The mayor of Olshanka had even had the courage to demand that the Dragon show the wound to the town physician: he grudgingly obliged, rolling up his sleeve to show the faint white scar, all that was left of the wound, and even told the man to draw some blood from his fingertip: it sprang out clean red. But they had also brought the old priest in his full purple gown to say a blessing over him, which infuriated him to no end. “What on earth are you lending yourself to this nonsense for?” he demanded of the priest, whom he evidently knew a little. “I’ve let you shrive a dozen corrupted souls: did any of them sprout the purple rose, or suddenly announce themselves saved and purified? What possible good do you imagine saying a blessing over me would do, if I were corrupted?”
“So you are well, then,” the priest had said dryly, and they at last allowed themselves to believe, and the mayor had handed over the fire-heart with great relief.
But of course my father and brothers hadn’t been allowed to come; nor had anyone from my village, who would have grieved to see me burn. And the men who had come, they’d looked at me standing beside the Dragon, and I didn’t know how to name what was in their faces. I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik. It was the way I had looked at Prince Marek, at first. They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn’t belong in their lives at all. I flinched from those looks. I was glad to go back into the tower.
That was the day I had taken Jaga’s book down to the library, and demanded that the Dragon stop pretending I had any more gift for healing than I did for any other sort of spell, and let me learn the kind of magic that I could do. I hadn’t tried to write a letter, even though I suppose the Dragon would have let me send one. What would I say? I had gone home, and I had even saved it, but it wasn’t my place anymore; I couldn’t go and dance in the village square among my friends, any more than six months ago I could have marched into the Dragon’s library and sat down at his table.
When I saw Wensa’s face, though, even from the library window, I didn’t think of any of that. I left my working hanging in the air, unfinished, as he’d so often ordered me never to do, and flung myself down the stairs. He shouted after me, but his voice couldn’t reach me: because Wensa wouldn’t be here if Kasia could have come. I jumped down the last few steps into the great hall, and at the doors I halted only a moment: “Irronar, irronar,” I cried: it was only a charm for untying snarled knots of thread, and slurred besides, but I flung profligate magic behind it, as though I’d determined to hack my way through a thicket with an axe instead of taking the time to find a way around. The doors jumped as if startled and opened for me.
I fell through them onto suddenly weak knees—as the Dragon delighted in telling me, caustically, there was good reason that the more powerful spells were also the more complicated—but I staggered up and caught Wensa’s hands as she raised them to knock. Her face, seen close, was wrung with weeping; her hair was hanging down her back, clouds of it pulling out of the long thick plait, and her clothing was torn and stained with dirt: she was wearing her nightshift and a smock flung over it. “Nieshka,” she said, gripping my hands too hard, strangling the feeling out of them and her nails digging into my skin. “Nieshka, I had to come.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“They took her this morning, when she went for water,” Wensa said. “Three of them. Three walkers,” her voice breaking.
It was a bad spring when even one of the walkers came out of the Wood, and went plucking people out of the forests like fruit. I’d seen one once, a long way off through the trees: like an enormous twig-insect, at once almost impossible to see among the underbrush and jointed wrong and dreadful, so when it moved I had shuddered back from it, queasy. They had arms and legs like branches, with long twiggy stalk-fingers, and they would pick their way through the woods and find places near foot-paths and near water, near clearings, and wait in silence. If someone came in arm’s reach, there was no saving them, unless you had a great many men with axes and fire nearby. When I was twelve, they caught one half a mile past Zatochek, the tiny village that was the last in the valley, the last before the Wood. The walker had taken a child, a little boy, bringing a pail of water to his mother for the washing; she’d seen him snatched and screamed. There had been enough women nearby to raise the alarm, and slow it down.
They had halted it at last with fire, but it had still been a day’s work to hack it to pieces. The walker broke the child’s arm and legs where it gripped it, and never let go until they finally cut through the trunk of its body and severed the limbs. Even then it took three strong men to break the fingers off the boy’s body, and he had scars around his arms and legs patterned like the bark of an oak-tree.
Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope. We could never know for certain, until one of them came out and proved they weren’t dead, and then had to be hunted down.
“Not Kasia,” I said. “Not Kasia.”
Wensa had bent her head. She was weeping into my hands, which she still clenched on like iron. “Please, Nieshka. Please.” She spoke hoarsely, without hope. She would never have come to ask the Dragon for help, I knew; she would have known better. But she had come to me.
She couldn’t stop weeping. I brought her inside, into the small entry hall, and the Dragon impatiently stalked into the room and held her out a draught, though she shrank from him and hid her face until I gave it to her. She relaxed heavily almost as soon as she had drunk it, and her face smoothed: she let me help her upstairs to my own little room, and she lay down on the bed quietly, though with her eyes open.