“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.”
I jerked away from his hand and his condescension both. “I’m not the one being shortsighted,” I told Kasia, fuming, as we hurried across the courtyard to seek Alosha out at her forge.
But Alosha only said, “I warned you,” grim but without heat. “The power in the Wood isn’t some blind hating beast; it can think and plan, and work towards its own ends. It can see into the hearts of men, all the better to poison them.” She took the sword from her anvil and plunged it into the cold water; steam billowed in great gusts like the breath of some monstrous beast. “If there wasn’t any corruption, you might have guessed there was something else at work.”
Sitting next to me, Kasia raised her head. “Is—is there something else at work in me?” she asked, unhappily.
Alosha paused and glanced at her. I found myself holding my breath, silent; then Alosha shrugged. “Isn’t this bad enough? You freed, then the queen freed, and now all of Polnya and Rosya ready to go up in flames? We can’t spare the men they’re sending to the front,” she added. “If we could, they would already have been there. The king is stripping the kingdom bare, and Rosya will have to do the same to meet us. It’ll be a bad harvest this year for all of us, win or lose.”
“And that’s what the Wood wanted, all along,” Kasia said.
“One of the things it wanted,” Alosha said. “I’ve no doubt it would gladly have eaten Agnieszka and Sarkan if it had the chance, and then it could have devoured the rest of the valley overnight. But a tree isn’t a woman; it doesn’t bear a single seed. It scatters as many of them as it can, and hopes for some of them to grow. That book was one; the queen was one. She should have been sent away at once, and you with her.” She turned back to the forge. “Too late to mend that now.”
“Maybe we should just go straight home,” I said to Kasia, and tried to ignore the longing rising in me like a swell just at the thought, that involuntary pull. I wanted to believe myself, saying, “There’s nothing more to do here. We’ll go home, we can help burning the Wood. We can raise a hundred men out of the valley at least—”
“A hundred men,” Alosha said to her anvil, with a snort. “You and Sarkan and a hundred men can do some damage, I’ve no doubt, but you’ll pay for every inch of ground you get. And meanwhile the Wood will have twenty thousand men slaughtering each other on the banks of the Rydva.”
“The Wood will have that anyway!” I said. “Can’t you do something?”
“I’m doing it,” Alosha said, and put the sword back into the fire again. She’d done it four times already just while we’d been sitting here with her, which I realized didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t seen swords made before, but I’d watched the smith at work often enough: we’d all liked to watch as children while he hammered out scythes, and pretend he was making swords; we would pick up sticks and have mock battles around the steaming forge. So I knew you weren’t meant to forge a blade over and over, but Alosha took the sword out again and put it back on the anvil, and I realized she was hammering spells into the steel: her lips moved a little while she worked. It was a strange kind of magic, because it wasn’t finished in itself; she was catching up a dangling spell, and she left it hanging again before she plunged it once more into the cold water.
The dark blade came out dripping, glazed with water. It had a strange and hungry feeling. When I looked into it I saw a long fall into some deep dry crack in the earth, tumbling away onto sharp rocks. It wasn’t like the other enchanted swords, the ones Marek’s soldiers had carried; this thing wanted to drink life.
“I’ve been forging this blade for a century,” Alosha said, holding it up. I looked at her, glad to take my eyes away from the thing. “After the Raven died, and Sarkan went to the tower, I began it. There’s less iron than spellcraft in it by now. The sword only remembers the shape it once had, and it won’t last for longer than a single stroke, but that’s all it will need.”
She put it back in the forge again, and we watched it sitting in the bath of flames, a long tongue of shadow among them. “The power in the Wood,” Kasia said slowly, her eyes on the fire. “Is it something you can kill?”
“This sword can kill anything,” Alosha said, and I believed her. “As long as we can make it put out its neck. But for that,” she added, “we’ll need more than a hundred men.”
“We could ask the queen,” Kasia said suddenly. I blinked at her. “I know there are lords who owe her fealty on her own—a dozen of them tried to come and pay her homage, while we were locked up together, though the Willow wouldn’t let them in. She must have soldiers she could give us, instead of sending them to Rosya.”
And she, at least, would surely want the Wood struck down. Even if Marek wouldn’t listen to me, or the king, or anyone else in the court, perhaps she would.
So Kasia and I went down to hover outside the great council-chamber: the queen was there again, a part of the war-council now. The guards would have let me inside: they knew who I was, now. They watched me sidelong out of the corners of their eyes, nervous and interested both, as though I might erupt with more sorcery at any moment, like contagious boils. But I didn’t want to go in; I didn’t want to get caught up in the arguments of the Magnati and the generals planning how best to murder ten thousand men, and harvest glory while the crops rotted in the fields. I wasn’t going to put myself into their hands as another weapon to aim.
So we waited outside and held back against the wall instead while the council came pouring out, a torrent of lords and soldiers. I had thought the queen would come behind them, with servants to help her walk. But she didn’t: she came out in the center of the crowd. She was wearing the circlet, Ragostok’s circlet, the one he’d been working on. The gold caught the light, and the rubies shone above her golden hair. She wore red silk, too, and all of the courtiers gathered around her, sparrows around a cardinal bird. It was the king who came behind the rest, talking in low voices with Father Ballo and two councilors, an afterthought.