told her to wait outside until I had flung the door open and looked in: empty. I let her in and shut and barred the door behind us, and pushed a chair beneath the doorknob. I would have liked to seal it with magic, if the Dragon hadn’t warned me against using spells, but as little as I wanted another visit from Prince Marek, I wanted him to remember what had really happened in the last one even less. I didn’t know if the Falcon could notice it if I cast a tiny spell of closing up here in my room, but I had felt his magic from the kitchens, so I didn’t mean to take chances.
I turned to Kasia: she was sitting on the bed heavily. Her back was straight—it was always straight now—but her hands were pressed flat together in her lap, and her head was bowed forward. “What did he say to you?” I demanded, a shudder of anger building in my belly, but Kasia shook her head.
“He asked me to help him,” she said. “He said he would speak to me again tomorrow.” She lifted her head and looked at me. “Nieshka, you saved me—could you save Queen Hanna?”
For a moment I was in the Wood again, deep beneath the branches, the weight of its hatred pressing on me and shadows creeping into me with every breath. Fear closed my throat. But I thought also of fulmia, rolling like thunder deep in my belly; of Kasia’s face and another tree grown tall, a face under the bark softened and blurred by twenty years of growth, vanishing like a statue under running water.
The Dragon was in his library, writing and irritated, and not less so when I came down and asked him the same question. “Try not to borrow more folly than you already possess,” he said. “Are you still incapable of recognizing a trap? This is the Wood’s doing.”
“You think the Wood has—Prince Marek?” I asked, wondering if that would explain it; if that was why he’d—
“Not yet it doesn’t,” the Dragon said. “But he’ll hand himself over and a wizard to boot: a magnificent trade for a peasant girl, and how much the better if you threw yourself in as well! The Wood will plant heart-trees in you and Solya, and swallow the valley in a week. That’s why it let her go.”
But I remembered that ferocious resistance. “It didn’t let her go!” I said. “It didn’t let me take her—”
“To a point,” he said. “The Wood might have done whatever it could to preserve a heart-tree, exactly as a general would to preserve a stronghold. But once the tree was lost—and it was surely already too far gone, whether the girl lived or died—then of course it would try to find a way to turn the loss to good account.”
We wrangled it back and forth. It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong; it seemed exactly the twisted sort of thing the Wood would do, turning love into a weapon. But that didn’t mean, I thought, that it wasn’t a chance worth taking. Freeing the queen could end the war with Rosya, could strengthen both nations, and if we destroyed another heart-tree in doing it, might be the chance to break the power of the Wood for a long time.
“Yes,” he said, “and if a dozen angels would only sweep down from above and lay waste to the entire Wood with flaming swords, the situation would be infinitely improved as well.”
I huffed in annoyance and went for the big ledger: I thumped it down on the table between us and opened it to the last pages, full of entries in his careful narrow hand, and put my hands down on it. “It’s been winning, hasn’t it, with all you can do?” His cold silence was enough answer. “We can’t wait. We can’t keep the secret of this locked up in the tower, waiting until we’re perfectly ready. If the Wood is trying to strike, we should strike back, and quickly.”
“There’s a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste,” he said. “What you really mean is you’ve heard too many clandestine ballads of the sad lost queen and the grief-stricken king, and you think you’re living in one of them with the chance to be the hero of the piece. What do you think will even be left of her, after twenty years being gnawed by a heart-tree?”