Solya looked back at me and only spread his hands, subtly, as much as to say I’ve done what I can. He leaned in and murmured something to Marek, and when the last physician had stepped down, the prince said, “Let Agnieszka of Dvernik be called to witness how the queen was freed.”

That’s what I had wanted, after all; this was the reason I’d come and fought to have myself put on the list. Everyone was looking at me, even the king with his lowered brows. But I still didn’t know what to say. What would it matter to the king, to any of these courtiers, for me to say the queen wasn’t corrupt? They certainly wouldn’t care what I said of Kasia.

Maybe Solya would try and cast the Summoning with me, if I asked him to. I thought of doing that, imagined that white light showing the whole court the truth. But—the queen had already been tested beneath Jadwiga’s veil. The court had seen her beneath the Falcon’s sight. The king could see she wasn’t corrupted. This wasn’t about truth at all. The court didn’t want truth, the king didn’t want truth. Any truth I could give them, they could ignore as easily as the rest. It wouldn’t change their minds.

But I could give them something else entirely. I could give them what they really wanted. And then I realized I knew what that was, after all. They wanted to know. They wanted to see what it had been like. They wanted to feel themselves a part of it, of the queen’s rescue; they wanted to be living in a song. That wasn’t truth, anything like it, but it might convince them to spare Kasia’s life.

I closed my eyes and remembered the illusion spell: Easier than real armies, Sarkan had said, and as I began to whisper the spell, I knew that he was right. It was no harder than making a single flower to raise up the whole of that monstrous heart-tree, and it climbed up out of the marble floor with terrible ease. Kasia dragged in a breath; a woman screamed; there was a clatter of a chair falling over somewhere in the room. I shut the noise out. I let the incantation keep rolling singsong off my tongue while I poured out magic and the sick, tight dread that had never left the back of my stomach. The heart-tree kept growing, spreading its great silver branches through the hall, the ceiling fading away into silver rustling leaves and the terrible stench of fruit. My stomach turned over once, and then Janos’s head came rolling by across the grass in front of my feet, and struck against the sprawling roots.

All the courtiers cried out and jerked back against the walls, but even as they did, they were fading away, disappearing. The walls all around us were gone, too, falling away into forest and the ringing clash of steel. Marek turned in sudden startled alarm, raising his sword: the silver mantis was there, lunging towards him. When its claws struck against his shoulders, they scraped against the steel of his brilliant armor. Corpses were staring up from the grass around his feet.

A haze of smoke was drifting across my eyes, the sudden crackle of fire. I turned towards the trunk, and Sarkan was there, too, caught in the tree with silver bark trying to devour him, saying, “Now, Agnieszka,” while fire-heart glowed red between his fingers. Instinctively, I half-reached my hand towards him, remembering dread and anguish, and for a moment—for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.

I put my hands on the tree trunk as the bark curled and split apart like the skin of a too-ripe tomato. Kasia was beside me, real; the trunk was splintering open beneath her pounding hands. She was breaking open the wood of the trunk, and the queen came staggering forward out of it, her hands reaching out to meet ours, groping for help, her face suddenly alive and full of horror. We caught her and pulled her out. I heard the Falcon shouting a spell of fire—and then I realized, he was calling real fire, and we weren’t really in the Wood. We were in the king’s castle—

As soon as I let myself remember that, the illusion spell went slithering straight out of my grasp. The tree burned away into the air; the fire at its roots swept up along the trunk and took all the rest of the Wood along with it. The corpses sank down through the ground, one last glimpse of their faces, all their faces, before the white marble floor closed over them. I watched them with tears running down my face. I hadn’t known I remembered the soldiers well enough to make so many of them. And then the last leaf-shadows cleared, and we were in the palace again, before the throne, with the king standing shocked upon his dais.

The Falcon whirled staring around himself, panting, fire still crackling in his hands and skittering over the marble floors; Marek also swung back looking for an enemy that wasn’t there anymore. His sword was unstained again, his armor bright and undented. The queen stood in the middle of the floor trembling, her eyes wide. All the court was pressed up against the walls and one another, as far from us and the center of the room as they could go. And I, I sank to my knees shaking, my arms wrapped around my stomach, feeling sick. I had never wanted to be back there again, in the Wood.

Marek recovered first. He stepped towards the throne, his chest still heaving. “That is what we reft her from!” he shouted up at his father. “That is the evil we overcame to bring her out, that is what we paid to save her! That is the evil you serve, if you—I won’t see it done! I will—”

“Enough!” the king roared back at him: he was pale beneath his beard.

Marek’s face was flushed and bright with violence, battle-lust. He was still holding his sword. He took a step towards the throne. The king’s eyes widened; red anger flushed into his cheeks, and he beckoned to his guards; there were six of them beside the dais.

Queen Hanna cried out suddenly, “No!”

Marek whirled back to look at her. She took a clumsy lurching step forward, her feet dragging as if she had to make an effort to move them. Marek was staring at her. She took another step and seized his arm. “No,” she repeated. She pulled his arm down, when he would have kept it up. He resisted, but she had turned her eyes up at him, and his face was suddenly a boy’s, looking down at her. “You saved me,” she said to him. “Marechek. You already saved me.”

His arm sank, and still clinging to it she turned slowly to the king. He was staring down at her. Her face was pale and beautiful framed in the cloud of her short hair. “I wanted to die,” she said. “I wanted so to die.” She took another dragging step and knelt on the wide dais stairs, and pulled Marek down with her; he bowed his head, staring at the floor. But she kept looking up. “Forgive him,” she said to the king. “I know the law. I am ready to die.” Her hand held tight when Marek would have jerked. “I am the queen of Polnya!” she said, loudly. “I am ready to die for my country. But not as a traitor.