Uprooted(100)
Author: Naomi Novik

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.