Uprooted(62)
Author: Naomi Novik

“The queen?” I asked him, as we sat on a bench outside afterwards, both of us rag-limp.

He jerked his chin forward, and I saw her: she was in the shade on the other side of the clearing, sitting quietly on a stump beneath a willow-tree. She still wore the enchanted yoke, but someone had given her a white dress. There wasn’t a stain or smudge anywhere on it; even the hem was clean, as if she hadn’t moved from the spot since she’d been put into it. Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.

“Well, she’s free,” the Dragon said. “Was it worth the lives of thirty men?”

He spoke savagely, and I hugged my arms around myself. I didn’t want to think about that nightmarish battle, about the slaughter. “Those two soldiers?” I said, a whisper.

“They’ll live,” he said. “And so will our fine princeling: more fortune than he deserves. The Wood’s grip on them was weak.” He pushed himself up. “Come: I’m purging them by stages. It’s time for another round.”

Two days later, Prince Marek was himself again with a speed that made me feel dull and sourly envious: he rose from his bed in the morning and by dinnertime he was wolfing down an entire roast chicken and doing exercises. I could barely taste the few mouthfuls of bread I forced down. Watching him pull himself up and down on a tree-branch made me feel even more like a cloth that had been washed and wrung out too many times. Tomasz and Oleg were awake, too, the two soldiers; I’d learned their names by then, ashamed that I didn’t know any of the ones we’d left behind.

Marek tried to take some food to the queen. She only stared at the plate he held out to her, and wouldn’t chew when he put slivers of meat in her mouth. Then he tried a bowl of porridge: she didn’t refuse, but she didn’t help. He had to work the spoon into her mouth like a mother with an infant just learning how to eat. He kept at it grimly, but after an hour, when he’d barely managed to get half a dozen swallows into her, he got up and hurled the bowl and spoon savagely against a rock, porridge and pottery-shards flying. He stormed away. The queen didn’t even blink at that, either.

I stood in the doorway of the barn, watching and wretched. I couldn’t be sorry to have got her out—at least she wasn’t being tormented by the Wood anymore, devoured to the scraps of herself. But this awful half-life left to her seemed worse than dying. She wasn’t ill or delirious, the way Kasia had been those first few days after the purging. There just didn’t seem to be enough left of her to feel or think.

The next morning, Marek came up behind me and caught me by the arm as I trudged back to the barn with a bucket of well-water; I jumped in alarm and sloshed water over us both, trying to jerk out of his grip. He ignored both the water and my efforts and snapped at me, “Enough of this! They’re soldiers; they’ll be fine. They’d already be fine, if the Dragon didn’t keep emptying potions into their bellies. Why haven’t you done anything for her?”

“What do you imagine there is to do?” the Dragon said, coming out of the barn.

Marek wheeled on him. “She needs healing! You haven’t even dosed her, when you have flasks to spare—”

“If there was corruption in her to purge, we’d purge it,” the Dragon said. “You can’t heal absence. Consider yourself lucky she didn’t burn with the heart-tree; if you want to call it luck, and not a pity.”

“A pity you didn’t, if that’s all the advice you have,” Marek said.

The Dragon’s eye glittered with what looked to me like a dozen cutting replies, but he compressed his lips and shut them in. Marek’s teeth were moving against each other, and through his gripping hand I could feel strung-hard tension, a trembling like a spooked horse, though he’d been as steady as a rock in that terrible glade with death and danger all around him.

The Dragon said, “There’s no corruption left in her. For the rest, only time and healing will help. We’ll take her back to the tower as soon as I’ve finished purging your men and it’s safe for them to go among other people. I’ll see what else can be done. Until then, sit with her and talk of familiar things.”

“Talk?” Marek said. He shoved my arm out of his grip; more water sloshed out over my feet as he stalked away.

The Dragon took the bucket from me, and I followed him back into the barn. “Can we do anything for her?” I asked.

“What is there to be done with a blank slate?” he said. “Give her some time and she may write something new on it. As for bringing back whatever she was—” He shook his head.

Marek sat by the queen the rest of the day; I had glimpses of his hard, downturned face a few times when I came out of the barn. But at least he seemed to accept there wasn’t going to be a sudden miraculous cure. That evening he got up and walked to Zatochek to speak to the village headman; the next day, when Tomasz and Oleg could finally walk as far as the well and back on their own, he gripped them hard by the shoulders and said, “We’ll light a fire for the others tomorrow morning, in the village square.”

Men came from Zatochek to bring us horses. They were wary of us, and I couldn’t blame them. The Dragon had sent word we would come out of the Wood, and he’d told them where to keep us and what signs of corruption to look for, but even so I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d come with torches instead, to burn us all inside the barn. Of course, if the Wood had taken possession of us, we’d have done worse things than sit in a barn quietly exhausted for a week.

Marek himself helped Tomasz and Oleg up into their saddles before he lifted the queen up to her own, a steady brown mare some ten years old. She sat stiff and inflexible; he had to put her feet one by one into the stirrups. He paused, looking up at her from the ground: the reins hung slack in her manacled hands where he’d given them to her. “Mother,” he tried again. She didn’t look at him. After a moment, his jaw hardened. He took a rope and made a leading rein for her horse, hooked it to his own saddle, and led her on.

We rode behind him to the square and found a tall bonfire assembled and waiting, full of seasoned wood, and all the village in their holiday best standing on the far side. They held torches in their hands. I didn’t know anyone from Zatochek well, but they came occasionally to our market days in spring. A handful of distantly familiar faces looked out at me from the crowd, like ghosts from another life through the faint grey haze of smoke, while I stood opposite them with a prince and wizards.