was too desolate to cry anymore. The light outside was growing dim; the witch-lanterns hadn’t yet lit. His face had settled into abstraction, unseeing, and in the dusk his eyes were impossible to read. “What happened to them?” I asked to fill the silence, feeling hollow. “What happened to her?”
He stirred. “Who?” he said, surfacing from his reverie. “Oh, Ludmila?” He paused. “After I came back to the court for the last time,” he said finally, “I told her there was nothing to be done for her husband. I brought two other wizards from the court to attest his corruption was incurable—they were quite appalled that I’d allowed him to live so long in the first place—and I let one of them put him to death.” He shrugged. “They tried to make hay of it, as it happens—there’s more than a little envy among enchanters. They suggested to the king that I ought to be sent here for punishment, for having concealed the corruption. They meant the king to refuse that punishment, but settle on something else, some small or petty wrist-slapping, I suppose. It rather deflated them when I announced I was going, no matter what anyone else thought of it.
“And Ludmila—I didn’t see her again. She tried to claw my eyes out when I told her we had to put him to death, and her remarks at the time rather quickly disillusioned me as to the real nature of her feelings for me,” he added, dryly. “But she inherited the estate and remarried a few years later to a lesser duke; she bore him three sons and a daughter, and lived to the age of seventy-six as a leading matron of the court. I believe the bards at court made me the villain of the piece, and her the noble faithful wife, trying to save her husband at any cost. Not even false, I suppose.”
That was when I realized that I already knew the story. I had heard it sung. Ludmila and the Enchanter, only in the song, the brave countess disguised herself as an old peasant woman and cooked and cleaned for the wizard who had stolen her husband’s heart, until she found it in his house locked inside a box, and she stole it back and saved him. My eyes prickled with hot tears. No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.
“Are you ready to let her go?” the Dragon said.
I wasn’t, but I was. I was so tired. I couldn’t bear to keep going down those stairs, down to the thing wearing Kasia’s face. I hadn’t saved her at all. She was still in the Wood, still swallowed up. But fulmia still shuddered in my belly deep down, waiting, and if I said yes to him—if I stayed here and buried my head in my arms and let him go away, and come back and tell me it was done—I thought it might come roaring out of me again, and bring the tower down around us.
I looked at the shelves, all around them, desperately: the endless books with their spines and covers like citadel walls. What if one of them still held the secret, the trick that would set her free? I stood and went and put my hands on them, gold-stamped letters meaningless beneath my blind fingers. Luthe’s Summoning caught me again, that beautiful leather tome that I’d borrowed so long ago, and enraged the Dragon by taking, before I’d ever known anything of magic, before I’d known how much and how little I could do. I put my hands on it, and then I said abruptly, “What does it summon? A demon?”
“No, don’t be absurd,” the Dragon said, impatiently. “Calling spirits is nothing but charlatanry. It’s very easy to claim you’ve sum moned something that’s invisible and incorporeal. The Summoning does nothing so trivial. It summons—” He paused, and I was surprised to see him struggling for words. “Truth,” he said finally, with half a shrug, as though that was inadequate and wrong, but as close as he could come. I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie.
“But why were you so angry that I had started reading it, then?” I demanded.