Uprooted(61)
Author: Naomi Novik

Kasia said, “We have to get farther from the Wood.” None of us answered her, or moved; it seemed to me she was speaking from very far away. She carefully gripped me by the shoulder and shook me. “Nieshka,” she said. I didn’t answer. The sky was deepening to twilight, and the early spring mosquitoes were busy around us, whining in my ear. I couldn’t even lift my hand to slap away a big one sitting right on my arm.

She straightened up and looked at us all, irresolute. I don’t think she wanted to leave us there alone, in the condition we were in, but there wasn’t much choice. Kasia bit her lip, then knelt in front of me and looked me in the face. “I’m going to Kamik,” she said. “I think it’s closer than Zatochek. I’ll run all the way. Hold on, Nieshka, I’ll be back as soon as I can find anyone.”

I only stared at her. She hesitated, and then she reached into my skirt pocket and brought out Jaga’s book. She pressed it into my hands. I closed my fingers around it, but I didn’t move. She turned and plunged into the grass, hacking and pushing her way through, following the last light to the west.

I sat in the grass like a field mouse, thinking of nothing. The sound of Kasia fighting her way through the tall grass faded away. I was tracing the stitches of Jaga’s book, feeling the soft ridges in the leather, mindlessly, staring at it. The Dragon lay inert beside me. His burns were getting worse, blisters rising translucent all over his skin. Slowly I opened the book and turned pages. Good for burns, better with morning cobwebs and a little milk, said the laconic page for one of her simpler remedies.

I didn’t have cobwebs or milk, but after a little sluggish thought I put out my hand to one of the broken stems of grass around us and squeezed a few milky green drops out onto my finger. I rubbed them between my thumb and finger and hummed, “Iruch, iruch,” up and down, like singing a child down to sleep, and began to lightly touch the worst of his blisters one after another with my fingertip. Each one twitched and slowly began to shrink instead of swell, the angriest red fading.

The working made me feel—not better exactly, but cleaner, as though I were rinsing water over a wound. I kept singing on and on and on and on. “Stop making that noise,” the Falcon said finally, lifting his head on a hiss.

I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Groshno’s spell for burns,” I told him: it was one of the charms the Dragon had tried to teach me when he’d still been insisting on thinking me a healer.

The Falcon was silent, and then he hoarsely began, “Oyideh viruch,” the start of the chant, and I went back to my humming, “Iruch, iruch,” while I felt out his spell, fragile as a spoked wheel built out of stalks of hay instead of wood, and hooked my magic onto it. He broke off his chant. I managed to hold the working together long enough to prod him into starting again.

It wasn’t nearly the same as casting with the Dragon. This was like trying to push in harness with an old and contrary mule that I didn’t like very much, with savage hard teeth waiting to bite me. I was trying to hold back from the Falcon even while I drove on the spell. But once he picked up the thread, the working began to grow. The Dragon’s burns began fading quickly to new skin, except for a dreadful shiny scar twisting down the middle of his arm and side where the worst of the blisters had been.

The Falcon’s voice was strengthening beside me, and my head cleared, too. Power was coursing through us, a renewed tide swelling, and he shook his head, blinking with it. He twisted his hand and caught my wrist, reaching for me, for more of my magic. Instinctively I jerked loose, and we lost the thread of the working. But the Dragon was already rolling over onto his hands, heaving for breath, retching. He coughed up masses of black wet soot out of his lungs. When the fit subsided, he sank back wearily onto his heels, wiping his mouth, and looked up. The queen was still standing on the razed ground nearby, a luminous pillar in the dark.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Of all the fool’s errands that ever were,” he rasped, so hoarse I could barely hear it, and dropped his hands again. He reached for my arm, and I helped him drag himself to his feet. We were alone in the sea of cooling grass. “We need to get back to Zatochek,” he said, prodding. “To the supplies we left there.”

I stared back at him dully, my strength fading again as the magic ebbed. The Falcon had already subsided back into a heap. The soldiers were beginning to shiver and twitch, their eyes staring as if they saw other things. Even Marek had gone inert, a silent slouched boulder between them. “Kasia went for help,” I said finally.

He looked around at the prince, the soldiers, the queen; back to me and the Falcon, down to the dregs of ourselves. He rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “Help me lay them straight on their backs. The moon is almost up.”

We wrestled Prince Marek and the soldiers flat in the grass, all three of them staring blindly at the sky. By the time we had wearily pushed down the grass around them, the moon was on their faces. The Dragon put me between him and the Falcon. We didn’t have the strength for a full purging: the Dragon and the Falcon only chanted another few rounds of the shielding spell he’d used that morning, and I hummed my little cleansing spell, Puhas, puhas, kai puhas. A little color seemed to come back into their faces.

Kasia came back not quite an hour later, driving a woodcutter’s cart with a hard expression. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said shortly; I didn’t ask how she’d got the cart. I knew what someone would have thought, seeing her come from the direction of the Wood, looking as she did.

We tried to help her, but she had to do the work mostly alone. She lifted Prince Marek and the two soldiers onto the cart, then heaved the three of us up after them. We sat with our legs dangling out the back. Kasia went to the queen and stepped between her and the trees, breaking the line of her gaze. The queen looked at her with the same blankness. “You aren’t in there anymore,” Kasia said to the queen. “You’re free. We’re free.”

The queen didn’t answer her, either.

We were a week in Zatochek, all of us laid out on pallets in the barn on the edge of town. I don’t remember any of it from the moment I fell asleep in the cart until I woke up three days later in the warm quieting smell of hay, with Kasia at my bedside wiping my face with a damp cloth. The dreadful honey-sweet taste of the Dragon’s purging elixir coated my mouth. When I was strong enough to stagger up from my cot, later that morning, he put me through another round of purging, and then made me do another for him.