Uprooted. Part 17

"Men are fools," Sigmund said. "Give me the blessing, and keep an eye on the children for me."

We stayed and watched him ride away. The two small children knelt up on a footstool, peering over the window-sill with their mother behind them, her hands on their heads, golden and dark. He went with a small troop of guards for escort, his retinue, the eagle flag in red on white billowing out behind him. Alosha watched silently beside me from the second window until they had gone out of the courtyard. Then she turned to me and said dourly, "There's always a price."

"Yes," I said, low and tired. And I didn't think we were done paying.

Chapter 24.

I couldn't do anything more, just then, but sleep. Alosha told me to lie down right there in the room, despite the princess's dubious looks, and I fell asleep on the soft wool rug before the fireplace: it was woven in a strange dancing pattern of enormous curved raindrop shapes, or perhaps tears. The stone floor beneath was hard, but I was too tired to care.

I slept the whole evening and night and woke in the early hours of the morning: still tired but my head less thick, and my lightning-scorched palms felt cool to the touch again. Magic ran whispering and slow over rocks, deep inside me. Kasia was sleeping on the rug at the foot of the bed; through the bedcurtains I could see the princess with the two children gathered close to her. There were two guards drowsing on either side of the door.

Alosha was sitting up in a chair by the fire with the hungry sword on her lap, sharpening it with her finger. I could feel the whisper of her magic as she ran the pad of her thumb near the edge of the blade. A thin line of blood welled up on her dark skin, even though she wasn't actually touching the steel, and it lifted in a faint red mist to sink into the blade. Her chair was turned to have full view of the doors and windows, as though she'd been watching all night.

"What do you fear?" I asked her, softly.

"Everything," she said. "Anything. Corruption in the palace-the king dead, Ballo dead, the crown prince lured off to a battlefield where anything might happen. It's late enough to start being cautious. I can miss a few nights' sleep. Are you better?" I nodded. "Good. Listen to me: we need to root out this corruption in the palace, and quickly. I don't believe we made an end of it when we destroyed that book."

I sat up and hugged my knees. "Sarkan thought it might be the queen after all. That she might have been-tortured into helping, instead of corrupted." I wondered if he was right: if the queen had smuggled out a small golden fruit somehow, plucked up off the ground in the Wood, and now in some dark corner of the palace gardens a thin silver sapling had broken the earth, scattering corruption all around. It was hard for me to imagine the queen so lost to everything she'd been that she would bring the Wood with her, that she'd turn it on her own family and kingdom.

But Alosha said, "She might not have needed much torment to help see her husband dead, after he abandoned her for twenty years in the Wood. And perhaps her elder son, too," she added, as I flinched in protest. "I notice Marek is the one she kept back from the front. In any case, it's safe enough to say she's at the center of what's happening. Can you put this Summoning of yours on her?"

I was silent. I remembered the throne room, where I'd thought of casting the Summoning on the queen. Instead I'd chosen to give the court an illusion, a theatrical, to win Kasia's pardon. Maybe that had been the mistake, after all.

"But I don't think I can do it alone," I said. I had a feeling the Summoning wasn't really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn't come and listen.

Alosha shook her head. "I can't help you. I won't leave the princess and the royal children unguarded until I see them safely to Gidna."

Reluctantly I said, "Solya might help me." The last thing I wanted was to cast a spell with him, and give him any more reasons to keep grasping at my magic, but maybe his sight would make the spell stronger.

"Solya." Alosha loaded his name with disapproval. "Well, he's been a fool, but he's not stupid. You may as well try him. If not, go to Ragostok. He's not as strong as Solya, but he might be able to manage it."

"Will he help me?" I said doubtfully, remembering the circlet on the queen's head. He hadn't liked me much, either.

"When I say so, he will," Alosha said. "He's my great-great-grandson; if he argues, tell him to come speak to me. Yes, I know he's an a.s.s," she added, misunderstanding my stare, and sighed. "The only child of my line to show magic, at least in Polnya." She shook her head. "It's cropped up in my favorite granddaughter's children and grandchildren, but she married a man from Venezia and went south with him. It would take more than a month to send for one of them."

"Do you have much family left, besides them?" I asked timidly.

"Oh, I have-sixty-seven great-great grandchildren, I think?" she said after a moment's thought. "Perhaps more by now; they drift away little by little. A few of them write to me dutifully every Midwinter. Most of them don't remember that they're descended from me, if they ever knew. Their skin has a little tea mixed in with the milk, but it only keeps them from burning in the sun, and my husband is a hundred and forty years dead." She said it easily, as if it didn't matter anymore; I suppose it didn't.

"And that's all?" I said. I felt almost desperate. Great-great-grandchildren, half of them lost and the rest of them so distant that she could sigh over Ragostok, and feel nothing more than a mild irritation. They didn't seem enough to keep her rooted to the world.

"I didn't have any other kin to begin with. My mother was a slave from Namib, but she died having me, so that's all I know of her. A baron in the south bought her from a Mondrian trader to give his wife consequence. They were kind enough to me, even before my gift came out, but it was the kindness of masters: they weren't kin." She shrugged. "I've had lovers now and then, mostly soldiers. But once you're old enough, they're like flowers: you know the bloom will fade even as you put them in the gla.s.s."

I couldn't help bursting out, "Then why-be here at all? Why do you care about Polnya, or-or anything?"

"I'm not dead," Alosha said tartly. "And I've always cared about good work. Polnya's had a line of good kings. They've served their people, built libraries and roads, raised up the University, and been good enough at war to keep their enemies from overrunning them and smashing everything. They've been worthy tools. I might leave, if they grew wicked and bad; I certainly wouldn't put swords in men's hands to follow that d.a.m.ned hothead Marek into a dozen wars for glory. But Sigmund-he's a sensible man, and good to his wife. I'm glad enough to help him hold up the walls."

She saw the misery on my face, and with rough kindness added, "You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things. Like poor Ballo," she said, with a kind of dusty, wistful regret, not strong enough to call grief. "He lived for forty years in a monastery illuminating ma.n.u.scripts before anyone noticed he wasn't growing older. He was always a little surprised to find himself a wizard, I think."

She went back to her sharpening, and I went out of the room, sore and more unhappy than before I'd asked. I thought of my brothers growing old, of my little nephew Da.n.u.shek bringing me his ball with his frowning little serious face; that face becoming an old man's, tired and folded and worn with years. Everyone I knew buried, and only their children's children left to love.

But better that than no one left at all. Better those children running in the forest, safe to run there. If I was strong, if I'd been given strength, I could be a shield for them: for my family, for Kasia, for those two small children sleeping in the bed and all the others who slept in the shadow of the Wood.

I told myself that, and tried to believe it would be enough, but it was still a cold and bitter thought to have, alone in the dark hallways. A few of the lower maids were just beginning to get the day's work under way, creeping quietly in and out of the n.o.bles' rooms to stir up the fires, just the same as the day before, even though the king was dead. Life went on.

- Solya said, "We don't need the fire tended, Lizbeta: just bring us some hot tea and breakfast, there's a girl," when I opened up his door. His fire was already up and mouthing a pair of fresh logs in a large stone fireplace.

No small gargoyle-haunted cell of a room for him: he had a pair of chambers, each three times as large as the one they'd crammed me into. His stone floors were covered in piled white rugs, soft and thick: he must have used magic to keep them clean. A large canopied bed, rumpled and untidy, was visible in the second room through a pair of open doors. Along the broad wooden panel at its foot, a carved falcon flew, its eye made of a single large smooth-polished golden stone with a black slitted pupil staring out of it.

A round table stood in the middle of his room, and Marek was sitting at it next to Solya, sprawled long and sulky in a chair with his boots up, in a nightshift and fur-edged dressing-gown over his trousers. A silver stand on the table held a tall oval mirror as long as my arm. After a moment I realized I wasn't looking from some peculiar angle and seeing the bedcurtains; the mirror wasn't showing a reflection at all. Like some impossible window, it looked out into a tent, the swaying pole in the middle holding up the draped sides, and a front opening in a narrow triangle-slice looking out onto a green field.

Solya was looking into the mirror intently, a hand on the frame and his eyes nothing but black wells of pupil, absorbing everything; Marek watched his face. Neither one of them noticed me until I was at their elbows, and even then Marek barely glanced away. "Where have you been?" he said, and without waiting for an answer added, "Stop disappearing before I have to put a bell on you. Rosya must have a spy in this castle to have learned we were going for the Rydva-if not half a dozen of them. I want you by me from now on."

"I've been sleeping," I said tartly, before I remembered he'd lost his father yesterday, and felt a little sorry. But he didn't look much like he'd been mourning. I suppose being king and prince had made them something other than father and son to one another, and he'd never forgiven his father letting the queen fall into the Wood. But I still would have expected to find him a little red-eyed-from confusion if not from love.

"Yes, well, what else is there to do but sleep?" he said sourly, and glared at the mirror again. "Where the h.e.l.l are all of them?"

"On the field by now," Solya said absently without drawing his eyes away.

"Where I should be, if Sigmund wasn't a lickspittle politician," Marek said.

"You mean if Sigmund were a perfect idiot, which he's not," Solya said. "He couldn't possibly hand you a triumph right now unless he wanted to hand you the crown along with it. I a.s.sure you he knows we've got fifty votes in the Magnati already."

"And what of it? If he can't hold the n.o.bles, he doesn't deserve it," Marek snapped, folding his arms across his chest. "If I were only there-"

He looked longingly at the unhelpful mirror again while I stared at them both in rising indignation. So it wasn't just Sigmund worrying the Magnati would give Marek the throne; Marek was trying to take it. Suddenly I understood the crown princess, why she'd looked sidelong at me-I was Marek's ally, as far as she knew. But I swallowed the first ten remarks that came to my tongue and said shortly to Solya, "I need your help."

That won me a look from one of those pit-black eyes, at least, with an arched eyebrow to go over it. "I'm equally delighted to help you, my dear, and to hear you say so."

"I want you to cast a spell with me," I said. "We need to put the Summoning on the queen."

He paused, much less delighted; Marek turned and threw me a hard look. "Now what's gotten into your head?"

"Something's wrong!" I said to him. "You can't pretend not to have seen: since we came back there's been one disaster after another. The king, Father Ballo, the war against Rosya-this has all been the Wood's design. The Summoning will show us-"

"What?" Marek snapped, standing up. "What do you think it will show us?"

He loomed over me; I stood my ground and flung my head back. "The truth!" I said. "It's not three days since we let her out of the tower, and the king is dead, there are monsters in the palace, and Polnya's at war. We've missed something." I turned to Solya. "Will you help me?"

Solya glanced between Marek and me, calculations ticking in his eyes. Then he said mildly, "The queen is pardoned, Agnieszka; we can't simply go enchanting her with no cause, only because you're alarmed."

"You must see something's wrong!" I said to him, furiously.

"There was something wrong," Solya said, condescending and complacent; I could have shaken him with pleasure. Too late, I had to be sorry I hadn't made a friend of him. I couldn't tempt him: he knew perfectly well by now that I didn't mean to make any regular occasion of sharing magic with him, even if I'd suffer through it for something important. "Very wrong: that corrupted book you found, now destroyed. There's no need to imagine dark causes when we have one already known."

"And the last thing Polnya needs now is more black gossip flying around," Marek said, more calmly; his shoulders were relaxing as he listened to Solya, swallowing down that poisonously convenient explanation. He dropped back into his chair and put his boots up on the table again. "About my mother or about you, for that matter. The Magnati have all been summoned for the funeral, and I'll be announcing our betrothal once they're gathered."

"What?" I said. He might have been giving me some piece of mildly interesting news, which concerned me only a little.

"You've earned it, slaying that monster, and it's the sort of thing commoners love. Don't make a fuss," he added, without even looking at me. "Polnya is in danger, and I need you at my side."

I only stood there, too angry to even find my voice, but they had stopped paying attention to me anyway. In the mirror, someone was ducking into the tent. An old man in a much-decorated uniform sank heavily into the chair on the other side, his face pulled down on all sides by age: jowls sagging, mustaches sagging, pouches beneath his eyes and the corners of his mouth; there were lines of sweat running through the dust caked on his face. "Savienha!" Marek said, leaning in, fiercely intent. "What's happening? Did the Rosyans have time to fortify their positions?"

"No," the old general said, wiping a tired hand across his forehead. "They didn't fortify the crossings: they laid an ambush on the Long Bridge instead."

"Stupid of them," Marek said, intently. "Without fortifications, they can't possibly hold the crossings for more than a couple of days. Another two thousand levies came in overnight, if I ride out with them at once-"

"We overran them at dawn," Savienha said. "They are all dead: six thousand."

Marek paused, evidently taken aback: he hadn't expected that. He exchanged a look with Solya, scowling a little, as though he didn't like hearing it. "How many did you lose?" he demanded.

"Four thousand, too many horses. We overran them," Savienha repeated, his voice breaking, sagging where he sat. Not all the tracks on his face were sweat. "Marek, forgive me. Marek-your brother is dead. They killed him in the first ambush, when he went to survey the river."

I backed away from the table as if I could escape from the words. The little boy upstairs holding out his sword, I won't be any trouble, his round face upturned. The memory jabbed me, knife-sharp.

Marek had gone silent. His face was bewildered more than anything. Solya went on speaking with the general a little longer. I could scarcely bear to hear them go on talking. Finally Solya reached up and drew a heavy cloth down over the mirror. He turned to look at Marek.

The bewilderment was fading. "By G.o.d," Marek said after a moment, "I would rather not have it, than have it so." Solya only inclined his head, watching him with a gleam in his eye. "But that's not the choice, after all."

"No," Solya agreed softly. "It's just as well the Magnati are on their way: we'll hold the confirmation vote at once."

There was salt in my mouth: I'd been crying without knowing it. I backed up farther. The doork.n.o.b came into my hand, the hollows and b.u.mps of its carved hawk's head pressing into my palm. I turned it and slipped out the door and shut it behind me quietly. I stood trembling in the hallway. Alosha had been right. One trap after another, long-buried under a carpet of thick leaves, finally springing shut. Tiny seedlings pushing grasping branches out of the dirt.

One trap after another.

All at once, I was running. I ran, my boots slapping on stone, past startled servants and the morning sun bright in all the windows. I was panting by the time I rounded the corner to the quarters of the crown prince. The door was shut, but unguarded. A thin grey haze trickled from underneath it into the hallway. The k.n.o.b was hot under my hand as I threw the door open.

The bedhangings were aflame, and the carpet scorched; the guards were dead huddled heaps on the floor. There were ten men in a silent knot around Alosha. She was burned horribly: half her armor melted onto her skin, and somehow still fighting. Behind her, the princess lay dead, barring the door to the wardrobe with her own body; Kasia was next to her corpse, her own clothes sliced in a dozen places but her skin unmarked. She was holding a chipped sword and swinging it fiercely at two men trying to get past her.

Alosha was holding off the rest with two long knives that sang wildly in the air and left crackles of fire behind them. She'd cut them all to ribbons, blood slick on the floor, but they weren't falling down. The men wore Rosyan uniforms, but their eyes were green and lost. The room smelled like a fresh birch-tree branch broken open down the middle.

I wanted to scream, to weep. I wanted to drag my hand across the world and wipe it all away. "Hulvad," I said, my hands pushing, pushing magic out with it. "Hulvad," remembering how Alosha had pulled that thin cloud of corruption out of Ballo's apprentice. And wisps of black smoke came streaming out of the men, out of every slash and knife-wound. The smoke blew away through the open window into the sunlight; and then they were only men again, hurt too much to live; they fell to the ground, one after another.

With her attackers gone, Alosha turned and threw her knives at the men trying to kill Kasia. The knives sank deep into their backs, and more of that evil smoke billowed out from around the blades. They fell, one and two.

The room was strangely quiet when they were all dead. The hinges on the wardrobe door squeaked; I jumped at the noise. The door pushed open a crack and Kasia whirled towards it: Stashek was inside trying to look out, his face scared, his small sword gripped in his hand. "Don't look," she said. She pulled a cloak out of the wardrobe, long rich red velvet. She covered the children's heads with it and gathered them into her arms. "Don't look," she said, and held them huddled close against her.

"Mama," the little girl said.

"Be quiet," the boy told her, his voice trembling. I covered my mouth with both my hands and crammed in a sob.

Alosha was dragging in heavy, labored breaths; blood bubbled on her lips. She sagged against the bed. I stumbled forward and reached for her, but she waved me back. She made a hooking gesture with a hand and said, "Hatol," and drew the killing sword out of the air. She held the hilt out to me. "Whatever's in the Wood," she said, hoa.r.s.e and whispering, her voice eaten by the fire. "Find it and kill it. Before it's too late."

I took it and held it awkwardly. Alosha was sliding to the floor even as she let it go into my hands. I knelt down beside her. "We have to get the Willow," I said.

She shook her head, a tiny movement. "Go. Get the children out of here," she said. "The castle's not safe. Go." She let her head sink back against the bed, her eyes closing. Her chest rose and fell only in shallow breaths.

I stood up, shaking. I knew she was right. I felt it. The king, the crown prince; now the princess. The Wood meant to kill all of them, Alosha's good kings, and slaughter Polnya's wizards, too. I looked at the dead soldiers in their Rosyan uniforms. Marek would blame Rosya again, as he was meant to do. He'd put on his crown and march east, and after he'd spent our army slaughtering as many Rosyans as he could, the Wood would devour him, too, and leave the country torn apart, the succession broken.

I was in the Wood again, underneath the boughs, that cold hateful presence watching me. The momentary silence in the room was only its pause for breath. Stone walls and sunlight meant nothing. The Wood's eyes were on us. The Wood was here.

Chapter 25.

We wrapped ourselves in torn cloaks we took off the dead guards and ran for it, our hems leaving streaks of blood on the floor behind us. I had shoved Alosha's sword back into its strange waiting-place, hatol opening a pocket in the world for me to put it in. Kasia carried the little girl and I held Stashek's hand. We went down a tower staircase, past a landing where two men in a hallway glanced over at us, puzzled and frowning; we hurried on down another turning, fast, and came into the narrow hallway to the kitchens, servants going back and forth. Stashek tried to pull back from me. "I want my father!" he said, his voice trembling. "I want Uncle Marek! Where are we going?"

I didn't know. I was only in flight; all I knew was we had to get away. The Wood had scattered too many seeds, all around us; they'd lain quiet in fallow ground, but now they were all coming to fruit. Nowhere was safe when corruption lived in the king's castle. The princess had meant to take them to her parents, to Gidna on the northern sea. The ocean is inimical to corruption, Alosha had said. But trees still grew in Gidna, and the Wood would pursue the children to the sh.o.r.e.

"To the tower," I said. I didn't plan on saying it; the words came out of me like Stashek's cry. I wanted the stillness of Sarkan's library, the faint spice-and-sulfur smell of his laboratory; those close, narrow hallways, the clean lines and the emptiness. The tower standing tall and lonely against the mountains. The Wood had no foothold there. "We're going to the Dragon's tower."

Some of the servants were slowing, looking at us. There were footsteps on the stairs coming after us; a man called down with authority, "You, there!"

"Hold on to me," I told Kasia. I put my hand on the castle wall and whispered us through, straight out into the kitchen gardens, one staring gardener kneeling up from the dirt. I ran between rows of beanstakes with Stashek wide-eyed running with me, catching our fear; Kasia ran behind us. We reached the outer wall of heavy brick; I took us through. The castle bells began to clang alarm behind us as we scrambled in a hail of dirt all the way down the steep slope, to the Vandalus running below.

The river rushed quick and deep here around the castle, leaving the city behind, going east. A hunting bird cried high above, a falcon wheeling in wide circles around the castle: was that Solya looking down at us? I s.n.a.t.c.hed up a handful of reeds from the bank, without any incantations or charms: they had all gone out of my head. Instead I pulled a thread out of my cloak and tied the reeds at two ends. I threw the bundle down on the bank, halfway in the water, and flung magic at it. It grew into a long, light boat, and we scrambled in even as the river tugged it off the bank and dragged us along, rushing, bouncing off rocks on either side. There were shouts behind us, guards appearing on the outer walls of the castle high above.

"Down!" Kasia shouted, and pushed the children down flat and covered them with her body. The guards were firing arrows at us. One tore through her cloak and hit her back. Another landed just beside me and stuck into the side of the boat, quivering. I s.n.a.t.c.hed the feathers off the arrow-shaft and threw them up into the air above us. They remembered what they'd once been and turned into a cloud of half-birds that whirled and sang, covering us from view for a few moments. I held on to the sides of the boat and called up Jaga's quickening charm.

We shot forward. In one lurch, the castle and the city blurred back and away, turned into children's toys. In a second, they had vanished around a curve of the river. In a third, we struck on the empty riverbank. My boat of reeds fell apart around us and dumped us all into the water.

I nearly sank. The weight of my clothes dragged me backwards, down into the murky water, light blurring above me. The cloud of Kasia's skirts billowed next to me. I thrashed for the surface, blindly grabbing, and found a small hand grabbing back: Stashek put my hand on a tree-root. I pulled myself up coughing and managed to put my feet down in the water. "Nieshka!" Kasia was calling; she was holding Marisha in her arms.

We slogged up the soft muddy bank, Kasia's feet sinking deep with every step, gouging holes in the earth that filled slowly in with water behind her. I sank down on the mucky gra.s.s. I was trembling with magic that wanted to spill out of me in every direction, uncontrolled. We'd moved too quickly. My heart was racing, still back there under the raining arrows, still in desperate flight, and not on a quiet deserted riverbank with waterbugs jumping over the ripples we'd made, mud staining my skirts. I'd been so long inside the castle, people and stone walls everywhere. The riverbank almost didn't seem real.

Stashek sat down in a heap next to me, his small serious face bewildered, and Marisha crept over to him and huddled against him. He put an arm around her. Kasia sat down on their other side. I could gladly have lain down and slept for a day, a week. But Marek knew which way we'd gone. Solya would send eyes down the river to look for us. There was no time to rest.

I shaped a pair of crude oxen out of riverbank mud and breathed a little life into them, and built a cart out of twigs. We hadn't been an hour on the road when Kasia said, "Nieshka," looking behind us, and I drove them quickly into a stand of trees some way back from the road. A small haze of dust was drifting up from the road behind us. I held the reins, the oxen standing with plodding obedience, and we all held our breath. The cloud grew, unnaturally fast. It came nearer and nearer, and then a small troop of red-cloaked riders with crossbows and bared swords went flashing past. Sparks of magic were striking from the horses' hooves, shod in steel caps that rang like bells on the hard-packed road. Some work of Alosha's hands, now being turned to serve the Wood. I waited until the cloud was out of sight again up ahead before I drove our cart back onto the road.

When we drew into the first town, we found signs already posted. They were crudely, hastily drawn: a long parchment with my face and Kasia's upon it, pinned to a tree next to the church. I hadn't thought what it meant to be hunted. I'd been glad to see the town, planning to stop and buy food: our stomachs were pinching with hunger. Instead we pulled the cloaks over our heads, and rolled onward without speaking to anyone. My hands shook on the reins, all the way through, but we were lucky. It was market day, and the town was large, so close to the city; there were enough strangers around that no one marked us out, or demanded to see our faces. As soon as we were past the buildings, I shook the reins and hurried the oxen onward, quicker, until the village disappeared entirely behind us.

We had to pull off the road twice more, packs of hors.e.m.e.n flying past. And then once more late that evening, when another king's messenger in his red cloak pa.s.sed us going the other way, racing back towards Kralia, hoof-sparks bright in the dimming light. He didn't see us, intent on his fast pace; we were just a shadow behind a hedge. While we were hiding, I caught sight of something dark and square behind us: it was the open doorway of an abandoned cottage, half lost in a stand of trees. While Kasia held the oxen I hunted through the overgrown garden: a handful of late strawberries, some old turnips, onions; a few beans. We gave the children most of the food, and they fell asleep in the cart as we drove back onto the road. At least our oxen didn't need to eat or rest, being made out of dirt. They would march on, all night long.

Kasia climbed onto the driver's seat with me. The stars had come out in a rush, the sky wide and dark so far away from anyone living. The air was cold, still, too quiet; the cart didn't creak, and the oxen didn't huff or snort. "You haven't tried to send word to their father," Kasia said quietly.