“And if you hadn’t come?” I said.

“I’m the only wizard in Polnya strong enough to hold it back,” the Dragon said, without any particular arrogance: a statement of fact. “Every few years it tests my strength, and once a decade or so makes a serious attempt—like this last assault on your own village. Dvernik is only one village out from the edge of the Wood. If it had managed to kill or corrupt me there, and establish a heart-tree—by the time another wizard came, the Wood would have swallowed up both your village and Zatochek, and been on the doorstep of the eastern pass to the Yellow Marshes. And it would continue on from there, if given the chance. If I’d allowed them to send a weaker wizard when the Raven died, by now the whole valley would have been taken over.

“That’s what’s happening on the Rosyan side. They’ve lost four villages in the last decade, and two before that. The Wood will reach the southern pass to Kyeva Province in the next, and then—” He shrugged. “We’ll learn whether it can spread itself over a mountain pass, I suppose.”

We sat in silence. In his words I saw a vision of the Wood marching slow but implacable over my home, over all the valley, over all the world. I imagined looking down from the tower windows at endless dark trees, besieged; a whispering hateful ocean in every direction, moving with the wind, not another living thing in sight. The Wood would strangle all of them, and drag them down under its roots. Like it had with Porosna. Like it had with Kasia.

Tears were sliding down my face, a slow trail, not hard weeping. I was too desolate to cry anymore. The light outside was growing dim; the witch-lanterns hadn’t yet lit. His face had settled into abstraction, unseeing, and in the dusk his eyes were impossible to read. “What happened to them?” I asked to fill the silence, feeling hollow. “What happened to her?”

He stirred. “Who?” he said, surfacing from his reverie. “Oh, Ludmila?” He paused. “After I came back to the court for the last time,” he said finally, “I told her there was nothing to be done for her husband. I brought two other wizards from the court to attest his corruption was incurable—they were quite appalled that I’d allowed him to live so long in the first place—and I let one of them put him to death.” He shrugged. “They tried to make hay of it, as it happens—there’s more than a little envy among enchanters. They suggested to the king that I ought to be sent here for punishment, for having concealed the corruption. They meant the king to refuse that punishment, but settle on something else, some small or petty wrist-slapping, I suppose. It rather deflated them when I announced I was going, no matter what anyone else thought of it.

“And Ludmila—I didn’t see her again. She tried to claw my eyes out when I told her we had to put him to death, and her remarks at the time rather quickly disillusioned me as to the real nature of her feelings for me,” he added, dryly. “But she inherited the estate and remarried a few years later to a lesser duke; she bore him three sons and a daughter, and lived to the age of seventy-six as a leading matron of the court. I believe the bards at court made me the villain of the piece, and her the noble faithful wife, trying to save her husband at any cost. Not even false, I suppose.”

That was when I realized that I already knew the story. I had heard it sung. Ludmila and the Enchanter, only in the song, the brave countess disguised herself as an old peasant woman and cooked and cleaned for the wizard who had stolen her husband’s heart, until she found it in his house locked inside a box, and she stole it back and saved him. My eyes prickled with hot tears. No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.

“Are you ready to let her go?” the Dragon said.

I wasn’t, but I was. I was so tired. I couldn’t bear to keep going down those stairs, down to the thing wearing Kasia’s face. I hadn’t saved her at all. She was still in the Wood, still swallowed up. But fulmia still shuddered in my belly deep down, waiting, and if I said yes to him—if I stayed here and buried my head in my arms and let him go away, and come back and tell me it was done—I thought it might come roaring out of me again, and bring the tower down around us.

I looked at the shelves, all around them, desperately: the endless books with their spines and covers like citadel walls. What if one of them still held the secret, the trick that would set her free? I stood and went and put my hands on them, gold-stamped letters meaningless beneath my blind fingers. Luthe’s Summoning caught me again, that beautiful leather tome that I’d borrowed so long ago, and enraged the Dragon by taking, before I’d ever known anything of magic, before I’d known how much and how little I could do. I put my hands on it, and then I said abruptly, “What does it summon? A demon?”

“No, don’t be absurd,” the Dragon said, impatiently. “Calling spirits is nothing but charlatanry. It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal. The Summoning does nothing so trivial. It summons—” He paused, and I was surprised to see him struggling for words. “Truth,” he said finally, with half a shrug, as though that was inadequate and wrong, but as close as he could come. I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie.

“But why were you so angry that I had started reading it, then?” I demanded.

He glared at me. “Does that seem to you a trivial working? I thought you’d been set on to an impossible task by some other enchanter at court—with the intention, on their part, of blasting the roof off the tower when you’d spent all your strength and your working fell in on itself, and thereby making me look an incompetent fool not to be trusted with an apprentice.”

“But that would have killed me,” I said. “You thought someone from court would—?”

“Spend the life of a peasant with half an ounce of magic to score a victory over me—perhaps to see me ordered back to court, humiliated?” the Dragon said. “Of course. Most courtiers set peasants one degree above cows, and somewhat below their favorite horses. They’re perfectly delighted to spend a thousand of you in a skirmish with Rosya for some minor advantage on the border; they’d hardly blink at this.” He waved the viciousness of it aside. “In any case, I certainly didn’t expect you to succeed.”