Uprooted(22)
Author: Naomi Novik

I made sure the bottle was sealed again, and put it back into my sack before I went and opened the door. Kasia and Krystyna were standing in the yard, in the ankle-deep snow. Krystyna’s face was wet and hopeless. I let them back in: Krystyna went to the narrow doorway and stared at the statue in the bed, suspended out of life.

“He doesn’t feel any pain,” I said. “He doesn’t feel time moving: I promise you. And this way, if the Dragon does know a way to purge the corruption …” I trailed off; Krystyna had sat down limply in her chair, as if she couldn’t support her weight anymore, her head bent. I wasn’t sure if I’d done her any real kindness, or only spared myself pain. I had never heard of anyone taken so badly as Jerzy being healed. “I don’t know how to save him,” I said softly. “But—but perhaps the Dragon will, when he comes back. I thought it was worth the chance.”

At least the house was quiet now, without the howling and the stink of corruption. The terrible blank distance had left Krystyna’s face, as if she hadn’t even been able to bear thinking, and after a moment she put her hand on her belly and looked down at it. She was so close to her time that I could even see the baby move a little, through her clothes. She looked up at me and asked, “The cows?”

“Burned,” I said, “all of them,” and she lowered her head: no husband, no cattle, a child coming. Danka would try and help her, of course, but it would be a hard year in the village for everyone. Abruptly I said, “Do you have a dress you could give me, in trade for this one?” She stared up at me. “I can’t bear to walk another step in it.” She very doubtfully dug out an old patched homespun dress for me, and a rough woolen cloak. I gladly left the huge velvet and silk and lace confection heaped up next to her table: it was surely worth at least the price of a cow, and milk would be worth more in the village for a while.

It was growing dark when Kasia and I finally went outside again. The bonfire at the pens was burning on, raising a great orange glow on the other side of the village. All the houses were still deserted. The cold air bit through my thinner clothes, and I was drained to the dregs. I stumbled doggedly along behind Kasia, who broke the snow for me, and turned now and then to hold my hand and give me some support. I had one happier thought to warm me: I couldn’t get back into the tower. So I would go home to my mother, and stay until the Dragon came for me again: what better place was there for me to go? “He’ll be at least a week,” I said to Kasia, “and maybe he’ll be fed up with me, and let me stay,” which I shouldn’t have said even inside my own head. “Don’t tell anyone,” I said hastily, and she stopped and turned and threw her arms around me and squeezed me tight.

“I was ready to go,” she said. “All those years—I was ready to be brave and go, but I couldn’t bear it when he took you. It felt like it had all been for nothing, and everything going on the same, just as if you had never been here—” She stopped. We stood there together, holding hands and crying and smiling at each other at the same time, and then her face changed; she jerked on my arm and pulled me backwards. I turned.

They came out of the woods slowly, with measured paces and wide-spread paws that stepped without breaking the crust on the snow. Wolves hunted in our woods, quick and lithe and grey; they would take a wounded sheep but fled from our hunters. These were not our wolves. Their heavy white-furred backs rose to the height of my waist, and pink tongues lolled out of their jaws: huge jaws full of teeth crammed in on one another. They looked at us—they looked at me—with pale yellow eyes. I remembered Kasia telling me that the first cattle to fall sick had been wolf-bitten.

The wolf in the lead was a little smaller than the rest. He sniffed the air towards me, and then jerked his head sideways without ever taking his eyes off me. Two more came padding out of the trees. The pack spread out as if he had signaled them, fanning out to either side of me, to block me in. They were hunting; they were hunting me. “Kasia,” I said, “Kasia, go, run now,” with my heart stuttering. I dragged my arm out of her grip and fumbled in my bag. “Kasia, go!” I shouted, and I pulled the stopper and flung the stone potion at the lead wolf as he sprang.

The grey mist rose up around him, and a great stone statue of a wolf fell like a boulder by my feet, the snarling jaws snapping at my ankle even as they stilled. One other wolf was caught in the edge of the mist, a wave of stone creeping more slowly over its body as it pawed the snow with its front feet for a moment, trying to escape.

Kasia didn’t run. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up and back towards the nearest house—Eva’s house. The wolves howled with one terrible voice in protest, nosing cautiously at the two statues, and then one of them yelped and they fell in. They turned and came loping at us together.

Kasia pulled us through the gate of Eva’s front garden, and slammed it: the wolves leapt the fence as lightly as springing deer. I didn’t dare throw fire-heart with no protection against its spreading, not after what I’d seen that day: it would have burned all our village, and maybe all our valley, and certainly the two of us. I drew out the small green vial instead, hoping for enough distraction to get us inside the house. “It grows grass,” the Dragon had said, dismissively, when I’d asked: the warm healthy color of it had looked friendly to me, like none of the other strange cold enchantments in his laboratory. “And an inordinate number of weeds; it’s useful only if you’ve had to burn a field clean.” I’d thought I might use it after the fire-heart to renew our grazing meadow. I wrenched open the stopper with shaking hands, and the potion spilled over my fingers: it smelled wonderful, good and clean and fresh, pleasantly sticky like crushed grass and leaves in spring full of juice, and I threw it out of my cupped hands over the snowbound garden.

The wolves were running at us. Vines erupted like leaping snakes out of the dead vegetable beds, brilliant green, and flung themselves onto the wolves, wrapping thick coils around their legs, and pulled them to the ground scarcely inches away from us. Everything was suddenly growing like a year crammed into a minute, beans and hops and pumpkins sprawling out across the ground and growing absurdly huge. They blocked the way towards us even while the wolves fought and snapped and tore at them. The vines kept growing even larger, sprouting thorns the size of knives. One wolf was crushed in a swelling green twist as thick around as a tree, and a pumpkin fell smashing onto another, so heavy it struck the wolf down to the ground as it burst.