I knew the Dragon wasn’t there; he was in the east, in Zatochek, where the thin column of smoke rose from the edge of the Wood. But I put him in the library anyway, at the table, the hard angles of his face lit by the candles that never melted; looking at me with that annoyed, baffled expression: Now what are you doing?

“Help me!” I said to him, and gave Stashek a push. The Dragon put his hands out automatically and the children tumbled into them together; Stashek cried out, and I saw him stare up at the Dragon with wide eyes. Sarkan stared down at him.

I turned back, half in the library, half on the mountain. “Kasia!” I cried.

“Go!” she shouted at me. One of the soldiers behind Marek had a clear view of me and the library behind me; he slung a bow down and stretched an arrow, taking aim.

Kasia ducked under the pike and ran at Marek’s horse and shoved the animal bodily back, both hands on its chest. It squealed and reared up, hopping back on its rear legs and lashing at her. Marek kicked her, snapping back her chin, and shoved the shaft of the pike down between them, just behind her ankle. He had both hands on the pike now, he’d dropped his reins, but somehow he made the horse do what he wanted anyway. The animal turned, he twisted his body as it did, gripping the pike, and he tripped Kasia up. The horse’s hindquarters struck her and swept her stumbling to the edge of the path, and Marek gave a quick, massive heave. She fell over: she didn’t even have time to scream, just gave a startled “Oh!” and was gone, dragging a clump of grass loose as she grabbed at it.

“Kasia!” I screamed. Marek turned towards me. The bowman let the arrow loose; the string twanged.

Hands seized my shoulders, gripping with familiar, unexpected strength; they dragged me backwards. The walls of the library rushed forward around me and closed up just before the arrow would have passed through them. The whistle of the wind, the cold crisp air, faded from my skin. I whirled, staring: Sarkan was there; he was standing right behind me. He’d pulled me through.

His hands were still on my shoulders; I was braced on his chest. I was full of alarm and a thousand questions, but he dropped his hands and stepped back, and I realized we weren’t alone. A map of the valley lay unrolled on the table, and an enormous, broad-shouldered man with a beard longer than his head and a shirt of mail under a yellow surcoat stood at the far end of it, gawking at us, with four armored men behind him gripping the hilts of their swords.

“Kasia!” Marisha was crying in Stashek’s arms and struggling against his grip. “I want Kasia!”

I wanted Kasia, too; I was still shaking with the memory of watching her tumble over the edge. How far could she fall, without being hurt? I ran to the window. We were far away, but I could see the thin plume of dust where she’d fallen, like a line drawn down the side of the mountain. She was a tiny dark heap of brown cloak and golden hair on the trail, a hundred feet down where it sloped back on itself down the mountain. I tried to gather my wits and my magic. My legs still shook with exhaustion.

“No,” Sarkan said, coming to my side. “Stop. I don’t know how you’ve done any of this, and I imagine I’ll be appalled when I learn, but you’ve been too profligate with your magic for one hour.” He pointed his finger out the window at the tiny huddled heap of Kasia’s body, his eyes narrowing. “Tualidetal,” he said, and clenched his hand into a fist, jerked it quickly back, and pointed his finger to an open place on the floor.

Kasia tumbled out of the air where he pointed and spilled to the floor trailing brown dust. She rolled and got up quickly, staggering only a little; there were some bloody scrapes on her arms, but she’d kept hold of her sword. She took one look at the armed men on the other side of the table and caught Stashek by the shoulder; she pulled him behind her and held the sword out like a bar. “Hush, Marishu,” she said, a quick touch of her hand to Marisha’s cheek, to quiet her; the little girl was trying to reach for her.

The big man had only been staring all this while. He said suddenly, “God in Heaven; Sarkan, that’s the young prince.”

“Yes, I imagine so,” Sarkan said. He sounded resigned. I stared at him, still half-disbelieving he was really there. He was thinner than when I’d seen him last, and almost as disheveled as I was. Soot streaked his cheek and neck, and had left a fine thin layer of grey over all his skin, enough that a line showed at the loose collar of his shirt where it gaped open, to divide clean skin from dirty. He wore a rough long coat of leather hanging open. The edges of the sleeves and the bottom hem were singed black, and the whole length of it patterned with scorch marks. He looked as though he’d come straight from burning the Wood: I wondered wildly if I’d somehow summoned him here, with my spell.

Peering from behind Kasia, Stashek said, “Baron Vladimir?” He hitched Marisha up a little in his arms, protectively, and looked at Sarkan. “Are you the Dragon?” he asked, his high young voice wavering and doubtful, as if thinking he didn’t quite look the part. “Agnieszka brought us here to keep us safe,” he added, even more doubtfully.

“Of course she did,” Sarkan said. He looked out the window. Marek and his men were already riding down the sloping trail, and not alone. The long marching line of the army was coming out of the mountain pass, their feet raising a sunset-golden cloud of dust that rolled down towards Olshanka like a fog.

The Dragon turned back to me. “Well,” he said, caustic, “you’ve certainly brought more men.”

Chapter 26

He must have scraped together every soldier in the south of Polnya,” the Baron of the Yellow Marshes said, studying Marek’s army. He was a big, comfortably barrel-bellied man who wore his armor as easily as cloth. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in our village tavern.

He’d just gotten the summons to come to the capital for the king’s funeral when Marek’s magic-sped messenger had arrived, told him that the crown prince was dead, too, and gave him his orders: to go over the mountains, seize Sarkan as corrupted and a traitor, and lay a trap for me and the children. The baron nodded, gave orders for his soldiers to gather, and waited until the messenger had left. Then he’d brought his men over the pass and gone straight to Sarkan, to tell him there was some kind of corrupt deviltry going on in the capital.

They’d come back to the tower together, and those were his soldiers encamped below; they were hastily putting up fortifications for a defense. “But we can’t hold out for longer than a day, not against that,” the baron said, jerking his thumb out the window at the army pouring down the mountainside. “So you’d better have something up your sleeve. I told my wife to write to Marek that I’d lost my mind and gone corrupted, so I hope he won’t behead her and the children, but I’d as soon keep my own head on, too.”