“You realize I’ve got no idea how to find her?”
“I hope so,” I said, sitting up to blow out the candle. “And I hope she’s prepared to help us. Good night, Gogu. Sweet dreams. Up at dawn, remember.”
“What?” I squinted at him in the darkness, but his eyes were already closed.
I settled Gogu in my pocket, wrapped in the sheepskin mitten, and tiptoed downstairs with the first lightening of the sky.
Florica already had the fire roaring in the kitchen stove and was kneading dough on the well-scoured table. Petru sat by the stove, his hands curled around a steaming cup of last night’s soup. Both looked up as I tried to pass the open doorway in my hooded cloak with my winter boots in my hands.
I went in. This was the first test of the day. “Florica, Petru, 276
I need a favor. I must go out on my own, without Cezar knowing. Please . . .”
Two pairs of dark old eyes regarded me shrewdly. “You’d want to hurry,” Florica said. “The boys will be down early today. Daniel and R?azvan. They’re leaving.”
“Really? Isn’t that rather sudden?”
“There was a lot of shouting last night, after you girls were in bed,” Petru said. “They didn’t like what Master Cezar planned to do. The two of them told him they wouldn’t have any of it. Packed up to go home.”
“Oh.” I would once have been glad to see those two gone, but now their departure felt like bad news. They had willingly performed a hundred and one tasks on the farm. I thought their presence had gone a certain way toward moderating Cezar’s behavior.
“What are you planning, Jena?” Florica muttered. “It’s not safe out there, you know that—especially for a girl on her own.”
“I do have to go, Florica. It’s really important. I’ll be safe, I promise. The folk of the forest don’t harm people who show them respect. You said that yourself. And I’m not alone, I’ve got Gogu. I’ll be safer out there than I am here in the castle, with Cezar in his current mood. All you need to do is keep quiet.
Please?”
“Off you go,” Petru said. “We never saw you. Or the frog.
Here, take this.” He put his little knife into my hand, the one he used for a thousand jobs on the farm. It had been next to him on the table, ready to cut the bread Florica would give him for his breakfast. “It’s sharp,” he warned me. “Keep it in the sheath until you need it. And make sure you bring it back.”
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Florica sniffed, wiping her floury hands on her apron. “May all the saints watch over you, Jena. Take this, too.” She reached into one of many capacious pockets in her apron, fished out a little figure made of garlic cloves, and pressed it into my hand.
“Go on, now. The boys will be here any moment; I’m just making them a little something for the road. Jena, you’ve had no breakfast. Let me—” She was already rummaging on the shelves, finding the crust of yesterday’s bread, a wedge of hard cheese, an apple, and wrapping them in a cloth. “Take these. Petru will be in the barn—find him first when you come back, and he’ll see you safely into the house.”
“Thank you,” I said, and moved to hug them, each in turn.
“I don’t know what we’d do without the two of you. I’ll be back before dusk. If anyone asks, you have no idea where I am.”
At first I didn’t even try to work out where Dr?agu?ta’s lair might be, or how to reach it quickly. My main aim was to disappear into the forest, somewhere Cezar could not readily track me. That wasn’t easy with the paths all thick with snow. If the imprints of my boots didn’t give me away, I thought, Cezar only needed to send the farm dogs after me and they’d find me by smell. So I did what I could to make my scent difficult to follow. I tried to walk along frozen streams, and Gogu and I sustained bruises. I clambered up a steep rock wall, and came close to a fall that would have broken an arm or a leg or worse, if I hadn’t grabbed on to a prickly bush just in time. Unfortunately, I had removed my gloves so I could climb better. My palm was full of thorns; at the top of the wall, I sat down to remove the 278
worst of them with the numb fingers of my other hand, and Gogu licked the sore places better.
“Yes,” I lied, thrusting the aching hand under my cloak.
“We’d better go on. I don’t think he’ll track us here. Now what? Which way do we go?”
“Do you want to go back in the pocket? It’s freezing out here.” In there, I thought, he could shut his eyes and pretend he was somewhere else.
“Gogu, are you sure? You sound strange. Sad. You didn’t have to come, you know.”
So we went to the Deadwash: not just as far as the little stream where we’d made pondweed pancakes in autumn, but right down under the dark trees to the shore itself. The water was sheeted with ice; the mist hung close, a shifting gray shroud. There was an odd stillness about the place. Not a bird called in bare-limbed willow or red-berried holly, not a creature rustled in the undergrowth. Above the canopy of inter-laced branches, the morning sky was a flat gray. It would snow again by nightfall.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, my heart hammering. “Calling out to her seems wrong. Praying would be blasphemous.
