Uprooted (36 page)

He put his hands around mine, and I squeaked out the words of the oath of fealty, stumbling over them; he answered me with long and easy practice, took his hands back, and nodded for me to go.

A page began making little beckoning motions at me from the side of the throne, but I realized belatedly that this was the first and just as likely only chance I had to ask the king anything.

“Your Majesty, if you please,” I said, trying hard to ignore the looks of puffing indignation from everyone near enough the throne to hear me, “I don’t know if you read Sarkan’s letter—”

One of the tall strong footmen by the throne almost at once got my arm, bowing to the king with a fixed smile on his face, and tried to tug me away. I planted my feet, muttering a sliver of Jaga’s earth spell, and ignored him. “We have a real chance to destroy the Wood, now,” I said, “but he hasn’t any soldiers, and—yes, I’ll go in a moment!” I hissed at the footman, who’d now got me by both my arms and was trying to rock me off the dais. “I only need to explain—”

“All right, Bartosh, stop breaking your back on her,” the king said. “We can give our newest witch a moment.” He was really looking at me now, for the first time, and sounding faintly amused. “We have indeed read the letter. It could have used a few more lines. Not least about you.” I bit my lip. “What would you ask of your king?”

My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask.
Let Kasia go!
I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.

I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”

“We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.

I tottered away suffused with relief—the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him—and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.

He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.

“When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.

He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.

“But isn’t there—it must start soon?” I tried.

He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”

Chapter 19

T
hree days later, the trial still hadn’t begun, and I hated everyone around me.

Sarkan had told me there was power to be had here, and I suppose for someone who understood the court there would have been. I could see there was a kind of magic in having my name written down in the king’s book. After speaking to the secretary, I had gone back to my tiny room, baffled and uncertain what to do next, and before I had been sitting on my bed for half an hour the maids had knocked five times carrying cards of invitation to dinners and parties. I thought the first one was a mistake. But even after I realized they couldn’t all have gone astray, I still had no idea what to do with them, or why they were coming.

“I see you’re already in demand,” Solya said, stepping out of a shadow and through my doorway before I could close it after yet another maid, delivering yet another card.

“Is this something we’re supposed to do?” I asked warily. I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was a duty of the king’s wizards. “Do these people need some kind of magic done?”

“Oh, it might come to that eventually,” he said. “But at the moment, all they want is the privilege of displaying the youngest royal witch ever named. There are already a dozen rumors flying about your appointment.” He plucked the cards out of my hands, shuffled through them, and handed one out to me. “Countess Boguslava is by far the most useful: the count has the king’s ear, and he’s sure to be consulted about the queen. I’ll take you to her soirée.”

“No, you won’t!” I said. “You mean they just want me to come and visit? But they don’t even know me.”

“They know enough,” he said, in patient tones. “They know you’re a witch. My dear, I really think you would be better off accepting my escort for your first outing. The court can be—difficult to navigate, if you’re unfamiliar with its ways. You know that we want the same thing: we want the queen and Kasia acquitted.”

“You wouldn’t give a crust of bread to save Kasia,” I said, “and I don’t like the way you go about getting the things you want.”

He didn’t let me chase away his manners. He only politely bowed himself backwards into the shadows in the corner of my room. “I hope you’ll learn to think better of me, by and by.” His voice floated distantly out of the dark, even as he vanished. “Do keep in mind that I am ready to be your friend, if you find yourself at sea.” I threw the card from Countess Boguslava after him. It fluttered to the ground in the empty corner.

I didn’t trust him at all, though I couldn’t help but worry he was telling me part of the truth. I was beginning to understand how little I understood about the life of the court. To listen to Solya, if I showed my face at a party given by a woman who didn’t know me, she would be pleased, and tell her husband so, and he’d—tell the king that the queen shouldn’t be put to death? And the king would listen? None of that made sense to me, but neither did strangers sending me a pile of invitations, all because a man had written my name down in a book. But here were the invitations, so plainly I was missing steps along the way.

I wished I could speak to Sarkan: half for advice, half to complain at him. I even opened up Jaga’s book and hunted through it for a spell that would let me reach him, but I didn’t find anything that seemed as though it could work. The closest was one called
kialmas,
with the note,
to be heard in the next village,
but I didn’t think anyone would appreciate me shouting so loudly that my voice would go a week’s distance across the country, and I didn’t think the mountains would let the noise through anyway, even if I deafened everyone in Kralia.

In the end, I picked out the earliest dinner invitation, and went. I was hungry, anyway. The last of the bread I’d saved in my skirt pocket was so stale by now that even magic couldn’t make it go down easily, or really fill my belly. There had to be kitchens somewhere in the castle, but the servants eyed me oddly when I went too far down the wrong hallway; I didn’t want to imagine their faces if I went sailing into the kitchens. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop one of those maids, a girl just like me, and ask her to serve me—as though I really thought myself a fine lady, instead of just dressed up pretending to be one.

I roamed up and down stairs and through hallways until I found my way back out to the courtyard, and there I girded myself and went to one of the guards on the door, and asked him the way, showing him my invitation. He gave me the same odd look the servants did, but he looked at the address and said, “It’s the yellow one third in from the outer gate. Go down the road and you’ll see it after you get around the cathedral. Do you want a chair? Milady?” He tacked on the last, doubtfully.

“No,” I said, confused by the question, and set off.

It wasn’t a very long walk: the nobles lived in houses set inside the outer walls of the citadel—or the richest ones did, anyway. The footmen at the yellow house stared at me, too, when I finally walked up to the entrance, but they opened the doors for me. I stopped on the threshold: it was my turn to stare. On my way, I had gone by more than one pair of men carrying peculiar tall boxes around the castle grounds; I hadn’t known what they were for. Now one of them was being carried to the steps of the house, right behind me. A footman opened up the door in its side, and there was a
chair
inside it. A young lady climbed out.

The footman offered her a hand to step out onto the stairs of the house, but then he went back to his place. She paused on the lower step looking up at me. I asked her doubtfully, “Do you need help?” She didn’t stand as though she had a bad leg, but I couldn’t tell what was beneath her skirts, and I couldn’t imagine any other reason she would have shut herself up into such a bizarre thing.

But she only stared at me, and then two more of the chairs came up behind her, discharging more guests behind her. It was just how they went from place to place. “Do none of you ever
walk
?” I asked, baffled.

“And how do
you
keep from getting all over mud?” she said.

We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today’s skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace.

“I don’t,” I said glumly.

That was how I met Lady Alicja of Lidzvar. We walked into the house and were immediately interrupted by our hostess, who appeared in the hall between us, greeted Lady Alicja very perfunctorily, then seized my arms and kissed me on both cheeks. “My dear Lady Agnieszka,” she said, “how lovely that you were able to come, and what a charming gown: you are sure to start a new fashion.” I stared at her beaming face in dismay. Her name had gone completely out of my head. But it didn’t seem to matter. Even while I mumbled something polite and grateful, she twined her perfumed arm around mine and drew me into the sitting-room where her guests were gathered.

She paraded me around to everyone there, while I silently and fervently hated Solya all the more, for being right. Everyone was so very glad to make my acquaintance, everyone was scrupulously polite—at first, anyway. They didn’t ask me for magic. What they did want was gossip about the queen’s rescue. Their manners were too nice to ask questions outright, but each of them said something like, “I’ve heard that there was a chimaera guarding her … ,” letting the words trail off expectantly, inviting me to correct them.

I could have said anything. I could have passed it off in some clever way, or claimed any number of marvels: they were plainly ready to be impressed with me, to let me assume a heroic role. But I recoiled from the memory of that dreadful slaughter all around me, of blood watering the earth into mud. I flinched and blundered, answering with a flat “No” or saying nothing at all, and dropping one conversation after another into an awkward hole of silence. My disappointed hostess finally abandoned me in a corner near a tree—there was an orange tree growing inside the house, in a pot—and went to smooth over the ruffled feathers of her other guests.

It was perfectly clear to me that if there was any good I could have done Kasia here, I’d just done the opposite. I was grimly wondering if I should swallow my reluctance and go find Solya after all when Lady Alicja appeared at my elbow. “I didn’t realize you were the new witch,” she said, taking my arm and leaning in conspiratorially. “Of course you don’t need a sedan chair. Do tell me, do you travel by turning yourself into an enormous bat? Like Baba Jaga—”

I was glad to talk about Jaga, about anything besides the Wood, and even more glad to find someone other than Solya willing to show me how to go on. By the time we finished dinner, I had agreed to go with Lady Alicja to a breakfast and a card party and a dinner the next day. I spent the next two days almost entirely in her company.

I didn’t think us friends, exactly. I wasn’t in a mood to make friends. Every time I trudged back and forth from the castle to yet another party, I had to pass by the barracks of the royal guard, and in the middle of their courtyard stood the stark iron block, scorched and black, where they beheaded the corrupted before they burned their corpses. Alosha’s forge stood nearby, and more often than not her fire was roaring, her silhouette raising showers of orange sparks with a hammer made of shadow.

“The only mercy you can give the corrupted is a sharpened blade,” she had said, when I’d tried to persuade her to at least visit Kasia once herself. I couldn’t help but think maybe she was working on the headman’s axe right then, while I sat in stuffy rooms and ate fish eggs on toast with the crusts cut off, and tea sweetened with sugar, and tried to talk to people I didn’t know.

But I did think Lady Alicja was kind, taking a clumsy peasant girl under her wing. She was only a year or two older than me, but already married to a rich old baron who spent most of his days at card-parties. She seemed to know everyone. I was grateful, and determined to be grateful, and I felt half-guilty for not being better company or understanding the manners of the court. I didn’t know what to say when Lady Alicja insisted on paying me loud and intensely fervent compliments on the excessive lace on my gown, or on the way I mangled the steps of a courtly dance when she persuaded some poor goggle-eyed young nobleman to take me on, much to the dismay of his toes and the amused stares of the room.