Uprooted (28 page)

“You may as well,” he said. “It’s not much worse than having them beneath the trees. You’d have to put them all down after this in any case.”

Janos had already slid down from his horse; he had a hand on its nose, calming the animal. He jerked his head around. “These are trained warhorses! They’re worth their weight in silver.”

“And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold,” the Dragon said. “If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn’t have brought them into the Wood. But don’t distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won’t arise.”

Prince Marek threw him a hard look, but he didn’t quarrel; instead he caught Janos aside and spoke to him consolingly.

Kasia had gone to stand by the edge of the clearing where a handful of deer tracks continued on; she was looking away from the pool. I wondered if she’d seen this place, too, in her long wandering imprisonment. She stared into the dark trees. The Dragon came past her; he glanced at her and spoke; I saw her head turn towards him.

“I wonder if you know what he owes you,” the Falcon said unexpectedly, behind me; I startled and turned my head around. My horse was drinking thirstily; I gripped the reins and edged a little closer to its warm side. I didn’t say anything.

The Falcon only raised one narrow eyebrow, black and neat. “The kingdom hasn’t a limitless store of wizards. By law, the gift places you beyond vassalage. You have a right to a place at court, now, and the patronage of the king himself. You should never have been kept here in this valley in the first place, much less treated like a drudge.” He waved a hand up and down at my clothes. I had dressed myself as I would have to go gleaning, in tall mud-boots, loose work trousers sewn of sacking, and a brown smock over it all. He still wore his white cloak, although the Wood’s malice was stronger than whatever charm he’d used to keep it neat in the ordinary woods; there were threads snagged along the edge of it.

He misunderstood my doubtful look. “Your father is a farmer, I suppose?”

“A woodcutter,” I said.

He flicked a hand as if to say it made not the least difference. “Then you know nothing of the court, I imagine. When the gift rose in me, the king raised my father to a knighthood, and when I finished my training, to a barony. He will not be less generous to you.” He leaned towards me, and my horse snorted bubbles in the water as I leaned hard against her. “Whatever you may have heard, growing up in this backwater, Sarkan is by no means the only wizard of note in Polnya. I assure you that you needn’t feel bound to him, simply because he’s found an—interesting way to use you. I’m certain there are many other wizards you could align yourself with.” He extended his hand towards me, and raised a thin spiraling flame in the palm of his hand with a murmured word. “Perhaps you’d care to try?”

“With
you
?” I blurted, undiplomatically; his eyes narrowed a little at the corners. I didn’t feel at all sorry, though. “After what you did to Kasia?”

He put on injured surprise like a second cloak. “I’ve done her and you a favor. Do you imagine anyone would have been willing to take Sarkan’s word for her cure? Your patron might charitably be called eccentric, burying himself out here and coming to court only when he’s summoned, gloomy as a storm and issuing warnings of inevitable disasters that somehow never come. He hasn’t any friends at court, and the few who would stand beside him are the very doom-sayers who insisted on having your friend put to death at once. If Prince Marek hadn’t intervened, the king would have sent an executioner instead, and summoned Sarkan to the capital to answer for the crime of letting her live this long.”

He’d come to be exactly that executioner, but apparently he didn’t mean to let that stand in the way of claiming he’d done me a kindness. I didn’t know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss. But he didn’t force me to that point. He said only, in a gentle voice that suggested I was being unreasonable, “Think a little about what I’ve told you. I don’t blame you for your anger, but don’t let it make you spurn good advice,” and gave me a courtly bow. He withdrew gracefully even as Kasia rejoined me. The soldiers were getting back on their horses.

Her face was sober, and she was rubbing her arms. The Dragon had gone to mount his own horse; I glanced over at him, wondering what he’d said to her. “Are you all right?” I asked Kasia.

“He told me not to fear I was still corrupted,” she said. Her mouth moved a little, the ghost of a smile. “He said if I could fear it, I probably wasn’t.” Then even more unexpectedly she added, “He told me he was sorry I’d been afraid of him—of being chosen, I mean. He said he wouldn’t take anyone again.”

I had shouted at him over that; I hadn’t ever expected him to listen. I stared at her, but I didn’t have any time to wonder: Janos had mounted, looked his men over, and he said abruptly, “Where’s Michal?”

We counted heads and horses, and called loudly in every direction. There was no answer, and no trail of broken branches or stirred leaves to show which way he’d gone. He’d been seen only a few moments before, waiting to give his horse water. If he’d been snatched, it had been silently.

“Enough,” the Dragon said at last. “He’s gone.”

Janos looked at the prince in protest. But after a silent moment, Marek said finally, “We go on. Ride two by two, and keep in each other’s sight.”

Janos’s face was hard and unhappy as he wrapped the scarf closely over his nose and mouth again, but he jerked his head at the first two soldiers, and after a moment they started into motion down the path. We rode on into the Wood.

Beneath the boughs it was hard to tell what time it was, how long we’d been riding. The Wood was silent as no forest ever was: no hum of insects, not even the occasional twig-snap under a rabbit’s foot. Even our own horses made very little noise, hooves coming down on soft moss and grass and saplings instead of bare dirt. The track was running out. The men in the front had to hack at the brush all the time to give us a way through at all.

A faint sound of rushing water came to us through the trees. The track abruptly widened again. We halted; I stood up in my stirrups, and over the shoulders of the soldier in front of me I could just see a break in the trees. We were on the bank of the Spindle again.

We came out of the forest nearly a foot above the river, on a soft sloping bank. Trees and brush overhung the water, willows trailing long weedy branches into the reeds that clustered thickly at the water’s edge, between the pale tangle of exposed tree-roots against the wet dirt. The Spindle was wide enough that over the middle, sunlight broke through the interlaced canopy of the trees. It glittered on the river’s surface without penetrating, and we could tell most of the day had gone. We sat for a long moment in silence. There was a wrongness to meeting the river like this, cutting across our path. We’d been riding east; we should have been alongside it.

When Prince Marek raised his fist towards the water, the violet gleam shone bright, beckoning us across to the other side, but the water was moving swiftly, and we couldn’t tell how deep it was. Janos tossed in a small twig from one of the trees: it was dragged away downstream at once and vanished almost immediately under a little glossy swell. “We’ll look for a ford,” Prince Marek said.

We turned and went on riding single-file along the river, the soldiers hacking away at the vegetation to give the horses a foothold on the bank. There was never any sign of an animal track leading down to the edge, and the Spindle ran on, never narrowing. It was a different river here than in the valley, running fast and silent beneath the trees; as shadowed by the Wood as we were. I knew that the river never came out on the other side in Rosya; it vanished somewhere in the deep part of the Wood, swallowed up in some dark place. That seemed almost impossible to believe here, looking at the wide dark stretch of it.

Somewhere behind me, one of the men sighed deeply—a relieved noise, as though he were setting down a heavy weight. It was loud in the Wood’s silence. I looked around. His scarf had sagged down from his face: it was the friendly young soldier with the broken nose who’d led my horse to water. He reached out with a knife drawn, sharp and bright silver, and he caught the head of the man riding in front of him and cut his throat in one deep red gash from side to side.

The other soldier died without a sound. The blood sprayed out over the animal’s neck and onto the leaves. It reared wildly, crying out, and as the man sagged down off its back, it floundered into the brush and disappeared. The young soldier with the knife was still smiling. He threw himself off his own horse, into the water.

We were frozen by the suddenness of it. Up ahead of me, Prince Marek gave a shout and flung himself off his own mount and down the slope, dirt furrowing away from his boots as he slid to the water’s edge. He tried to reach out and catch the soldier’s hand, but the man didn’t reach back. He went past the prince on his back, floating like driftwood, the ends of his scarf and cloak trailing away in the water behind him. His legs were already being dragged down as his boots filled with water, then his whole body was sinking. We had one last pale flash of his round face staring upwards in the sun. The water closed in over his head, over the broken nose; the cloak went down with a last green billowing. He was gone.

Prince Marek had climbed back up to his feet. He stood down on the bank watching, gripping the trunk of one narrow sapling for balance, until the soldier went under. Then he turned and clambered up the slope. Janos had slid down from his own mount, catching Marek’s reins; he reached down an arm to help him up. Another one of the soldiers had caught the reins of the other now-riderless horse; it was trembling, its nostrils flaring, but it stood still. Everything settled back into quiet again. The river ran on, the branches hung still, the sun shone on the water. We didn’t even hear any noise from the horse that had run away. It was as though nothing had happened.

The Dragon pushed his horse down the line and looked down at Prince Marek. “The rest of them will go by nightfall,” he said bluntly. “If not you as well.”

Marek looked up at him, his face for the first time open and uncertain; as though he’d just seen something beyond his understanding. I saw the Falcon beside them looking back along the line of the men with unblinking eyes, his piercing eyes trying to see something invisible. Marek looked at him; the Falcon looked back and nodded very slightly, confirming.

The prince hauled himself up into his saddle. He spoke to the soldiers ahead of him. “Cut us a clearing.” They started to hack at the brush around us; the rest of them joined in, burning and salting it as they went, until we had cleared enough room to crowd in together. The horses were eager to push their heads in and butt up closely against one another.

“All right,” Marek said to the soldiers, their gazes fixed on him. “You all know why you’re here. Every one of you is hand-picked. You’re men of the north, the best I have. You’ve followed me into Rosyan sorcery and made a wall beside me against their cavalry charges; there’s not a one of you who doesn’t wear the scars of battle. I asked every one of you, before we left, if you’d ride into this benighted place with me; every one of you said yes.

“Well, I won’t swear to you now I’ll bring you out alive; but you have my oath that every man who does come out with me will have every honor I can bestow, and every one of you made a landed knight. And we’ll ford the river here, now, however best we can, and we will ride on together: to death or worse perhaps, but like men and not like frightened voles.”

They must have known, by then, that Marek himself didn’t know what would happen; that he hadn’t been ready for the shadow of the Wood. But I could see his words lift some of that shadow from all of their faces: a brightness came into them, a deep breath. None of them asked to turn back. Marek took his hunting horn from his saddle. It was a long thing made all of brass, bright-polished and circled on itself. He put it to his mouth and blew with all his voice, an enormous martial noise that shouldn’t have made my heart leap but did: brash and ringing. The horses stamped and flicked their ears back and forth, and the soldiers drew their swords and roared along with that note. Marek wheeled his horse and led us in a single headlong rush down the slope and into the cold dark water, and all the other horses followed.

The river hit my legs like a shock as we plunged into it, foaming away from my horse’s broad chest. We kept going. The water climbed up over my knees, over my thighs. My horse had its head held up high, nostrils flaring as its legs beat at the riverbed, surging forward and trying to keep purchase on the bottom.

Somewhere behind me, one of the horses stumbled and lost its footing. It was tumbled over at once and carried into another soldier’s horse. The river swept them away and swallowed them whole. We didn’t stop: there was no way to stop. I groped for a spell, but I couldn’t think of anything: the water was roaring at me, and then they were gone.

Prince Marek sounded another blast from his horn: he and his horse were lurching up on the other side of the river, and he was kicking it onward into the trees. One by one we came up out of the river, dripping wet, and kept going without a pause: all of us crashing through the brush, following the purple blaze of Marek’s light up ahead, following the sound of his calling horn. The trees were whipping by us. The underbrush was lighter on this side of the river, the trunks larger and farther apart. We weren’t riding in a single line anymore: I could see some of the other horses weaving through the trees beside me as we flew, as we fled, running away as much as running towards. I had given up all hope of the reins and just clung to my own horse with my fingers woven into the mane, bent over its neck away from lashing branches. I could see Kasia near me, and the bright flash of the Falcon’s white cloak ahead.