Knitting lay on the rocking chair, and the baby was sleeping in a cot by the fireplace: big and healthy and ruddy-faced, with a gnawed wooden rattle clutched in one fist. I went to look at it, of course. Kasia came in behind me and looked over at the cradle. I almost called her over, but she turned away, keeping her face out of the firelight, and I didn’t speak. Krystyna didn’t need any more to fear. She huddled into the corner with me, darting looks over my shoulder as the Dragon came in, and she told me in a bare whisper that the baby’s name was Anatol. Her voice died at Prince Marek ducking into the cottage, and the Falcon with his cloak of brilliant white, which showed not a speck of dirt. None of them paid the least attention to the baby, or to Krystyna herself. “Where’s the corrupted man?” the prince said.
Krystyna whispered to me, “He’s in the barn. We put him in the—I thought to have the room back, we didn’t want—I didn’t mean any harm—”
She didn’t need to explain why she hadn’t wanted that tormented face in her house, every night. “It’s all right,” I said. “Krystyna, Jerzy might—what we can try, it might not—it will work. But he might die of it.”
Her hands were gripping the side of the cradle, but she only nodded a little. I think he was already gone in her mind by then: as though he’d been at a battle that had been lost, and she only waited to hear the final word.
We went outside. Seven small rooting pigs and their big-bellied mother looked up snuffling incuriously at our horses from a new-built pen by the side of the house, the wood of the fence still pale brown and unweathered. We rode around it and single-file down a narrow path through the trees, already almost overgrown, to the small grey barn. It stood in tall grass full of eager saplings springing up, a few ragged holes in the thatch where birds had picked it apart for nests and the bar across the door rusted in its hooks. It already had the feeling of a long-abandoned place.
“Open it up, Michal,” the captain of the guard said, and one of the soldiers slid down and went tramping ahead through the grass. He was a young man, and like most of the soldiers he wore his brown hair long and straight, with a long dangling mustache and beard, braided, all of them like pictures in the Dragon’s history books of the old days, the founding of Polnya. He was as strong as a young oak, tall and broad even among the other soldiers; he slid the bar over with one hand and pushed open both of the doors with an easy shove, letting the afternoon sunlight into the barn.
Then he jerked back with a wordless choked noise in his throat, hand moving towards his sword-belt, and almost stumbled over his own feet backing away. Jerzy was propped against the back wall, and the light had shone full onto the snarl of his twisted face. The statue’s eyes were looking straight out at us.
“What a hideous grimace,” Prince Marek said in an offhand tone. “All right, Janos,” he added to the chief of his guard, sliding off his horse, “Take the men and the horses to the village green, and get them under some sort of cover. The beasts won’t sit still for a lot of magic and howling, I imagine.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Janos said, and jerked his head to his second.
The soldiers were as happy as the horses to be out of it. They took our mounts, too, and went eagerly, a few of them glancing sidelong through the barn doors. I saw Michal look back over his hunched shoulders several times, the ruddy color gone out of his face.
None of them understood, really, about the Wood. They weren’t men from the valley—as I’ve said, the Dragon didn’t need to levy a troop to send to the king’s army—and they weren’t from anywhere nearby, either. They carried shields marked with a crest of a knight upon a horse, so they were all from the northern provinces around Tarakai, where Queen Hanna had come from. Their idea of magic was a lightning-strike on a battlefield, deadly and clean. They didn’t know what they were riding to face.
“Wait,” the Dragon said, before Janos turned his own