I huddled in my bed all that night without sleeping, desperate all over again. But getting out of the tower didn’t become easier just because I wanted it more. I did go to the great doors the next morning, and tried for the first time to lift the enormous bar across them, no matter how ridiculous the attempt. But of course I couldn’t budge it a quarter of an inch.
Down in the pantry, using a long-handled pot for a lever, I pried up the great iron cap that covered the refuse-pit and looked down. Deep below a fire gleamed; there was no escape there for me. I pushed the iron lid back into place with an effort, and then I searched all along the walls with both my palms, into every dark corner, looking for some opening, some entry. But if there was one, I didn’t find it; and then morning was spilling down the stairs behind me, an unwelcome golden light. I had to make the breakfast and carry the tray up to my doom.
As I laid the food out, the plate of eggs, the toast, the preserves, I looked over and looked over again, at the long steel-gleaming butcher’s knife with its handle jutting out of the block towards me. I had used it to cut meat; I knew how quick it was. My parents raised a pig every year. I’d helped at butchering-time, held the bucket for the pig’s blood, but the thought of putting a knife into a man was something else, unimaginable. So I didn’t imagine it. I only put the knife on the tray, and went upstairs.
When I came into the library, he was standing by the window-sill with his back to me and his shoulders stiff with irritation. I mechanically put out the dishes, one after another, until there was nothing left but the tray, the tray and the knife. My dress was splattered with oatmeal and egg; in a moment he would say—
“Finish with that,” he said, “and go upstairs.”
“What?” I said, blankly. The knife was still under its napkin, drowning out all my other thoughts, and it took a moment for me to understand I’d been reprieved.
“Are you grown suddenly deaf?” he snapped. “Stop fussing with those plates and take yourself off. And keep to your rooms until I summon you again.”
My dress was stained and crumpled, a ruin of tangled ribbons, but he hadn’t even turned to look at me. I snatched up the tray and fled the room, needing no more excuse. I ran up the stairs, feeling almost as if I were flying without that terrible weariness dragging at my heels. I went into my room and shut the door and tore off my silken finery, put back on my homespun, and sank down on the bed, hugging myself with relief like a child who’d escaped a whipping.
And then I saw the tray discarded on the floor, the knife lying bare and gleaming. Oh. Oh, what a fool I’d been, even to think about it. He was my lord: if by some horrible chance I had killed him, I would surely be put to death for it, and like as not my parents along with me. Murder was no escape at all; better to just throw myself out the window.
I even turned and looked out the window, miserably, and then I saw what the Dragon had been watching with such distaste. There was a cloud of dust on the road coming to the tower. It wasn’t a wagon but a great covered carriage almost like a house on wheels: harnessed to a team of steaming horses, with two horsemen riding before the driver, all of them in coats of grey and brilliant green. Four more horsemen followed it, in similar coats.
The carriage drew up outside the great doors: there was a green crest on it, a monster with many heads, and all the outriders and guards came rolling down off their horses and went into an enormous bustle of work. They all flinched away a little when the tower doors swung lightly open, those huge doors I couldn’t even shift. I craned my head to peer down and saw the Dragon step out from the doors alone, onto the threshold.
A man came ducking out of the belly of the carriage: tall, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, with a long cloak all of that same brilliant green; he jumped down over the steps which had been put out for him, took with one hand the sword which another of his servants held across the palms, and strode quickly between his men and up to the door even as he belted it on, with no hesitation.
“I loathe a coach more than a chimaera,” he said to the Dragon, clear enough that I heard his voice rising to my window, over the snorting stamping horses. “A week shut up in the thing: why can’t you ever come to court?”
“Your Highness will have to forgive me,” the Dragon said, coldly. “My duties here occupy me.”
I was leaning out far enough by then I might have easily fallen out just by accident, with all my fear and misery forgot. The king of Polnya had two sons, but Crown Prince Sigmund was nothing but a sensible young man. He had been well educated and had married the daughter of some reigning count in the north, which had brought us an ally and a port. They had already assured the succession with a boy and a girl for spare; he was supposedly an excellent administrator, and would be an excellent king, and no one cared anything about him.
Prince Marek was enormously more satisfying. I had heard at least a dozen stories and songs of how he had slain the Vandalus Hydra, none of them alike but all of them, I was assured, true in every particular; and besides that he had killed at least three or four or nine giants in the last war against Rosya. He had even ridden out to try and kill a real dragon once, only it had turned out to be some peasants pretending to have been attacked by a dragon and hiding the sheep they claimed it had eaten, to get out of tax. And he hadn’t even executed them, but had chastised their lord for levying too high a tax.
He went into the tower with the Dragon, and the doors closed behind them; the prince’s men began encamping on the level field before the doors. I turned back into my small room and paced the floor in circles; at last I went and crept down the stairwell to try and listen, edging down until I heard their voices drifting out of the library. I couldn’t catch more than one word in five, but they were speaking of the wars with Rosya, and of the Wood.
I didn’t try very hard to eavesdrop; I didn’t much care what they were talking about. Far more important to me was the faint hope of rescue stirring: whatever the Dragon was doing to me, this horror of life-draining, it was surely against the king’s law. He’d told me to keep away, to keep out of sight; what if that wasn’t only because I was a discreditable mess, which he could have repaired with a word, but because he didn’t want the prince to know what he was doing? What if I threw myself on the prince’s mercy, and he took me away—
“Enough,” Prince Marek said, his voice breaking in on my thoughts: the words had come clearer as if he was moving closer to the door. He sounded angry. “You and my father and Sigmund, all of you bleating like sheep — no, enough. I don’t mean to let this rest.”
I hastily flew back up the stairwell on bare feet as noiseless as I could make them: the guest chambers were on the third floor, the one between mine and the library. I sat at the top of the stairwell listening to their boots on the steps below until the sounds died away. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to disobey the Dragon directly: if he caught me trying to go knock on the prince’s door, he’d surely do something terrible to me. But he was already doing something terrible to me. Kasia would have seized the chance, I was sure — if she’d been here, she would go and open the door and kneel at the prince’s feet and beg him for rescue, not like a frightened blubbering child but like a maiden out of the stories.
I went back to my room and practiced the scene, murmuring words under my breath, while the sun sank down. And when at last it was dark and late, I crept down the stairs with my heart pounding. But I was still afraid. First I went down and looked to make sure the lights were out in the library and in the laboratory: the Dragon wasn’t awake. On the third floor, a dim fire’s glow showed orange beneath the first guest chamber, and I couldn’t see anything of the Dragon’s bedroom door at all; it was lost in the shadows at the end of the hall. But still I hesitated on the landing — and then I went down to the kitchens instead.