The dark blade came out dripping, glazed with water. It had a strange and hungry feeling. When I looked into it I saw a long fall into some deep dry crack in the earth, tumbling away onto sharp rocks. It wasn’t like the other enchanted swords, the ones Marek’s soldiers had carried; this thing wanted to drink life.

“I’ve been forging this blade for a century,” Alosha said, holding it up. I looked at her, glad to take my eyes away from the thing. “After the Raven died, and Sarkan went to the tower, I began it. There’s less iron than spellcraft in it by now. The sword only remembers the shape it once had, and it won’t last for longer than a single stroke, but that’s all it will need.”

She put it back in the forge again, and we watched it sitting in the bath of flames, a long tongue of shadow among them. “The power in the Wood,” Kasia said slowly, her eyes on the fire. “Is it something you can kill?”

“This sword can kill anything,” Alosha said, and I believed her. “As long as we can make it put out its neck. But for that,” she added, “we’ll need more than a hundred men.”

“We could ask the queen,” Kasia said suddenly. I blinked at her. “I know there are lords who owe her fealty on her own—a dozen of them tried to come and pay her homage, while we were locked up together, though the Willow wouldn’t let them in. She must have soldiers she could give us, instead of sending them to Rosya.”

And she, at least, would surely want the Wood struck down. Even if Marek wouldn’t listen to me, or the king, or anyone else in the court, perhaps she would.

So Kasia and I went down to hover outside the great council-chamber: the queen was there again, a part of the war-council now. The guards would have let me inside: they knew who I was, now. They watched me sidelong out of the corners of their eyes, nervous and interested both, as though I might erupt with more sorcery at any moment, like contagious boils. But I didn’t want to go in; I didn’t want to get caught up in the arguments of the Magnati and the generals planning how best to murder ten thousand men, and harvest glory while the crops rotted in the fields. I wasn’t going to put myself into their hands as another weapon to aim.

So we waited outside and held back against the wall instead while the council came pouring out, a torrent of lords and soldiers. I had thought the queen would come behind them, with servants to help her walk. But she didn’t: she came out in the center of the crowd. She was wearing the circlet, Ragostok’s circlet, the one he’d been working on. The gold caught the light, and the rubies shone above her golden hair. She wore red silk, too, and all of the courtiers gathered around her, sparrows around a cardinal bird. It was the king who came behind the rest, talking in low voices with Father Ballo and two councilors, an afterthought.

Kasia looked at me. We would have had to shove through the crowd to get to her—brazen, but we could have done it; Kasia could have made a way for us. But the queen looked so different. The stiffness seemed to have faded, and her silence. She was nodding to the lords around her, she was smiling; she was one of them again, one of the actors moving on the stage, as graceful as any of them. I didn’t move. She glanced aside for a moment, almost towards us. I didn’t try to catch her eye; instead I caught Kasia’s arm, and pressed her farther back into the wall with me. Something held me like the instinct of a mouse in a hole, hearing the breath of the owl’s wing overhead.

The guards fell in after the court with last looks at me; the hallway stood empty. I was trembling. “Nieshka,” Kasia said. “What is it?”

“I’ve made a mistake,” I said. I didn’t know just what, but I’d done something wrong; I felt the dreadful certainty of it sinking down through me, like watching a penny falling away down a deep well. “I’ve made a mistake.”

Kasia followed me through the hallways, the narrow stairs, almost running by the end, back to my small room. She was watching me, worried, while I shut the door hard behind us and leaned against it, like a child hiding. “Was it the queen?” Kasia said.

I looked at her standing in the middle of my room, firelight golden on her skin and through her hair, and for one horrible moment she was a stranger wearing Kasia’s face: for one moment I’d brought the dark in with me. I whirled away from her to the table. I’d brought a few branches of pine into my bedroom, to have them nearby. I took a handful of needles and burned them on the hearth and breathed in the smoke, the sharp bitter smell, and I whispered my cleansing spell. The strangeness faded. Kasia was sitting on the bed watching me, unhappy. I looked up at her miserably: she’d seen suspicion in my eyes.

“It’s no more than I’ve thought myself,” she said. “Nieshka, I should—maybe the queen, maybe both of us, should be—” Her voice shook.

“No!” I said. “No.” But I didn’t know what to do. I sat on the hearth, panting, afraid, and then I turned abruptly to the fire, cupping my hands, and I called up my old practice illusion, the small and determinedly thorny rose, the vining branches of the rosebush climbing sluggishly over the sides of the fire-screen. Slowly, singing, I gave it perfume, and a handful of humming bees, and leaves curling at the edges with ladybugs hiding; and then I made Sarkan on the other side of it. I called up his hands beneath mine: the long spindly careful fingers, the smooth-rubbed pen calluses, the heat of his skin radiating; and he took shape on the hearth, sitting beside me, and we were sitting in his library, too.

I was singing my short illusion spell back and forth, feeding a steady silver thread of magic to it. But it wasn’t like the heart-tree had been, the day before. I was looking at his face, his frown, his dark eyes scowling at me, but it wasn’t really him. It wasn’t just an illusion that I needed, not just the image of him or even a smell, or a sound, I realized. That wasn’t why the heart-tree had lived, down in that throne room. It had grown out of my heart, out of fear and memory and the churning of horror in my belly.

The rose was cupped in my hands. I looked at Sarkan on the other side of the petals, and let myself feel his hands cupped around mine, the places where his fingertips just barely brushed against my skin and where the heels of my palms rested in his. I let myself remember the alarming heat of his mouth, the crush of his silk and lace between our bodies, his whole length against me. And I let myself think about my anger, about everything I’d learned, about his secrets and everything he’d hidden; I let go of the rose and gripped the edges of his coat to shake him, to shout at him, to kiss him—