by Naomi Novik
And on the other side of the town, in front of the western mountains, the Dragon’s tower stood gleaming white in the sun, still small and far away. It was ringed around with soldiers, a small army of men in yellow surcoats. I stared at it desperately. Had they gotten inside? The great doors were still closed; there was no smoke coming from the windows. I didn’t want to believe the tower had fallen. I wanted to shout Sarkan’s name, I wanted to fling myself across the yawning air. I got back up on my feet.
Kasia had stopped in the narrow road behind us. She drew out the sword I’d given her even as the horses came around the curve. Marek was with them, leading; his spurs were wet with blood and he had his sword drawn, his teeth bared in a snarl. His bay came charging, and Kasia didn’t move. Her hair was flying loose, streaming in the wind. She planted her feet wide in the trail and held the sword out straight, and Marek had to yank aside the horse’s head or ride directly onto the blade.
He pulled up, but smashed his own sword down at her as he twisted the horse on the narrow path. Kasia caught the blow and whacked it aside with pure brute strength. She knocked the sword straight out of Marek’s hand. It struck the edge of the path and fell over, disappearing down the mountainside with a wash of pebbles and dust.
“A pike!” Marek shouted, and a soldier threw him one; he caught it easily even as he wheeled his horse around on the path. He brought the pike around in a long, low sweep that nearly caught Kasia at the waist. She had to jump back: if he could knock her off the path, it wouldn’t matter that she was stronger than he was. She tried to grab for the end of the pike, but Marek jerked it back too quickly; then he immediately nudged his horse forward and pulled it up into a crow-stepping rear, iron-shod hooves lashing towards her head. He was herding her back: as soon as he reached the place where the road widened, he and the other soldiers would spill out and surround her. They could come past her at us, at the children.
I groped for the Dragon’s spell, the transport spell. Valisu, and zokinezh—but even while I tried to fit the words together, I knew somehow that it wasn’t going to work. We weren’t in the valley yet; that path wasn’t open to us.
My head was light with thin air and desperation. Stashek had picked up Marisha and was holding her tight. I shut my eyes and spoke the illusion spell: I called up Sarkan’s library, shelves rising up out of bare rock around us, golden-lettered spines and the smell of leather; the clockwork bird in its cage, the window looking out on the whole green length of the valley and the winding river. I even saw us in the illusion: tiny ant-figures on the mountainside, moving. There was a line of twenty men strung out on the trail behind Marek: if he could only shove his way into the wider ground, they would be on us.
I knew the Dragon wasn’t there; he was in the east, in Zatochek, where the thin column of smoke rose from the edge of the Wood. But I put him in the library anyway, at the table, the hard angles of his face lit by the candles that never melted; looking at me with that annoyed, baffled expression: Now what are you doing?
“Help me!” I said to him, and gave Stashek a push. The Dragon put his hands out automatically and the children tumbled into them together; Stashek cried out, and I saw him stare up at the Dragon with wide eyes. Sarkan stared down at him.
I turned back, half in the library, half on the mountain. “Kasia!” I cried.
“Go!” she shouted at me. One of the soldiers behind Marek had a clear view of me and the library behind me; he slung a bow down and stretched an arrow, taking aim.
Kasia ducked under the pike and ran at Marek’s horse and shoved the animal bodily back, both hands on its chest. It squealed and reared up, hopping back on its rear legs and lashing at her. Marek kicked her, snapping back her chin, and shoved the shaft of the pike down between them, just behind her ankle. He had both hands on the pike now, he’d dropped his reins, but somehow he made the horse do what he wanted anyway. The animal turned, he twisted his body as it did, gripping the pike, and he tripped Kasia up. The horse’s hindquarters struck her and swept her stumbling to the edge of the path, and Marek gave a quick, massive heave. She fell over: she didn’t even have time to scream, just gave a startled “Oh!” and was gone, dragging a clump of grass loose as she grabbed at it.
“Kasia!” I screamed. Marek turned towards me. The bowman let the arrow loose; the string twanged.
Hands seized my shoulders, gripping with familiar, unexpected strength; they dragged me backwards. The walls of the library rushed forward around me and closed up just before the arrow would have passed through them. The whistle of the wind, the cold crisp air, faded from my skin. I whirled, staring: Sarkan was there; he was standing right behind me. He’d pulled me through.
His hands were still on my shoulders; I was braced on his chest. I was full of alarm and a thousand questions, but he dropped his hands and stepped back, and I realized we weren’t alone. A map of the valley lay unrolled on the table, and an enormous, broad-shouldered man with a beard longer than his head and a shirt of mail under a yellow surcoat stood at the far end of it, gawking at us, with four armored men behind him gripping the hilts of their swords.
“Kasia!” Marisha was crying in Stashek’s arms and struggling against his grip. “I want Kasia!”
I wanted Kasia, too; I was still shaking with the memory of watching her tumble over the edge. How far could she fall, without being hurt? I ran to the window. We were far away, but I could see the thin plume of dust where she’d fallen, like a line drawn down the side of the mountain. She was a tiny dark heap of brown cloak and golden hair on the trail, a hundred feet down where it sloped back on itself down the mountain. I tried to gather my wits and my magic. My legs still shook with exhaustion.
“No,” Sarkan said, coming to my side. “Stop. I don’t know how you’ve done any of this, and I imagine I’ll be appalled when I learn, but you’ve been too profligate with your magic for one hour.” He pointed his finger out the window at the tiny huddled heap of Kasia’s body, his eyes narrowing. “Tualidetal,” he said, and clenched his hand into a fist, jerked it quickly back, and pointed his finger to an open place on the floor.
Kasia tumbled out of the air where he pointed and spilled to the floor trailing brown dust. She rolled and got up quickly, staggering only a little; there were some bloody scrapes on her arms, but she’d kept hold of her sword. She took one look at the armed men on the other side of the table and caught Stashek by the shoulder; she pulled him behind her and held the sword out like a bar. “Hush, Marishu,” she said, a quick touch of her hand to Marisha’s cheek, to quiet her; the little girl was trying to reach for her.
The big man had only been staring all this while. He said suddenly, “God in Heaven; Sarkan, that’s the young prince.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” Sarkan said. He sounded resigned. I stared at him, still half-disbelieving he was really there. He was thinner than when I’d seen him last, and almost as disheveled as I was. Soot streaked his cheek and neck, and had left a fine thin layer of grey over all his skin, enough that a line showed at the loose collar of his shirt where it gaped open, to divide clean skin from dirty. He wore a rough long coat of leather hanging open. The edges of the sleeves and the bottom hem were singed black, and the whole length of it patterned with scorch marks. He looked as though he’d come straight from burning the Wood: I wondered wildly if I’d somehow summoned him here, with my spell.
Peering from behind Kasia, Stashek said, “Baron Vladimir?” He hitched Marisha up a little in his arms, protectively, and looked at Sarkan. “Are you the Dragon?” he asked, his high young voice wavering and doubtful, as if thinking he didn’t quite look the part. “Agnieszka brought us here to keep us safe,” he added, even more doubtfully.
“Of course she did,” Sarkan said. He looked out the window. Marek and his men were already riding down the sloping trail, and not alone. The long marching line of the army was coming out of the mountain pass, their feet raising a sunset-golden cloud of dust that rolled down towards Olshanka like a fog.
Chapter 26
He must have scraped together every soldier in the south of Polnya,” the Baron of the Yellow Marshes said, studying Marek’s army. He was a big, comfortably barrel-bellied man who wore his armor as easily as cloth. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in our village tavern.
He’d just gotten the summons to come to the capital for the king’s funeral when Marek’s magic-sped messenger had arrived, told him that the crown prince was dead, too, and gave him his orders: to go over the mountains, seize Sarkan as corrupted and a traitor, and lay a trap for me and the children. The baron nodded, gave orders for his soldiers to gather, and waited until the messenger had left. Then he’d brought his men over the pass and gone straight to Sarkan, to tell him there was some kind of corrupt deviltry going on in the capital.
They’d come back to the tower together, and those were his soldiers encamped below; they were hastily putting up fortifications for a defense. “But we can’t hold out for longer than a day, not against that,” the baron said, jerking his thumb out the window at the army pouring down the mountainside. “So you’d better have something up your sleeve. I told my wife to write to Marek that I’d lost my mind and gone corrupted, so I hope he won’t behead her and the children, but I’d as soon keep my own head on, too.”
“Can they break down the doors?” I asked.
“If they try long enough,” Sarkan said. “And the walls, for that matter.” He pointed to a pair of wooden carts trundling down the mountainside, carrying the long iron barrels of cannon. “Enchantment won’t hold against cannon-fire forever.”
He turned away from the window. “You know we’ve already lost,” he said to me bluntly. “Every man we kill, every spell and potion we waste, it all serves the Wood. We could take the children to their mother’s family and marshal a fresh defense in the north, around Gidna—”
He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know, hadn’t known even when I’d come flying home like a bird to its burning nest. “No,” I said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I know your heart is in this valley. I know you can’t let it go—”
“Because I’m bound to it?” I said, sharply. “Me, and all the other girls you chose?” I’d tumbled into his library with an army at my heels and half a dozen people around us, and there hadn’t been time for conversation, but I still hadn’t forgiven him. I wanted to get him alone and shake him until answers came out, and shake him a little more for good measure. He fell silent, and I forced myself to push aside the hot anger. I knew this wasn’t the time.
“That’s not why,” I said, instead. “The Wood could reach into the king’s castle in Kralia, a week’s journey from here. Do you think there’s anywhere we can take the children that the Wood can’t reach? At least here we have a chance of victory. But if we run, if we let the Wood take back the whole valley, we’ll never raise an army anywhere that can fight all the way through to its heart.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, sharp, “the one we have now is pointing the wrong way.”
“Then we need to persuade Marek to turn it around,” I said.
Kasia and I took the children down to the cellars, the safest place, and we made up a pallet for them of straw and spare blankets from the shelves. The kitchen stores were untouched by time, and we were all hungry enough after our day of running that not even worry could stifle our appetite. I took a rabbit from the cold store in back and put it in a pot with some carrots and dried buckwheat and water and threw lirintalem at it, to make it into something edible. We all wolfed it down together without bothering with bowls, and almost at once the children collapsed into an exhausted sleep, curled together. “I’ll stay with them,” Kasia said, sitting down beside the pallet. She put her sword unsheathed next to her, and rested a hand on Marisha’s sleeping head. I mixed up a simple dough in a big bowl, just flour paste and salt, and I carried it upstairs to the library.
Outside, the soldiers had put up Marek’s tent, a white pavilion with two tall spell-lamps planted in the ground before it. Their blue light gave the white fabric an unearthly glow, as though the whole pavilion had descended straight from Heaven, which I imagine was the idea. The king’s banner was snapping in the wind atop the highest point, the red eagle with its mouth and its talons open, crowned. The sun was sinking. The long shadow of the western mountains was creeping slowly over the valley.
A herald came out and stood between the lamps, official and stark in a white uniform with a heavy golden chain of office around his neck. Another piece of Ragostok’s working: it threw his voice against the tower walls like a blast of righteous trumpets. He was recounting all our crimes: corruption, treason, murdering the king, murdering Princess Malgorzhata, murdering Father Ballo, conspiring with the traitor Alosha, the abduction of Prince Kasimir Stanislav Algirdon and Princess Regelinda Maria Algirdon—it took me a moment to realize they meant Stashek and Marisha—consorting with the enemies of Polnya, and going on from there. I was glad to hear them name Alosha a traitor: maybe that meant she was still alive.
The list finished with a demand for the return of the children and our immediate surrender. Afterwards, the herald paused for breath and to take a drink of water; then he began to recite the gruesome litany all over again. The baron’s men milled uneasily around the base of the tower where they were encamped, and looked up askance towards our windows.
“Yes, Marek seems eminently persuadable,” Sarkan said as he came into the room. Faint smears of oil glistened on his throat and the back of his hand and across his forehead: he had been brewing up potions of sleep and forgetfulness in his laboratory. “What do you mean to do with that? I doubt Marek is going to eat a poisoned loaf of bread, if that was your notion.”
I turned my dough out onto the smooth marble top of the long table. I had the vague thought of the oxen in my head, the way I’d cobbled them together; they’d crumbled, but they’d only been made of mud. “Do you have any sand?” I asked. “And maybe some small pieces of iron?”
I kneaded iron shavings and sand into my dough while the herald chanted on outside. Sarkan sat across from me, his pen scratching out a long incantation of illusion and dismay put together from his books. An hourglass streamed sand between us, marking time while his potions brewed. A few unhappy soldiers from the baron were waiting for him while he worked, shifting from foot to foot uneasily in the corner of the room. He put down his pen just as the last few grains of sand spilled, precisely timed. “All right, come with me,” he told them, and took them along to the laboratory, to give them the flasks to carry downstairs.
But I hummed my mother’s baking songs while I worked, folding and folding in a steady rhythm. I thought of Alosha, forging her blade again and again, working a little more magic in each time. When my dough was pliable and smooth, I broke off a piece, rolled it into a tower in my hands, and planted it in the middle, folding up the dough on one side to make the wall of the mountains behind us.
Sarkan came back into the room and scowled down at my work. “A charming model,” he said. “I’m sure the children will be entertained.”
“Come and help me,” I said. I pinched up a wall around the tower out of the soft dough and started to murmur a chant of earth spells over it: fulmedesh, fulmishta, back and forth in a steady rhythm. I built a second wall farther out, then a third; I kept humming softly to them. A groaning sound, like trees in a high wind, came in from outside the window, and the floor trembled faintly beneath us: earth and stone, waking up.
Sarkan watched, frowning a while longer. I felt his eyes on the back of my neck. The memory curled in me of the last time we’d worked together in this room: roses and thorns sprawling furiously everywhere between us. I wanted and didn’t want his help. I wanted to stay angry at him a while longer, but I wanted the connection more; I wanted to touch him, wanted the brilliant crisp bite of his magic in my hands. I kept my head down
and kept working.
He turned and went to one of his cabinets; he brought over a small drawer full of chips of stone that looked like the same grey granite as the tower, of varied sizes. He began to gather the chips up and with his long fingers pressed them into the walls I’d built. He recited a spell of repairing as he worked, a spell of mending cracks and patching stone. His magic came running through the clay, vivid and bright where it brushed against mine. He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.
I drew his magic into my working, running my hands back along the walls, my chant still marching away beneath the melody of his spell. I darted a quick glance at him. He was staring down at the dough trying to keep his scowl, and flushed at the same time with the high transcendent light that he brought to his elaborate workings: delighted and also annoyed, trying not to be.
Outside, the sun had gone down. A faint blue-violet glow flickered over the surface of the dough like strong liquor burning off in a pot. I could just barely make it out in the dim twilight of the room. Then the working went up like dry kindling. There was a jolt, a rush of magic, but this time Sarkan was ready for the dam-bursting. Even as the spell caught, he pulled abruptly back from me. Instinctively I reached after him at first, but then I pulled back, too. We fell away into our separate skins instead of spilling magic all over each other.
A cracking noise like winter ice breaking came in through the window, and shouts rose. I hurried past Sarkan, my face hot, to go and look. The spell-lamps outside Marek’s tent were rolling slowly up and down as if they were lanterns on boats climbing a wave. The ground was shuddering like water.
The baron’s men all backed hastily to the tower walls. Their thin fencework, little more than heaped bundles of sticks they’d gathered, was falling apart. In the spell-light, I saw Marek come ducking out of his tent, hair and armor shining brilliant and a gold chain—the gold chain the herald had been wearing—gripped in his fist. A scurrying crowd of men and servants poured out behind him, escaping: the whole great pavilion was collapsing. “Put out the torches and the fires!” Marek bellowed, his voice unnaturally loud. The earth groaned and rumbled all around with complaining voices.