“This is only an exercise in delaying what we all know has to be done,” a woman was saying, somewhere out of sight: her voice was deep for a woman, a lovely warm sound, but there was an angry edge to her words. “No, don’t start bleating at me again about the relics, Ballo. Any spell can be defeated—yes, even the one on holy blessed Jadwiga’s shawl, and stop looking scandalized at me for saying so. Solya’s gone drunk on politics to lend himself to this enterprise in the first place.”

“Come, Alosha. Success excuses all risks, surely,” the Falcon said mildly as we rounded a corner and found three wizards gathered at a large round table in an alcove, with a wide window letting in the afternoon sun. I squinted against it, after the dim light of the palace hallways.

The woman he’d called Alosha was taller even than me, with ebony-dark skin and shoulders as broad as my father’s, her black hair braided tightly against her skull. She wore men’s clothes: full red cotton trousers tucked into high leather boots, and a leather coat over it. The coat and the boots were beautiful, embossed with gold and silver in intricate patterns, but they still looked lived-in; I envied them in my ridiculous dress.

“Success,” she said. “Is that what you call this, bringing a hollow shell back to the court just in time to burn her at the stake?”

My hands clenched. But the Falcon only smiled and said, “Perhaps we’d best defer these arguments for the moment. After all, we aren’t here to judge the queen, are we? My dear, permit me to present to you Alosha, our Sword.”

She looked at me unsmiling and suspicious. The other two were men: one of them the same Father Ballo who’d examined the queen. He didn’t have a single line creasing his cheeks, and his hair was still solidly brown, but he somehow contrived to look old anyway, his spectacles sliding over a round nose in a round face as he peered up and down at me doubtfully. “Is this the apprentice?”

The other man might have been his opposite, long and lean, in a rich wine-red waistcoat embroidered elaborately in gold and a bored expression; his narrow pointed black beard curled up carefully at the tip. He was stretched in a chair with his boots up on the table. There was a heap of short stubby golden bars on the table beside him and a small black velvet bag heaped with tiny glittering red jewels. He was working two bars in his hands, magic whispering out of him; his lips were moving faintly. He was running the ends of the gold together, the bars thinning under his fingers into a narrow strip. “And this is Ragostok, the Splendid,” Solya said.

Ragostok said nothing, and didn’t even lift his head save for one brief glance that took me in from head to feet and dismissed me at once and forever as beneath his notice. But I preferred his disinterest to the hard suspicious line of Alosha’s mouth. “Where exactly did Sarkan find you?” she demanded.

They’d heard some version of the rescue by then, it seemed, but Prince Marek and the Falcon hadn’t bothered with the parts of the story that didn’t suit them, and there was more they hadn’t known. I stumbled through an awkward explanation of how I’d met Sarkan, uncomfortably aware of the Falcon’s eyes on me, bright and attentive. I wanted to say as little as I could about Dvernik, about my family; he already had Kasia as a tool to use against me.

I borrowed Kasia’s secret fear and tried to hint that my family had chosen to offer me to the Dragon; I made sure to say my father was a woodcutter, which I already knew they would disdain, and I didn’t tell them any names. I said the village headwoman and one of the herdsmen instead of Danka and Jerzy, and made it sound as though Kasia was my only friend, and not just my dearest, before I haltingly told them of her rescue.

“And I suppose you asked nicely, and the Wood gave her back to you?” said Ragostok without looking up from his work: he was pressing the tiny red jewels into the gold with his thumbs, one after another.

“The Dragon—Sarkan—” I found myself grateful for the small lift I felt, from the thunder of his name on my tongue. “—he thought the Wood gave her to me for the chance of setting a trap.”

“So he hadn’t lost his mind entirely by then,” Alosha said. “Why didn’t he put her to death at once? He knows the law as well as anyone.”

“He let—he let me try,” I said. “He let me try to purge her. And then it worked—”

“Or so you imagine,” she said. She shook her head. “And so does pity lead straight to disaster. Well, I’m surprised to hear it of Sarkan; but better men than he have lost their heads over a girl not half their age.”

I didn’t know what to say: I wanted to protest, to say That’s not it, there’s nothing like that, but the words stuck in my throat. “And do you suppose that I lost my head over her as well?” the Falcon said, in amused tones. “And Prince Marek in the bargain?”

She looked at him, an edge of contempt. “When Marek was a boy of eight, he wept for a month demanding his father take the army and every wizard in all Polnya into the Wood to bring his mother back,” she said. “But he’s not a child anymore. He should have known better, and so should you. How many men did this crusade of yours cost us? You took thirty veterans, cavalrymen, every one of them a prime soldier, every one of them carrying blades from my forge—”

“And we brought back your queen,” the Falcon said, a sudden hard bite in his voice, “if that means anything to you?”

Ragostok heaved a noisy and pointed sigh without even looking up from his golden circlet. “What difference does it make at the moment? The king wants the girl tried—so try her already and let’s be done with it.” His tone made clear he didn’t expect it to take long.

Father Ballo cleared his throat; he reached for a pen, dipped it into an inkwell, and leaned in towards me, peering through his small spectacles. “You do seem rather young to be examined. Tell me, my dear, how long have you been studying under your master?”

“Since the harvest,” I said, and stared back at their incredulous eyes.

Sarkan hadn’t mentioned to me that wizards ordinarily took seven years of study before asking to be admitted to the list. And after I spent a good three hours flubbing half the spells they set me on, exhausting myself in the meantime, even Father Ballo was inclined to believe that Sarkan had gone stupidly in love with me, or was having some sort of joke at their expense, to send me to be tested.