Uprooted(64)
Author: Naomi Novik

I had no idea how to carry out any of the instructions he was firing at me: how was I supposed to persuade the king to give us any soldiers? But Marek was already calling for Tomasz and Oleg to mount up, and I didn’t need the Dragon to tell me I was going to have to work it out for myself. I swallowed and nodded instead, and then I said, “Thank you—Sarkan.”

His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales. He eyed me and said stiffly, “Don’t land yourself into a boiling-pot, and as difficult as you may find it, try and present a respectable appearance.”

Chapter 17

I didn’t do very well at following his advice.

We were a week and a day riding to the capital, and my horse jerked her head the entire way: step, step, step, and a sudden nervous thrust forward against the bit, pulling my reins and my arms forward, until my neck and my shoulders were hard as stone. I always lagged to the back of our little caravan, and the big iron-bound wagon-wheels kicked up a fine cloud of dust in front of me. My horse added regular sneezing pauses to her gait. Even before we passed Olshanka I was coated in pale grey, sweat clumping the dust into thick brown lines under my fingernails.

The Dragon had written me a letter for the king in the last few minutes we’d had together. It was only a few lines hastily scribbled on cheap paper with thin ink borrowed from the villagers, telling him I was a witch, and asking him for men. But he had folded it over, and cut his thumb with a knife and wiped a little blood across the edge, and then he’d written his name through the smear: Sarkan in strong black letters that smoked at the edges. When I took it out of my skirt pocket and touched the letters with my fingers, the whisper of smoke and beating wings came near. It was a comfort and a frustration at the same time, as every day’s miles took me farther from where I should have been, helping to hold back the Wood.

“Why are you insisting on taking Kasia?” I said to Marek, one last try as we camped the first night at the foot of the mountains, near the shallow eddy of a stream hurrying off to join the Spindle. I could see the Dragon’s tower to the south, lit orange by the last of the sunset. “Take the queen if you insist on it, and let us go back. You’ve seen the Wood, you’ve seen what it is—”

“My father sent me here to deal with Sarkan’s corrupted village girl,” he said. He was sluicing his head and neck down with water. “He’s expecting her, or her head. Which would you prefer I took with me?”

“But he’ll understand about Kasia once he sees the queen,” I said.

Marek shook off the water and raised his head. The queen still sat blank and unmoving in the wagon, staring ahead, as the night closed around her. Kasia was sitting next to her. They were both changed, both strange and straight and unwearied even by a full day of travel; they both shone like polished wood. But Kasia’s head was turned back looking towards Olshanka and the valley, and her mouth and her eyes were worried and alive.

We looked at them together, and then Marek stood up. “The queen’s fate is hers,” he said to me flatly, and walked away. I hit at the water in frustration, then I cupped water and washed my face, rivulets black with dirt running away over my fingers.

“How dreadful for you,” the Falcon said, popping up behind me without warning and making me come spluttering up out of my hands. “To be escorted to Kralia by the prince, acclaimed as a witch and a heroine. What misery!”

I wiped my face on my skirt. “Why do you even want me there? There are other wizards at court. They can see the queen isn’t corrupted for themselves—”

Solya was shaking his head as if he pitied me, silly village girl, who didn’t understand anything. “Do you really think it’s so trivial? The law is absolute: the corrupted must die by the flame.”

“But the king will pardon her?” I said. It came out a question.

Solya looked thoughtfully over at the queen, almost invisible now, a shadow among shadows, and didn’t answer. He glanced back at me. “Sleep well, Agnieszka,” he said. “We have a long road yet to go.” He went to join Marek by the fire.

After that, I didn’t sleep well at all, that night or any of the others.

Word raced ahead of us. When we passed through villages and towns, people stopped work to line the road and stare at us wide-eyed, but they didn’t come near, and held their children back against them. And on the last day a crowd was waiting for us, at the last crossroads before the king’s great city.

I had forgotten hours and days by then. My arms ached, my back ached, my legs ached. My head ached worst of all, some part of me tethered back to the valley, stretched out of recognizable shape and trying to make sense of myself when I was so far from anything I knew. Even the mountains, my constants, had disappeared. Of course I’d known there were parts of the country with no mountains, but I’d imagined I would still see them somewhere in the distance, like the moon. But every time I looked behind me, they were smaller and smaller, until finally they disappeared with one final gasp of rolling hills. Wide rich fields planted with grain seemed to go on forever in every direction, flat and unbroken, the whole shape of the world gone strange. There were no forests here.

We climbed one last hill, and at the summit found ourselves overlooking the vast sprawl of Kralia, the capital: yellow-walled houses with orange-brown roofs blooming like wildflowers around the banks of the wide shining Vandalus, and in the midst of them Zamek Orla, the red-brick castle of the kings, rearing up on a high outcropping of stone. It was larger than any building I could have imagined: the Dragon’s tower was smaller than the smallest tower of the castle, and there seemed to be a dozen of them jutting up to the sky.

The Falcon looked around at me, I think to see how I took the view, but it was so large and strange that I didn’t even gawk. I felt I was looking at a picture in a book, not something real, and I was so tired that I was nothing but my body: the steady dull throb in my thighs, the tremor all along my arms, the thick grime of dust muffling my skin.

A company of soldiers waited for us below at the crossroads, arrayed in ranks around a large platform that had been raised over the center. Half a dozen priests and monks stood upon it, flanking a man in the most astonishing priest’s robes I had ever seen, deep purple embroidered all over with gold. His face was long and severe, made longer by his tall, double-coned hat.

Marek pulled up, looking down at them, and I had time to catch my plodding horse up to him and the Falcon. “Well, my father’s trotted out the old prosy,” Marek said. “He’ll put the relics on her. Is this going to cause difficulties?”