Uprooted(55)
Author: Naomi Novik

“With you?” I blurted, undiplomatically; his eyes narrowed a little at the corners. I didn’t feel at all sorry, though. “After what you did to Kasia?”

He put on injured surprise like a second cloak. “I’ve done her and you a favor. Do you imagine anyone would have been willing to take Sarkan’s word for her cure? Your patron might charitably be called eccentric, burying himself out here and coming to court only when he’s summoned, gloomy as a storm and issuing warnings of inevitable disasters that somehow never come. He hasn’t any friends at court, and the few who would stand beside him are the very doom-sayers who insisted on having your friend put to death at once. If Prince Marek hadn’t intervened, the king would have sent an executioner instead, and summoned Sarkan to the capital to answer for the crime of letting her live this long.”

He’d come to be exactly that executioner, but apparently he didn’t mean to let that stand in the way of claiming he’d done me a kindness. I didn’t know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss. But he didn’t force me to that point. He said only, in a gentle voice that suggested I was being unreasonable, “Think a little about what I’ve told you. I don’t blame you for your anger, but don’t let it make you spurn good advice,” and gave me a courtly bow. He withdrew gracefully even as Kasia rejoined me. The soldiers were getting back on their horses.

Her face was sober, and she was rubbing her arms. The Dragon had gone to mount his own horse; I glanced over at him, wondering what he’d said to her. “Are you all right?” I asked Kasia.

“He told me not to fear I was still corrupted,” she said. Her mouth moved a little, the ghost of a smile. “He said if I could fear it, I probably wasn’t.” Then even more unexpectedly she added, “He told me he was sorry I’d been afraid of him—of being chosen, I mean. He said he wouldn’t take anyone again.”

I had shouted at him over that; I hadn’t ever expected him to listen. I stared at her, but I didn’t have any time to wonder: Janos had mounted, looked his men over, and he said abruptly, “Where’s Michal?”

We counted heads and horses, and called loudly in every direction. There was no answer, and no trail of broken branches or stirred leaves to show which way he’d gone. He’d been seen only a few moments before, waiting to give his horse water. If he’d been snatched, it had been silently.

“Enough,” the Dragon said at last. “He’s gone.”

Janos looked at the prince in protest. But after a silent moment, Marek said finally, “We go on. Ride two by two, and keep in each other’s sight.”

Janos’s face was hard and unhappy as he wrapped the scarf closely over his nose and mouth again, but he jerked his head at the first two soldiers, and after a moment they started into motion down the path. We rode on into the Wood.

Beneath the boughs it was hard to tell what time it was, how long we’d been riding. The Wood was silent as no forest ever was: no hum of insects, not even the occasional twig-snap under a rabbit’s foot. Even our own horses made very little noise, hooves coming down on soft moss and grass and saplings instead of bare dirt. The track was running out. The men in the front had to hack at the brush all the time to give us a way through at all.

A faint sound of rushing water came to us through the trees. The track abruptly widened again. We halted; I stood up in my stirrups, and over the shoulders of the soldier in front of me I could just see a break in the trees. We were on the bank of the Spindle again.

We came out of the forest nearly a foot above the river, on a soft sloping bank. Trees and brush overhung the water, willows trailing long weedy branches into the reeds that clustered thickly at the water’s edge, between the pale tangle of exposed tree-roots against the wet dirt. The Spindle was wide enough that over the middle, sunlight broke through the interlaced canopy of the trees. It glittered on the river’s surface without penetrating, and we could tell most of the day had gone. We sat for a long moment in silence. There was a wrongness to meeting the river like this, cutting across our path. We’d been riding east; we should have been alongside it.

When Prince Marek raised his fist towards the water, the violet gleam shone bright, beckoning us across to the other side, but the water was moving swiftly, and we couldn’t tell how deep it was. Janos tossed in a small twig from one of the trees: it was dragged away downstream at once and vanished almost immediately under a little glossy swell. “We’ll look for a ford,” Prince Marek said.

We turned and went on riding single-file along the river, the soldiers hacking away at the vegetation to give the horses a foothold on the bank. There was never any sign of an animal track leading down to the edge, and the Spindle ran on, never narrowing. It was a different river here than in the valley, running fast and silent beneath the trees; as shadowed by the Wood as we were. I knew that the river never came out on the other side in Rosya; it vanished somewhere in the deep part of the Wood, swallowed up in some dark place. That seemed almost impossible to believe here, looking at the wide dark stretch of it.

Somewhere behind me, one of the men sighed deeply—a relieved noise, as though he were setting down a heavy weight. It was loud in the Wood’s silence. I looked around. His scarf had sagged down from his face: it was the friendly young soldier with the broken nose who’d led my horse to water. He reached out with a knife drawn, sharp and bright silver, and he caught the head of the man riding in front of him and cut his throat in one deep red gash from side to side.

The other soldier died without a sound. The blood sprayed out over the animal’s neck and onto the leaves. It reared wildly, crying out, and as the man sagged down off its back, it floundered into the brush and disappeared. The young soldier with the knife was still smiling. He threw himself off his own horse, into the water.

We were frozen by the suddenness of it. Up ahead of me, Prince Marek gave a shout and flung himself off his own mount and down the slope, dirt furrowing away from his boots as he slid to the water’s edge. He tried to reach out and catch the soldier’s hand, but the man didn’t reach back. He went past the prince on his back, floating like driftwood, the ends of his scarf and cloak trailing away in the water behind him. His legs were already being dragged down as his boots filled with water, then his whole body was sinking. We had one last pale flash of his round face staring upwards in the sun. The water closed in over his head, over the broken nose; the cloak went down with a last green billowing. He was gone.