Jakub’s voice rose higher and higher as he spoke, until it broke and stopped. His hands were shaking.

Alosha poured more nalevka into a glass for him to drink. “It’s stronger than we thought,” she said. “We have to burn it at once.”

I struggled up off my footstool, but Alosha shook her head at me. “You’re overspent. Go sit on the hearth, and keep watch on me: don’t try to do anything unless you see it’s taking me.”

The book still lay placidly on the floor between the shattered pieces of the stone table, illuminated and innocent. Alosha took a pair of gauntlets from one of the guards and picked it up. She took it to the hearth and called fire: “Polzhyt, polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,” and on further from there, a long incantation, and the dull ashes in the hearth roared up like the blaze of her forge. The fire licked at the pages and gummed them, but the book only flung itself open in the fire and its pages ruffled like flags in a high wind, snapping, pictures of beasts trying to catch the eye, illuminated with firelight behind them.

“Get back!” Alosha said sharply to the guards: a few of them had been about to take a step closer, their eyes vague and caught. She reflected firelight into their faces from the flat of her dagger, and they blinked and then startled back, pale and afraid.

Alosha watched with a wary eye until they moved farther away, then turned back and kept chanting her fire spell, over and over, her arms spread wide to hold the fire in. But the book still hissed and spat on the hearth like wet green wood, refusing to catch; the fresh smell of spring leaves crept into the room, and I could see veins standing out on Alosha’s neck, strain showing in her face. She had her eyes fixed on the mantelpiece, but they kept drifting downwards towards the glowing pages. Each time, she pressed her thumb against the edge of her dagger. Blood dripped. She lifted her gaze back up.

Her voice was going hoarse. A handful of orange sparks landed on the carpet and smoldered. Sitting tired on the footstool, I looked at them and slowly I began to hum the old song about the spark on the hearth, telling its long stories: Once there was a golden princess, loved a simple player; the king gave them a splendid wedding, and the story ends there! Once there was old Baba Jaga, house made out of butter; and in that house so many wonders—tsk! The spark is gone now. Gone, taking the story with it. I sang it once through softly and said, “Kikra, kikra,” and then sang it again. The flying sparks began to drop onto the pages like rain, each one darkening a tiny spot before they went out. They fell in glowing showers, and when they fell in clusters, thin plumes of smoke went up.

Alosha slowed and stopped. The fire was catching at last. The pages were curling in on themselves at the edges like small animals huddling to die, with a burnt-sugar smell of sap in the fire. Kasia took my arm gently, and we backed away from the fire while it slowly ate the book up like someone forcing herself to eat stale bread.

“How did this bestiary come to your hands?” one minister bellowed at me, seconded by half a dozen more. “Why was the king there?” The council chamber was full of nobles shouting at me, at Alosha, at one another, afraid, demanding answers that weren’t to be had. Half of them still suspected me of having set a trap for the king, and talked of throwing me in the dungeon; some others decided, on no evidence at all, that shivering Jakub was a Rosyan agent who’d lured the king to the library and tricked Father Ballo into reading the book. He began to weep and make protests, but I didn’t have the strength to defend myself against them. My mouth stretched into an involuntary yawn instead, and made them angrier.

I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t think. My hands were still stinging with lightning and my nose was full of smoke, of burning paper. None of it seemed real to me yet. The king dead, Father Ballo dead. I had seen them barely an hour ago, walking away from the war-conference, whole and healthy. I remembered the moment, too vividly: the small worried crease in Father Ballo’s forehead; the king’s blue boots.

In the library, Alosha had done a purging spell over the king’s body, then the priests had carried him away to the cathedral for vigil, wrapped hastily in a cloth. The boots had been sticking out of the end of the bundle.

The Magnati kept shouting at me. It didn’t help that I felt I was to blame. I’d known something was wrong. If I’d only been quicker, if I’d only burned the book myself when I first found it. I put my stinging hands over my face.

But Marek stood up next to me and shouted the nobles down with the authority of the bloody spear he was still holding. He slammed it down on the council table in front of them. “She slew the beast when it might have killed Solya and another dozen men besides,” he said. “We don’t have time for this sort of idiocy. We march on the Rydva in three days’ time!”

“We march nowhere without the king’s word!” one of the ministers dared to shout back. Lucky for him, he was across the table and out of arm’s reach: even so he shrank back from Marek leaning across the table, mailed hand clenched into a fist, rage illuminating him with righteous wrath.

“He’s not wrong,” Alosha said sharply, putting a hand down in front of Marek, and making him straighten up to face her. “This is no time to be starting a war.”

Half of the Magnati along the table were snarling and clawing at each other; blaming Rosya, blaming me, even blaming poor Father Ballo. The throne stood empty at the head of the table. Crown Prince Sigmund sat to the right of it. His hands were clenched around each other into a single joined fist. He stared at it without speaking while the shouting went on. The queen sat on the left. She still wore Ragostok’s golden circlet, above the smooth shining satin of her black gown. I noticed dully that she was reading a letter: a messenger was standing by her elbow, with an empty dispatch bag and an uncertain face. He’d come into the room just then, I suppose.

The queen stood up. “My lords.” Heads turned to look at her. She held up the letter, a short folded piece of paper; she’d broken the red seal. “A Rosyan army has been sighted coming for the Rydva: they will be there in the morning.”

No one let out a word.

“We must put aside our mourning and our anger,” she said. I stared up at her: the very portrait of a queen, proud, defiant, her chin raised; her voice rang clearly in the stone hall. “This is no hour for Polnya to show weakness.” She turned to the crown prince: his face was turned up towards her just like mine, startled and open as a child’s, his mouth loosely parted over words that weren’t coming. “Sigmund, they have only sent four companies. If you gather the troops already mustering outside the city and ride at once, you will have the advantage in numbers.”