The pain got worse instead of better. I pulled away from them and tried to press myself into the wall, the cool hard stone, as if I could make myself a part of it and be unfeeling. I dug my fingernails into the mortar, whining, Kasia’s hand on my shoulder—and then the worst of it was past. The running blood slowed and stopped. I began to be able to see again, and hear: fighting on the stairs, the dull clang of swords striking each other, the stone walls, scraping metal and occasionally a ringing note. Blood was trickling down through the barricade.

Sarkan had sunk back against the wall next to me, his lips still moving but almost no sound coming anymore, his eyes clenched shut with strain. The Summoning was like a sand-castle with one side washed away, the rest ready to come sliding down; he was holding it up with raw strength. If the rest came down, I wondered if that nothingness would swallow up the whole tower, devour all of us and leave a blank empty hole in the world—and then close in; the mountainside tumbling to fill the eaten-away hollow in the earth, as if all of us had never existed at all.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. He gestured to Kasia, to the children huddled behind her, peering afraid over a barrel. Sarkan gestured again: Go. He meant me to take them and flee, to whisk us away somewhere. I hesitated, and his eyes glittered at me, angrily; he waved his hand in a sweep of the empty floor. The book was gone: the Summoning was gone. We couldn’t finish the spell, and when his strength ran out—

I drew a breath and laced my hand with his, and went back into the spell. He resisted. I sang softly at first, in short bursts of air, feeling my way. We didn’t have a map anymore, and I didn’t remember the words, but we’d done this before. I remembered where we were going, what we were trying to build. I pushed up more sand against the wall, and dug a moat against the coming waves; I made it long and wide. I kept humming, bits of stories and songs. I began to heap up the sand again in my mind. He held back, baffled, not sure how to help me. I sang him something longer, putting a bit of melody like a handful of wet pebbles into his hands, and he slowly gave it back to me, chanted slow and precise and even, laying the stones one by one around along the base of the wet-sand wall, shoring our tower up.

The working was growing stronger, more solid once again. We’d stopped the slide. I kept on going, poking here and there, finding a way and showing it to him. I piled on more sand and let him smooth the wall and make it even; together we stuck a fluttering-leaf branch into the top for a flying pennant. My breath still came short. I could feel an odd puckering knot in my chest and a deep tight pain where the potion still worked away, but magic was running clear through me, bright and quick, overflowing.

Men were shouting. The last of the baron’s men were scrambling over the barricade from the other side, most of them swordless and only trying to escape. A light was coming down the staircase, screams coming before it. The soldiers reached up hands, helped the fleeing men down and over. There weren’t very many of them. The flow stopped, and the soldiers threw the last of the sticks and big iron cauldrons on top, blocked off the passage as much as they could. Marek’s voice echoed from behind it, and I glimpsed the queen’s head, golden. The baron’s soldiers jabbed spears down at her that turned aside on her skin. The barricade was coming apart.

We still couldn’t let the spell go. Kasia was standing up; she was pushing open the door to the tomb. “Down there, quick!” she told the children. They scrambled into the stairwell. She caught my arm and helped me up; Sarkan struggled to his feet. She pushed us inside and picked up her sword from the floor, and snatched another sealed jar from the cabinet. “This way!” she shouted to the men. They came piling in after us.

The Summoning came with us. I went around and around the turning steps, Sarkan just behind me, magic singing between us. I heard a grinding noise above, and the stairway grew darker: up above one of the soldiers had pushed the door shut. The line of old letters to either side shone in the dimness and murmured faintly, and I found myself changing our working a little to slide gently against their magic. Subtly my sense of our inner tower changed; it grew wider and more broad, terraces and windows forming, a gold dome at the top, walls of pale white stone, inscribed in silver like the stairway walls. Sarkan’s voice slowed; he saw it, too: the old tower, the lost tower, long ago. Light was dawning all around us.

We spilled out into the round room at the bottom of the stairs. The air was stifling, not enough for all of us, until Kasia took up one of the old iron candlesticks and used the base of it to smash open the wall to the tomb, bricks tumbling in. Cool air came rushing in as she pushed the children inside, and told them to hide behind the old king’s coffin.

Far above came the sound of breaking stone. The queen was leading Marek and his men in after us. A few dozen soldiers crammed themselves into the room and against the walls, their faces afraid. They wore yellow surcoats, or what was left of them, so they were with us, but I didn’t recognize any of their faces. I didn’t see the baron. Swords rang again distantly: the last of the Yellow Marshes soldiers still pent up on the stairs were fighting. The light of the Summoning was building quickly.

Marek stabbed the last man in the stairwell and kicked the body tumbling in onto the floor. Soldiers jumped forward to meet him, almost eagerly: at least he was an enemy who made sense; someone who could be defeated. But Marek met one swing on his shield, ducked under it, and thrust his sword through the man’s body; he whirled and took off the head of the man on the other side; clubbed one man with his sword-hilt as he finished the swing, and stabbed forward to take another one in the eye. Kasia took a step beside me, a cry of protest, her sword rising: but they were all down before she’d even finished the sound.

But we finished the Summoning. I sang the last three words and Sarkan sang them after, and we sang them together once more. Light dawned blazing through the room, glowing almost from within the marble walls. Marek pushed forward into the space he’d cleared, and the queen came down behind him.

Her sword hung, dripping blood. Her face was calm and still and serene. The light shone on her and through her, steady and deep; there was no trace of corruption. Marek was clear, and Solya behind him also; the light washing over her caught them both at the edges, and there weren’t shadows in them: only a hard glittering kind of selfishness, pride like spiked citadel walls. But there wasn’t even any of that in the queen. I stared at her, panting, baffled. There was no corruption inside her.