Uprooted(106)
Author: Naomi Novik

Between the ruined doors the queen appeared, morning light shining behind her, and for one moment I thought instead of a woman there was a tree in the doorway, a silver-barked tree, stretching from the floor up to the ceiling. Then Sarkan drew me back with him into the stairway, and led me down. The tower was shuddering, and stones were tumbling down the stairs behind us. Sarkan chanted his last line of the spell with each step, keeping the rest of the spell from bursting free. I couldn’t help him.

I opened my eyes again with Kasia kneeling next to me, anxiously. The air was full of dust, but the shuddering of the walls had stopped at least. I was leaning against the wall of the cellar; we were underground. I didn’t remember coming the rest of the way down the stairs. Nearby, the baron was shouting instructions to his remaining soldiers; they were pushing over wine racks and barrels and heaping iron pots into a barricade at the bottom of the stairs, shoring it up with crumbled stone. I could see sunlight coming down from above, around the turn in the stairs. Sarkan was next to me, still chanting the same line over and over, his voice going hoarse.

He’d put me next to a locked cabinet beside us made of metal; there were scorch marks around the handles. He motioned Kasia towards the lock. She took it by the handle. Flame boiled out of the lock, lapping around her hands, but she gritted her teeth and broke it open anyway. A rack of small jars of faintly glowing liquid stood inside. Sarkan took one out and pointed at me. Kasia stared at him and then down at the arrow. “I should pull it out?” she said. He made a pushing gesture with his hand, forward—she swallowed and nodded. She knelt down next to me again and said, “Nieshka, hold on.”

She took the arrow between her hands and broke off the feathered shaft that still stuck out of my chest. The arrow-head shivered inside me. My mouth opened and closed, agony silent. I couldn’t breathe. Hurrying, she picked off the worst splinters and made it smooth as she could, and then she turned me to my side, against the wall, and with one horrible shove pushed the arrow the rest of the way through me. She caught the arrow-head coming out of my back and pulled it all the rest of the way through.

I moaned, and blood ran hot down my front and back. Sarkan had opened the jar. He poured the liquid into the cup of his hand and now rubbed it on my skin, pressing it into the open wound. It burned horribly. I tried to push him away with one feeble hand. He ignored me, pulling my dress aside to put on more of it; then Kasia pushed me forward, and they poured it down into the wound on my back. I screamed then, and suddenly I could scream. Kasia gave me a wad of cloth to bite on; I bit and shuddered around it.

The pain got worse instead of better. I pulled away from them and tried to press myself into the wall, the cool hard stone, as if I could make myself a part of it and be unfeeling. I dug my fingernails into the mortar, whining, Kasia’s hand on my shoulder—and then the worst of it was past. The running blood slowed and stopped. I began to be able to see again, and hear: fighting on the stairs, the dull clang of swords striking each other, the stone walls, scraping metal and occasionally a ringing note. Blood was trickling down through the barricade.

Sarkan had sunk back against the wall next to me, his lips still moving but almost no sound coming anymore, his eyes clenched shut with strain. The Summoning was like a sand-castle with one side washed away, the rest ready to come sliding down; he was holding it up with raw strength. If the rest came down, I wondered if that nothingness would swallow up the whole tower, devour all of us and leave a blank empty hole in the world—and then close in; the mountainside tumbling to fill the eaten-away hollow in the earth, as if all of us had never existed at all.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. He gestured to Kasia, to the children huddled behind her, peering afraid over a barrel. Sarkan gestured again: Go. He meant me to take them and flee, to whisk us away somewhere. I hesitated, and his eyes glittered at me, angrily; he waved his hand in a sweep of the empty floor. The book was gone: the Summoning was gone. We couldn’t finish the spell, and when his strength ran out—

I drew a breath and laced my hand with his, and went back into the spell. He resisted. I sang softly at first, in short bursts of air, feeling my way. We didn’t have a map anymore, and I didn’t remember the words, but we’d done this before. I remembered where we were going, what we were trying to build. I pushed up more sand against the wall, and dug a moat against the coming waves; I made it long and wide. I kept humming, bits of stories and songs. I began to heap up the sand again in my mind. He held back, baffled, not sure how to help me. I sang him something longer, putting a bit of melody like a handful of wet pebbles into his hands, and he slowly gave it back to me, chanted slow and precise and even, laying the stones one by one around along the base of the wet-sand wall, shoring our tower up.

The working was growing stronger, more solid once again. We’d stopped the slide. I kept on going, poking here and there, finding a way and showing it to him. I piled on more sand and let him smooth the wall and make it even; together we stuck a fluttering-leaf branch into the top for a flying pennant. My breath still came short. I could feel an odd puckering knot in my chest and a deep tight pain where the potion still worked away, but magic was running clear through me, bright and quick, overflowing.

Men were shouting. The last of the baron’s men were scrambling over the barricade from the other side, most of them swordless and only trying to escape. A light was coming down the staircase, screams coming before it. The soldiers reached up hands, helped the fleeing men down and over. There weren’t very many of them. The flow stopped, and the soldiers threw the last of the sticks and big iron cauldrons on top, blocked off the passage as much as they could. Marek’s voice echoed from behind it, and I glimpsed the queen’s head, golden. The baron’s soldiers jabbed spears down at her that turned aside on her skin. The barricade was coming apart.

We still couldn’t let the spell go. Kasia was standing up; she was pushing open the door to the tomb. “Down there, quick!” she told the children. They scrambled into the stairwell. She caught my arm and helped me up; Sarkan struggled to his feet. She pushed us inside and picked up her sword from the floor, and snatched another sealed jar from the cabinet. “This way!” she shouted to the men. They came piling in after us.

The Summoning came with us. I went around and around the turning steps, Sarkan just behind me, magic singing between us. I heard a grinding noise above, and the stairway grew darker: up above one of the soldiers had pushed the door shut. The line of old letters to either side shone in the dimness and murmured faintly, and I found myself changing our working a little to slide gently against their magic. Subtly my sense of our inner tower changed; it grew wider and more broad, terraces and windows forming, a gold dome at the top, walls of pale white stone, inscribed in silver like the stairway walls. Sarkan’s voice slowed; he saw it, too: the old tower, the lost tower, long ago. Light was dawning all around us.