Uprooted (50 page)

“Surely it’s not too much to ask a
little
patience,” he said, his black eyes glittering. I glared at him, but then he stroked me again, gently, dipped his fingers into me; he drew a long line between my thighs again and again, circling at the top. He was asking me a question I didn’t know the answer to, until I did; I clenched up suddenly, wrung-out and wet against his hands.

I fell back shaking against the pillows; I put my hands up into my snarled mess of hair and pressed them against my damp forehead, panting. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

“There,” he said, smugly pleased with himself, and I sat up and pushed him backwards the other way on the bed.

I caught the waist of his breeches—he was still wearing his breeches!—and said, “
Hulvad.
” They melted into the air with a jerk, and I flung my skirts after them. He lay naked beneath me, long and lean and suddenly narrow-eyed, his hands on my hips, the smirk fallen away from his face. I climbed onto him.

“Sarkan,” I said, holding the smoke and thunder of his name in my mouth like a prize, and slid onto him. His eyes shut tight, clenched; he looked almost in pain. My whole body felt wonderfully heavy, pleasure still going through me in widening ripples, a kind of tight ache. I liked the feeling of him deep in me. He was panting in long ragged breaths. His thumbs were pressing tight on my hips.

I held on to his shoulders and rocked against him. “Sarkan,” I said again; I rolled it on my tongue, explored all the long dark corners of it, parts hiding deep, and he groaned helplessly and surged up against me. I wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging, and he put an arm tight around me and bore me over and down into the bed.

I lay curled snugly against his side to fit in the small bed, catching my breath. His hand was in my hair, and his face staring up at the canopy was oddly bewildered, as if he couldn’t quite remember how all of this had happened. My arms and legs were full of sleep, heavy as if it would have taken a winch to lift them. I rested against him and finally asked, “Why did you take us?”

His fingers were carding absently through my hair, straightening out tangles. They paused. After a moment he sighed beneath my cheek. “You’re bound to the valley, all of you; born and bred here,” he said. “It has a hold on you. But that’s a channel of its own in turn, and I could use it to siphon away some of the Wood’s strength.”

He raised his hand and drew it flat over the air above our heads, a fine tracery springing up silver behind the sweep of his palm: a skeletal version of the painting in my room, a map of lines of magic running through the valley. They followed the long bright path of the Spindle and all its small tributaries coming in from the mountains, with gleaming stars for Olshanka and all our villages.

The lines didn’t surprise me, somehow: it felt like something I’d always known was there, beneath the surface. The splash of the water-bucket echoing up from the deep well, in the village square at Dvernik; the murmur of the Spindle running quick in summer. They were full of magic, of power, there to be drawn up. And so he’d cut irrigation-lines to pull more of it away before the Wood could get hold of it.

“But why did you need one of us?” I said, still puzzled. “You could have just—” I made a cupping gesture.

“Not without being bound to the valley myself,” he said, as if that was all the explanation in the world. I grew very still against him, confusion rising in me. “You needn’t be alarmed,” he added, dryly, misunderstanding dreadfully. “If we manage to survive the day, we’ll find a way to untangle you from it.”

He drew his palm back over the silver lines, wiping them away again. We didn’t speak again; I didn’t know what to say. After a while, his breath evened out beneath my cheek. The heavy velvet hangings’ deep dark closed us in all around, as if we lay inside his walled heart. I didn’t feel the hard grip of fear anymore, but I ached instead. A few tears were stinging in my eyes, hot and smarting, as if they were trying to wash out a splinter but there weren’t enough of them to do it. I almost wished I hadn’t come upstairs.

I hadn’t really thought about
after,
after we stopped the Wood and survived; it seemed absurd to think about
after
something so impossible. But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I’d half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.

I’d already known without having to put it into words that there wasn’t a place for me in my mother’s house anymore. But I knew I didn’t want to spend my days roaming the world on a hut built on legs, like the stories said of Jaga, or in the king’s castle, either. Kasia had wanted to be free, had dreamed of all the wide world open to her. I never had.

But I couldn’t belong here with him, either. Sarkan had shut himself up in this tower; he’d taken us one after another; he’d used our connection, all so he wouldn’t have to make one of his own. There was a reason he never came down into the valley. I didn’t need him to tell me that he couldn’t come to Olshanka and dance the circle without putting down his own roots, and he didn’t want them. He’d kept himself apart for a century behind these stone walls full of old magic. Maybe he would let me come in, but he’d want to close the doors up again behind me. He’d done it before, after all. I’d made myself a rope of silk dresses and magic to get out, but I couldn’t make
him
climb out the window if he didn’t want to.

I sat up away from him. His hand had slipped from my hair. I pushed apart the stifling bedcurtains and slid out of the bed, taking one of the coverlets with me to wrap around me. I went to the window and pushed the shutters open and put my head and shoulders out into the open night air, wanting the breeze on my face. It didn’t come; the air around the tower was still. Very still.

I stopped, my hands braced on the stone sill. It was the middle of the night, still pitch-dark, most of the cooking-fires gone out or banked for the night. I couldn’t see anything down on the ground. I listened for the old stone voices of the walls we’d built, and heard them murmuring, disturbed.

I hurried back to the bed and shook Sarkan awake. “Something’s wrong,” I said.

We scrambled into our clothes,
vanastalem
spinning clean skirts up from my ankles and lacing a fresh bodice around my waist. He was cupping a soap-bubble between his hands, a small version of one of his sentinels, giving it a message: “Vlad, rouse your men, quickly: they’re trying something under cover of night.” He blew it out the window and we ran; by the time we reached the library, torches and lanterns were being lit all through the trenches below.

There were almost none in Marek’s camp, though, except the ones held by the handful of guards, and one lamp shining inside his pavilion. “Yes,” Sarkan said. “He’s doing something.” He turned to the table: he’d laid out half a dozen volumes of defensive magic. But I stayed at the window and stared down, frowning. I could feel the gathering of magic that had a flavor of Solya, but there was something else, something moving slow and deep. I still couldn’t see anything. Only a few guards on their rounds.

Inside Marek’s pavilion, a shape passed between the lantern and the tent wall and flung a shadow against the wall, a face in profile: a woman’s head, hair piled high, and the sharp peaks of the circlet she wore. I jerked back from the window, panting, as if she’d seen me. Sarkan looked back at me, surprised.

“She’s here,” I said. “The queen is here.”

There wasn’t time to think what it meant. Marek’s cannon roared out with gouts of orange fire, a horrible noise, and clods of dirt went flying as the first cannon-balls smashed into the outer wall. I heard Solya give a great shout, and light blazed up all across Marek’s camp: men were thrusting coals into beds of straw and kindling that they had laid down in a line.

A wall of flame leaped up to face my wall of stone, and Solya stood behind it: his white robe was stained with orange and red light, blowing out from his wide-spread arms. His face was clenched with strain, as if he were lifting something heavy. I couldn’t hear the words over the roar of the fire, but he was speaking a spell.

“Try to do something about that fire,” Sarkan told me, after one quick look down. He whirled back to his table and pulled out one of the dozen scrolls he’d prepared yesterday, a spell to blunt cannon-fire.

“But what—” I began, but he was already reading, the long tangled syllables flowing like music, and I was out of time for questions. Outside, Solya bent his knees and heaved up his arms as if he were throwing a large ball. The whole wall of flame jumped into the air and curved up over the wall and into the trench where the baron’s men crouched.

Their screams and cries rose up with the crackling of the flames, and for a moment I was frozen. The sky was wide and too-clear above, stars from end to end, not a cloud anywhere that I could wring rain from. I ran for the water-jug in the corner, in desperation: I thought maybe if I could make one cloud grow into a storm, I could make a drop grow into a cloud.

I poured water into the cup of my hand and whispered the rain spell over it, telling the drops they could be rain, they could be a storm, a blanketing deluge, until a pool shimmered solid quicksilver in my palm. I threw my handful of water out the window, and it did become rain: a hiccup of thunder and a single gush of water that went straight down into the trench, squashing the fire down in one place.

The cannon kept roaring all the while. Sarkan was standing beside me at the window now, holding up the shield against them, but every thump struck against him like a blow. The orange fire lit his face from below, shone on his clenched teeth as he grunted with impact. I would have liked to speak to him, between the cannon rounds, to ask whether we were all right—I couldn’t tell if we were doing well, or if they were.

But the fire in the trench was still burning. I kept throwing rain, but it was hard work making rain out of handfuls of water, and it got harder as I went along. The air around me went dry and parched and my skin and hair winter-crackly, as if I was stealing every bit of moisture around me, and the torrents only struck one part of the fire at a time. The baron’s men were doing their best to help, beating down the flames with cloaks sopped into the water that ran off.

Then the two cannon roared together. But this time, the flying iron balls glowed with blue and green fire, trailing them both like comets. Sarkan was flung back hard against the table, the edge slamming into his side. He staggered, coughing, the spell broken. The two balls tore through his shield and sank into the wall almost slowly, like pushing a knife into an unripe fruit. Around them the rock seemed almost to melt away, glowing red around the edges. They vanished inside the wall, and then, with two muffled roars, they burst. A great cloud of earth went flying up, chips of stone flung so hard I heard them pattering against the walls of the tower itself, and a gap crumbled in right in the middle of the wall.

Marek thrust his spear up into the air and roared, “Forward!”

I couldn’t understand why anyone would obey: through that ragged opening, the fire still leaped and hissed, despite all my work, and men were screaming as they burned. But men did obey him: a torrent of soldiers came charging with spears held at waist-level, into the burning chaos of the trench.

Sarkan pushed himself up from the table and came back to the window, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose and lip. “He’s decided to be profligate,” he said grimly. “Each of those cannon-balls was a decade in the forging. Polnya has fewer than ten of them.”

“I need more water!” I said, and catching Sarkan’s hand I pulled him with me into the spell. I could feel him wanting to protest: he didn’t have a spell prepared to match mine. But he muttered irritation under his breath and then gave me a simple cantrip, one of the early ones he’d tried to teach me, which was meant to fill up a glass of water from the well down below us. He’d been so annoyed when I either slopped water all over his table, or barely brought up a trickle of drops. When he spoke the spell, water came rippling smoothly up to the very brim of my jug, and I sang my rain spell to the whole jug and to the well below, all that deep cold sleeping water, and then I flung the whole jug out the window.

For a moment I couldn’t see: a howl of wind blew rain spattering into my face and eyes, the slap of a biting winter rain. I wiped my face with my hands. Down in the trench, a downpour had smothered the flames entirely, only small flickering pockets left, and armored men on both sides were sliding off their feet, falling in the sudden ankle-deep torrent. The gap in the wall was gushing mud, and with the fire gone, the baron’s men were crowding into the breach with their pikes, filling it up with bristling points and shoving back the men who’d been trying to come in. I sagged against the sill with relief: we’d stopped Solya’s fire, we’d stopped Marek’s advance. He’d already spent so much magic, more than he could afford surely, and we’d still halted him; surely now he’d think better of—

“Get ready,” Sarkan said.

Solya was casting another spell. He held his hands up into the air at an angle, all the fingers pointed with his eyes looking straight along them, and silver lines lanced out from each finger and split into three. The arcing lines came down over the wall, each one landing on a different target—a man’s eye, a chink in his armor at the throat, the elbow of his sword-hand, the place directly over his heart.