Like it had with Kasia.
Tears were sliding down my face, a slow trail, not hard weeping. I