Prince Marek nodded to Janos, confirming the orders. “See to it everyone gets a little rest, if they can,” he said. “We’ll ride straight for the Wood as soon as we’re done here.”

“And pray that the queen isn’t deep inside it,” the Dragon added, flatly; Janos darted a glance at him and back to the prince, but Marek only slapped the flank of Janos’s horse and turned away, a dismissal; Janos followed the other men away, down the narrow path and out of sight.

We were left alone just inside the barn, the five of us. Dust floated through the sunlight, the warm sweet smell of hay, but with a faint choking undercurrent of rotting leaves beneath. I could see a broken jagged-edged hole gaping in the side of the wall: where the wolves had come through, not to eat the cattle but to savage and corrupt them. I hugged myself. The day was growing late: we’d ridden straight across the valley to Dvernik since before the morning light, only stopping long enough to let the horses rest. Wind stirred through the doors and blew against my neck, a cold touch. The sun was orange on Jerzy’s face, his wide unseeing stone eyes. I remembered the cold, still feeling of being stone: I wondered if Jerzy could see out of his own fixed gaze, or if the Wood had closed him into darkness.

The Dragon looked at the Falcon and made a wide mocking sweep of his arm towards Jerzy. “Perhaps you’d care to be of some assistance?”

The Falcon gave him a thin, smiling bow and went to stand before the statue with upraised hands. The words to lift the stone spell came ringing off his tongue, beautifully enunciated, and as he spoke Jerzy’s fingertips curled in with a twitch as the stone drained out of them. The stiffened claws of his hands were still outstretched to either side of him, and the rusting chains hanging from his wrists had been nailed to the wall. The metal links scraped against one another as he started to move. The Falcon backed away a little, still smiling, as the stone retreated slowly down from the crown of Jerzy’s head and his eyes began to roll and dart from side to side. A shrill faint thread of laughter wheezed out of him as his mouth came loose; then the stone freed his lungs, and the smile slid off the Falcon’s face as it rose and rose to a shrieking pitch.

Kasia moved against me, clumsily, and I gripped her hand. She stood beside me like a statue herself, rigid and remembering. Jerzy howled and laughed and howled, over and over, as though he was trying to make up for all the howls that had been closed up inside his stone chest. He howled until he was out of breath, and then he lifted his head and grinned at us all with his blackened and rotting teeth, his skin still mottled green. Prince Marek was staring at him, his hand clenched on his sword; the Falcon had backed away to his side.

“Hello, princeling,” Jerzy crooned to him, “do you miss your mother? Would you like to hear her scream, too? Marek!” Jerzy shrilled suddenly, in a woman’s voice, high and desperate. “Marechek, save me!”

Marek flinched bodily as if something had struck him in the gut, three inches of his sword-blade coming out of its sheath before he stopped. “Stop it!” he snarled. “Make it be silent!”

The Falcon raised a hand and said, “Elrekaduht!” still staring and appalled. Jerzy’s wide-mouthed cackles went muffled as if he’d been closed up inside a thick-walled room, only a faint distant whine of “Marechek, Marechek” still coming through.

The Falcon whirled towards us. “You can’t possibly mean to cleanse this thing—”

“Ah, so now you’re feeling squeamish?” the Dragon said, cold and cutting.

“Look at him!” the Falcon said. He turned back and said, “Lehleyast palezh!” and swept his opened hand down through the air as though he were wiping down a pane of glass covered in steam. I recoiled, Kasia’s hand clenching painfully on mine; we stared in horror. Jerzy’s skin had gone translucent, a thin greenish onion-skin layer, and beneath it nothing but black squirming masses of corruption that boiled and seethed. Like the shadows I’d seen beneath my own skin, but grown so fat they’d devoured everything there was inside him, even coiling beneath his face, his stained yellow eyes barely peering out of the grotesque, seething clouds.

“And yet you were prepared to ride blithely into the Wood,” the Dragon said. He turned. Prince Marek was staring at Jerzy, grey as a mirror; his mouth was a narrow bloodless line. The Dragon said to him, “Listen to me. This?” He gestured at Jerzy. “This is nothing. His corruption is thrice-removed, less than three days old thanks to the stone spell. If it were only four times removed instead, I could have cleansed him with the usual purgative. The queen’s been held in a heart-tree for twenty years. If we can find her, if we can bring her out, if we can purge her, none of which is remotely certain, she’ll still have lived twenty years in the worst torment the Wood can devise. She won’t embrace you. She won’t even know you.

“We have a true chance against the Wood here,” he added. “If we succeed in purging this man, if we destroy another heart-tree doing it, we shouldn’t use that opening to make a foolish headlong charge deep into the bowels of the Wood, risking everything. We should begin at the nearest border, cut a road into the Wood as deep as we can from sunrise to sunset, and then set fire-heart in the forest behind us before we retreat. We could reclaim twenty miles of this valley, and weaken the Wood for three generations.”

“And if my mother burns with it?” Prince Marek said, wheeling on him.

The Dragon nodded towards Jerzy. “Would you rather live like that?”

“Then if she doesn’t burn!” Marek said. “No.” He heaved a breath like there were iron bands around his chest. “No.”

The Dragon’s mouth compressed. “If we were able to so weaken the Wood, our chances of finding her—”

“No,” Marek said, a slash of his hand, cutting him off. “We’ll bring my mother out, and as we go we’ll lay waste as much of the Wood as we can. Then, Dragon, when you’ve purged her and burned the heart-tree that held her, I swear you’ll have every man and axe that my father can spare you, and we won’t just burn the Wood back twenty miles: we’ll burn it all the way to Rosya, and be rid of it for good.”

He straightened as he spoke, his shoulders going back; he’d planted himself still more firmly. I bit my own lip. I trusted Prince Marek not at all, except to please himself, but I couldn’t help feeling that he had the right of it. If we cut the Wood back even twenty miles, it would be a great victory, but only a temporary one. I wanted all of it to burn.