“I should be the one who—!” Marek said, rousing to protest, but Queen Hanna held up her hand, and he stopped.

“Prince Marek will stay here and secure the capital with the royal guard, gathering the additional levies that are coming in,” she said, turning back to the court. “He will be guided by the council’s advice and, I hope, my own. Surely there is nothing else to be done?”

The crown prince stood. “We will do as the queen proposes,” he said. Marek’s cheeks were purpling with frustration, but he blew out a breath and said sourly, “Very well.”

Just that quickly, everything seemed decided. The ministers began at once to take themselves off busily in every direction, glad of order restored. There wasn’t a moment to protest, a moment to suggest any other course; there wasn’t a chance to stop it.

I stood up. “No,” I said, “wait,” but no one was listening. I reached for the last dregs of my magic, to make my voice louder, to make them turn back. “Wait,” I tried to say, and the room swam away into black around me.

I woke up in my room and sat straight up in one jerk, all the hair standing on my arms and my throat burning: Kasia was sitting on the foot of my bed, and the Willow was straightening up away from me with a thin, disapproving expression on her face, a potion-bottle in her hand. I didn’t remember how I’d got there; I looked out the window, confused; the sun had moved.

“You fell down in the council-room,” Kasia said. “I couldn’t stir you.”

“You were overspent,” the Willow said. “No, don’t try to rise. You’d better stay just where you are, and don’t try to use magic again for at least a week. It’s a cup that needs to be refilled, not an endless stream.”

“But the queen!” I blurted. “The Wood—”

“Ignore me if you like and spend your last dregs and die, I shan’t have anything to say about it,” the Willow said, dismissive. I didn’t know how Kasia had persuaded her to come and see to me, but from the cold look they exchanged as the Willow swept past her and out the door, I didn’t think it had been very gently.

I knuckled my eyes and lay there in the pillows. The potion the Willow had given me was a churning, glowing warmth in my belly, like I’d eaten something with too many hot peppers in it.

“Alosha told me to get the Willow to look at you,” Kasia said, still leaning worried over me. “She said she was going to stop the crown prince from going.”

I gathered my strength and struggled up, grabbing for Kasia’s hands. The muscles of my stomach were aching and weak. But I couldn’t keep to my bed right now, whether I could use magic or not. A heaviness lingered in the air of the castle, that terrible pressure. The Wood was still here, somehow. The Wood hadn’t finished with us yet. “We have to find her.”

The guards at the crown prince’s rooms were on high alert; they half-wanted to bar us coming in, but I called out, “Alosha!” and when she put her head out and spoke to them, they let us into the skelter of packing under way. The crown prince wasn’t in full armor yet, but he had on his greaves and a mail shirt, and he had a hand on his son’s shoulder. His wife, Princess Malgorzhata, stood with him holding the little girl in her arms. The boy had a sword—a real sword with an edge, made small enough for him to hold. He wasn’t seven years old. I would have given money that a child that young would cut off a finger within a day—his or someone else’s—but he held it as expertly as any soldier. He was presenting it across his palms to his father with an anxious, upturned face. “I won’t be any trouble,” he said.

“You have to stay and look after Marisha,” the prince said, stroking the boy’s head. He looked at the princess; her face was sober. He didn’t kiss her, but he kissed her hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I’m thinking of taking the children to Gidna once the funeral is over,” the princess said: I knew vaguely it was the name of the city she was from, the ocean port the marriage had opened to Polnya. “The sea air will be healthy for them, and my parents haven’t seen Marisha since her christening.” From the words, you would have thought she’d just had the idea a moment ago, but as she said them, they sounded rehearsed.

“I don’t want to go to Gidna!” the boy said. “Papa—”

“Enough, Stashek,” the prince said. “Whatever you think best,” he told the princess, and turned to Alosha. “Will you put a blessing on my sword?”

“I’d rather not,” she said grimly. “Why are you lending yourself to this? After we spoke yesterday—”

“Yesterday my father was alive,” Prince Sigmund said. “Today he’s dead. What do you think is going to happen when the Magnati vote on the succession, if I let Marek go and he destroys this Rosyan army for us?”

“So send a general,” Alosha said, but she wasn’t really arguing; I could tell she was only saying it while she searched for another answer that she believed in. “What about Baron Golshkin—”

“I can’t,” he said. “If I don’t ride out at the head of this army, Marek will. Do you think there’s any general I could appoint who would stand in the way of the hero of Polnya right now? The whole country is ringing with his song.”

“Only a fool would put Marek on the throne instead of you,” Alosha said.

“Men are fools,” Sigmund said. “Give me the blessing, and keep an eye on the children for me.”

We stayed and watched him ride away. The two small children knelt up on a footstool, peering over the window-sill with their mother behind them, her hands on their heads, golden and dark. He went with a small troop of guards for escort, his retinue, the eagle flag in red on white billowing out behind him. Alosha watched silently beside me from the second window until they had gone out of the courtyard. Then she turned to me and said dourly, “There’s always a price.”

“Yes,” I said, low and tired. And I didn’t think we were done paying.

Chapter 24

I couldn’t do anything more, just then, but sleep. Alosha told me to lie down right there in the room, despite the princess’s dubious looks, and I fell asleep on the soft wool rug before the fireplace: it was woven in a strange dancing pattern of enormous curved raindrop shapes, or perhaps tears. The stone floor beneath was hard, but I was too tired to care.