I stood up and arched my tired back when we were done, stretching. Then I rubbed my hands with dirt. I went back to the heart-tree and put my hands back on its sides, but this time I didn’t try to speak with the trapped souls. “Kisara,” I said, and drew the water out. I worked gently, slowly. The water beaded up in fat droplets on the bark and trickled slowly down in thin wet rivulets to sink into the ground. The sun moved onward overhead, coming ever more strongly through the leaves as they curled up and went dry. It was dipping out of sight by the time I finished, my forehead sticky with sweat and my hands covered with sap. The ground beneath my feet was soft and damp, and the tree had gone pale as bone, its branches making a noise like rattling sticks in the wind. The fruit had all withered on the boughs.

I stood clear and kindled it with a word. Then I sat heavily and wiped my hands on the grass as well as I could, and pulled my knees up to my chest. The walkers folded their legs neatly and sat around me. The tree didn’t thrash or shriek, already more than half gone; it went up quickly and burned without much smoke. Flakes of ash fell on the damp ground and melted into it like early snowflakes. They landed on my bare arms sometimes, not big enough to burn, just tiny sparks. I didn’t back away. We were the only mourners the tree and its dreamers had left.

I fell asleep at some point while the bonfire went on, tired from my work. When I woke in the morning, the tree was burned out, a black stump that crumbled easily into ash. The walkers raked the ash evenly around the clearing with their many-fingered hands, leaving a small mound at the center where the old tree had stood. I planted a fruit from my basket beneath it. I had a vial of growing-potion that I’d brewed up out of river-water and the seeds of heart-trees. I sprinkled a few drops over the mound, and sang encouragement to the fruit until a silver sapling poked its head out and climbed up to three years’ height. The new tree didn’t have a dream of its own, but it carried on the quiet dream of the grove-tree the fruit had come from, instead of tormented nightmares. The walkers would be able to eat the fruit, when it came.

I left them tending it, busily putting up a shade of tall branches to keep its fresh new leaves from crisping in the hot sun, and went away through the stones, back out into the Wood. The ground was full of ripened nuts and tangles of bramble-berries, but I didn’t gather while I walked. It would be a long time yet before it would be safe to eat any fruit from outside the grove. There was too much sorrow under the boughs, too many of the tormented heart-trees still anchoring the forest.

I’d brought out a handful of people from a heart-tree in Zatochek, and another handful from the Rosyan side. But those had been people taken only very lately. The heart-trees took everything: flesh and bone and not just dreams. Marek’s hope had always been a false one, I’d discovered. Anyone who’d been caught inside for more than a week or two was too much a part of the tree to be brought out again.

I had been able to ease some of those, and help them slide into the long deep dream. A few of them had even found their way into dreaming by themselves, once the Wood-queen had slipped away, her animating rage gone. But that left hundreds of heart-trees still standing, many of them in dark and secret places of the Wood. Drawing the water out of them and giving them to the fire was the gentlest way I’d found to set them free. It still felt like killing someone, every time, although I knew it was better than leaving them trapped and lingering. The grey sorrow of it stayed with me afterwards.

This morning, a clanging bell surprised me out of my weary fog, and I pushed aside a bush to find a yellow cow staring back at me, chewing grass meditatively. I was near the border on the Rosyan side, I realized. “You’d better go back home,” I told the cow. “I know it’s hot, but you’re too likely to eat the wrong thing in here.” A girl’s voice was calling her in the distance, and after a moment she came through the bushes and stopped when she saw me; nine years old or so.

“Does she run away into the forest a lot?” I asked her, stumbling a little over my Rosyan.

“Our meadow is too small,” the girl said, looking up at me with clear blue eyes. “But I always find her.”

I looked down at her and knew she was telling the truth; there was a strand of silver bright inside her, magic running close to the surface. “Don’t let her go too deep,” I said. “And when you get older, come and find me. I live on the other side of the Wood.”

“Are you Baba Jaga?” she asked, interestedly.

“No,” I said. “But you might call her a friend of mine.”

Now I had woken up enough to know where I was, I turned back westward right away. The Rosyans had sent soldiers to patrol the borders of the Wood on their side, and I didn’t want to distress them. They were still uneasy about me popping out on their side now and then, even after I’d sent back some of their lost villagers, and I couldn’t really blame them. All the songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways, and I suspected that the bards weren’t bringing the most outrageous ones to my side of the valley at all. A man had been booed out of Olshanka tavern a few weeks ago, I’d heard, for trying to sing one where I’d turned into a wolf-beast and eaten up the king.

But my step was lighter anyway: meeting the little girl and her cow had lifted some of the grey weight from my shoulders. I sang Jaga’s walking-song and hurried away, back towards home. I was hungry, so I ate a fruit from my basket as I walked. I could taste the forest in it, the running magic of the Spindle caught in roots and branches and fruit, infused with sunlight to become sweet juice on my tongue. There was an invitation in it, too, and maybe one day I would want to accept; one day when I was tired and ready to dream a long dream of my own. But for now it was only a door standing open on a hill in the distance, a friend waving to me from afar, and the grove’s deep sense of peace.

Kasia had written me from Gidna: the children were doing as well as could be hoped. Stashek was still very quiet, but he had stood up and spoken to the Magnati, when they had been summoned to vote, well enough to persuade them to crown him with his grandfather as his regent. He’d also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha’s daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn’t much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.