Uprooted(40)
Author: Naomi Novik

The chains were rattling. Kasia was struggling against them now, furiously, and the noise of the iron links against the wall would have been a horrible noise, if the spell had left room for it. But the scraping was muffled into a mild rattling, somewhere far away, and it didn’t distract me from the spell. I didn’t dare look at her, not yet. When I did—I would know. If Kasia was gone, if there was nothing left of her, I would know. I stared at the pages, too afraid to look, while we kept on chanting. He lifted each one halfway; I took it and carefully finished turning it. The sheaf of pages under my hand grew and grew, and still the spell poured out of us, and finally I lifted my head, my belly tight, to look at her.

The Wood stared back at me out of Kasia’s face: an endless depth of rustling leaves, whispering hatred and longing and rage. But the Dragon paused; my hand had clenched on his. Kasia was there, too. Kasia was there. I could see her, lost and wandering in that dark forest, her hands groping ahead of her, her eyes staring without seeing as she flinched away from branches that slapped in her face, thorns that drank blood from deep scratches on her arms. She didn’t even know she wasn’t in the Wood anymore. She was still trapped, while the Wood tore at her little by little, drinking up her misery.

I let go of him and stepped towards her. The working didn’t fail: the Dragon kept on reading, and I kept feeding my magic to the spell. “Kasia,” I called, and cupped my hands before her face. The light of the spell pooled in them: a brilliant sharp terrible white light, hard to bear. I saw my own face reflected in her wide glassy eyes, and my own secret jealousies, how I had wanted all her gifts, if not the price she would have to pay for them. Tears crept into my eyes; it felt like Wensa haranguing me all over again, and this time there was no escape. All the times I’d felt like nothing, the girl who didn’t matter, that no lord would ever want; all the times I’d felt myself a gangly tangled mess beside her. All the ways she’d been treated specially: a place set aside for her, gifts and attention lavished, everyone taking the chance to love her while they could. There had been times I had wanted to be the special one, the one everyone knew would be chosen. Not for long, never for long, but now that seemed like cowardice: I’d enjoyed a dream of being special and nursed a secret seed of envy against her, though I’d had the luxury of putting it aside whenever I chose.

But I couldn’t stop: the light was reaching her. She turned towards me. Lost in the Wood, she turned towards me, and in her face I saw her own deep anger, an anger years long. She’d known all her life she was going to be taken, whether she wanted it or not. The terror of a thousand long nights stared back out at me: with her lying in the dark, wondering what would happen to her, imagining a terrible wizard’s hands on her and his breath on her cheek, and behind me I heard the Dragon draw in a sharp breath; he stumbled over the words, and halted. The light pooled in my hands flickered.

I threw a desperate look back at him, but even as I did, he took up the spell again, his voice rigidly disciplined, his eyes fixed on the page. The light shone through him entirely: as though he’d somehow made himself clear as glass, emptied himself of thought and feeling to carry on the spell. Oh, how I wanted to do that; I didn’t think I could. I had to turn back to Kasia full of all my messy tangled thoughts and secret wishes, and I had to let her see them, see me, like an exposed pale squirming worm from under an overturned log. I had to see her, bare before me, and that hurt even worse: because she’d hated me, too.

She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn’t set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn’t forced me to go three hours’ walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn’t turned her back to me when I’d cried, and told me I had to be brave. My mother hadn’t brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love—oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.

And then—and then she’d even hated me for being taken. She hadn’t been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place, everyone whispering; she had never imagined herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn’t meant to welcome her back. She’d made up her mind to pay the price, and be brave; but now there was nothing left to be brave for, no glittering future ahead. The older village boys smiled at her with a kind of strange, satisfied confidence. Half a dozen of them had spoken to her during the feast: boys who’d never said a word to her, or had only looked at her from afar as though they didn’t dare to touch, now came and spoke to her familiarly, as if she had nothing to do but sit there and be chosen by someone else instead. And I’d come back in silk and velvet, my hair caught in a net of jewels, my hands full of magic, the power to do as I liked, and she’d thought, That should be me, it should have been me, as though I was a thief who’d taken something that belonged to her.

It was unbearable, and I saw her recoil from it, too; but somehow we had to bear it. “Kasia!” I called to her, choked out, and held the light steady for her to see. I saw her stand there hesitating a moment longer, and then she came stumbling towards me, hands reaching forward. The Wood tore at her as she came, though, branches clawing and vines tangling around her legs, and I could do nothing. I could only stand there and hold the light while she fell and struggled up again, and fell again, terror rising in her face.

“Kasia!” I cried. She was crawling now, still coming, her jaw set with determination, leaving a bloody trail on the fallen leaves and dark moss behind her. She grabbed at roots and pulled herself forward, even while the branches lashed her back, but she was still so far away.

And then I looked back up at her body, at the face inhabited by the Wood, and it smiled at me. She couldn’t escape. The Wood was deliberately letting her try, feasting on her very courage, on my own hope. It could drag her back at any moment. It would let her come close enough to see me, maybe even to feel her own body, the air on her face, and then vines would spring up and lash around her, a storm of falling leaves would shroud her, and the Wood would close up around her again. I moaned a protest, and I almost lost the thread of the spell, and then the Dragon said behind me, his voice strange and remote, as though he spoke from far away, “Agnieszka, the purging. Ulozishtus. Try it. I can finish alone.”