Uprooted(103)
Author: Naomi Novik

“No,” Sarkan said, a little distant and remote, also turned inward by the steady drain of magic. “But he’s keeping the flights small. He’ll likely have enough to last until morning.”

Sarkan went briefly out of the room after finishing his next turn, and brought back a sealed glass jar from the laboratory, full of cherries in syrup. He kept a big silver samovar on a table in the back corner of the library, which never ran out of tea: it had survived the ruin of the cannon-ball, although the delicate glass cup had fallen over and smashed. He poured tea into two measuring-bowls instead, and pushed the jar of cherries over to me.

They were the deep wine-red sour cherries from the orchards outside Viosna, halfway down the valley, preserved in sugar and spirits. I stirred in two heaping spoonfuls and greedily licked the spoon clean. They tasted of home to me, and the valley’s slow magic resting in them. He dipped only three of them out for himself, chary and measured, and he scraped the spoon on the edge of the jar, as though he was being careful, even now, not to take too much. I looked away and drank my own tea gladly with both hands cupped around the bowl. It was a warm night, but I felt chilled through.

“Lie down and get a little sleep,” Sarkan said. “He’ll likely try a final push just before morning.” The cannon had fired again at last, but without doing much harm: I guessed that all the men who really knew how to work them had been caught in the stone spell. Several of the balls had fallen short, landing among Marek’s own men, or went too far and flew past the tower entirely. The walls were holding. The baron’s men had covered the second trench with pikes and spear-hafts, and laid their blankets and tents on them, helping to hide themselves from the arrow-flights.

I felt thick even after the tea, tired and dulled like a knife that had been used to cut wood. I folded over the rug once to make a pallet, and it felt so very good to lie down on it. But sleep wouldn’t come. The silver arrow-flares lit the top of the window-frame at long, stuttered intervals. The murmur of Sarkan’s voice, turning them aside, seemed far away. His face stood in shadow, the profile sharp-outlined against the wall. The tower floor beneath my cheek and my ear trembled faintly with the fighting, like the distant heavy step of an approaching giant.

I shut my eyes and tried to think of nothing but my breath. Maybe I slept a moment; then I was sitting up with a jerk out of a dream of falling. Sarkan was looking down through the broken window. The arrow-flights had stopped. I pushed myself up and joined him.

Knights and servants were milling around Marek’s pavilion like stirred-up bees. The queen had come out of the tent. She was wearing armor, a mail shirt put over a simple white shift, and in one hand she carried a sword. Marek spurred over to her, bending down, speaking; she looked up towards him with her face clear and hard as steel. “They’ll give the children to the Wood as Vasily did me!” she cried out to him, her voice ringing loud enough to hear. “Let them cut me limb from limb first!”

Marek hesitated, and then he swung down from the horse and called for his shield; he drew his own sword. The rest of his knights were climbing down beside him, and Solya was at his side. I looked at Sarkan, helplessly. I almost felt that Marek deserved to die, after he’d driven so many of his men to death; but if that was what he really believed, if he thought we meant to do something dreadful to the children—“How could he believe that?” I asked.

“How could he convince himself that everything else was coincidence?” Sarkan said, already at his bookshelves. “It’s a lie that matches his desire.” He lifted one volume off the shelf in both his arms, a massive tome nearly three feet tall. I reached out to help him and jerked my hands away, involuntarily: it was bound in a kind of blackened leather that felt dreadful to the touch, sticky in a way that didn’t want to rub off my fingers.

“Yes, I know,” he said, heaving it onto his reading-chair. “It’s a necromantic text; it’s hideous. But I’d rather spend dead men twice than any more of the living.”

The spell was written out in long old-fashioned script. I tried to help him read it, but I couldn’t; I recoiled from even the first words. The root of that spell was death; it was death from beginning to end. I couldn’t bear to even look at it. Sarkan frowned at my distress in irritation. “Are you being missish?” he demanded. “No, you aren’t. What the devil is the matter? Never mind; go and try to slow them down.”

I sprang away, eager to get far from that book, and hurried to the window. I seized bits of broken stone and rubble from the floor and tried the rain spell on them, the same way I’d used it on the water-jug. Showers of dust and pebbles rained down on Marek’s soldiers. They had to take cover, wrapping their hands over their heads, but the queen didn’t so much as pause. She marched through the breach in the wall; she climbed over the corpses, the hem of her shift soaking up blood.

Marek and his knights surged in front of her, holding their shields over their heads. I threw heavier rocks down at them, bigger chunks that grew into boulders, but even though a few of them staggered down to their knees, most of them stayed safe tucked under their shields. They came to the passageway, and began to seize the corpses and drag them out of the way. The baron’s men stabbed at them with spears. Marek’s knights caught blows on their shields and their armor. And didn’t: half a dozen of them fell, bodies in full gleaming armor heaved back limp and dead. But they pressed on, forced an opening, and the queen stepped inside.

I couldn’t see the fighting inside the tunnel, but it was over quickly. Blood ran out of the passageway, black in the torch-light, and then the queen was stepping through the other side. She hurled down the head of a man she’d been gripping in her free hand, the neck sliced cleanly through. The defenders began backing away from her in fear. Marek and his knights spread out around her, hacking and killing, and his foot-soldiers poured into the trench behind them. Solya lashed magic out in white crackling streams.

The baron’s men began falling back quickly, stumbling over their own feet, away from the queen. I’d imagined Kasia with a sword, this same kind of horror. The queen lifted her sword again and again, stabbed and hacked with brutal practicality, and none of their swords pierced her. Marek was shouting orders. The baron’s men inside the last wall had climbed up onto the top of it and were trying to shoot at the queen from above. But the arrows couldn’t break her skin.