Work Text:
Sarkan smoothed his hand over the page again, wishing he could smooth down the feelings of regret and loss that arose every time he contemplated this decision. It had been three weeks since he left the Valley for the capital, and he had intended to write to Agnieszka as soon as he'd arrived; he had left her without detailed instructions for the work he expected her to do on the tower, after all. But there was little use in expending her energy on the tower now that he had decided not to return. His talents would be put to better use here in Kralia than in the newly subdued Wood, and he would probably be required at court for as long as the young king lived. Surely she would understand that; she wasn't entirely without reason.
He scowled at his own train of thought. Why should he care whether or not she understood? There was no practical purpose for him to return to the Valley now. He dipped his quill and began to write, stating the situation as clearly, formally, and impersonally as possible. Better to make it a clean break.
Agnieszka,
I write to you from Kralia to inform you of my decision to remain here indefinitely. There are years of work ahead of me at court, and your peculiar abilities with regard to the Wood make my presence there unnecessary, in any case. Unless the king commands me to do so, I do not plan to return to the valley during his reign.
I will send a steward from the court in October to make business arrangements and to transport my personal possessions to the capital. You need not trouble yourself further about repairs to the tower.
There, he thought, setting his pen down with a feeling of accomplishment. This wasn't as difficult as he expected it to be. But then he read back over the lines, and all in a rush, her face rose up in his memory as he'd last seen her, the morning she had discovered him packing to leave: angry, surprised, hurt. The image made him wince. He picked up his pen again, cursing himself for his weakness.
I am of course available for consultation by post, should you find you require advice on the management of the Wood.
Regards,
The Dragon
At the very least, she could never say that he had abandoned her without any resources, especially when she had no desire to be anywhere other than that backwater of a town in her corrupted Valley.
He muttered a quick-dry cantrip over the ink and was reaching for his block of sealing wax when the words he had written started to shift and change on the paper, at first very subtly, but then all of a sudden in a rush of ink. Before his eyes, the letter transformed into something very different.
My dear Agnieszka,
I write to you from Kralia to tell you that I am safe and well. There could be years of work ahead of me here, but I hope to return to the Valley as soon as possible. Your peculiar abilities with regard to the Wood may make my presence there seem unnecessary, but I am confident that the new king will give me leave to return home before winter.
My departure was more abrupt than I intended, and for that I beg you will forgive me. Until I am able to return, I hope you will use that impossible illusion spell of yours to contact me frequently. I find that I miss you already.
With affection,
Sarkan
Sarkan frowned. Where had this sentimental drivel come from? This was most decidedly not the letter he had written; something must have gone wrong with the drying spell.
He crumpled the paper into a ball, drew out another sheet, and wrote the letter again. It was easy to replicate the words of his first missive, short as it had been, and he sat back in satisfaction once more, waiting for the ink to dry on its own this time.
It didn't. In front of him, the ink swam and shifted and rearranged itself to form the words and sentences of the second letter, the one in which he assured Agnieszka that he would be home – as if he could ever think of such a place as home – as soon as he could. He read it through again. The words were the same, even down to the ending. I find that I miss you already.
“What the devil…” he began, but then he paused and glowered at the letter. He set it aside, trimmed his quill with his penknife, and reached for another piece of paper. Within a few moments, he had recreated his letter for the third time. No spells this time, no cantrips. He sat and watched the piece of paper, trying not to ponder how ridiculous he must look: he was literally watching ink dry. But then it happened again.
I find that I miss you already.
He stared at the letter for a long moment, speechless with confusion and outrage. He had picked up this paper and ink from the clerk's office at the Charovnikov shortly after arriving in Kralia. Someone must have given him enchanted writing materials; it was the only explanation. Someone, he thought with a dull sense of rage, was trying to make a fool of him.
Sarkan gathered up the pages and the bottle of ink and slammed the door of his chambers behind him.
“I suppose you all think this is funny,” he snarled at the first clerk he saw in the Charovnikov, dropping the paper and ink bottle onto the middle of his desk. The bottle, unstoppered, spattered ink across the sheaf of blank pages and onto the clerk’s spotless robes. The clerk was young, probably in his first or second year of apprenticeship, and he nearly jumped out of his chair, gripping the sides of his seat and staring at Sarkan wide-eyed.
“Tell me,” Sarkan said, rocking forward on his toes, “what did you expect me to think of this?” He gestured contemptuously at the ink-spattered paper now strewn across the clerk’s desk.
“Lord Dragon,” the clerk sputtered, “What --”
Sarkan cut him off, gesturing impatiently. “The paper, you imbecile. It’s enchanted. Everything I write on it turns into something else.”
The clerk ran a nervous finger along the edge of the pages. “Surely you are mistaken, my lord. We have no enchanted paper--”
“Am I mistaken about this?” Sarkan hissed, shaking one of the copies of the letter in the clerk’s face. “I watched it change myself!”
The clerk looked at him as if he were mad. “I am sorry, my lord,” he said carefully. “We do not maintain a supply of enchanted paper--”
“The ink, then,” Sarkan shouted. “The pens. Something!”
The boy merely shook his head, red in the face and speechless.
“A trick, perhaps?” Sarkan growled, leaning in, threatening. “A joke among the clerks? Perhaps something that wasn’t meant to get out?”
The penalty for something like that would have been severe; the clerk’s face blanched. “No, my lord!” the boy cried. “I do assure you!”
Sarkan crossed his arms and surveyed him. The boy appeared to be telling the truth; he was probably too dull to be a good liar, and most certainly too stupid to have come up with the type of enchantment Sarkan had witnessed.
“New paper,” Sarkan barked at the unfortunate clerk. “New ink and pens as well, while you’re at it. And make sure they work properly this time.”
“Yes -- yes, sir.” The clerk scrabbled around his desk, rounding up supplies. “These are mine, personally, Lord Dragon,” he said, presenting a stack of neatly trimmed paper, two quills, and a bottle of blue-black ink. “I promise you, they work splendidly.”
“I should hope they do,” Sarkan muttered, snatching the copies of his letter as he left. A thought nagged at him: he had been using this supply of paper for weeks, and this afternoon was the first time something like this had happened. This afternoon was also the first time he’d written to Agnieszka.
It couldn’t be her, could it? Could her strange magic reach him, even all the way here?
He shrugged off the question, hurrying back to his rooms and dropping the new supplies onto his desk without a second look. His first concern was to destroy the ruined copies of the letter before anyone else got a look at them and thought he and Agnieszka--.
He stopped himself deliberately, before he could reach the conclusion of that thought, and threw the handwritten pages into the fire. It was easy to cast the first two copies in, but he hesitated at the third, reading and re-reading the words despite himself. They made something in him resonate in a strange and not entirely unpleasant way.
I find that I miss you already.
Reluctantly, he turned away from the fire, laid the letter into the drawer of his desk, locked it, and pocketed the key.
**
Sarkan used the clerk’s paper and ink the next day to take notes on purging spells in the library. The writing materials behaved exactly as the boy said they would. Exactly as paper and pen should behave, he thought, disgruntled at the spectacle he must have made of himself in the clerk’s office.
He spent the remainder of the week carefully isolating and destroying further pockets of corruption in the library, paying special attention to the room in which the corrupted bestiary had been discovered. Although the task should have been routine, he’d had a hard time concentrating, and some of his spells went unpredictably awry. He was so tired and frustrated by the time he reached his room each evening that he didn't try writing to Agnieszka again until more than a week had passed after his first attempt. There was no way he could have tried any sooner, he told himself; he certainly wasn't avoiding the task.
When he finally settled at his desk with pen in hand, he eyed the paper with trepidation. He had taken precautions this time - bought extra supplies at an ordinary stationers’ shop outside the palace walls: new pens, new paper, newly mixed ink, just in case the ones from the Charovnikov proved faulty again. He used no magic, not even his usual cantrips for trimming his pen or mixing his ink. He gave himself a shake, clenched his teeth, and wrote the same letter he had written before, reminding himself all the while that it was not possible for the same thing to happen again, and that he was not nervous about the outcome of this experiment.
Even so, once he had finished writing, he sat back and watched the paper once more, holding his breath. The ink appeared to dry at first, and Sarkan exhaled a relieved sigh. Just as he was reaching for the paper to fold it, though, the dried ink puddled together in the middle of the page, then burst apart into an array of different words, ones that he had never written.
He tore the offending piece of paper into shreds and deposited it in the fireplace in disgust without even reading it. Then, anger blazing, he seized the stack of paper the clerk had given him and fed it to the fire as well. Ballo’s successor must be an incompetent fool, he thought indignantly, to allow the clerks to practice such spells on confirmed wizards.
Sarkan drew out the supplies he had purchased in the city and wrote the letter again, gritting his teeth. His handwriting, usually precise and elegant, was an angry scrawl this time, but he didn’t much care. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared at the sheet of paper while he waited for the ink to dry.
Again, the words rearranged themselves to thwart his intended meaning.
Sarkan swore emphatically and picked up the paper, determined to throw it into the fireplace right away, but before he knew what he was doing, he was reading it eagerly. It was as if the words on the page were a flag waving, trying to attract his attention.
My dearest Agnieszka,
I am sorry for the long lapse between my first letter and this one. I uncovered more corruption in the library this week and have spent long days clearing it. The work is satisfying, but I cannot but think that it would have been more effective if we had worked on it together. Our combined workings always seemed to add up to more than we could accomplish singly.
The palace is as I remember it, although much improved by the absence of most of the members of the court. Even so, I no longer know how to live here. I long for trees outside my window, for the comfort of my own library, for your incessant questions, noise, and disorder. I did not understand until I left how dear your presence had become to me. My heart is in the Valley, with you.
I remain entirely yours,
Sarkan
Entirely yours. He scoffed. He was entirely no one’s; most certainly not hers. He did not even belong entirely to himself, apparently, as he could not even manage to express himself in a simple letter. And the idea that her chaos had somehow become dear to him? Preposterous.
Even as he scoffed at the letter, he felt compelled to read it again. There was something about the words, the emotion they expressed, something he couldn't put a finger on… My heart is in the Valley, with you. An image of Agnieszka filled his mind’s eye: her eyes sparkling at him from under her tangle of brown curls, her mouth caught up at the corners in that mischievous smile of hers. His own mouth softened into a slight smile at the memory, but then, as he realized what he was doing, his shoulders stiffened and he pushed the thought away.
“Of all the asinine, ridiculous, absurd things…” he began to scold himself. He shook his head violently to clear his thoughts, clutched the piece of paper in his fist, and began pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace.
The question, he told himself, wasn't why he felt some pull toward these letters; it was why this mawkish rubbish kept replacing the reasonable letters he had written. The new paper he had purchased had yielded the same result as the old. He could only conclude that the problem was with the writer: him.
He must be under a spell.
Who would have had the requisite skill and knowledge to do something like this? Sarkan’s first guess would have been Solya, but he was still in Gidna, along with the king and the rest of the court. Alosha and the Willow were there as well, along with most of the other confirmed witches and wizards; the Charovnikov was, in fact, quite sparsely inhabited at present.
It couldn’t be Agnieszka, he thought uneasily. It was improbable that her magic could reach this far. He doubted she would even want to receive a letter from him, as angry as she had been the last time he’d seen her. And he certainly didn’t want her magic to be the culprit; that would be ridiculous.
Ragostok, then. Sarkan would hardly have thought him capable of such an enchantment, especially without attracting Sarkan’s notice, but perhaps his skills had improved in the decades since Sarkan had lived at court. He was the only wizard of sufficient strength in Kralia, anyway; it could only be him.
Sarkan flung himself out into the corridor toward Ragostok’s chambers without a thought, still clutching the incriminating letter in his fist. He banged on the door with it clenched between his fingers, then thrust it into Ragostok’s face as soon as he opened the door.
“Tell me,” Sarkan kept his voice low and poisonous, drawing all the shadows in the hall to cluster around him like a cape, “what do you mean to accomplish by enchanting my correspondence?”
The Splendid yawned, unperturbed. “To what do I owe the rather dubious pleasure of this visit, Sarkan? Something I am supposed to have done?”
“My letters. What type of spell did you put on them? Or on me?” Sarkan demanded plainly.
“I am sure I don't know what you mean,” Ragostok replied lazily. He plucked the letter from between Sarkan’s fingers and read it entirely without interest, dangling it between his forefinger and thumb like a dirty rag, shifting to keep it just out of Sarkan’s reach. “You write very tedious love letters, unsurprisingly,” he drawled, yawning again. “But you can hardly blame a spell for that.”
“I'm not trying to write love letters at all,” Sarkan snapped, feeling his face redden as he snatched the letter back. “Quite the opposite.”
Ragostok gave him a long, appraising look. “Would you like me to tell you something, Dragon?” He beckoned conspiratorially, and Sarkan leaned in closer to hear him. “Despite your delusions to the contrary, no one is waiting with bated breath for an opportunity to sabotage your love life, or your career, or anything else, for that matter. You're simply not that interesting. Now, if you will excuse me, I, for one, have better things to do.” He closed the door firmly in Sarkan’s face.
Sarkan stood for a moment, staring at the wooden door, clenching and unclenching his fists, then turned on his heel and walked briskly back to his rooms.
**
“There's nothing wrong with you,” the apprentice healer told him the next morning. “No evidence of any corruption, no spells, nothing that I can find. Perhaps you have simply been working too hard,” she added unhelpfully. They were in the rooms in the tower where the Willow kept an infirmary. The Willow herself was in Gidna to attend to Alosha and the royal children, but her most senior apprentice had stayed behind to see to those who were left in Kralia.
Sarkan scowled in reply. “You're sure there's no corruption?” he questioned. “I have been working on quite a few cases lately; it is possible that I have come into close contact with a corrupted item.”
“You have already had a double dose of your own purging potion,” the healer said, putting her hands on her hips, “and, as you well know, short of working the Summoning on you, that provides ample proof that you’re not corrupted or under enchantment.”
He wasn’t surprised that the healer had found no evidence of corruption in him. His long years of experience with the Wood had taught him to recognize its effects on himself, and he had not sensed any of them. Visiting her had been more a precaution than anything else; there was no sense in being reckless where magic was concerned. Plus, he did not trust Ragostok at his word when it came to enchantments.
“The symptoms I have described—“ Sarkan began, more out of principled dislike of her dismissiveness than genuine concern for himself. Apparently, however, the Willow had trained her assistants to be just as obstinate as she was. She cut him off impatiently.
“Poor concentration, faulty memory, and a bad temper,” she said briskly. “All characteristic of overwork and lack of sleep, except I suspect that the bad temper is more of a chronic condition in your case. I would be happy to discuss this with you at length, but I have other patients to visit. Patients who actually need treatment,” she added, opening the door and motioning him through it.
Sarkan stalked past her, not deigning to reply. It was something of a relief to have ruled out corruption in his own person as a cause for his strange inability to write a simple letter. Now he could test another theory to explain what was happening to him: his rooms. It had occurred to him, as he returned to his chambers after his confrontation with Ragostok, that some object in his study might be interfering with his letter-writing, whether it was corrupted, enchanted, or simply a bit of rotten magic. The easiest way to test that theory would be to write a letter outside his palace chambers, away from the influence of the hypothetical object. Hence this trip to the Charovnikov library, which he had just purged of corruption himself the week before.
He chose a seat at a reading table and looked around surreptitiously from the corners of his eyes. The idea had seemed a sensible one in theory, but now that he was here, it seemed an awfully public spot to compose such a private letter. He felt exposed, somehow, as if everyone in the room knew exactly what he was going to write.
“Not a love letter,” he grunted to himself, scowling. He bent his head toward the paper and wrote quickly; he had the succinct text of his letter to Agnieszka memorized by now, and as usual, he sat back and watched as the ink dried. A library assistant passed near him, carrying a stack of books to re-shelve.
“I know a spell that could speed that up for you,” the boy said helpfully. “A cantrip, really. It goes—“
“Yes, yes, I know,” the Dragon snapped at him. “Can you not see that I am engaged in an experiment at the moment?” He fixed the assistant with a fiery glare, and the boy flushed red up to the roots of his hair, suddenly realizing to whom he had offered help with basic spell work.
“My apologies, my lord,” he muttered, backing away, and Sarkan returned his attention to the paper – only to find that in the few seconds he had spent interacting with the boy, the note had transformed into yet another page of worthless twaddle.
My love,
Did you know there are two books of spells written by people from the Valley here in the Charovnikov? Stumbling across them was almost like finding you here, unexpectedly; they felt like you, like home.
I am told that while you were in Kralia, you looked for me here in the library as well. It does not surprise me that you then came up with a way to contact me that no one, including myself, thought feasible. I only wish I could use that method to see you now.
I miss you more than I ever thought I could, you gloriously incomprehensible creature. Many years ago I forbade myself to love, thinking it impossible, and you have proven me wrong. I must admit, I have never been so happy to be shown my own error.
Unabashedly yours,
Sarkan
Sarkan sat and stared at the letter, dumbfounded. What could possibly be causing this? He had eliminated his writing supplies, external enchantments on his own person, and now, anything in his rooms as the cause of the mysterious letters. He had never even heard of this type of spellwork. It simply should not be possible.
The assistant was making his way back across the library toward Sarkan’s table. Sarkan grabbed the letter before anyone else could see it, folded it, and stood abruptly, almost overturning his chair in his haste.
**
That night, back in his private office in his palace quarters, Sarkan yanked open the drawer of his desk and took out the first two letters, scrutinizing all three together for any detail that could reveal where they came from or how they had been produced. Disappointingly, they were relentlessly ordinary. The handwriting was undeniably his, and there was nothing strange about them that he could see, other than their contents.
“Ulozhistus,” he muttered, and the pages went almost transparent in the spell-light, but as he expected, there was nothing corrupted to be seen in any of them.
He straightened up and sighed. There was one other spell he could try, although he had been reluctant to use it. The spell would, at least, show him the person behind the words that kept appearing on the page. It would also likely offer a channel for communication with that person, independent of ink and paper. If the source of this strange problem was Agnieszka, as he had suspected from the beginning, he would rather not open that channel; she’d only complicate and muddle things, as she always did.
But there was nothing else for it. He recited the spell resolutely, every syllable precisely enunciated, then watched intently as the spell-light brightened and a series of sensations – images, scents, sounds, thoughts, emotions – bombarded him.
His library at the Tower, comfortably austere, with Agnieszka curled in the armchair by the fireplace. The faintest of smiles playing around his own mouth as the two of them worked. His hand joined with hers, casting the Summoning, casting the rose illusion, the way their fingers laced together perfectly. His hand, covered in burning bark from the heart tree, squeezing her fingers for what he thought was one last time. Her eyes searching his; her voice humming breathily, her throat, her lips…
His eyes narrowed. This wasn't what he had expected; these were his own memories, seen from his point of view. He gasped as the scene in the spell-light abruptly changed.
Agnieszka bleeding and dying next to him on the floor of the cellar. Bodies of soldiers stacked up in the trench around the tower. Agnieszka struggling with the Wood Queen, disappearing into the heart-tree. An overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and despair. His own voice calling her name, his hands cupping the water of the Spindle.
A wave of emotion swept over him, full of grim resolve and pain, and he passed a trembling hand over his face. He had never wanted anything more than to forget those few days; he didn’t think he could bear the reminder of what he could have lost. Just when he thought he couldn't watch any more, the scene shifted, transformed from memories into something else: a torrent of disconnected images, one after another.
Agnieszka’s face: laughing, smiling up at him, talking, scowling. Muddy footprints on his stone floor. Her head on his shoulder, hair spread out over his pillow; his arm around her waist. A long table in Dvernik, with her friends and family – and himself – seated around it. An infant’s cradle near the fireplace in his library, his own voice humming a lullaby. Trees – heart-trees in full bloom – healthy and thriving in the Wood. Himself, striding through the marketplace in Olshanka, a child perched on his shoulders.
Two hands, twisted and wrinkled with age, fingers entwined. Two great trees in the heart-tree grove, their trunks almost fused together, their branches entangled.
The spell-light went dark, and Sarkan took a long, stunned breath. Those were his memories, his emotions, and, at the end, his desires for the future -- desires so deeply hidden that he had not even realized he held them.
The spell had shown him nothing that was not his own.
The papers on the table in front of him tugged at his mind and heart, and he picked them up, eyes skimming over them again. He found himself tracing Agnieszka’s name with the tip of one finger, whispering some of the phrases he didn’t realize he was capable of writing. I find that I miss you already. My heart is in the Valley, with you. My dearest Agnieszka. My love.
All of it - the memories, images, desires, words - had a ring of truth that he could not deny. It was as if they called to him, trying to make him acknowledge a part of himself he thought he had closed off long ago.
“What am I doing?” he wondered out loud. The edge of desperation in his question frightened him. He let go of the letters quickly, as if they had burned the tips of his fingers. Hands shaking, he stuffed them back into the drawer, then put out the lamps and sat for a long time, staring into the dark.
**
For weeks after the night of his unfortunate revelation, Sarkan combed the library for clues about what was happening to him, worried that he might be going mad. He found nothing at first and had reluctantly resumed his focus on the corruption in the city, when by chance, he stumbled across a fragment from an ancient mystical text. It was the kind of thing that he would normally scoff at – he was never one for mysticism – but this passage immediately riveted his attention.
Strive for wholeheartedness in all that you do. It is a dangerous thing for a wizard to be divided in his purpose; still more so for him to be divided in heart and mind. Such detachment of thought from emotion can lead to an unexpected instability of power, with unpredictable results.
That seemed to describe his condition quite accurately, and at first he was perplexed about how to proceed. It didn’t take long for him to decide, with his usual logic, to simply convince his heart of what his mind already knew: that his feelings were unreasonable and risky, and that this foolishness could not be allowed to proceed any further. Once he was successful, he reasoned, he should be able to restore the natural balance of his power.
There was no use in continuing to write his goodbye letter; instead he focused on persuading the irrational part of himself to accept the fact that it could not have what it wanted. He started with lists of reasons why he could not return to the Valley, why he could not allow himself the luxury of a relationship, why that relationship could not be with Agnieszka. He had conclusive arguments against each, he thought.
What he hadn’t realized was that his heart was by far the most stubborn part of him.
He had always prided himself on his open mind, his willingness to bend. He found, over the course of two or three months, that this quality did him no favors in his internal struggle; his destabilized magic turned all his arguments on end, converting them into lists of reasons he should return to the Valley, lists of reasons he needed to allow himself to form connections, and finally, lists upon lists of things he loved about Agnieszka.
He had to admit that his heart’s arguments were indeed more compelling than he had thought they would be. After a protracted period of debate with himself, he even conceded that yes, as illogical as it was, he was, in fact, in love with his unconventional, incomprehensible, and utterly exasperating former apprentice. He now had, in his assembled sheaves of closely-written paper, the makings of an entire treatise on the various aspects of his love for her. He was nothing if not thorough.
But he could not bring himself to agree that it would be acceptable for him to return to the Valley.
Now, with an entire summer’s worth of letters and lists behind him, Sarkan sat at his desk with pen in hand, ready for the day's exercise. Although some days he drove himself to distraction, he had come to enjoy this daily argument with himself. However, he was not enjoying the work before him today. It was time to put an end to this nonsense; he had let it go on for too long already. He smoothed his sheet of paper and prepared to write the goodbye letter he had put off for so many months.
My dear Agnieszka,
I have been telling myself to write this letter for months, but I must admit that I have found myself completely unequal to the task. I hope you will overlook the tardiness of this communication.
I will come quickly to my point: in the Grove, when I cast the Summoning and saw you in its light, I was surprised to find that you wanted a different life not just for yourself, but also for me. You wanted me to be human; you wanted to make me remember that I had a heart. You had no way of knowing how thoroughly you had already succeeded in doing so. In living so long, it is perhaps inevitable that one becomes distanced from one’s own humanity. Rest assured that you have succeeded in reconnecting me with mine.
I have given extensive thought to your vision of the future, and I confess that I have longed for it myself. I fear that what we both want is impractical, however. Even if you would still welcome my presence in the Valley (and I understand that, given my conduct, you might not), I am completely devoted to other endeavors.
Yours sincerely,
Sarkan
He sat back and waited for the letter to transform, to argue with him and prove him wrong. But the ink dried, and the words remained unchanged. Moments ticked by, and he stared at the letter in mounting disbelief, his mouth dry and his chest tight. The realization hit him like a blow to the stomach: he had succeeded. He had finally tamed his own wayward magic. He had finally subjugated his desire to logic.
He should have felt like celebrating, but instead he fought down a rising sense of panicked desperation. It couldn’t be finished – he had written thinking that the letter would correct itself, that there would be many more unsent letters to Agnieszka ahead of him. He wasn’t ready to let go of this tug-of-war between his heart and head.
He wasn’t ready to let go of her.
He stood up and strode to the window, opening the casement to take deep breaths of fresh air, and looked out over the red rooftops of Kralia. The view did nothing to ease his heartache. There was barely a green or growing thing in sight, but the red roofs made him think of the leaves that would be changing in the Wood, and the air held an autumnal chill. In her valley -- his valley -- the townsfolk would be gathering their fall tribute soon, and he hadn’t made arrangements for someone to go on his behalf. The mental image of the villagers bringing their hard-earned produce to an empty tower was enough to make him grit his teeth.
Best to make a clean break of it. He pushed down his despair and walked back over to his desk, intending to add a postscript about waiving his usual tax altogether. The letter lay there, deceptively inert, the culmination of an entire summer’s effort, and the ruin of all his unacknowledged hopes. He resisted an urge to throw it into the fire along with all the others. Instead, he picked it up, his eyes scanning it again for any change, combing through it word by word, even though he knew it was of no use.
And then, in spite of himself, he gasped.
There were changes in the letter, changes so small he had overlooked them – and only the very end had transformed. He read it over once, twice, and then out loud, until he finally believed it himself, trusted in his own words.
I have given extensive thought to your vision of our future, and I confess that I have longed for it myself. I fear that what we both want is impractical; however, if you would still welcome my presence in the Valley (and I understand that, given my conduct, you might not), I am completely devoted to making it a joint endeavor.
“You win,” he told his wayward, irrational self. He surprised himself by laughing out loud, something he hadn’t done in years. For the first time all summer – for the first time ever, perhaps – he felt honest and unburdened, as if some heaviness in him had finally given way.
He thought again of the harvest festival; Agnieszka had hoped he would go with her someday, to dance, eat and drink, meet her parents and friends. It would be a start. If he left the next day, he would get there just in time.
He packed his bags, had dinner in his rooms, slept easily and rose early. The next morning, daylight found him on the road to Olshanka.