I told myself I was hungry. I ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese to fortify myself, while I stood shivering in front of the fire, and then I went back upstairs. All the way upstairs, back to my room.
I couldn’t make myself really imagine it, me at the prince’s door, me kneeling and making a graceful speech. I wasn’t Kasia, wasn’t anyone special. I’d only burst into tears and look like a lunatic, and he’d probably throw me out or, worse, call the Dragon to have me properly chastised. Why would he believe me? A peasant girl in a homespun smock, a low servant in the Dragon’s house, waking him in the middle of the night with a wild story of the great wizard tormenting me?
I went desolately back into my room and stopped short. Prince Marek was standing in the middle of the chamber, studying the painting: he’d pulled down the cover I’d put over it. He turned around and looked me over with a doubtful expression. “My lord, Highness,” I said, but not really. The words came out in such a whisper he couldn’t have heard them except as an inarticulate noise.
He didn’t seem to care. “Well,” he said, “you aren’t one of his beauties, are you.” He crossed the room, barely two steps needed: he made it seem smaller by being there. He put his hand under my chin, turned my face side-to-side inspecting it. I stared up at him dumbly. He was strange to be so close to, overwhelming: taller than I was, broad with the weight of a man who nearly lived in armor, handsome as a portrait and clean-shaven, freshly bathed; his golden hair was dark and damply curling at the base of his neck. “But perhaps you’ve some particular skill, sweet, that makes up for it? That’s his usual line, isn’t it?”
He didn’t sound cruel, only teasing, and his smile down at me was conspiratorial. I didn’t feel wounded at all, only dazed from so much attention, as though I’d already been saved without having to say a word. And then he laughed, and kissed me, and reached efficiently for my skirts.
I startled like a fish trying to jump out of a net and struggled against him. It was like struggling against the tower doors, impossible; he scarcely even noticed me trying. He laughed again and kissed my throat. “Don’t worry, he can’t object,” he said, as though that was my only reason to protest. “He’s still my father’s vassal, even if he likes to stay out here in the hinterlands lording it over you all alone.”
It’s not that he was taking pleasure in overcoming me. I was still mute and my resistance was more confused batting at him, half-wondering: surely he couldn’t, Prince Marek couldn’t, the hero; surely he couldn’t even really want me. I didn’t scream, I didn’t plead, and I think he scarcely imagined that I would resist. I suppose in an ordinary noble house, some more-than-willing scullery maid would already have crept into his bedchamber and saved him the trouble of going looking. For that matter, I’d probably have been willing myself, if he’d asked me outright and given me enough time to get over my surprise and answer him: I struggled more by reflex than because I wanted to reject him.
But he did overcome me. Then I began to be really afraid, wanting only to get away; I pushed at his hands, and said, “Prince, I don’t, please, wait,” in disjointed bursts. And though he might not have wanted resistance, when he met it, he cared nothing: he only grew impatient.
“There, there; all right,” he said, as though I were a horse to be reined in and made calm, while he pinned my hand by my side. My homespun dress was tied up with a sash in a simple bow; he already had it loose, and then he dragged up my skirts.
I was trying to thrust my skirts back down, push him away, drag myself free: useless. He held me with such casual strength. And then he reached for his own hose, and I said aloud, desperate, without thinking, “Vanastalem.”
Power shuddered out of me. Crusted pearls and whalebone closed up beneath his hands like armor, and he jerked his hands off me and stepped back as a wall of velvet skirts fell rustling between us. I caught myself on the wall trembling and struggling to get my breath while he stared at me.
And then he said, in a very different voice, a tone I couldn’t understand, “You’re a witch.”
I backed from him like a wary animal, my head spinning: I couldn’t get my breath properly. The gown had saved me but the stays were strangling-tight, the skirts dragging and heavy, as though they’d deliberately made themselves impossible to remove. He came towards me more slowly, a hand outstretched, saying, “Listen to me—” but I hadn’t the least intention of listening. I snatched up the breakfast tray, still sitting atop my dresser, and swung it wildly at his head. The edge of it clanged loudly against his skull and knocked him staggering sideways. I gripped it with both hands and lifted it up and swung again and again, blindly, desperate.
I was still swinging when the door burst open and the Dragon was there, in a long magnificent dressing-gown flung over his nightshift, his eyes savage. He took one step into the room and halted, staring. I halted too, panting, the tray still upraised mid-swing. The prince had sunk to his knees before me. A maze of blood was running down over his face, bloody bruises across his forehead. His eyes were closed. He fell over onto the floor before me unconscious with a thump.
The Dragon took in the scene, looked at me, and said, “You idiot, what have you done now?”
—
We heaved the prince onto my narrow bed together. His face was already blackening with bruises: the tray upon the floor was dented badly with the curve of his skull. “Splendid,” the Dragon said through his teeth, inspecting him — the prince’s eyes were staring and strange, dull, when he lifted their lids, and his arm, lifted, fell limply back to the cot and dangled off the side.
I stood watching, panting against the bodice, my desperate fury gone and only horror left. As strange as it may sound, I wasn’t only afraid of what would happen to me; I didn’t want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who’d just been pawing at me. “He’s not — he’s not—”
“If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly,” the Dragon snapped. “Go down to the laboratory and bring me the yellow elixir in the clear flask from the shelf in the back. Not the red one, and not the violet one — and try if possible not to break it as you bring it up the stairs, unless you want to try and persuade the king that your virtue was worth the life of his son.”
He laid his hands on the prince’s head and began to chant softly, words that shivered along my spine. I ran for the stairs clutching my skirts up against me. I brought the elixir back up in only moments, panting with haste and the confinement of my stays, and found the Dragon still working: he didn’t interrupt his chanting, only held a hand out towards me impatiently, beckoning sharply; I lay the flask in his hand. With the fingers of one hand, he worked out the cork and tipped a swallow into the prince’s mouth.
The smell of it was horrible, like rotting fish; I nearly choked with nausea just from standing nearby. The Dragon shoved the flask and cork back at me without even looking, and I had to hold my breath to close it. He was clamping the prince’s jaw shut with both hands. Even unconscious and wounded, the prince jerked and tried to spit. The elixir was glowing somehow from inside his mouth, so bright that I could see his jaw and teeth outlined like a skull.
I managed to shut the flask again without retching, and then sprang to help: I pinched the prince’s nose shut, and after a moment he finally swallowed. The brilliant glow went down his throat and into his belly. I could make it out still traveling all throughout his body, a light underneath his clothes, thinning out as it branched away into his arms and legs, until at last it died away too dim to see.