by Naomi Novik
I didn’t know what to do. If I agreed, if I went along with Alosha—would the king listen to her? If I wrote to Sarkan, and he wrote back to agree? I bit my lip while she raised one cool eyebrow at me, waiting for me to answer. Then she looked over: the doors to the Charovnikov had swung open. The Falcon stood in the doorway, his snowy robes catching the light, a white figure framed in the dark opening. His eyes narrowed as he took the three of us in standing together; then he manufactured another of his smiles. “I see you’ve all been busy here,” he said lightly. “But in the meantime, there have been developments. Perhaps you’d care to come down to the trial?”
Chapter 21
Outside the haven of the Charovnikov, the noise of the party filled the empty corridors. The music had stopped, but a sea of raised voices in the distance roared and fell like waves, louder and louder as the Falcon led us to the state ballroom. The footmen opened the doors for us hastily onto the staircase leading down to the vast dancing-floor. The ambassador in his white coat sat in a chair beside the king’s throne, on a high dais overlooking the floor; Prince Sigmund and his wife were on the king’s other side. The king was sitting with his hands clenched over the lion-clawed arms of his chair, face mottled with anger.
In the middle of the floor before him, Marek had cleared a wide-open circle, six full rows of shocked and avidly staring dancers drawn back from him, the ladies in their billowing skirts like strewn flowers in a ring. In the center of that circle stood the queen, blank-faced in a white prisoner’s shift, with Kasia holding on to her arm; Kasia looked around and saw me with relief on her face, but I couldn’t get anywhere near her. The crowd was packed up the stairs, hanging over the edge of the overlooking mezzanine to watch.
The royal secretary was almost crouched before Marek, speaking in a tremulous voice, holding a heavy law-book in front of himself as if it could make a shield. I couldn’t blame him for cowering. Marek stood not two paces from him like a figure stepped out of a song: encased in armor of bright, polished steel, with a sword in his hand that could have cut down an ox and a helm under his arm. He stood before the secretary like a figure of avenging justice, shining with violence.
“In cases—in cases of corruption,” the secretary stammered, “the right of trial by combat is not—is expressly revoked, by the law of Boguslav the—” He fell back with a choked sound. Marek had swept the sword up barely inches from his face.
Marek continued the movement, swung the sword around all the room, turning: the breathless crowd drew back from the point. “The queen of Polnya has the right to a champion!” he shouted. “Let any wizard stand forth and show any sign of corruption in her! You there, Falcon,” he said, whirling and pointing up the stairs, and the whole court’s eyes turned towards us, “lay a spell upon her now! Let all the court look and see if there is any spot upon her—” The whole court made a sound together, a sigh that rose and fell, ecstatic: archdukes and serving-maids as one.
I think that was why the king didn’t stop it right away. The crowd on the stairs parted to make way for us, and the Falcon swept forward, his long sleeves trailing down the staircase, and coming to the floor made the king an elegant bow. He had obviously made ready for this moment: he had a large pouch full of something heavy, and he crooked his finger and brought four of the high spell-lamps down from the ceiling, to stand around the queen. And then he opened the pouch and flung a wave of blue sand up into the air over her head, speaking softly.
I couldn’t hear the incantation, but a hot white light came crackling out of his fingers and ran through the falling sand. There was a smell of melting glass, thin wisps of smoke escaping: the sand dissolved away entirely as it came down, and a faintly blue distortion formed in the air instead, so that it seemed I saw the queen and Kasia through a thick pane of glass with mirrors all around them. The spell-lamps’ light shone blazing through the distortion, brightening as it passed through. I could see the bones of Kasia’s hand through her flesh, where it rested on the queen’s shoulder, and the faint outline of her skull and her teeth.
Marek reached out and took the queen’s hand, leading her in a circle on display. The nobles hadn’t seen the archbishop’s trial, Jadwiga’s veil. They stared avidly at the queen in her white gown, her very blood vessels a faint tracework of shining lines inside her, everything glowing; her eyes were lamps and her parted lips breathing a glowing haze: no shadow, no smudge of darkness. The court was murmuring even before the light slowly faded out of her.
The glass shattered apart and fell in a chiming shower, dissolving back into blue wisps of smoke as it reached the ground. “Let her be examined further,” Marek shouted over the rising noise of conversation, almost aglow himself with righteousness. “Call any witness: let the Willow come forth, and the archbishop—”
The room was plainly Marek’s for the moment; even I could see a thousand rumors of murder beginning here if the king refused, if he ordered the queen taken away, and put her to death later. The king saw it, too. He looked around at all his courtiers and then gave a short, hard jerk of his chin to his chest; he sat back in the throne. So Marek had managed to force his father’s hand this far, even without sorcery: whether the king had wanted to call a trial or not, the trial was effectively begun.
But I had seen the king three times, now. I would have called him—not pleasant, exactly; there were too many lines drawn deep in his face, frowning, to imagine him gentle or kind. But if I’d been asked to describe him in a word, I would have said worried. Now I would have said angry, cold as a winter storm, and he was still the one who had to pass judgment in the end.
I wanted to run out and break up the trial, to tell Marek to take it back, but it was too late. The Willow had already stepped forward to testify, pillar-straight in a silver gown. “I have found no corruption, but I will not swear there is none,” she said coolly, speaking directly up to the king and ignoring Marek’s clenched jaw and the scrape of his gauntleted hand upon his sword-hilt. “The queen is not herself. She has spoken not a word, and she shows no signs of recognition. Her flesh is wholly changed. There is nothing left of her mortal sinew or bone. And while flesh may be turned to stone or to metal without carrying corruption, this change has certainly been carried out by a corrupt agency.”
“And yet if her altered flesh carried corruption,” the Falcon broke in, “would you not have expected to observe it beneath my spell?”
The Willow didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge him; he had evidently spoken out of turn. She only inclined her head to the king, who nodded once and moved his fingers in a slight gesture to dismiss her.
The archbishop was just as equivocal. He would only say that he had tried the queen on all the holy relics of the cathedral, not that she wasn’t corrupt. They neither of them cared to be proven wrong afterwards, I imagine.
Only a few other witnesses came forward to speak in the queen’s favor, physicians whom Marek had brought to see her. None of them spoke about Kasia at all. She wasn’t even an afterthought to them, but she would live or die on their words. And the queen stood silent and inert next to her. The glow had faded out now and left her blank-faced, empty, for all the court to see.
I looked at Alosha, standing next to me, and Ballo on her other side. I knew when it was their turn, they would stand up and tell the king about that hideous bestiary, sitting back there in the Charovnikov in a thick circle of salt and iron with all the protective spells they could layer over it and the guards posted to watch it close. Alosha would say that the chance shouldn’t be taken; she would tell the king that there was too much risk to the kingdom. And then, if he wanted to, the king could rise and say the laws against corruption were absolute; he could put on a regretful face, and send the queen to death, and Kasia along with her. And looking at him, I thought that he would. He would do it.
He’d sunk back deeply into his great carved chair as if he needed the support for the weight of his body, and his hand covered his unsmiling mouth. Decision was settling over
him like snowfall, the first thin dusting that would build and build. The rest of the witnesses would speak, but he wouldn’t hear them. He’d already decided. I saw Kasia’s death in his heavy, grim face, and I looked desperately across the room to catch the Falcon’s eye. Next to him, Marek stood as tense as his fist clenched around his sword.
Solya looked back at me and only spread his hands, subtly, as much as to say I’ve done what I can. He leaned in and murmured something to Marek, and when the last physician had stepped down, the prince said, “Let Agnieszka of Dvernik be called to witness how the queen was freed.”
That’s what I had wanted, after all; this was the reason I’d come and fought to have myself put on the list. Everyone was looking at me, even the king with his lowered brows. But I still didn’t know what to say. What would it matter to the king, to any of these courtiers, for me to say the queen wasn’t corrupt? They certainly wouldn’t care what I said of Kasia.
Maybe Solya would try and cast the Summoning with me, if I asked him to. I thought of doing that, imagined that white light showing the whole court the truth. But—the queen had already been tested beneath Jadwiga’s veil. The court had seen her beneath the Falcon’s sight. The king could see she wasn’t corrupted. This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.
But I could give them something else entirely. I could give them what they really wanted. And then I realized I knew what that was, after all. They wanted to know. They wanted to see what it had been like. They wanted to feel themselves a part of it, of the queen’s rescue; they wanted to be living in a song. That wasn’t truth, anything like it, but it might convince them to spare Kasia’s life.
I closed my eyes and remembered the illusion spell: Easier than real armies, Sarkan had said, and as I began to whisper the spell, I knew that he was right. It was no harder than making a single flower to raise up the whole of that monstrous heart-tree, and it climbed up out of the marble floor with terrible ease. Kasia dragged in a breath; a woman screamed; there was a clatter of a chair falling over somewhere in the room. I shut the noise out. I let the incantation keep rolling singsong off my tongue while I poured out magic and the sick, tight dread that had never left the back of my stomach. The heart-tree kept growing, spreading its great silver branches through the hall, the ceiling fading away into silver rustling leaves and the terrible stench of fruit. My stomach turned over once, and then Janos’s head came rolling by across the grass in front of my feet, and struck against the sprawling roots.
All the courtiers cried out and jerked back against the walls, but even as they did, they were fading away, disappearing. The walls all around us were gone, too, falling away into forest and the ringing clash of steel. Marek turned in sudden startled alarm, raising his sword: the silver mantis was there, lunging towards him. When its claws struck against his shoulders, they scraped against the steel of his brilliant armor. Corpses were staring up from the grass around his feet.
A haze of smoke was drifting across my eyes, the sudden crackle of fire. I turned towards the trunk, and Sarkan was there, too, caught in the tree with silver bark trying to devour him, saying, “Now, Agnieszka,” while fire-heart glowed red between his fingers. Instinctively, I half-reached my hand towards him, remembering dread and anguish, and for a moment—for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.
I put my hands on the tree trunk as the bark curled and split apart like the skin of a too-ripe tomato. Kasia was beside me, real; the trunk was splintering open beneath her pounding hands. She was breaking open the wood of the trunk, and the queen came staggering forward out of it, her hands reaching out to meet ours, groping for help, her face suddenly alive and full of horror. We caught her and pulled her out. I heard the Falcon shouting a spell of fire—and then I realized, he was calling real fire, and we weren’t really in the Wood. We were in the king’s castle—
As soon as I let myself remember that, the illusion spell went slithering straight out of my grasp. The tree burned away into the air; the fire at its roots swept up along the trunk and took all the rest of the Wood along with it. The corpses sank down through the ground, one last glimpse of their faces, all their faces, before the white marble floor closed over them. I watched them with tears running down my face. I hadn’t known I remembered the soldiers well enough to make so many of them. And then the last leaf-shadows cleared, and we were in the palace again, before the throne, with the king standing shocked upon his dais.
The Falcon whirled staring around himself, panting, fire still crackling in his hands and skittering over the marble floors; Marek also swung back looking for an enemy that wasn’t there anymore. His sword was unstained again, his armor bright and undented. The queen stood in the middle of the floor trembling, her eyes wide. All the court was pressed up against the walls and one another, as far from us and the center of the room as they could go. And I, I sank to my knees shaking, my arms wrapped around my stomach, feeling sick. I had never wanted to be back there again, in the Wood.
Marek recovered first. He stepped towards the throne, his chest still heaving. “That is what we reft her from!” he shouted up at his father. “That is the evil we overcame to bring her out, that is what we paid to save her! That is the evil you serve, if you—I won’t see it done! I will—”
“Enough!” the king roared back at him: he was pale beneath his beard.
Marek’s face was flushed and bright with violence, battle-lust. He was still holding his sword. He took a step towards the throne. The king’s eyes widened; red anger flushed into his cheeks, and he beckoned to his guards; there were six of them beside the dais.
Queen Hanna cried out suddenly, “No!”
Marek whirled back to look at her. She took a clumsy lurching step forward, her feet dragging as if she had to make an effort to move them. Marek was staring at her. She took another step and seized his arm. “No,” she repeated. She pulled his arm down, when he would have kept it up. He resisted, but she had turned her eyes up at him, and his face was suddenly a boy’s, looking down at her. “You saved me,” she said to him. “Marechek. You already saved me.”
His arm sank, and still clinging to it she turned slowly to the king. He was staring down at her. Her face was pale and beautiful framed in the cloud of her short hair. “I wanted to die,” she said. “I wanted so to die.” She took another dragging step and knelt on the wide dais stairs, and pulled Marek down with her; he bowed his head, staring at the floor. But she kept looking up. “Forgive him,” she said to the king. “I know the law. I am ready to die.” Her hand held tight when Marek would have jerked. “I am the queen of Polnya!” she said, loudly. “I am ready to die for my country. But not as a traitor.
“I am not a traitor, Kasimir,” she said, stretching her other arm out. “He took me. He took me!”
A murmuring started through the room, rising fast as a river in flood. I lifted my weary head and stared around, not understanding. Alosha’s face when I looked at her was drawing into a frown. The queen’s voice was trembling but loud enough to rise above the noise. “Let me be put to death for corruption,” she said. “But God above witness me! I did not leave my husband and my children. The traitor Vasily took me from the courtyard with his soldiers, and carried me to the Wood, and there he bound me to the tree himself.”
Chapter 22
I warned you,” Alosha said, without looking up from her steady ringing thumps of hammer-strokes. I hugged my knees in the corner of her forge, just beyond the scorched circle of ground where the sparks fell, and didn’t say anything. I didn’t have an answer: she had warned me.
No one cared that Prince Vasily must have been corrupted himself, to do s
uch a mad thing; no one cared that he’d died in the Wood, a lonely corpse feeding the roots of the heart-tree. No one cared that it was the fault of the bestiary. Prince Vasily had kidnapped the queen and given her to the Wood. Everyone was as angry as if he’d done it yesterday, and instead of marching on the Wood, they wanted to march on Rosya.
I’d tried to speak to Marek already: a waste of time. Not two hours after the queen had been pardoned, he was in the barracks courtyard exercising horses, already choosing which ones he’d take to the front. “You’ll come with us,” he said as though it was unquestioned, without even taking his eyes off the flashing legs as he sent a tall bay gelding around him in a circle, one hand on the lead and the other on the long-tailed whip. “Solya says you can double the strength of his workings, perhaps more.”
“No!” I said. “I’m not going to help you kill Rosyans! It’s the Wood we need to fight, not them.”
“And so we will,” Marek said easily. “After we take the eastern bank of the Rydva, we’ll come south over their side of the Jaral Mountains and surround the Wood from both sides. All right, we’ll take this one,” he said to his groom, tossing over the lead; he caught up the dangling tail of the whip with an expert flick of his wrist and turned to me. “Listen, Nieshka—” I glared at him speechlessly; how dare he put a pet name on me? But only he put an arm around my shoulders, too, and sailed straight onward. “If we take half the army south to your valley, they’ll come pouring over the Rydva themselves while our backs are turned, and sack Kralia itself. That’s probably why they leagued with the Wood in the first place. They wanted us to do just that. The Wood doesn’t have an army. It’ll stay where it is until we’ve dealt with Rosya.”
“No one would ever be in league with the Wood!” I said.
He shrugged. “If they aren’t, they’ve still deliberately used it against us,” he said. “What comfort do you think it is to my mother if that dog Vasily died, too, after he handed her over to that endless hell? And even if he was corrupted beforehand, you must see it doesn’t matter. Rosya won’t scruple to take advantage of the opening if we turn south. We can’t turn on the Wood until we’ve protected our flank. Stop being shortsighted.”