“The count had gone to Rosya to negotiate a treaty, across the mountain pass. He came back with unacceptable terms and a thread of corruption. Ludmila had a wise-woman at her house, her nursemaid, who knew enough to warn her: they locked him up in the cellar and barred the door with salt, and told everyone he was ill.

“No one in the capital thought anything of a beautiful young wife making a scandal of herself while her older husband ailed out of sight; least of all myself, when she made me the object of her pursuit. I was still young and foolish enough at the time to believe myself and my magic likely to elicit admiration instead of alarm, and she was clever and determined enough to take advantage of my vanity. She had me thoroughly on a string before she asked me to save him.

“She had a particularly deft understanding of human nature,” he added, dryly. “She told me that she couldn’t leave him in such a state. She professed herself willing to give up her place at court, her title, her reputation, but so long as he was corrupted, honor demanded she remain chained to his side; only by saving him could I free her to run away with me. She tempted my selfishness and my pride at once: I assure you I thought of myself as a noble hero, promising to save my lover’s husband. And then—she let me see him.”

He fell silent. I hardly breathed, sitting like a mouse under an owl’s tree so he would go on talking. His gaze was turned inward, bleak, and I felt a kind of recognition: I thought of Jerzy laughing dreadfully at me out of his sickbed, of Kasia below with the terrible brightness in her eyes, and knew that same look lived in my own face.

“I spent half a year trying,” he said finally. “I was already accounted the most powerful wizard of Polnya by then; I was certain there was nothing I couldn’t do. I ransacked the king’s library and the University, and brewed a score of remedies.” He waved towards the table, where Jaga’s book lay shut. “That was when I bought that book, among other less wise attempts. Nothing served.”

His mouth twisted again. “Then I came here.” He indicated the tower with one finger, circling. “There was another witch here guarding the Wood then, the Raven. I thought she might have an answer. She was growing old at last, and most of the wizards at court avoided her carefully; none of them wanted to be sent to replace her when she finally died. I wasn’t afraid of that: I was too strong to be sent away from court.”

“But—” I said, startled into speaking, and bit my lip; he looked at me for the first time, one of those sarcastic eyebrows raised. “But you were sent here, in the end?” I said uncertainly.

“No,” he said. “I chose to stay. The king at the time wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about my decision: he preferred to keep me under his eye, and his successors have often pressed me to return. But she—persuaded me.” He looked away from me again, out the window and over the valley towards the Wood. “Have you ever heard of a town called Porosna?”

It sounded only vaguely familiar. “The baker in Dvernik,” I said. “Her grandmother was from Porosna. She made a kind of bun—”

“Yes, yes,” he said, impatient. “And do you have any idea where it is?”

I groped helplessly: I barely knew the name. “Is it in the Yellow Marshes?” I offered.

“No,” he said. “It was five miles down the road from Zatochek.”

Zatochek was not two miles from the barren strip that surrounded the Wood. It was the last town in the valley, the last bastion before the Wood; so it had been all my life. “The Wood—took it?” I whispered.

“Yes,” the Dragon said. He rose and went for the great ledger I had seen him write in, the day that Wensa had come to tell us about Kasia being taken, and he brought it to the table and opened it. Each of the great pages was divided into neat lines, rows and columns, careful entries like an account-book: but in each row stood the name of a town, names of people, and numbers: this many corrupted, this many taken; this many cured, this many slain. The pages were thick with entries. I reached out and turned the pages back, the parchment unyellowed, the ink still dark: there was a faint clinging magic of preservation on them. The years grew thinner and the numbers smaller as I went back. There had been more incidents lately, and larger ones.

“It swallowed Porosna the night the Raven died,” the Dragon said. He reached out and turned a thick sheaf of pages to where someone else, less orderly, had been keeping the records: each incident was merely written out like a story, the writing larger and the lines a little shaky.

Today a rider from Porosna: they have a fever there with seven sick. He did not stop in any towns. He was sickening too. A woodbane infusion eased his fever, and Agata’s Seventh Incantation was effective at purifying the root of the sickness. Sevenweight of silver worth of saffron consumed in the incantation, and fifteen for the woodbane.
It was the last entry in that hand.

“I was on my way back to the court by then,” the Dragon said. “The Raven had told me the Wood was growing—she asked me to stay. I refused, indignantly; I thought it beneath me. She told me there was nothing to be done for the count, and I resented it; I told her grandly I would find a way. That whatever the Wood’s magic had done, I could undo. I told myself she was an old weak fool; that the Wood was encroaching because of her weakness.”

I hugged myself as he spoke, staring down at the implacable ledger, the blank page beneath that entry. I wished now he would stop speaking: I didn’t want to hear any more. He was trying to be kind, baring his own failure to me, and all I could think was Kasia, Kasia, a cry inside me.

“So far as I could learn, afterwards—a frantic messenger caught me on the road—she went to Porosna, taking her stores with her, and wore herself out healing the sick. That, of course, was when the Wood struck. She managed to fling a handful of children to the next town—I imagine your baker’s grandmother was among them. They told a story of seven walkers coming, carrying a seedling heart-tree.

“I was still able to make it through the trees when I came, half a day later. They had planted the heart-tree in her body. She yet lived, if you can call it that. I managed to give her a clean death, but that was all I could do before I had to flee. The village was gone, and the Wood had pushed its borders out.

“That was the last great incursion,” he added. “I halted the advance by taking her place, and I’ve held it since then—more or less. But it’s always trying.”