Uprooted(47)
Author: Naomi Novik

There were spells running in the back of my head, a litany of desperation. If he drew his sword against her—if the Falcon tried to strike her down—

Prince Marek looked at her: his face was hard and downturned, intent. “You were in the Wood?” he demanded.

She inclined her head. “The walkers took me.”

“Come look at her,” he said over his shoulder, to the Falcon.

“Your Highness,” the Falcon began, coming to his side. “It is plain to any—”

“Stop,” the prince said, his voice sharp as a knife. “I don’t like him any better than you do, but I didn’t bring you here for politics. Look at her. Is she corrupted or not?”

The Falcon paused, frowning; he was taken aback. “One held overnight in the Wood is invariably—”

“Is she corrupted?” the prince said to him, every word bitten out crisp and hard. Slowly the Falcon turned and looked at Kasia—really looked at her, for the first time, and his brow slowly gathered with confusion. I looked at the Dragon, hardly daring to hope and hoping anyway: if they were willing to listen—

But the Dragon wasn’t looking at me, or at Kasia. He was looking at the prince, and his face was grim as stone.

The Falcon began testing her at once. He demanded potions from the Dragon’s stores and books from his shelves, all of which the Dragon sent me running after, without argument. The Dragon ordered me to stay in the kitchens the rest of the time; I thought at first that he meant to spare me watching the trials, some of them as dreadful as the breath-stealing magic he had used on me after I had come back from the Wood. Even in the kitchens, I could hear the chanting and the crackle of the Falcon’s magic running overhead. It sounded in my bones, like a large drum played far away.

But the third morning I caught sight of myself in the side of one of the big copper kettles and noticed I was an untidy mess: I hadn’t thought to mutter up some clean clothes for myself, not with the rumbling above and all my worry for Kasia. I didn’t wonder that I’d accumulated spots, stains, tears, and I didn’t mind it, either; but the Dragon hadn’t said anything. He’d come down to the kitchens more than once, to tell me what to go and fetch. I stared at the reflection, and the next time he came down I blurted, “Are you keeping me out of the way?”

He paused, not even off the bottom step, and said, “Of course I’m keeping you out of the way, you idiot.”

“But he doesn’t remember,” I said, meaning Prince Marek. It came out an anxious question.

“He will, given half a chance,” the Dragon said. “It matters too much to him. Keep out of the way, behave like an ordinary serving-girl, and don’t use magic anywhere he or Solya can see you.”

“Kasia’s all right?”

“As well as anyone would be,” he said. “Make that the least of your concerns: she’s a good deal harder to harm now than an ordinary person, and Solya isn’t egregiously stupid. In any case, he knows very well what the prince wants, and all being equal he’d prefer to give it to him. Go get three bottles of milk of fir.”

Well, I didn’t know what the prince wanted, and I didn’t like the idea of him getting it, either, whatever it was. I went up to the laboratory for the milk of fir: it was a potion the Dragon brewed out of fir needles, which somehow under his handling became a milky liquid without scent, although the one time he’d tried to teach me to do it, I’d produced only a wet stinking mess of fir needles and water. Its virtue was to fix magic in the body: it went into every healing potion and into the stone-skin potion. I brought the bottles down to the great hall.

Kasia stood in the center of the room, inside an elaborate double ring drawn on the floor in herbs crushed in salt. They had put a heavy collar around her neck like a yoke for oxen, of black-pitted iron engraved with spell-writing in bright silvery letters, with chains that hung from it to her manacled wrists. She didn’t have so much as a chair to sit on, and it should have bowed her double, but she stood straight up underneath it, easily. She gave me a small smile when I came into the room: I’m all right.

The Falcon looked more weary than she did, and Prince Marek was rubbing his face through an enormous yawn, though he was only sitting in a chair watching. “Over there,” the Falcon said in my direction, waving a hand to his heaped worktable, paying me no more attention than that. The Dragon sat on his high seat, and threw me a sharp look when I hesitated. Mutinous, I put the bottles on the table, but I didn’t leave the room: I retreated to the doorway and watched.

The Falcon infused spells of purification into the bottles, three different ones. He worked with a kind of sharp directness: where the Dragon folded magic into endless intricacies, the Falcon drew a straight line across. But his magic worked in the same sort of way: it seemed to me he was only choosing a different road of many, not wandering in the trees as I did. He handed the bottles across the line to Kasia with a pair of iron tongs: he seemed to have grown more rather than less cautious as he went along. Each one glowed through her skin as she drank it, and the glow lingered, held; by the time she had drunk all three, she lit up the whole room. There was no hint of shadow in her, no small feathery strand of corruption lingering.

The prince sat slouched in his chair, a large goblet of wine at his elbow, careless and easy, but I noticed now that the wine was untouched, and his eyes never left Kasia’s face. It made my hands itch to reach for magic: I would have gladly slapped his face just to keep him from looking at her.

The Falcon stared at her a long time, and then he took a blindfold out of a pocket of his doublet and tied it over his eyes: thick black velvet ornamented with silver letters, large enough that it covered his forehead. He murmured something as he put it on; the letters glowed, and then an eyehole opened in the mask just over the center of his forehead. A single eye was looking out of it: large and oddly shaped, roundish, the ring around the enormous pupil dark enough to make it seem almost entirely black, shot through with small flickers of silver. He came to the very edge of the circle and stared at Kasia with it: up and down, and walking in a circle around her three times.

At last he stepped back. The eye closed, then the eyehole, and he raised shaking arms to take off the blindfold, fumbling at the knot. He took it off. I couldn’t help staring at his forehead: there wasn’t any sign of another eye there, or any mark at all, although his own eyes were badly bloodshot. He sat down heavily into his chair.