by Naomi Novik
It wasn’t a very long walk: the nobles lived in houses set inside the outer walls of the citadel—or the richest ones did, anyway. The footmen at the yellow house stared at me, too, when I finally walked up to the entrance, but they opened the doors for me. I stopped on the threshold: it was my turn to stare. On my way, I had gone by more than one pair of men carrying peculiar tall boxes around the castle grounds; I hadn’t known what they were for. Now one of them was being carried to the steps of the house, right behind me. A footman opened up the door in its side, and there was a chair inside it. A young lady climbed out.
The footman offered her a hand to step out onto the stairs of the house, but then he went back to his place. She paused on the lower step looking up at me. I asked her doubtfully, “Do you need help?” She didn’t stand as though she had a bad leg, but I couldn’t tell what was beneath her skirts, and I couldn’t imagine any other reason she would have shut herself up into such a bizarre thing.
But she only stared at me, and then two more of the chairs came up behind her, discharging more guests behind her. It was just how they went from place to place. “Do none of you ever walk?” I asked, baffled.
“And how do you keep from getting all over mud?” she said.
We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today’s skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace.
“I don’t,” I said glumly.
That was how I met Lady Alicja of Lidzvar. We walked into the house and were immediately interrupted by our hostess, who appeared in the hall between us, greeted Lady Alicja very perfunctorily, then seized my arms and kissed me on both cheeks. “My dear Lady Agnieszka,” she said, “how lovely that you were able to come, and what a charming gown: you are sure to start a new fashion.” I stared at her beaming face in dismay. Her name had gone completely out of my head. But it didn’t seem to matter. Even while I mumbled something polite and grateful, she twined her perfumed arm around mine and drew me into the sitting-room where her guests were gathered.
She paraded me around to everyone there, while I silently and fervently hated Solya all the more, for being right. Everyone was so very glad to make my acquaintance, everyone was scrupulously polite—at first, anyway. They didn’t ask me for magic. What they did want was gossip about the queen’s rescue. Their manners were too nice to ask questions outright, but each of them said something like, “I’ve heard that there was a chimaera guarding her … ,” letting the words trail off expectantly, inviting me to correct them.
I could have said anything. I could have passed it off in some clever way, or claimed any number of marvels: they were plainly ready to be impressed with me, to let me assume a heroic role. But I recoiled from the memory of that dreadful slaughter all around me, of blood watering the earth into mud. I flinched and blundered, answering with a flat “No” or saying nothing at all, and dropping one conversation after another into an awkward hole of silence. My disappointed hostess finally abandoned me in a corner near a tree—there was an orange tree growing inside the house, in a pot—and went to smooth over the ruffled feathers of her other guests.
It was perfectly clear to me that if there was any good I could have done Kasia here, I’d just done the opposite. I was grimly wondering if I should swallow my reluctance and go find Solya after all when Lady Alicja appeared at my elbow. “I didn’t realize you were the new witch,” she said, taking my arm and leaning in conspiratorially. “Of course you don’t need a sedan chair. Do tell me, do you travel by turning yourself into an enormous bat? Like Baba Jaga—”
I was glad to talk about Jaga, about anything besides the Wood, and even more glad to find someone other than Solya willing to show me how to go on. By the time we finished dinner, I had agreed to go with Lady Alicja to a breakfast and a card party and a dinner the next day. I spent the next two days almost entirely in her company.
I didn’t think us friends, exactly. I wasn’t in a mood to make friends. Every time I trudged back and forth from the castle to yet another party, I had to pass by the barracks of the royal guard, and in the middle of their courtyard stood the stark iron block, scorched and black, where they beheaded the corrupted before they burned their corpses. Alosha’s forge stood nearby, and more often than not her fire was roaring, her silhouette raising showers of orange sparks with a hammer made of shadow.
“The only mercy you can give the corrupted is a sharpened blade,” she had said, when I’d tried to persuade her to at least visit Kasia once herself. I couldn’t help but think maybe she was working on the headman’s axe right then, while I sat in stuffy rooms and ate fish eggs on toast with the crusts cut off, and tea sweetened with sugar, and tried to talk to people I didn’t know.
But I did think Lady Alicja was kind, taking a clumsy peasant girl under her wing. She was only a year or two older than me, but already married to a rich old baron who spent most of his days at card-parties. She seemed to know everyone. I was grateful, and determined to be grateful, and I felt half-guilty for not being better company or understanding the manners of the court. I didn’t know what to say when Lady Alicja insisted on paying me loud and intensely fervent compliments on the excessive lace on my gown, or on the way I mangled the steps of a courtly dance when she persuaded some poor goggle-eyed young nobleman to take me on, much to the dismay of his toes and the amused stares of the room.
I didn’t realize she was mocking me all the time until the third day. We’d planned to meet at an afternoon music party held at the house of a baroness. There was music at all the parties, so I didn’t understand what made this one especially a music party; Alicja had just laughed when I’d asked her. But I dutifully tramped over after lunch, trying my best to hold up my long silver-frost train and balance the matching headdress, a long curved heavy swoop over my head that wanted to fall either backwards or forwards, either way as long as it didn’t stay in place. Coming into the room, I caught the train in the doorway and stumbled, and the headdress went sliding back over my ears.
Alicja caught sight of me and crossed the room in a dramatic rush to clasp my hands. “Dearest,” she said urgently, breathlessly, “what a brilliantly original angle—I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
I blurted out, “Are you—are you trying to be rude?” As soon as the idea occurred to me, all the odd things she’d said and done came together and made a strange malicious sense. But I couldn’t believe it at first; I didn’t understand why she would have. No one had made her talk to me, or be in my company. I couldn’t understand why she would have gone to the trouble just to be unpleasant.
Then I couldn’t doubt it anymore: she put on a wide-eyed, surprised expression that plainly meant yes, she was trying to be rude. “Why, Nieshka,” she began, as though she thought I was an idiot, too.
I pulled my hands free from hers with a jerk, staring at her. “Agnieszka will do,” I said, startled and sharp, “and since you like my style so much, katboru.” Her own curved headdress tipped backwards down her head—and took with it the elaborate lovely curls to either side of her face, which were evidently false. She gave a small scream and clutched at them, and ran out of the room.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Worse was the titter that went all around the room, from men I’d seen her dance with and women she’d called her intimate friends. I jerked off my own headdress and hurried over to the lavish refreshments, hiding my face from the room over bowls of grapes. Even there, a young man in an embroidered coat that must have taken some woman a year of work sidled up to my side and whispered in tones of glee that Alicja wouldn’t be able to show her face at court for a year—as though that should have pleased me.
I managed to duck away from him into a servants’ hallway, and then in desperation I pulled out Jaga’s book from my pocket until I found a spell for a quick exit, to let me pass through the wall of the house instead of going back inside and out the front door. I couldn’t bear to hear any more poisonous congr
atulations.
I came out through the yellow-brick wall panting like I’d escaped from a prison. A small lion-mouthed fountain stood gurgling away in the center of the plaza, the afternoon sun dazzling and captured in the basin, and a carved flock of birds around the top singing softly. I could tell at a glance it was Ragostok’s work. And there was Solya, perched on the edge of the fountain, running his fingers through the light in the water.
“I’m glad to see you’ve rescued yourself,” he said. “Even though you walked yourself into it as determinedly as you possibly could.” He hadn’t been in the house at all, but I was sure he knew every detail of Alicja’s mortification and mine, and for all his sorrowful expression, I was sure he’d been delighted to watch me make a fool of myself.
All the time I’d been grateful that Alicja didn’t want my magic or my secrets, it had never occurred to me that she might want something else. Even if it had, I wouldn’t have imagined she’d been looking for a target for malice. We weren’t stupidly cruel to each other in Dvernik. Of course there were quarrels sometimes and people you liked less, and sometimes even a fight broke out, if people got angry enough. But when harvest came, your neighbors came to help you gather and thresh, and when the shadow of the Wood stole over us, we knew better than to make it any darker. And none of us would’ve been rude to a witch no matter what. “I would have thought even a noblewoman had more sense than that,” I said.
Solya shrugged. “Perhaps she didn’t believe you one.”
I opened my mouth to protest that she’d seen me do magic, but I suppose she hadn’t: not like Ragostok, who would burst into rooms like a thunderclap with showers of glittering silver sparks and birds calling as they flew out in every direction; not even like Solya gliding smoothly in and out of shadows in his elegant robes, with those bright sharp eyes of his that seemed to see everything that went on in the castle grounds. I shoved myself into ballgowns in my own room, and walked to parties stubbornly, and in a strangling corset that was quite enough to spend my breath on without doing tricks just to show off.
“But how did she think I got myself on the list?” I demanded.
“I imagine she thought what the rest of the wizards did, at first.”
“What, that you put me on because Sarkan was in love with me?” I said, sarcastic.
“Marek, more likely,” he said, entirely serious, and I stared at him appalled. “Really, Agnieszka, I would have expected you to understand that much by now.”
“I don’t want to understand any of this!” I said. “Those people in there, they were happy for Alicja to mock me, and then they were just as happy for me to make her miserable.”
“Of course,” he said. “They’re delighted to learn that you were playing the yokel only to set up an elaborate mockery of the first person who took your bait. That makes you part of the game.”
“I didn’t set a trap for her!” I said. I wanted to add that no one would think of something like that, no one in their right mind anyway, only I had the unpleasant sticky feeling that some of these people would.
“No, I didn’t imagine you had,” Solya said judiciously. “But you may want to let people believe you did. They will anyway, no matter what you say.” He stood up from the edge of the fountain. “The situation’s not beyond repair. I think you’ll find people much friendlier to you at the dinner tonight. Won’t you let me escort you, after all?”
For answer, I turned on my pointed heel and stalked away from him and his amused huff of laughter, letting my stupid train drag along the ground behind me.
I made my thundercloud way out of the neat courtyard and into the noisy bustle of the green outer courtyard of the castle. A heap of haybales and barrels sat alongside the main road from the outer gates to the inner ones, waiting to be loaded somewhere or other. I sat down on one bale to think. I had the horrible certain feeling that Solya was right about this, too. And that meant any courtier who would speak to me now would only do so because they liked this sort of spiteful game; anyone decent wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
But there wasn’t anyone else I could talk to, or even ask for advice. The servants and soldiers didn’t want any part of me, either, nor the officials hurrying on their appointed rounds. As they came past me now I could see them all throwing doubtful looks in my direction: a fine lady sitting on a haybale next to the road in my satin and lace finery, my dragging train full of grass and sand, a stray leaf in a well-tended garden. I didn’t belong.
Worse than that, I wasn’t being any use—to Kasia or to Sarkan or anyone back home. I was ready to testify, and there wasn’t a trial; I’d begged for soldiers, but none had gone. I’d attended more parties in three days than in my whole life before, and I had nothing to show for it but ruining the reputation of one silly girl who’d probably never had a real friend in her life.
In a burst of frustration and anger, I called vanastalem, but slurred deeply, and between one passing wagon and the next, I put myself back into the clothes of a woodcutter’s daughter: good plain homespun, a skirt that wasn’t too long for sensible boots to show beneath it, an apron with two big pockets in it. I breathed easier at once, and found myself suddenly invisible: no one was looking at me anymore. No one cared who I was, or what I was doing.
There were hazards to invisibility, too: while I stood there on the edge of the road enjoying the pleasure of a deep breath, an enormous carriage swollen out over its wheels on all sides and four footmen hanging off it came rattling past me, and nearly knocked me over. I had to jump out of the way into a puddle, my boots squelching and mud spattering my skirts. But I didn’t care. I knew myself for the first time in a week, standing on earth instead of polished marble.
I went back up the hill in the carriage track, my stride swinging wide and free in my easy skirts, and slipped into the inner court without any trouble. The fat carriage had drawn up to disgorge an ambassador in a white coat, a red sash of office brilliant across his chest. The crown prince was there to meet him, with a crowd of courtiers and an honor guard carrying the flag of Polnya and a yellow-and-red flag with the head of an ox upon it, one I’d never seen before. He must have been coming to the state dinner. I’d been meant to go there with Alicja this evening. All the guards were watching the ceremony with half an eye at least, and when I whispered to them that I wasn’t worth taking any notice of, their eyes slid over me the way they wanted to, anyway.
Going back and forth from parties three times a day from my inconvenient room had been good for one thing, at least: I had learned to find my way about the castle. There were servants in the hallways, but all of them were laden under linens and silver, hurrying to make ready for the dinner party. None of them had attention to spare for a mud-spattered scullery-maid. I eeled around and through them and made my way down the long dark corridor to the Grey Tower.
The four guards on duty at the base of the tower were bored and yawning with the late hour. “You missed the stair to the kitchens, sweetheart,” one of them said good-naturedly to me. “It’s back down the hall.”
I stored that information away for later, and then I did my best to stare at them the way that everyone had been staring at me for the last three days, as though I were perfectly astonished by their ignorance. “Don’t you know who I am?” I said. “I’m Agnieszka, the witch. I’m here to see Kasia.” And to have a look at the queen, more to the point. I couldn’t think why the trial would be put off so long, unless the king was trying to give the queen more time to get well.
The guards all looked at each other uncertainly. Before they could decide what to do about me, I whispered, “Alamak, alamak,” and walked straight on through the locked doors between them.
They weren’t nobles, so I suppose they weren’t inclined to pick a quarrel with a witch. They didn’t come after me, at least. I climbed the narrow staircase around and around until I came out onto the landing with the hungry imp knocker gaping at me. Taking the round knob felt as though my hand was being licked thoroughly by
a lion that was deciding whether or not I would taste good. I held it as gingerly as I could and banged on the door.
I had a list of arguments for the Willow, and behind them flat determination. I was ready to shove my way past her if I had to; she was too much a fine lady to lower herself to wrestling with me, I suspected. But she didn’t come to the door at all, and when I pressed my ear to it, I faintly heard shouting inside. In alarm, I backed up and tried to think: would the guards be able to knock the door down, if I shouted for them? I didn’t think so. The door was made of iron and riveted with iron, and there wasn’t even a keyhole to be seen.
I looked at the imp, which leered back. Hunger radiated from its empty maw. But if I filled it up? I called a simple spell, just some light: the imp immediately began to suck the magic in, but I kept feeding power to the spell until finally a little candle-wavering gleam lit in my hand. The imp’s hunger was an enormous pull, guzzling in nearly all the magic I could give, but I managed to divert a narrow silver stream: I let it collect into a tiny pool inside me, and then I squeezed out, “Alamak,” and with one desperate jump I went through the door. It took all the strength I had left: I rolled out onto the floor of the room beyond and sprawled flat on my back, emptied.
Footsteps came running across the floor to me, and Kasia was at my side. “Nieshka, are you all right?”
The shouting was from the next room: Marek, standing fists clenched in the middle of the floor and roaring at the Willow, who stood ramrod-stiff and white with anger. Neither of them paid much attention to my falling in through the door; they were too busy being furious at each other.
“Look at her!” Marek flung an arm out at the queen. She still sat by the same window as before, listless and unmoved. If she heard the shouting, she didn’t so much as flinch. “Three days without a word from her lips, and you call yourself a healer? What use are you?”
“None, evidently,” the Willow said icily. “All I have done is everything that could be done, as well as it could be done.” She did take notice of me then, finally: she turned and looked down her nose at me on the floor. “I understand this is the miracle-worker of the kingdom. Perhaps you can spare her from your bed long enough to do better. Until then, tend her yourself. I am not going to stand here to be howled at for my efforts.”