I felt even more peculiar, listening to them all argue. “Prince Stashek must be crowned at once, and a regency established,” Solya was going on. “The Archduke of Gidna and the Archduke of Varsha, at least—”
“Those children aren’t going anywhere but to their grandparents,” Kasia said, “if I have to put them on my back and carry them all the way myself.”
“My dear girl, you don’t understand—” Solya said.
“I’m not your dear girl,” Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him. “If Stashek’s the king now, all right; the king’s asked me to take him and Marisha to their mother’s family. That’s where they’re going.”
“The capital is too close in any case.” Sarkan flicked his fingers, impatient, dismissive. “I do understand the Archduke of Varsha won’t want the king in the hands of Gidna,” he added peevishly, when Solya drew breath to argue, “and I don’t care. Kralia wasn’t safe before; it won’t be safer now.”
“But nowhere will be safe,” I said, breaking in on them, bewildered. “Not for long.” They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.
After a moment, Sarkan said, “Gidna is on the ocean. The northern castles will be well placed to mount a substantial defense—”
“The Wood will come anyway!” I said. I knew it. I’d looked into the Wood-queen’s face, felt that implacable wrath beating against my skin. All these years, Sarkan had held the Wood back like a tide behind a dam of stone; he’d diverted its power away into a thousand streams and wells of power, scattered throughout the valley. But it was a dam that couldn’t hold forever. Today, next week, next year, the Wood would break through. It would reclaim all those wells, those streams, go roaring up to the mountainside. And fueled with all that new-won strength, it would come over the mountain passes.
There wasn’t going to be any strength to meet them. The army of Polnya was shattered, the army of Rosya wounded—and the Wood could afford to lose a battle or two or a dozen; it would establish its footholds and scatter its seeds, and even if it was pushed back over one mountain pass or another, that wouldn’t matter in the end. It would keep coming. She would keep coming. We might hold the Wood off long enough for Stashek and Marisha to grow up, grow old, even die, but what about Borys and Natalya’s grandchildren, running with them in the garden? Or their own children, growing up in the lengthening shadow?
“We can’t keep holding the Wood back with Polnya burning behind us,” Sarkan said. “The Rosyans will come over the Rydva for vengeance, as soon as they know Marek is dead—”
“We can’t hold the Wood back at all!” I said. “That’s what they tried—that’s what you’ve been doing. We have to stop it for good. We have to stop her.”
He glared at me. “Yes, what a marvelous idea. If Alosha’s blade couldn’t kill her, nothing can. What do you propose to do?”
I stared back and saw the knotting fear in my stomach reflected in his eyes. His face stilled. He stopped glaring. He sank back in his chair, still staring at me. Solya eyed us both in confusion and Kasia watched me with worry in her face. But there wasn’t anything else to do.
“I don’t know,” I said to Sarkan, my voice shaking. “But I’ll do something. Will you come into the Wood with me?”
Kasia stood with me irresolute at the crossroads outside Olshanka, unhappy. The sky was still the first pale pink-grey of morning. “Nieshka, if you think I can help you,” she said softly, but I shook my head. I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a distant shadow but happy anyway. Then the sun came down the road and touched us. We let go and stepped back: she was golden and stern, almost too beautiful to be living, and there was magic in my hands. I took her face in my hands a moment; we leaned our foreheads together, and then she turned away.
Stashek and Marisha were sitting in the wagon, watching anxiously for Kasia, with Solya next to them; one of the soldiers was driving. Some more men had come wandering back into town, those who’d run away from the fighting and the tower before the end, a mix of men from the Yellow Marshes and Marek’s men. They were all going along as escort. They weren’t enemies anymore; they hadn’t really been enemies to begin with. Even Marek’s men had thought they were saving the royal children. They’d all just been put on opposite sides of a chessboard by the Wood-queen, so she could sit to the side and watch them taken off by one another.
The wagon was loaded with supplies from the whole town, goods that would have gone to Sarkan’s tribute later that year. He’d given Borys gold for the horses and the wagon. “They’ll pay you to drive them as well,” he’d said, handing him the purse. “And take your family along; you’d have enough to make a new start of it.”
Borys looked at Natalya. She shook her head a little. He turned back and said, “We’ll stay.”
Sarkan muttered as he turned away, impatient with what looked to him like folly. But I met Borys’s eyes. The low murmur of the valley sang beneath my feet, home. I had deliberately come outside without shoes, so I could curl my toes into the soft grass and the dirt and draw that strength into me. I knew why he wasn’t going; why my mother and father wouldn’t go if I went to Dvernik and asked them to leave. “Thank you,” I told him.
The wagon creaked away. The soldiers fell in behind it. From the back, Kasia looked at me, her arms around the children, until the dust of marching raised up a muddy cloud behind them and I couldn’t see their faces anymore. I turned back to Sarkan: he regarded me with a hard, grim face. “Well?” he said.
We walked down the road from Borys’s big house, towards the wooden swish-thump of the flour mill’s water-wheel, the river steadily churning it along. Under our feet, the road gradually turned into loose pebbles, then slipped beneath the clear just-foaming water. There were a handful of boats tied up on the shore. We untied the smallest one and we pushed it out into the river, my skirts hiked up and his boots thrown into the boat; we weren’t very graceful about getting in, but we managed it without soaking ourselves, and he picked up the oars.