No response. A terrible, cold feeling began to creep through me. This was Dr?agu?ta’s doing. She’d never meant to help me without payment. She’d given me the potion and she’d smiled, and the price she’d wanted was the one she’d asked for in the first place: my precious companion. “Gogu!” I shouted.
“Gogu, if you’re there, come out right now!” I crawled around in the undergrowth, clawing wildly at ferns and creepers.
“Gogu, be here somewhere—please, oh please. . . .”
I was bending to look under a clump of grass when I saw him: a lanky, sprawled figure lying on the shore at some distance from me, as if thrown there. He was pale-skinned, long-limbed, his dark hair straggling down into his eyes. The rags he wore didn’t cover him very well: a considerable amount of naked flesh was on show. He lay limp, perhaps unconscious. Maybe dead. A wanderer, a vagrant. Drunk, probably—
perhaps mad. I was alone out here in the forest. I should run straight home and not look behind me. On the other hand, he might be hurt, and it was freezing. Father had taught us to be compassionate. I couldn’t just leave him.
I crept nearer, my hand gripping the hilt of Petru’s little sharp knife. The young man lay utterly silent. I came still closer, crouching down an arm’s length from him. Not dead: breathing. His face was bony and well formed, a familiar face with a thin-lipped mouth and a strong jaw.
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My skin prickled, my heart felt a sudden deathly chill. Perhaps I had known who it was from the first, although my mind shrank from it. Who else would be there beside T?aul Ielelor in the middle of winter? There had been nobody—just me and my frog.
“Gogu?” I whispered, backing away with the knife in my hand. “Is it you?” My heart was breaking.
The young man looked at me, not saying a thing. That was cruelest of all: if he had managed even a word or two, some expression of regret, it might have eased the pain just a little. He sat up, wrapping his long arms around his bony knees. Suddenly he was racked with convulsive shivering.
“Here,” I said, taking off my cloak and putting it around his shoulders. “It
I knew I should flee: I should run as fast as I could, away from the Deadwash and out of the wildwood, back home to my sisters. He was a monster. I had seen it with my own eyes. But deep inside me, something wanted to help him—something that could not disregard his beseeching gaze. This was like being ripped apart. I hated Dr?agu?ta as I had never hated anyone in my life. If this was the price for a few drops of sleeping potion, it was too high.
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“Gogu?” I ventured again, my voice shaking. If only he would say something— anything—while he was still in this form. How long, I wondered, until that kind, sweet face turned to the mask of hideous decay? How long before this semblance of a human became the thing underneath, an evil being from the world of Dark of the Moon? How long before it turned its rend-ing claws and vicious teeth on me as I fled through the forest? It was a long way home to Piscul Dracului. But how could I turn my back on him? It was cold, and we were in the middle of the forest. And it was Gogu, whom I had promised never to leave behind.
“Have you got somewhere to go?” I asked, hating the way those green eyes were looking at me, full of love and reproach.
“Can you get up and walk?” Despite myself, I held out a hand to help him to his feet. He tried. After a moment, his legs buckled under him and he collapsed in a heap, trembling violently.
“Who were you before?” I asked him. Fear tugged at my feet; sorrow and pity held me still. He wasn’t Gogu anymore.
Surely he could answer the question now, the one he’d never been able to respond to before. “Before you became a frog, were you a man or something else? Tell me, go on. Who were you?”
The young man stared at me without a word. His expression was so sad, it made me want to throw my arms around him and reassure him that everything would be all right. But the words that had come to me at Dr?agu?ta’s mirror were still in my head:
“If you won’t tell me, how can I possibly understand 289
anything?” I burst out. “I don’t want to walk away, but I can’t stay here.” Saying this, I could not look at him. “It’s going to take me a long time to walk home. I don’t think I can fetch help.
There’s only Cezar, and—” I thought of trying to explain this to my cousin; of what would likely be the violent and bloody result: this young man pursued and butchered by a mob of scythe-wielding hunters—or, worse still, turning into his true self and inflicting deadly damage on the men of the valley before he was captured and killed. “I wish you would say something,” I whispered. “It seems terrible to leave you like this. Please tell me who you are.”
Nothing; not a word.
“Then I’m going,” I said, fixing my mind on the vision in Dr?agu?ta’s mirror, the bad part of it. “I have no choice.” I took a step away, but something was holding me back. I turned, looking down, and saw that he was clutching a fold of my gown, his long fingers gripping the woolen fabric, desperate to delay the moment when I would walk away. I made myself meet his eyes; tears welled in mine. He looked forlorn, bereft. His expression was just like the frog’s, those times when I had somehow offended Gogu and he had retreated to the bushes.
I reached down and opened his fingers, undoing his grasp as if he were a small child clinging to something forbidden. His fingertips brushed the back of my hand, and I felt his touch all through my body, flooding me with tenderness and longing. I 290
remembered Tadeusz’s chill fingers against my skin, his soft voice and tempting words, and the sensations they had aroused in me. I knew that they had been nothing—nothing at all compared with what I felt now. This was deep and strong and com-pelling, and I needed all my strength to fight it. It was all wrong. It was something I could not have. Yet, cruelly, it felt more right than anything in the world.
