My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask. Let Kasia go! I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.
I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”
“We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.
I tottered away suffused with relief — the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him — and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.
He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.
“When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.
He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.
“But isn’t there — it must start soon?” I tried.
He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”
Chapter 19
Three days later, the trial still hadn’t begun, and I hated everyone around me.
Sarkan had told me there was power to be had here, and I suppose for someone who understood the court there would have been. I could see there was a kind of magic in having my name written down in the king’s book. After speaking to the secretary, I had gone back to my tiny room, baffled and uncertain what to do next, and before I had been sitting on my bed for half an hour the maids had knocked five times carrying cards of invitation to dinners and parties. I thought the first one was a mistake. But even after I realized they couldn’t all have gone astray, I still had no idea what to do with them, or why they were coming.
“I see you’re already in demand,” Solya said, stepping out of a shadow and through my doorway before I could close it after yet another maid, delivering yet another card.
“Is this something we’re supposed to do?” I asked warily. I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was a duty of the king’s wizards. “Do these people need some kind of magic done?”
“Oh, it might come to that eventually,” he said. “But at the moment, all they want is the privilege of displaying the youngest royal witch ever named. There are already a dozen rumors flying about your appointment.” He plucked the cards out of my hands, shuffled through them, and handed one out to me. “Countess Boguslava is by far the most usefuclass="underline" the count has the king’s ear, and he’s sure to be consulted about the queen. I’ll take you to her soirée.”
“No, you won’t!” I said. “You mean they just want me to come and visit? But they don’t even know me.”
“They know enough,” he said, in patient tones. “They know you’re a witch. My dear, I really think you would be better off accepting my escort for your first outing. The court can be — difficult to navigate, if you’re unfamiliar with its ways. You know that we want the same thing: we want the queen and Kasia acquitted.”
“You wouldn’t give a crust of bread to save Kasia,” I said, “and I don’t like the way you go about getting the things you want.”
He didn’t let me chase away his manners. He only politely bowed himself backwards into the shadows in the corner of my room. “I hope you’ll learn to think better of me, by and by.” His voice floated distantly out of the dark, even as he vanished. “Do keep in mind that I am ready to be your friend, if you find yourself at sea.” I threw the card from Countess Boguslava after him. It fluttered to the ground in the empty corner.
I didn’t trust him at all, though I couldn’t help but worry he was telling me part of the truth. I was beginning to understand how little I understood about the life of the court. To listen to Solya, if I showed my face at a party given by a woman who didn’t know me, she would be pleased, and tell her husband so, and he’d — tell the king that the queen shouldn’t be put to death? And the king would listen? None of that made sense to me, but neither did strangers sending me a pile of invitations, all because a man had written my name down in a book. But here were the invitations, so plainly I was missing steps along the way.
I wished I could speak to Sarkan: half for advice, half to complain at him. I even opened up Jaga’s book and hunted through it for a spell that would let me reach him, but I didn’t find anything that seemed as though it could work. The closest was one called kialmas, with the note, to be heard in the next village, but I didn’t think anyone would appreciate me shouting so loudly that my voice would go a week’s distance across the country, and I didn’t think the mountains would let the noise through anyway, even if I deafened everyone in Kralia.
In the end, I picked out the earliest dinner invitation, and went. I was hungry, anyway. The last of the bread I’d saved in my skirt pocket was so stale by now that even magic couldn’t make it go down easily, or really fill my belly. There had to be kitchens somewhere in the castle, but the servants eyed me oddly when I went too far down the wrong hallway; I didn’t want to imagine their faces if I went sailing into the kitchens. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop one of those maids, a girl just like me, and ask her to serve me — as though I really thought myself a fine lady, instead of just dressed up pretending to be one.
I roamed up and down stairs and through hallways until I found my way back out to the courtyard, and there I girded myself and went to one of the guards on the door, and asked him the way, showing him my invitation. He gave me the same odd look the servants did, but he looked at the address and said, “It’s the yellow one third in from the outer gate. Go down the road and you’ll see it after you get around the cathedral. Do you want a chair? Milady?” He tacked on the last, doubtfully.
“No,” I said, confused by the question, and set off.
It wasn’t a very long walk: the nobles lived in houses set inside the outer walls of the citadel — or the richest ones did, anyway. The footmen at the yellow house stared at me, too, when I finally walked up to the entrance, but they opened the doors for me. I stopped on the threshold: it was my turn to stare. On my way, I had gone by more than one pair of men carrying peculiar tall boxes around the castle grounds; I hadn’t known what they were for. Now one of them was being carried to the steps of the house, right behind me. A footman opened up the door in its side, and there was a chair inside it. A young lady climbed out.