I didn’t realize she was mocking me all the time until the third day. We’d planned to meet at an afternoon music party held at the house of a baroness. There was music at all the parties, so I didn’t understand what made this one especially a music party; Alicja had just laughed when I’d asked her. But I dutifully tramped over after lunch, trying my best to hold up my long silver-frost train and balance the matching headdress, a long curved heavy swoop over my head that wanted to fall either backwards or forwards, either way as long as it didn’t stay in place. Coming into the room, I caught the train in the doorway and stumbled, and the headdress went sliding back over my ears.
Alicja caught sight of me and crossed the room in a dramatic rush to clasp my hands. “Dearest,” she said urgently, breathlessly, “what a brilliantly original angle—I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
I blurted out, “Are you—are you trying to be rude?” As soon as the idea occurred to me, all the odd things she’d said and done came together and made a strange malicious sense. But I couldn’t believe it at first; I didn’t understand why she would have. No one had made her talk to me, or be in my company. I couldn’t understand why she would have gone to the trouble just to be unpleasant.
Then I couldn’t doubt it anymore: she put on a wide-eyed, surprised expression that plainly meant yes, she was trying to be rude. “Why, Nieshka,” she began, as though she thought I was an idiot, too.
I pulled my hands free from hers with a jerk, staring at her. “Agnieszka will do,” I said, startled and sharp, “and since you like my style so much, katboru.” Her own curved headdress tipped backwards down her head—and took with it the elaborate lovely curls to either side of her face, which were evidently false. She gave a small scream and clutched at them, and ran out of the room.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Worse was the titter that went all around the room, from men I’d seen her dance with and women she’d called her intimate friends. I jerked off my own headdress and hurried over to the lavish refreshments, hiding my face from the room over bowls of grapes. Even there, a young man in an embroidered coat that must have taken some woman a year of work sidled up to my side and whispered in tones of glee that Alicja wouldn’t be able to show her face at court for a year—as though that should have pleased me.
I managed to duck away from him into a servants’ hallway, and then in desperation I pulled out Jaga’s book from my pocket until I found a spell for a quick exit, to let me pass through the wall of the house instead of going back inside and out the front door. I couldn’t bear to hear any more poisonous congratulations.
I came out through the yellow-brick wall panting like I’d escaped from a prison. A small lion-mouthed fountain stood gurgling away in the center of the plaza, the afternoon sun dazzling and captured in the basin, and a carved flock of birds around the top singing softly. I could tell at a glance it was Ragostok’s work. And there was Solya, perched on the edge of the fountain, running his fingers through the light in the water.
“I’m glad to see you’ve rescued yourself,” he said. “Even though you walked yourself into it as determinedly as you possibly could.” He hadn’t been in the house at all, but I was sure he knew every detail of Alicja’s mortification and mine, and for all his sorrowful expression, I was sure he’d been delighted to watch me make a fool of myself.
All the time I’d been grateful that Alicja didn’t want my magic or my secrets, it had never occurred to me that she might want something else. Even if it had, I wouldn’t have imagined she’d been looking for a target for malice. We weren’t stupidly cruel to each other in Dvernik. Of course there were quarrels sometimes and people you liked less, and sometimes even a fight broke out, if people got angry enough. But when harvest came, your neighbors came to help you gather and thresh, and when the shadow of the Wood stole over us, we knew better than to make it any darker. And none of us would’ve been rude to a witch no matter what. “I would have thought even a noblewoman had more sense than that,” I said.
Solya shrugged. “Perhaps she didn’t believe you one.”
I opened my mouth to protest that she’d seen me do magic, but I suppose she hadn’t: not like Ragostok, who would burst into rooms like a thunderclap with showers of glittering silver sparks and birds calling as they flew out in every direction; not even like Solya gliding smoothly in and out of shadows in his elegant robes, with those bright sharp eyes of his that seemed to see everything that went on in the castle grounds. I shoved myself into ballgowns in my own room, and walked to parties stubbornly, and in a strangling corset that was quite enough to spend my breath on without doing tricks just to show off.
“But how did she think I got myself on the list?” I demanded.
“I imagine she thought what the rest of the wizards did, at first.”
“What, that you put me on because Sarkan was in love with me?” I said, sarcastic.
“Marek, more likely,” he said, entirely serious, and I stared at him appalled. “Really, Agnieszka, I would have expected you to understand that much by now.”
“I don’t want to understand any of this!” I said. “Those people in there, they were happy for Alicja to mock me, and then they were just as happy for me to make her miserable.”
“Of course,” he said. “They’re delighted to learn that you were playing the yokel only to set up an elaborate mockery of the first person who took your bait. That makes you part of the game.”
“I didn’t set a trap for her!” I said. I wanted to add that no one would think of something like that, no one in their right mind anyway, only I had the unpleasant sticky feeling that some of these people would.
“No, I didn’t imagine you had,” Solya said judiciously. “But you may want to let people believe you did. They will anyway, no matter what you say.” He stood up from the edge of the fountain. “The situation’s not beyond repair. I think you’ll find people much friendlier to you at the dinner tonight. Won’t you let me escort you, after all?”
For answer, I turned on my pointed heel and stalked away from him and his amused huff of laughter, letting my stupid train drag along the ground behind me.
I made my thundercloud way out of the neat courtyard and into the noisy bustle of the green outer courtyard of the castle. A heap of haybales and barrels sat alongside the main road from the outer gates to the inner ones, waiting to be loaded somewhere or other. I sat down on one bale to think. I had the horrible certain feeling that Solya was right about this, too. And that meant any courtier who would speak to me now would only do so because they liked this sort of spiteful game; anyone decent wouldn’t want anything to do with me.