her. All the ways she’d been treated specially: a place set aside for her, gifts and attention lavished, everyone taking the chance to love her while they could. There had been times I had wanted to be the special one, the one everyone knew would be chosen. Not for long, never for long, but now that seemed like cowardice: I’d enjoyed a dream of being special and nursed a secret seed of envy against her, though I’d had the luxury of putting it aside whenever I chose.
But I couldn’t stop: the light was reaching her. She turned towards me. Lost in the Wood, she turned towards me, and in her face I saw her own deep anger, an anger years long. She’d known all her life she was going to be taken, whether she wanted it or not. The terror of a thousand long nights stared back out at me: with her lying in the dark, wondering what would happen to her, imagining a terrible wizard’s hands on her and his breath on her cheek, and behind me I heard the Dragon draw in a sharp breath; he stumbled over the words, and halted. The light pooled in my hands flickered.
I threw a desperate look back at him, but even as I did, he took up the spell again, his voice rigidly disciplined, his eyes fixed on the page. The light shone through him entirely: as though he’d somehow made himself clear as glass, emptied himself of thought and feeling to carry on the spell. Oh, how I wanted to do that; I didn’t think I could. I had to turn back to Kasia full of all my messy tangled thoughts and secret wishes, and I had to let her see them, see me, like an exposed pale squirming worm from under an overturned log. I had to see her, bare before me, and that hurt even worse: because she’d hated me, too.
She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn’t set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn’t forced me to go three hours’ walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn’t turned her back to me when I’d cried, and told me I had to be brave. My mother hadn’t brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love—oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.
And then—and then she’d even hated me for being taken. She hadn’t been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place, everyone whispering; she had never imagined herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn’t meant to welcome her back. She’d made up her mind to pay the price, and be brave; but now there was nothing left to be brave for, no glittering future ahead. The older village boys smiled at her with a kind of strange, satisfied confidence. Half a dozen of them had spoken to her during the feast: boys who’d never said a word to her, or had only looked at her from afar as though they didn’t dare to touch, now came and spoke to her familiarly, as if she had nothing to do but sit there and be chosen by someone else instead. And I’d come back in silk and velvet, my hair caught in a net of jewels, my hands full of magic, the power to do as I liked, and she’d thought, That should be me, it should have been me, as though I was a thief who’d taken something that belonged to her.
It was unbearable, and I saw her recoil from it, too; but somehow we had to bear it. “Kasia!” I called to her, choked out, and held the light steady for her to see. I saw her stand there hesitating a moment longer, and then she came stumbling towards me, hands reaching forward. The Wood tore at her as she came, though, branches clawing and vines tangling around her legs, and I could do nothing. I could only stand there and hold the light while she fell and struggled up again, and fell again, terror rising in