by Various
Sofiya gave a tremulous smile. She sank down on the fallen tree and told the fox of her brother.
Jurek was a late riser, but regular in his prayers. He bathed in ice-cold water and ate six eggs for breakfast every morning. Some days he went to the tavern, others he cleaned hides. And sometimes he simply seemed to disappear.
“Think very carefully,” said Koja. “Does your brother have any treasured objects? An icon he always carries? A charm, even a piece of clothing he never travels without?”
Sofiya considered this. “He has a little pouch he wears on his watch fob. An old woman gave it to him years ago, after he saved her from drowning. We were just children, but even then, Jurek was bigger than all the other boys. When she fell into the Sokol, he dove in after and dragged her back up its banks.”
“Is it dear to him?”
“He never removes it and he sleeps with it cradled in his palm.”
“She must have been a witch,” said Koja. “That charm is what allows him to enter the forest so silently, to leave no tracks and make no sound. You will get it from him.”
Sofiya’s face paled. “No,” she said. “No, I cannot. For all his snoring, my brother sleeps lightly and if he were to discover me in his chamber—” She shuddered.
“Meet me here again in three days’ time,” said Koja, “and I will have an answer for you.”
Sofiya stood and dusted the snow from her horrible cloak. When she looked at the fox, her eyes were grave. “Do not ask too much of me,” she said softly.
Koja took a step closer to her. “I will free you from this trap,” he said. “Without his charm, your brother will have to make his living like an ordinary man. He will have to stay in one place and you will find yourself a sweetheart.”
She wrapped the cables of her sled around her hand. “Maybe,” Sofiya said. “But first I must find my courage.”
* * *
It took a day and a half for Koja to reach the marshes where a patch of dropwort grew. He was careful digging the little plants up. The roots were deadly. The leaves would be enough to manage Jurek.
By the time he returned to his own woods, the animals were in an uproar. The boar, Tatya, had gone missing, along with her three piglets. The next afternoon their bodies were spitted and cooking on a cheery bonfire in the town square. Red Badger and his family were packing up to leave, and they weren’t the only ones.
“He leaves no tracks!” cried the badger. “His rifle makes no sound! He is not natural, fox, and your clever mind is no match for him.”
“Stay,” said Koja. “He is a man, not a monster, and once I have robbed him of his magic, we will be able to see him coming. The wood will be safe once more.”
Badger did not look happy. He promised to wait a little while longer, but he did not let his children stray from the burrow.
* * *
“Boil them down,” Koja told Sofiya when he met her in the clearing to give her the dropwort leaves. “Then add the water to his wine and he’ll sleep like the dead. You can take the charm from him unhindered, just leave something useless in its place.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Do this small thing and you will be free.”
“But what will become of me?”
“I will bring you chickens from Tupolev’s farm and kindling to keep you warm. We will burn the horrible cloak together.”
“It hardly seems possible.”
Koja darted forward and nudged her trembling hand once with his muzzle, then slipped back into the wood. “Freedom is a burden, but you will learn to bear it. Meet me tomorrow and all will be well.”
Despite his brave words, Koja spent the night pacing his den. Jurek was a big man. What if the dropwort was not enough? What if he woke when Sofiya tried to take his precious charm? And what if they were successful? Once Jurek lost the witch’s protection, the forest would be safe and Sofiya would be free. Would she leave then? Go back to her sweetheart in Balakirev? Or might he persuade his friend to stay?
Koja got to the clearing early the next day. He padded over the cold ground. The wind had a blade’s edge and the branches were bare. If the hunter kept preying upon the animals, they would not survive the season. The woods of Polvost would be emptied.
Then Sofiya’s shape appeared in the distance. He was tempted to run to meet her, but he made himself wait. When he saw her pink cheeks and that she was grinning beneath the hood of her horrible cloak, his heart leapt.
“Well?” he asked as she entered the clearing, quiet on her feet as always. With her hem brushing the path behind her, it was almost as if she left no tracks.
“Come,” she said, eyes twinkling. “Sit down beside me.”
She spread a woolen blanket on the fallen tree and opened her basket. She unpacked another wedge of the delicious cheese, a loaf of black bread, a jar of mushrooms, and a gooseberry tart glazed in honey. Then she held out her closed fist. Koja bumped it with his nose. She uncurled her fingers.
In her palm lay a tiny cloth bundle, bound with blue twine and a piece of bone. It smelled of something rotten.
Koja released a breath. “I feared he might wake,” he said at last.
She shook her head. “He was still asleep when I left him this morning.”
They opened the charm and looked through it: a small gold button, dried herbs and ashes. Whatever magic might have worked inside it was invisible to their eyes.
“Fox, do you really believe this is what gave him his power?”
Koja batted the remains of the charm away. “Well, it wasn’t his wits.”
Sofiya smiled and pulled a jug of wine from the basket. She poured some for herself and then filled a little tin dish for Koja to lap up. They ate the cheese and the bread and all of the gooseberry tart.
“Snow is coming,” Sofiya said as she gazed into the gray sky.
“Will you go back to Balakirev?”
“There is nothing for me there,” Sofiya said.
“Then you will stay to see the snow.”
“Long enough for that.” Sofiya poured more wine into the dish. “Now, fox, tell me again how you outsmarted the hounds.”
So Koja told the tale of the foolish hounds and asked Sofiya what wishes she might make, and at some point, his eyes began to droop. The fox fell asleep with his head in the girl’s lap, happy for the first time since he’d gazed upon the world with his too-clever eyes.
* * *
He woke to Sofiya’s knife at his belly, to the nudge of the blade as it began to wiggle beneath his skin. When he tried to scramble away, he found his paws were bound.
“Why?” he gasped as Sofiya worked the knife in deeper.
“Because I am a hunter,” she said with a shrug.
Koja moaned. “I wanted to help you.”
“You always do,” murmured Sofiya. “Few can resist the sight of a pretty girl crying.”
A lesser creature might have begged for his life, given in to the relentless spill of his blood on the snow, but Koja struggled to think. It was hard. His clever mind was muddled with dropwort.
“Your brother—”
“My brother is a fool who can barely stand to be in the same room with me. But his greed is greater than his fear. So he stays, and drinks away his terror, and while you are all watching him and his gun, and talking of witches, I make my way through the woods.”
Could it be true? Had it been Jurek who kept his distance, who drowned his fear in bottles of kvas, who stayed away from his sister as much as he could? Had it been Sofiya who had brought the gray wolf home and Jurek who had filled their house with people so he wouldn’t have to be alone with her? Like Koja, the villagers had credited Jurek with the kill. They’d praised him, demanded stories that weren’t rightfully his. Had he offered up the wolf’s head as some kind of balm to his sister’s pride?
Sofiya’s silent knife sank deeper. She had no need for clumsy bows or noisy rifles. Koja whimpered his pain.
“You are clever,” she said thoughtfu
lly as she started to peel the pelt from his back. “Did you never notice the sled?”
Koja clawed at his thoughts, looking for sense. Sofiya had sometimes trailed a sled behind her to carry food to the widows’ home. He remembered now that it had also been heavy when she had returned. What horrors had she hidden beneath those woolen blankets?
Koja tested his bonds. He tried to rattle his drugged mind from its stupor.
“It is always the same trap,” she said gently. “You longed for conversation. The bear craved jokes. The gray wolf missed music. The boar just wanted someone to tell her troubles to. The trap is loneliness, and none of us escapes it. Not even me.”
“I am a magic fox…” he rasped.
“Your coat is sad and patchy. I will use it for a lining. I will keep it close to my heart.”
Koja reached for the words that had always served him, the wit that had been his tether and his guide. His clever tongue would not oblige. He moaned as his life bled into the snowbank to water the fallen tree. Then, hopeless and dying, Koja did what he had never done before. He cried out, and high in the branches of her birch tree, the nightingale heard.
Lula came flying and when she saw what Sofiya had done, she set upon her, pecking at her eyes. Sofiya screamed and slashed at the little bird with her knife. But Lula did not relent.
* * *
It took two days for Sofiya to stumble from the woods, blind and near starving. In time, her brother found a more modest house and set himself up as a woodcutter—work to which he was well suited. His new bride was troubled by his sister’s mad ramblings of foxes and wolves. With little regret, Lev Jurek sent Sofiya to live at the widows’ home. They took her in, mindful of the charity she’d once shown them. But though she’d brought them food, she’d never offered kind words or company. She’d never bothered to make them her friends, and soon, their gratitude exhausted, the old women grumbled over the care Sofiya required and left her to huddle by the fire in her horrible cloak.
As for Koja, his fur never sat quite right again. He took more care in his dealings with humans, even the foolish farmer Tupolev. The other animals took greater care with Koja too. They teased him less, and when they visited the fox and Lula, they never said an unkind word about the way his coat bunched at his neck.
The fox and the nightingale made a quiet life together. A lesser creature might have held Koja’s mistakes against him, might have mocked him for his pride. But Lula was not only clever. She was wise.
Copyright (C) 2013 by Leigh Bardugo
Art copyright (C) 2013 by Anna & Elena Balbusso
Contents
Title Page
Begin Reading
The oldest records say Duenne’s University was born from a philosophical debate begun in a wine shop. According to those histories, two elderly scholars disagreed over whether our lives were governed by fate or free will. The argument continued over a half dozen jugs of wine, attracting an ever-larger audience, including the shop’s owner, who kept his establishment open far beyond the usual hour. The following day, others joined the debate, which splintered into smaller groups.
Within a year, twenty scholars had established lectures in philosophy and rational thought. Within a century, the University had erected its own buildings around the same old wine shop, which housed the new offices for the Bursar, the Registrar, and the Senior Masters.
* * *
I stood before the brick archway that marked the entry into the University Quarter. Narrow stone-paved lanes unraveled before me, like a skein of thread tossed haphazardly over the riverbanks. I was sweating in the thick heat of late summer. All the residents and students had vanished withindoors, and a deep quiet overlaid the district, broken only by a faint trill from the nearby Gallenz River. Ancient houses and lecture halls, built from rust-colored brick and gray stone, hid the river itself from my view, but a rank scent of mud and water hung in the air, as clear as any marker on a map.
My carrier cart had already departed, leaving behind my trunk of clothing and books, as well as myself. My haversack with my personal papers and letters of credit lay at my feet. Of course I had directions from our agent, telling me the best route to my destination, together with the instructions I needed for this next and vital step. But what I remembered the clearest were my sister’s words
Pretend to trust them, she’d said, and they will believe you. They’ve all turned complacent, living here in the heart of the Empire. Even those from the outer provinces.
I summoned a boy with a wheelbarrow and gave him a few coins to take charge of my trunk. Then I swung my haversack over my shoulder and headed toward the University offices.
* * *
“Name,” the old woman said. “Family, given.”
After several wrong turns in the maze of streets, and a long climb up the stairs, I had finally gained entrance into the office for the Registrar of Duenne’s University. Pigeonholes stuffed with scrolls lined one entire wall of this cramped office. Shelves lined a second wall, and drawers a third, as if all three hundred years of the University’s records resided here. The air was filled the scent of paper dust and ink, and the heavy fragrance of spices I could not identify. The Registrar herself bent over an enormous desk, with a massive book open before her, each half as thick as my hand was wide. A row of pens in inkwells stood between us, like so many pieces in a game.
My feet ached and the leather strap of my haversack dug into my shoulder. I wanted to sit, even if that meant the hard stool shoved against the far wall, but from the Registrar’s edged smile, I knew she would not permit such a liberty. So I stood with knees bent and my hands clasped behind my back, as though I stood before my grandmother and the Council of Versterlant.
And so I did, after a fashion. According to the graven plate outside the office, my questioner was Vrou Renata Nef. Every new student presented themselves and their papers to her, confirming their qualifications to study at the University.
“My name is Irene Denk.”
Nef glared at me. Many would have found her expression unnerving.
I waited a moment and smiled. “Denk, Irene.”
Silently, she recorded my name in the volume, where each page was divided by faint vertical dots into a dozen columns. She wrote in square, upright letters, using a pen with a metal nib instead of a brush. Lèna had described the implement, among the welter of other details she poured out from her sickbed. Southerners were very strange, she kept saying. Even when they seemed the most ordinary, they would surprise a person. The implication, that those surprises were almost never pleasant ones, remained unsaid.
“Judging by your given name and your face, you are a resident of the province of Fortezzien, yes?”
I nodded. “City of Veria.”
It was dangerous to offer too many answers, but the opposite also applied: keep too many secrets and you made them curious. Veria was a small city on Fortezzien’s western coast. My grandparents had selected the province and city by scanning maps of the region and consulting a history of its recent past. With the influx of Imperial trade ships, Veria had expanded swiftly in the past ten years, and only a minority protested the Empire’s presence. My province of origin would explain any flaws in my accent, and my Veraenen surname would imply loyalty to the Empire.
Vrou Nef recorded the city name. She added a curious symbol in the next column. It was nothing like the Erythandran letters Lèna and I had memorized as children, when our grandparents had first conceived their plan, nor did it resemble the script of any northern language.
“What do you propose to study here, Irene Denk?” the Registrar asked.
“Philosophy,” I said. Philosophy would lead eventually and naturally to magic. Our plans were indirect by necessity.
“And if you could not? If we denied you?”
I hesitated. Lèna had not mentioned such an odd question. However, my tutors had prepared me for the unexpected, and I had a number of plausible answers in reserve. Some of them were even true.
Nef studied me with grave eyes. She was far older than I had first estimated. Her coarse black hair overlaid a nest of white, just visible when she tilted her head to meet my gaze. More telling, fine lines etched her dark brown face, and the way she held her body spoke of an inflexibility of habit in mind and action, which I associated with great age and with my grandparents.
“Linguistics,” she said softly.
I nodded.
“And history,” she added. “An excellent choice. With those subjects, you might choose any number of professions. Most first year students are not so perceptive. But then, you are a year or two older than most applicants.”
Five years older. That was the reason our Council had chosen Lèna to make the first attempt. There had been talk about sending me in the guise of a servant, or some other minion, to the palace itself, but my mother insisted I could not pretend the part well enough, and after a long and terrible argument, my grandparents agreed. So, like Lèna, I applied to the University.
Nef wrote History, Linguistics in the next column, followed by another notation in that unknown script.
“We shall need records of your past studies, any letters of recommendation, and whatever certificates you have earned.”
Silently I handed over the sheaf of papers I had guarded through the long journey from Versterlant. Each one represented hours of research, and more hours spent under oil lamps, forging the necessary signatures and seals. The result was a packet that proclaimed me a student of one Michalis Iannou, a tutor in the arts of philosophy and science, and someone qualified to study at university level.
Nef scanned through my documents twice, as though she were memorizing their contents. She then recorded another cryptic notation, followed by a longer comment in Veraenen. I stretched onto my toes and pretended an interest in the strange carving above the doors on the opposite side of the room. Not one of the goddess Lir, which I had expected, nor one of her brother god, Toc. This one was an ugly, squat thing, with a face like an ancient sea monster.