I was sorry now that I’d given the Dragon’s letter away, my only tool and talisman. How did I know it had even been delivered? I decided to go find it: I remembered the guard captain’s face, or at least his mustache. There couldn’t be many mustaches like that even in all Kralia. I stood up and pulled the door open boldly, walked out into the hallway, and nearly ran straight into the Falcon. He was just raising his hand to the latch on my door. He flowed deftly back out of my way, saving us both, and gave me a small, gentle smile that I didn’t trust at all.
“I hope you’re feeling refreshed,” he said, and offered me his arm.
I didn’t take it. “What do you want?”
He turned the gesture neatly into a long inviting sweep of his hand towards the hallway. “To escort you to the Charovnikov. The king has given orders you’re to be examined for the list.”
I was so relieved that I didn’t quite believe him. I eyed him sidelong, half-expecting a trick. But he kept standing there with his arm and smile, waiting for me. “At once,” he added, “although perhaps you’d care to change first?”
I would have liked to tell him what to do with his mocking little hint, but I looked down at myself: all mud and dust and sweat-stained creases, and underneath the mess a homespun skirt that stopped just below my knee and a faded brown cotton shift, worn old clothes I’d begged off a girl in Zatochek. I didn’t look like one of the servants; the servants were far better dressed than me. Meanwhile Solya had exchanged his black riding clothes for a long robe of black silk with a long sleeveless coat embroidered in green and silver over it, and his white hair spilled over it in a graceful fall. If you had seen him from a mile away, you would have known him for a wizard. And if they didn’t think me a wizard, they wouldn’t let me testify.
“Try and present a respectable appearance,” Sarkan had said.
Vanastalem gave me clothes to match the mood of my sullen muttering: a stiff and uncomfortable gown of rich red silk, endless flounces edged in flame-orange ribbons. I could have used an arm to lean on, at that, trying to negotiate stairs in the enormous skirt without being able to see my feet, but I grimly ignored Solya’s subtly renewed offer at the head of the staircase, and picked my way slowly down, feeling for the edges of the steps with my tight-slippered toes.
He clasped his hands behind his back instead and paced me. He remarked idly, “The examinations are often challenging, of course. I suppose Sarkan prepared you for them?” He threw me a mildly inquiring glance; I didn’t answer him, but I couldn’t quite keep myself from dragging my bottom lip through my teeth. “Well,” he said, “if you do find them difficult, we might provide a—joint demonstration to the examiners; I’m sure they would find that reassuring.”
I only glared at him and didn’t answer. Anything we did, I was sure he’d take the credit for. He didn’t press the matter, smiling on as though he hadn’t even noticed my cold looks: a circling bird high above waiting for any opening. He took me through an archway flanked by two tall young guards who looked at me curiously, and into the Charovnikov, the Hall of Wizards.
I slowed involuntarily coming into the cavernous room. The ceiling was like an opening into Heaven, painted clouds spilling over a blue sky and angels and saints stretched across it. Enormous windows poured in the afternoon sunlight. I stared up, dazzled, and almost ran myself into a table, reaching blindly to catch myself with my hands on the corner and feeling my way around it. All the walls were covered in books, and a narrow balcony ran the full length of the room, making an even taller second level of bookcases. Ladders hung down from the ceiling on little wheels all along it. Great worktables stood along the length of the room, heavy solid oak with marble topping them.
“This is only an exercise in delaying what we all know has to be done,” a woman was saying, somewhere out of sight: her voice was deep for a woman, a lovely warm sound, but there was an angry edge to her words. “No, don’t start bleating at me again about the relics, Ballo. Any spell can be defeated—yes, even the one on holy blessed Jadwiga’s shawl, and stop looking scandalized at me for saying so. Solya’s gone drunk on politics to lend himself to this enterprise in the first place.”
“Come, Alosha. Success excuses all risks, surely,” the Falcon said mildly as we rounded a corner and found three wizards gathered at a large round table in an alcove, with a wide window letting in the afternoon sun. I squinted against it, after the dim light of the palace hallways.
The woman he’d called Alosha was taller even than me, with ebony-dark skin and shoulders as broad as my father’s, her black hair braided tightly against her skull. She wore men’s clothes: full red cotton trousers tucked into high leather boots, and a leather coat over it. The coat and the boots were beautiful, embossed with gold and silver in intricate patterns, but they still looked lived-in; I envied them in my ridiculous dress.
“Success,” she said. “Is that what you call this, bringing a hollow shell back to the court just in time to burn her at the stake?”
My hands clenched. But the Falcon only smiled and said, “Perhaps we’d best defer these arguments for the moment. After all, we aren’t here to judge the queen, are we? My dear, permit me to present to you Alosha, our Sword.”
She looked at me unsmiling and suspicious. The other two were men: one of them the same Father Ballo who’d examined the queen. He didn’t have a single line creasing his cheeks, and his hair was still solidly brown, but he somehow contrived to look old anyway, his spectacles sliding over a round nose in a round face as he peered up and down at me doubtfully. “Is this the apprentice?”
The other man might have been his opposite, long and lean, in a rich wine-red waistcoat embroidered elaborately in gold and a bored expression; his narrow pointed black beard curled up carefully at the tip. He was stretched in a chair with his boots up on the table. There was a heap of short stubby golden bars on the table beside him and a small black velvet bag heaped with tiny glittering red jewels. He was working two bars in his hands, magic whispering out of him; his lips were moving faintly. He was running the ends of the gold together, the bars thinning under his fingers into a narrow strip. “And this is Ragostok, the Splendid,” Solya said.
Ragostok said nothing, and didn’t even lift his head save for one brief glance that took me in from head to feet and dismissed me at once and forever as beneath his notice. But I preferred his disinterest to the hard suspicious line of Alosha’s mouth. “Where exactly did Sarkan find you?” she demanded.