Uprooted (40 page)

I fumbled for an answer I didn’t know how to give. The idea was simply foreign. Kasia had imagined leaving, because she’d had to; I never had. I loved Dvernik, the deep soft woods around my house, the long bright running of the Spindle beneath the sun. I loved the cup of the mountains around us, a sheltering wall. There was a peace deep in our village, in our valley; it wasn’t just the Dragon’s light hand on the reins. It was home.

“A home where some misshapen thing might come out of the forest at night and steal away your children,” Alosha said. “Even before the Wood roused fully again, that valley was infested with corruption; there are old tales from the Yellow Marshes that speak of seeing walkers on the other side of the mountain passes, from before we ever pushed our way over the mountains and started to cut down the trees. But men still sought out that valley, and stayed there, and tried to live in it.”

“Do you think we’re
all
corrupted?” I said in horror: maybe she would rather burn all the valley, and all of us inside it, if given her way.

“Not corrupted,” she said. “
Lured
. Tell me, where does the river go?”

“The Spindle?”

“Yes,” she said. “Rivers flow to the sea, to lakes or marshland, not to forests. Where does that one go? It’s fed every year by the snows of a thousand mountains. It doesn’t simply sink into the earth.
Think,
” she added, with a bite, “instead of going on blindly wanting. There is some power deep in your valley, some strangeness beyond mortal magic that draws men in, plants roots in them—and not only men. Whatever thing it is that lives in the Wood, that puts out corruption, it’s come to live there and drink from that power like a cup. It killed the people of the tower, and then it slumbered for a thousand years because no one was fool enough to bother it. Then along we come, with our armies and our axes and our magic, and think that
this
time we can win.”

She shook her head. “Bad enough we went there at all,” she said. “Worse to keep pressing on, cutting down trees, until we woke the Wood again. Now who knows where it will end? I was glad when Sarkan went to hold it back, but now he’s behaving like a fool.”

“Sarkan’s not a fool,” I snapped out, “and neither am I.” I was angry and more than that, afraid; what she was saying rang too true. I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I’d missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots—yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go. I thought of Maria Olshankina, of Jaga, my sisters in the strange magic that no one else seemed to understand, and I knew, suddenly, why the Dragon took a girl from the valley. I knew why he took one, and why she left after ten years.

We were of the valley. Born in the valley, of families planted too deep to leave even when they knew their daughter might be taken; raised in the valley, drinking of whatever power also fed the Wood. I remembered the painting, suddenly, that strange painting in my room, showing the line of the Spindle and all its little tributaries in silver, and the odd pull of it that had made me cover it up, instinctively. We were a channel. He used us to reach into the valley’s power, and kept each girl in his tower until her roots had withered and the channel closed. And then—she didn’t feel the tie to the valley anymore. She could leave, and so she did, getting away from the Wood like any sensible ordinary person would.

I wanted to speak to Sarkan now more than ever, to shout at him; I wanted him in front of me so I could shake him by his thin shoulders. I shouted at Alosha instead. “Maybe we shouldn’t have gone in,” I said, “but it’s too late for that now. The Wood isn’t going to let us go, even if we could. It doesn’t want to drive us away, it wants to devour us. It wants to devour everything, so no one ever comes back again. We need to
stop
it, not run away.”

“The Wood isn’t to be defeated by wanting it so,” she said.

“That’s no reason not to try when we have the chance!” I said. “We’ve destroyed three heart-trees already, with the
Summoning
and the purging spell, and we can destroy more. If only the king would give us enough soldiers, Sarkan and I could start burning the whole thing back—”

“Whatever are you speaking of, child?” Ballo said, bewildered, breaking in. “Do you mean
Luthe’s Summoning
? No one has cast that spell in fifty years—”

“All right,” Alosha said, contemplating me from under her dark brows. “Tell me exactly how you’ve been destroying these trees, and from the beginning: we shouldn’t have relied on Solya to tell it to us properly.”

I haltingly told them about the first time we’d cast the
Summoning,
about the long stretch of that brilliant light reaching down to Kasia, the Wood lashing at her and trying to hold her back; about those final dreadful moments with Kasia’s fingers around my throat unlocking one by one, knowing I would have to kill her to save her. I told them about Jerzy, too; and the strange inner Wood the
Summoning
had shown us, where the two of them had wandered lost.

Ballo looked distressed through my whole recitation, wavering between resistance and unwilling belief, occasionally saying faintly, “But I have never heard … ,” and “The
Summoning
has never been reported to … ,” only to trail off again when Alosha made impatient silencing gestures.

“Well,” she said, when I was done, “I’ll grant that you and Sarkan have done
something,
anyway. You’re not entirely fools.” She was still holding the dagger in her hand, and she tapped the tip of the blade against the stone edge of the table, tap, tap, tap, a ringing noise like a small bell. “That doesn’t mean the queen was worth saving. After twenty years wandering in this shadow-place you’ve seen, what did any of you expect to be left of her?”

“We didn’t,” I said. “Sarkan didn’t. But I had to—”

“Because Marek said he’d put your friend to death otherwise,” Alosha finished for me. “Damn him anyway.”

I didn’t feel I owed Marek anything, but I said honestly, “If it were my mother—I’d try anything, too.”

“Then you’d be behaving like a child instead of a prince,” Alosha said. “Him and Solya.” She turned to Ballo. “We should have known better, when they offered to go after the girl Sarkan had brought out.” She looked back at me grimly. “I was too busy worrying that the Wood had finally got its claws into Sarkan. All I wanted was to have her put to death quickly, and Sarkan dragged back here for the rest of us to look over. And I’m still not certain that wouldn’t be for the best, after all.”

“Kasia’s not corrupted!” I said. “And neither is the queen.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t still be turned to serve the Wood.”

“You can’t put them to death just because something dreadful
might
happen that won’t even be their fault,” I said.

Ballo said, “I cannot disagree with her, Alosha. When the relics have already proven they are pure—”

“Of course we can, if it’ll save the kingdom from being overrun by the Wood,” Alosha said, brutally, overriding us both. “But that doesn’t mean I long to do it; and still less,” she added to me, “to provoke
you
into some stupidity. I’m starting to understand why Sarkan indulged you as far as he has.”

She tapped the blade on the table again before she spoke on, with sudden decision. “Gidna,” she said.

I blinked at her. I knew about Gidna, of course, in a vague distant way; it was the great port city on the ocean, far to the north, that brought in whale oil and green woolen cloth; the crown prince’s wife had come from there.

“That’s far enough from the Wood, and the ocean is inimical to corruption,” Alosha said. “If the king sends them both there—that might do. The count has a witch, the White Lark. Lock them up under her eyes, and in ten years’ time—or if we do manage to burn down the whole rotten Wood—then I’ll stop worrying so much.”

Ballo was already nodding. But—ten years! I wanted to shout, to refuse. It was as though Kasia would be taken all over again. Only someone a century old could so easily throw ten years away. But I hesitated. Alosha wasn’t a fool, either, and I could see she wasn’t wrong to be wary. I looked at the corrupt bestiary lying on the table. The Wood had set us one trap after another, over and over. It had set a chimaera on the Yellow Marshes and white wolves on Dvernik, trying to catch the Dragon. It had taken Kasia, to lure me in. And when I’d found a way to break her out, the Wood had still tried to use Kasia to corrupt the Dragon and me both, and when that hadn’t worked, it had let her live, to lure us into its hands again. We’d fought our way out of that trap, but what if there was another one, some way the Wood could turn our victory into defeat all over again?

I didn’t know what to do. If I agreed, if I went along with Alosha—would the king listen to her? If I wrote to Sarkan, and he wrote back to agree? I bit my lip while she raised one cool eyebrow at me, waiting for me to answer. Then she looked over: the doors to the Charovnikov had swung open. The Falcon stood in the doorway, his snowy robes catching the light, a white figure framed in the dark opening. His eyes narrowed as he took the three of us in standing together; then he manufactured another of his smiles. “I see you’ve all been busy here,” he said lightly. “But in the meantime, there have been developments. Perhaps you’d care to come down to the trial?”

Chapter 21

O
utside the haven of the Charovnikov, the noise of the party filled the empty corridors. The music had stopped, but a sea of raised voices in the distance roared and fell like waves, louder and louder as the Falcon led us to the state ballroom. The footmen opened the doors for us hastily onto the staircase leading down to the vast dancing-floor. The ambassador in his white coat sat in a chair beside the king’s throne, on a high dais overlooking the floor; Prince Sigmund and his wife were on the king’s other side. The king was sitting with his hands clenched over the lion-clawed arms of his chair, face mottled with anger.

In the middle of the floor before him, Marek had cleared a wide-open circle, six full rows of shocked and avidly staring dancers drawn back from him, the ladies in their billowing skirts like strewn flowers in a ring. In the center of that circle stood the queen, blank-faced in a white prisoner’s shift, with Kasia holding on to her arm; Kasia looked around and saw me with relief on her face, but I couldn’t get anywhere near her. The crowd was packed up the stairs, hanging over the edge of the overlooking mezzanine to watch.

The royal secretary was almost crouched before Marek, speaking in a tremulous voice, holding a heavy law-book in front of himself as if it could make a shield. I couldn’t blame him for cowering. Marek stood not two paces from him like a figure stepped out of a song: encased in armor of bright, polished steel, with a sword in his hand that could have cut down an ox and a helm under his arm. He stood before the secretary like a figure of avenging justice, shining with violence.

“In cases—in cases of corruption,” the secretary stammered, “the right of trial by combat is not—is expressly revoked, by the law of Boguslav the—” He fell back with a choked sound. Marek had swept the sword up barely inches from his face.

Marek continued the movement, swung the sword around all the room, turning: the breathless crowd drew back from the point. “The queen of Polnya has the right to a champion!” he shouted. “Let any wizard stand forth and show any sign of corruption in her! You there, Falcon,” he said, whirling and pointing up the stairs, and the whole court’s eyes turned towards us, “lay a spell upon her now! Let all the court look and see if there is any spot upon her—” The whole court made a sound together, a sigh that rose and fell, ecstatic: archdukes and serving-maids as one.

I think that was why the king didn’t stop it right away. The crowd on the stairs parted to make way for us, and the Falcon swept forward, his long sleeves trailing down the staircase, and coming to the floor made the king an elegant bow. He had obviously made ready for this moment: he had a large pouch full of something heavy, and he crooked his finger and brought four of the high spell-lamps down from the ceiling, to stand around the queen. And then he opened the pouch and flung a wave of blue sand up into the air over her head, speaking softly.

I couldn’t hear the incantation, but a hot white light came crackling out of his fingers and ran through the falling sand. There was a smell of melting glass, thin wisps of smoke escaping: the sand dissolved away entirely as it came down, and a faintly blue distortion formed in the air instead, so that it seemed I saw the queen and Kasia through a thick pane of glass with mirrors all around them. The spell-lamps’ light shone blazing through the distortion, brightening as it passed through. I could see the bones of Kasia’s hand through her flesh, where it rested on the queen’s shoulder, and the faint outline of her skull and her teeth.

Marek reached out and took the queen’s hand, leading her in a circle on display. The nobles hadn’t seen the archbishop’s trial, Jadwiga’s veil. They stared avidly at the queen in her white gown, her very blood vessels a faint tracework of shining lines inside her, everything glowing; her eyes were lamps and her parted lips breathing a glowing haze: no shadow, no smudge of darkness. The court was murmuring even before the light slowly faded out of her.