Uprooted. Part 23

I put the rest of my gathered fruit into the hollow and went inside for a moment. The house didn't need tidying: the floor was soft moss and the gra.s.s coverlet turned itself back over the bed without my help after I climbed out in the mornings. I did need tidying, badly, but I'd wasted too much time wandering grey and tired this morning. The sun was climbing past noon, and I didn't want to be late. I only picked up my reply for Kasia and the corked jug of Spindle-water, and put them in my basket, so I could give them to Danka to post for me.

I went back out onto the riverbank and took three more big steps going west to come out of the Wood at last. I crossed the Spindle at Zatochek bridge, in the shade of the tall young heart-tree growing there.

The Wood-queen had made a final furious push at the same time as Sarkan and I were floating down the river to find her, and the trees had half swallowed Zatochek before we stopped her. People fleeing the village met me on the road as I walked away from the tower. I ran the rest of the way and found the handful of desperate defenders about to chop down the newly planted heart-tree.

They'd stayed behind to buy time for their families to escape, but they'd done it expecting to be taken, corrupted; they were wild-eyed and terrified even in their courage. I don't think they would have listened to me if it hadn't been for my ragged flapping clothes, my hair in snarls and blackened with soot, and my feet bare in the road: I couldn't easily have been anything but a witch.

Even then, they weren't quite sure whether to believe me when I told them the Wood had been defeated, defeated for good. None of us had imagined such a thing ever happening. But they'd seen the mantises and the walkers go fleeing suddenly back into the Wood, and they were all very tired by then. In the end they stood back and let me work. The tree hadn't been even a day old: the walkers had bound the village headman and his three sons into it, to make it grow. I was able to bring the brothers out, but their father refused: a hot coal of pain had been burning slowly in his belly for a year.

"I can help you," I'd offered, but the old man shook his head, his eyes half-dreaming already, smiling, and the hard k.n.o.bs of his bones and body trapped beneath the bark melted away suddenly beneath my hands. The crooked heart-tree sighed and straightened up. It dropped all its poisonous blooms at once; new flowers budded on the branches instead.

We all stood together for a moment under the silver branches, breathing in their faint fragrance, nothing like the overwhelming rotten sweetness of the corrupt flowers. Then the defenders noticed what they were doing, shifted nervously and backed away. They were as afraid to accept the heart-tree's peace as Sarkan and I had been, in the grove. None of us knew how to imagine something that came from the Wood and wasn't evil and full of hate. The head-man's sons looked at me helplessly. "Can't you bring him out, too?" the eldest asked.

I had to tell them that there wasn't anything to bring him out of, anymore; that the tree was him. I was too tired to explain very well, but anyway it wasn't something people could easily understand, even people from the valley. The sons stood in baffled silence, confused whether to grieve or not. "He missed Mother," the eldest said finally, and they all nodded.

None of the villagers felt easy about having a heart-tree growing on their bridge, but they trusted me enough at least that they'd left it standing. It had grown well since then: its roots were already twining themselves enthusiastically with the logs of the bridge, promising to take it over. It was laden with fruit and birds and squirrels. Not many people were ready to eat a heart-tree's fruit yet, but the animals trusted their noses. I trusted mine, too: I picked a dozen more for my basket and went on, singing my way down the dusty long road to Dvernik.

Little Anton was out with his family's flock, lazing on his back in the gra.s.s. He jumped up when I lurched into his field, a little nervously, but mostly everyone had gotten used to my appearing now and then. I might have been shy of going home at first, after everything that had happened, but I'd been so tired after that terrible day, tired and lonely and angry and sad all at once, the Wood-queen's sorrow and my own all tangled up. After I finally finished clearing out Zatochek, almost without thinking my weary feet turned and took me home. My mother took one look at me in the doorway and didn't say anything, just put me to bed. She sat beside me and stroked my hair, singing until I fell asleep.

Everyone was jumpy around me the next day when I came out to the village green to talk to Danka and tell her a little of what had happened, and to look in on Wensa, and on Jerzy and Krystyna. But I was still tired and in no mood to be considerate, so I just ignored the twitching, and after a while of my not setting anything on fire or turning into a beast, it stopped. I learned from the lesson to make people get used to me; now I made a point of stopping into all the villages regularly, a different one each Sat.u.r.day.

Sarkan hadn't come back. I didn't know if he'd ever come back. I heard fourth- or fifth-hand that he was still in the capital, setting things right, but he hadn't written. Well, we'd never needed a lord to settle quarrels for us, the headmen and -women could do that, and the Wood wasn't the same kind of danger as before, but there were some things a village needed a wizard for, if they could get one. So I went around to all of them, and put a spell on the beacon-fires, and now if they lit them, a matching candle in my cottage lit up to tell me where I was wanted.

But today I wasn't here to work. I waved to Anton and tramped on into the village. The heaped harvest tables were out on the green, dressed in white cloth, with the square in the middle for dancing. My mother was there with Wensa's two oldest daughters, putting out trays full of stewed mushrooms; I ran and kissed her, and she put her hands on my cheeks and smoothed my tangled hair back, smiling with her whole face. "Look at you," she said, picking a long silver twig out of my hair, and some dried brown leaves. "And you might as well be wearing boots. I should tell you to go wash up and sit quietly in the corner." My bare legs were thick with dust to my knees. But she was laughing, joyful, and my father was driving the wagon-cart in with a load for the evening bonfire.

"I'll clean up before it's time to eat," I said, stealing a mushroom, and went to go sit with Wensa in the front room of her house. She was better, but still spent most of her time sitting in a chair by the window, only sewing a little. Kasia had written to her, too, but a stiff, stilted letter: I had read it to her, and softened it a little where I could. Wensa listened to it in silence. I think there was a secret guilt in her to match Kasia's secret resentment: a mother who had resigned herself to an unnecessary fate. That would be a long time healing, too, if it ever did. She did let me persuade her to come to the green with me, and I saw her settled at the tables with her daughters.

There wasn't a pavilion this year: it was only our own small village festival. The big festival was in Olshanka, as it was in every year without a choosing: as it would be every year from now on. We were all too hot eating in the sun, an odd sensation for harvest-time, until it finally sank low. I didn't care. I ate a big bowl of sour zhurek with slices of boiled eggs floating, and a plateful of stewed cabbage and sausage, and then four blini full of sour cherries. Then we all sat around in the sun groaning how good the food had been and how we'd all eaten too much, while the small children ran around wildly in the green until little by little they lay down under the trees and fell asleep. Ludek brought out his suka and put it across his knees and began playing, quietly at first; as more of the children drowsed off, more instruments came out and began joining in, people clapping and singing as the mood took them, and we opened the beer-casks and pa.s.sed around the cold jug of vodka brought up from Danka's cellar.

I danced with Kasia's brothers and mine, and after that with a handful of other boys I knew a little. I think they were off to one side daring one another to ask me, but I didn't care. They were a little nervous that I might lob fire at their heads, but in the same way I had been nervous to go creeping across old Hanka's yard at twilight to steal the big sweet red apples from her tree, the best ones for eating. We were all happy, all together, and I could recognize the song of the river running through the ground beneath our feet, the song we really danced to.

I sat down in a breathless heap in front of my mother's chair, my hair tumbled loose around my shoulders again, and she gave a sigh and put it in her lap to braid it back up. My basket was at her feet, and I took another of the tree-fruits to eat, golden and bursting with juice. I was licking my fingers and half lost in the bonfire when Danka stood up abruptly from the long bench corner to ours. She put down her cup and said loudly enough to make everyone pay attention, "My lord."

Sarkan was standing at the opening of the circle. One hand perched on the table nearest him, firelight leaping to pick out his silver rings and fine silver b.u.t.tons and the winding silver embroidery along the edges of his blue coat: a dragon whose head began at his collar and ran all along the borders of the coat until the tail came back up to the collar on the other side. The lace cuffs of his shirt spilled past the sleeves, and his boots were so brightly polished the fire shone in them. He looked grander than the king's ballroom, and perfectly improbable.

All of us were staring at him, me included. His mouth thinned with what I would have called displeasure, once, and now named p.r.i.c.kly mortification. I climbed to my feet and went to him, licking my thumb clean. He darted a look at the uncovered basket behind me, saw what I was eating, and glared at me. "That's appalling," he said.

"They're wonderful!" I said. "They're all coming ripe."

"All the better to turn you into a tree," he said.

"I don't want to be a tree yet," I said. Happiness was bubbling up through me, a bright stream laughing. He'd come back. "When did you arrive?"

"This afternoon," he said stiffly. "I came to receive the taxes, of course."

"Of course," I said. I was sure he'd even gone to Olshanka for the tribute first, just so he could pretend that was the truth for a little bit longer. But I couldn't really bring myself to pretend with him, not even long enough for him to get used to the idea; my mouth was already turning up at the corners without my willing it to. He flushed and looked away; but that wasn't any better for him, since everyone else was watching us with enormous interest, too drunk on beer and dancing to be polite. He looked back at me instead, and scowled at my smile.

"Come and meet my mother," I said. I reached out and took his hand.

Acknowledgments.

I know this may puzzle many a reader: it's p.r.o.nounced ag-NYESH-kah. The name comes from a fairy tale that I demanded from my mother endlessly as a child called Agnieszka Skrawek Neiba (Agnieszka "Piece of the Sky"), the version by the wonderful Natalia Gaczyska. The heroine and her wandering yellow cow make a small cameo appearance here, and the roots of the Wood are planted in the wild, overgrown las of that story.

This book owes an enormous debt to Francesca Coppa and Sally McGrath, who beta-read and cheered me on throughout the entire writing process on a near-daily basis. Many thanks as well to Seah Levy and Gina Paterson and Lynn Loschin for early reading and advice.

Thank you to my wonderful editor, Anne Groell, and my agent, Cynthia Manson, who encouraged and embraced this book from its very beginnings, and to everyone at Del Rey for their help and enthusiasm.

And most of all so many thanks and so much love to my husband, Charles Ardai, who makes my life and my work better and more true. Not every author is lucky enough to have a fellow writer and brilliant editor in-house for her first reader, and I am so glad that I am!

From my mother, and for my daughter: from root to flower. Evidence, when you are old enough to read this book, I hope it can be a connection for you back to your Babcia and the stories she gave me. I love you so very much.

By Naomi Novik.

Uprooted.

THE TEMERAIRE SERIES.

His Majesty's Dragon.

Throne of Jade.

Black Powder War.

Empire of Ivory.

Victory of Eagles.

Tongues of Serpents.

Crucible of Gold.

Blood of Tyrants.

About the Author.

NAOMI NOVIK was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. Her first novel, His Majesty's Dragon, the opening volume of the Temeraire series, was published in 2006 and has been translated into twenty-three languages and optioned by Peter Jackson, the Academy Awardawinning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, and is herself a fanfic writer and fan vidder, as well as one of the architects of the open-source Archive of Our Own.

Novik lives in New York City with her husband, Edgar Awardawinning mystery novelist Charles Ardai, their shiny new daughter, Evidence, and a recently and ruthlessly winnowed set of four five computers.

You can find out more at her website (http://naominovik.com) and follow her as naominovik on Livejournal, Twitter, and Facebook.

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