by Naomi Novik
I’d grown up riding my father’s big slow draft horses, who would only look around at me in mild surprise if I stood upside down on their broad backs, and refused to have anything to do with trotting, much less a canter. But Prince Marek had put us on spare horses his knights had brought with them, and they seemed like entirely different animals. When I accidentally tugged on the reins in some wrong way, my horse jumped up onto its hind legs and lashed out its hooves, crow-stepping forward while I clung in alarm to its mane. It came down after some time, for reasons equally impenetrable to me, and pranced along very satisfied with itself. At least until we passed Zatochek.
There wasn’t a single place where the valley road ended. I suppose it had gone on much farther once—on to Porosna, and maybe to some other nameless long-swallowed village beyond it. But before the creak of the mill-house at Zatochek bridge faded behind us, the weeds and grass began to nibble at the edges, and a mile onward we could barely tell that it was still underfoot. The soldiers were still laughing and singing, but the horses were wiser than we were, maybe. Their pace slowed without any signal from their riders. They whuffed nervously and jerked their heads, their ears pricking forward and back and their skin giving nervous shivers as if flies were bothering them. But there were no flies. Up ahead, the wall of dark trees was waiting.
“Pull up here,” the Dragon said, and as if they’d understood him and were glad of the excuse, the horses halted almost at once, all of them. “Get a drink of water and eat something, if you like. Let nothing more pass your lips once we’re beneath the trees.” He swung down from his horse.
I climbed down from my own, very cautiously. “I’ll take her,” one of the soldiers said to me, a blond boy with a friendly round face marred only by a twice-broken nose. He clucked to my mare, cheerful and competent. All the men were taking their horses to drink from the river, and passing around loaves of bread and flasks with liquor in them.
The Dragon beckoned me over. “Put on your protection spell, as thickly as you can,” he said. “And then try to place it on the soldiers, if you can. I’ll lay another on you as well.”
“Will it keep the shadows out of us?” I said doubtfully. “Even inside the Wood?”
“No. But it will slow them down,” he said. “There’s a barn just outside Zatochek: I keep it stocked with purgatives, against a need to go into the Wood. As soon as we’re out again, we’ll go there and dose ourselves. Ten times, no matter how certain you are that you’re clear.”
I looked at the crowd of young soldiers, talking and laughing among themselves as they ate their bread. “Do you have enough for all of them?”
He turned a cold certain look over them like the sweep of a scythe. “For however many of them will be left,” he said.
I shivered. “You still don’t think this is a good idea. Even after Jerzy.” A thin plume of smoke still rose from the Wood, where the heart-tree burned: we’d seen it yesterday.
“It’s a dreadful idea,” the Dragon said. “But letting Marek lead you and Solya in there without me is a still-worse one. At least I have some idea what to expect. Come: we don’t have much time.”
Kasia silently helped me gather bundles of pine needles for my spell. The Falcon was already building an elaborate shield of his own around Prince Marek, like a shining wall of bricks going up one after another, and when he had raised it above Marek’s head, the whole thing glowed as a whole and then collapsed in on him. If I glanced at Marek sideways I could see the faint shimmer of it clinging to his skin. The Falcon put another one on himself. I noticed he didn’t lay it on any of the soldiers, though.
I knelt and made a smudge-fire of my pine needles and branches. When the smoke was filling the clearing, bitter and throat-drying, I looked up at the Dragon. “Cast yours now?” I asked. The Dragon’s spell settling on my shoulders felt like putting on a heavy coat in front of the fireplace: it left me itchy and uncomfortable, and thinking too much about why I was going to need it. I hummed my protection spell along with his chant, imagining that I was bundling up the rest of the way against the heart of winter: not just coat but mittens, woolen scarf, hat with the ear-covers buttoned down, knitted pants over my boots, and veils wrapped over it all, everything tucked snugly in, leaving no cracks for the cold air to wriggle through.
“All of you pull up your scarves,” I said, without looking away from my smoky fire, forgetting a moment that I was talking to grown men, soldiers; and what was odder still was they did what I said. I pushed the smoke out around me, letting it sink into the wool and cotton of their wraps, carrying protection with it.
The last of the needles crumbled into ash. The fire went out. I climbed a little unsteadily up to my feet, coughing from the smoke, and rubbed my tearing eyes. When I blinked them clear again, I flinched: the Falcon was watching me, hungry and intent, even as he drew a fold of his own cloak up over his mouth and nose. I turned quickly away and went to get a drink from the river myself, and wash the smoke from my hands and face. I didn’t like the way his eyes tried to pierce my skin.
Kasia and I shared a loaf of bread ourselves: the endlessly familiar daily loaf from Dvernik’s baker, crusty and grey-brown and a little bit sour, the taste of every morning at home. The soldiers were putting away their flasks and wiping off crumbs and getting back on their horses. The sun had broken over the trees.
“All right, Falcon,” Prince Marek said, when we were all back on our horses. He drew off his gauntlet. He had a ring sitting above the first joint of his smallest finger, a delicate round band of gold set with small blue jewels; a woman’s ring. “Show us the way.”
“Hold your thumb above the band,” the Falcon said, and leaning over from his own horse, he pricked Marek’s finger with a jeweled pin and squeezed it. A fat drop of blood fell onto the ring, painting the gold red while the Falcon murmured a finding spell.
The blue stones turned dark purple. A violet light gathered around Marek’s hand, and even when he pulled his gauntlet back on, the light still limned it. He raised his fist up before him and moved it from side to side: it brightened when he held it towards the Wood. He led us forward, and one after another our horses crossed over the ash and went into the dark trees.
The Wood was a different place in spring than in winter. There was a sense of quickening and wakefulness. My skin shivered with the sense of watching eyes all around as soon as the first bough-shadows touched me. The horses’ hooves fell with muffled blows on the ground, picking over moss and underbrush, edging past brambles that reached for us with long pricking thorns. Silent dark birds darted almost invisible from tree to tree, pacing us. I was sure suddenly that if I had come alone, in spring, I wouldn’t have reached Kasia at all; not without a fight.
But today, we rode with thirty men around us, all of them armored and armed. The soldiers carried long heavy blades and torches and sacks of salt, as the Dragon had ordered. The ones riding in the lead hacked at the brush, widening the trails as we pushed our way along them. The rest burned back the brambles to either side, and salted the earth of the path behind us so we’d be able to retreat the way we’d come.
But their laughter died. We rode silently but for the muffled jingle of harness, the soft thuds of hooves on the bare track, a murmur of a word to one another here and there. The horses didn’t even whicker anymore. They watched the trees with large eyes rimmed with white. We all felt that we were hunted.
Kasia rode next to me, and her head was bowed deeply over her horse’s neck. I managed to reach out and catch her fingers with mine. “What is it?” I said softly.
She looked away from our path and pointed towards a tree in the distance, an old blackened oak struck years before by lightning; moss hung from its dead branches, like a bent old woman spreading wide her skirts to curtsy. “I remember that tree,” she said. She dropped her hand and stared straight ahead through her horse’s ears. “And that red rock we passed, and the grey bramble—all of them. It’s as though I didn’t leave.” She was whispering, too
. “It’s as though I never left at all. I don’t know if you’re even real, Nieshka. What if I’ve only been having another dream?”
I squeezed her hand, helplessly. I didn’t know how to comfort her.
“There’s something nearby,” she said. “Something up ahead.”
The captain heard her and glanced back. “Something dangerous?”
“Something dead,” Kasia said, and dropped her eyes to her saddle, her hands clenched on the reins.
The light was brightening around us, and the track widened beneath the horses’ feet. Their shoes clopped hollowly. I looked down and saw cobblestones half-buried beneath moss, broken. When I looked back up, I flinched: in the distance, through the trees, a ghostly grey face stared back at me, with a huge hollow eye above a wide square mouth: a gutted barn.
“Get off the track,” the Dragon said sharply. “Go around: north or south, it doesn’t matter. But don’t ride through the square, and keep moving.”
“What is this place?” Marek said.
“Porosna,” the Dragon said. “Or what’s left of it.”
We turned our horses and went north, picking our way through brambles and the ruins of small poor houses, sagging on their beams, thatched roofs fallen in. I tried not to look at the ground. Moss and fine grass covered it thickly, and tall young trees were stretching up for sun, already spreading out overhead and breaking the sunlight into moving, shifting dapples. But there were shapes still half-buried beneath the moss, here and there a hand of bones breaking the sod, white fingertips poking through the soft carpeting green that caught the light and gleamed cold. Above the houses, if I looked towards where the village square would have stood, a vast shining silver canopy spread, and I could hear the far-off rustling whisper of the leaves of a heart-tree.
“Couldn’t we stop and burn it?” I whispered to the Dragon, as softly as I could.
“Certainly,” he said. “If we used fire-heart, and retreated the way we came at once. It would be the wise thing to do.”
He didn’t keep his voice down. But Prince Marek didn’t look around, though a few of the soldiers glanced at us. The horses stretched their necks, trembling, and we rode on quickly, leaving the dead behind us.
We stopped a little while later to give the horses a rest. They were all tired, from fear as much as effort. The path had widened around some marshy ground, the end of a spring creek that was drying up now as the snowmelt stopped running. A small trickle still came bubbling along and made a wide clear pool over a bed of rocks. “Is it safe to let the horses drink?” Prince Marek asked the Dragon, who shrugged.
“You may as well,” he said. “It’s not much worse than having them beneath the trees. You’d have to put them all down after this in any case.”
Janos had already slid down from his horse; he had a hand on its nose, calming the animal. He jerked his head around. “These are trained warhorses! They’re worth their weight in silver.”
“And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold,” the Dragon said. “If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn’t have brought them into the Wood. But don’t distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won’t arise.”
Prince Marek threw him a hard look, but he didn’t quarrel; instead he caught Janos aside and spoke to him consolingly.
Kasia had gone to stand by the edge of the clearing where a handful of deer tracks continued on; she was looking away from the pool. I wondered if she’d seen this place, too, in her long wandering imprisonment. She stared into the dark trees. The Dragon came past her; he glanced at her and spoke; I saw her head turn towards him.
“I wonder if you know what he owes you,” the Falcon said unexpectedly, behind me; I startled and turned my head around. My horse was drinking thirstily; I gripped the reins and edged a little closer to its warm side. I didn’t say anything.
The Falcon only raised one narrow eyebrow, black and neat. “The kingdom hasn’t a limitless store of wizards. By law, the gift places you beyond vassalage. You have a right to a place at court, now, and the patronage of the king himself. You should never have been kept here in this valley in the first place, much less treated like a drudge.” He waved a hand up and down at my clothes. I had dressed myself as I would have to go gleaning, in tall mud-boots, loose work trousers sewn of sacking, and a brown smock over it all. He still wore his white cloak, although the Wood’s malice was stronger than whatever charm he’d used to keep it neat in the ordinary woods; there were threads snagged along the edge of it.
He misunderstood my doubtful look. “Your father is a farmer, I suppose?”
“A woodcutter,” I said.
He flicked a hand as if to say it made not the least difference. “Then you know nothing of the court, I imagine. When the gift rose in me, the king raised my father to a knighthood, and when I finished my training, to a barony. He will not be less generous to you.” He leaned towards me, and my horse snorted bubbles in the water as I leaned hard against her. “Whatever you may have heard, growing up in this backwater, Sarkan is by no means the only wizard of note in Polnya. I assure you that you needn’t feel bound to him, simply because he’s found an—interesting way to use you. I’m certain there are many other wizards you could align yourself with.” He extended his hand towards me, and raised a thin spiraling flame in the palm of his hand with a murmured word. “Perhaps you’d care to try?”
“With you?” I blurted, undiplomatically; his eyes narrowed a little at the corners. I didn’t feel at all sorry, though. “After what you did to Kasia?”
He put on injured surprise like a second cloak. “I’ve done her and you a favor. Do you imagine anyone would have been willing to take Sarkan’s word for her cure? Your patron might charitably be called eccentric, burying himself out here and coming to court only when he’s summoned, gloomy as a storm and issuing warnings of inevitable disasters that somehow never come. He hasn’t any friends at court, and the few who would stand beside him are the very doom-sayers who insisted on having your friend put to death at once. If Prince Marek hadn’t intervened, the king would have sent an executioner instead, and summoned Sarkan to the capital to answer for the crime of letting her live this long.”
He’d come to be exactly that executioner, but apparently he didn’t mean to let that stand in the way of claiming he’d done me a kindness. I didn’t know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss. But he didn’t force me to that point. He said only, in a gentle voice that suggested I was being unreasonable, “Think a little about what I’ve told you. I don’t blame you for your anger, but don’t let it make you spurn good advice,” and gave me a courtly bow. He withdrew gracefully even as Kasia rejoined me. The soldiers were getting back on their horses.
Her face was sober, and she was rubbing her arms. The Dragon had gone to mount his own horse; I glanced over at him, wondering what he’d said to her. “Are you all right?” I asked Kasia.
“He told me not to fear I was still corrupted,” she said. Her mouth moved a little, the ghost of a smile. “He said if I could fear it, I probably wasn’t.” Then even more unexpectedly she added, “He told me he was sorry I’d been afraid of him—of being chosen, I mean. He said he wouldn’t take anyone again.”
I had shouted at him over that; I hadn’t ever expected him to listen. I stared at her, but I didn’t have any time to wonder: Janos had mounted, looked his men over, and he said abruptly, “Where’s Michal?”
We counted heads and horses, and called loudly in every direction. There was no answer, and no trail of broken branches or stirred leaves to show which way he’d gone. He’d been seen only a few moments before, waiting to give his horse water. If he’d been snatched, it had been silently.
“Enough,” the Dragon said at last. “He’s gone.”
Janos looked at the prince in protest. But after a silent moment, Marek said finally, “We go on. Ride two by two, and keep in each other’s sight.”
Janos’s
face was hard and unhappy as he wrapped the scarf closely over his nose and mouth again, but he jerked his head at the first two soldiers, and after a moment they started into motion down the path. We rode on into the Wood.
Beneath the boughs it was hard to tell what time it was, how long we’d been riding. The Wood was silent as no forest ever was: no hum of insects, not even the occasional twig-snap under a rabbit’s foot. Even our own horses made very little noise, hooves coming down on soft moss and grass and saplings instead of bare dirt. The track was running out. The men in the front had to hack at the brush all the time to give us a way through at all.
A faint sound of rushing water came to us through the trees. The track abruptly widened again. We halted; I stood up in my stirrups, and over the shoulders of the soldier in front of me I could just see a break in the trees. We were on the bank of the Spindle again.
We came out of the forest nearly a foot above the river, on a soft sloping bank. Trees and brush overhung the water, willows trailing long weedy branches into the reeds that clustered thickly at the water’s edge, between the pale tangle of exposed tree-roots against the wet dirt. The Spindle was wide enough that over the middle, sunlight broke through the interlaced canopy of the trees. It glittered on the river’s surface without penetrating, and we could tell most of the day had gone. We sat for a long moment in silence. There was a wrongness to meeting the river like this, cutting across our path. We’d been riding east; we should have been alongside it.