Uprooted(70)
Author: Naomi Novik

They stared at me, and in the silence I heard shouts outside in the courtyard, running feet. The guards were looking in with their hands on their sword-hilts, and I realized I’d just shaken the king’s castle, in the king’s city, and shouted at the highest wizards of the land.

They did, after all, put me on the list. The king had demanded an explanation for the earthquake, and been told it was my fault; after that, they couldn’t very well also say I wasn’t much of a witch. But they weren’t very happy about it. Ragostok seemed to have taken offense enough to build a grudge on, which I thought was unreasonable: he’d been the one insulting me. Alosha regarded me with even more suspicion, as if she imagined I’d been hiding my power for some devious reason, and Father Ballo just disliked having to admit me on the grounds of my being outside his experience. He wasn’t unkind, but he had all Sarkan’s obsessive hunger for explanation, with none of his willingness to bend. If Ballo couldn’t find it in a book, that meant it couldn’t be so, and if he found it in three books, that meant it was the unvarnished truth. Only the Falcon smiled at me, with that irritating air of secret amusement, and I could have done very well without his smiles.

I had to face them in the library again the very next morning for the naming ceremony. With the four of them around me I felt lonelier than in those early days in the Dragon’s tower, cut away from everything I’d known. It was worse than being alone to feel that none of them were my friend, or even wished me anything good at all. If I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, they would have been relieved, or at least not distressed. But I was determined not to care: the only thing that really mattered was being able to speak in Kasia’s defense. I knew by now that no one else here would give her a moment’s thought: she didn’t matter.

The naming itself seemed more like another test than a ceremony. They set me at a worktable and put out a bowl of water, three bowls of different powders in red and yellow and blue, a candle, and an iron bell inscribed around in letters of gold. Father Ballo placed the naming spell on a sheet of parchment in front of me: the incantation was nine long tangled words, with detailed annotations that gave precise instructions on the pronunciation of every syllable, and how one ought to stress each word.

I muttered it over to myself, trying to feel out the important syllables, but they sat inert on my tongue: it just didn’t want to come apart. “Well?” Ragostok said, impatiently.

I slogged my awkward tongue-twisted way through the entire incantation and started to put the powder in the water, a pinch here and there. The magic of the spell gathered sluggish and reluctant. I made a brownish mess of the water, spilled some of all three kinds of powder on my skirts, and finally gave up trying to make anything better. I lit the powder, squinted through the cloud of smoke, and groped for the bell.

Then I let the magic go, and the bell clanged in my hand: a long deep note that came strangely out of so small a bell; it sounded like the great church bell in the cathedral that rang matins every morning over the city, a sound that filled the room. The metal hummed beneath my fingers as I put it down and looked around expectantly; but the name didn’t write itself on the parchment, or appear in letters of flame, or anywhere at all.

The wizards were all looking annoyed, although for once not at me; Father Ballo said to Alosha in some irritation, “Was that meant for a joke?”

She was frowning; she reached out to the bell and picked it up and turned it over: there wasn’t a clapper inside it at all. They all stared into it, and I stared at them. “Where will the name come from?” I asked.

“The bell should have sounded it,” Alosha said shortly. She put it down; it clanged again softly, an echo of that deep note, and she glared at it.

No one knew what to do with me, after that. After they all stood in silence for a moment while Father Ballo made noises about the irregularity, the Falcon—he still seemed determined to be amused by everything to do with me—said lightly, “Perhaps our new witch should choose a name for herself.”

Ragostok said, “I think it more appropriate we choose a name for her.”

I knew better than to let him have any part in picking my name: surely I’d end up as the Piglet or the Earthworm. But it all felt wrong to me, anyway. I’d gone along with the elaborate dance of the thing, but I knew abruptly I didn’t want to change my name for a new one that trailed magic around behind it, any more than I wanted to be in this fancy gown with its long dragging train that picked up dirt from the hallways. I took a deep breath and said, “There’s nothing wrong with the name I already have.”

So I was presented to the court as Agnieszka of Dvernik.

I half-regretted my refusal during the presentation. Ragostok had told me, I think meaning to be nasty, that the ceremony would only be a little thing, and that the king didn’t have much time to spare for such events when they came out of the proper season. It seems ordinarily new wizards were put onto the list in the spring and the fall, at the same time as the new knights. If he was telling the truth, I could only be grateful for it, standing at the end of that great throne room with a long red carpet like the lolling tongue of some monstrous beast stretched out towards me, and crowds of glittering nobility on either side of it, all of them staring at me and whispering to one another behind their voluminous sleeves.

I didn’t feel like my real self at all; I would almost have liked another name on me then, a disguise to go with my clumsy, wide-skirted dress. I set my teeth and picked my way down the endless hall until I came to the dais and knelt at the king’s feet. He still looked weary, as he had in the courtyard when we’d come. The dark gold crown banded his forehead, and it must have been an enormous weight, but it wasn’t that simple kind of tiredness. His face beneath his brown-and-grey beard had lines like Krystyna’s, the lines of someone who couldn’t rest for worrying about the next day.

He put his hands around mine, and I squeaked out the words of the oath of fealty, stumbling over them; he answered me with long and easy practice, took his hands back, and nodded for me to go.

A page began making little beckoning motions at me from the side of the throne, but I realized belatedly that this was the first and just as likely only chance I had to ask the king anything.

“Your Majesty, if you please,” I said, trying hard to ignore the looks of puffing indignation from everyone near enough the throne to hear me, “I don’t know if you read Sarkan’s letter—”