Uprooted(75)
Author: Naomi Novik

Marek turned on me, his temper still unspent. “And you! You’re meant to be the foremost witness, and you’re wandering the castle looking like a kitchen slut. Do you think anyone is going to believe a word out of your mouth? Three days since I got you on the list—”

“You got me!” I said indignantly, wobbling up to my feet with the support of Kasia’s arm.

“—and all you’ve done is persuade the entire court you’re a useless bumpkin! Now this? Where is Solya? He was supposed to be showing you how to go on.”

“I don’t want to go on,” I said. “I don’t care what any of these people think of me. What they think doesn’t matter!”

“Of course it matters!” He seized me by the arm and dragged me out of Kasia’s hands. I stumbled with him, trying to gather together a spell to knock him away, but he pulled me to the window-sill and pointed down to the castle courtyard. I paused and looked down, puzzled. There didn’t seem to be anything alarming happening. The red-sashed ambassador was just going into the building with Crown Prince Sigmund.

“That man with my brother is an envoy from Mondria,” Marek said, low and savage. “Their prince consort died last winter: the princess will be out of mourning in six months. Now do you understand?”

“No,” I said, baffled.

“She wants to be queen of Polnya!” Marek shouted.

“But the queen’s not dead,” Kasia said, and then we understood.

I stared at Marek, cold, horrified. “But the king—” I blurted. “He loved—” I stopped.

“He’s putting the trial off to buy time, do you understand?” Marek said. “Once memories of the rescue have faded, he’ll get the nobility to look the other way, and then he can put her quietly to death. Now are you going to help me, or do you want to keep blundering around the castle until the snow flies and they burn her—and your beloved friend here—once it’s too cold for anyone to come out and watch?”

I curled my fingers tight around Kasia’s stiff hand, as if I could protect her that way. It felt too cruel and hollow to imagine: that we could have won Queen Hanna free, brought her out of the Wood, all so the king could cut off her head and marry someone else. Just to add a principality to the map of Polnya, another jewel to his crown. “But he loved her,” I said again, a protest I couldn’t help making—stupidly I suppose. Yet that story, the story of the lost beloved queen, made more sense to me than the one Marek was telling me.

“And you think that would make him forgive being made a fool?” Marek said. “His beautiful wife, who ran away from him with a Rosyan boy who sang her charming songs in the garden. That’s what they said of her, until I was old enough to kill men for saying it. They told me not to even mention her name to him, when I was a boy.”

He was staring down at Queen Hanna in her chair, where she sat blank as waiting paper. In his face, I could see him as he’d been, a child hiding in his mother’s deserted garden to escape that same crowd of poisonous courtiers—all of them smirking and whispering about her, shaking their heads and pretending at sorrow while they gossiped that they’d known it all along.

“And you think we can save her and Kasia by dancing to their music?” I said.

He lifted his gaze from the queen and looked at me. For the first time ever, I think he really listened to me. His chest rose and fell, three times. “No,” he said finally, agreeing. “They’re all just vultures, and he’s the lion. They’ll shake their heads and agree it’s a shame, and pick at the bones he throws them. Can you force my father to pardon her?” he demanded, as easily as if he wasn’t asking me to ensorcell the king, and take someone’s will away from them, as dreadful as the Wood.

“No!” I said, appalled. I looked at Kasia. She stood with a hand resting on the back of the queen’s chair, straight and golden and steady, and she shook her head to me. She wouldn’t ask that of me. She wouldn’t even ask me to run away with her, to abandon our people to the Wood—even if it meant the king would murder her, just so he could kill the queen, too. I swallowed. “No,” I said again. “I won’t do that.”

“Then what will you do?” Marek snarled, angry again, and stalked from the room without waiting for me to answer. It was just as well. I didn’t know what to say.

Chapter 20

The guards on the Charovnikov did recognize me, despite my clothes. They opened the heavy wooden doors for me and swung them closed again. I stood with my back pressed up to them, the gilt and turning angels overhead and the endless walls of books looming all the way down one wall and back along the next, dipping into alcoves and back out again. There were a handful of other people working at the tables here and there, young men and women in robes with their heads bent over alembics or books. They didn’t pay attention to me; they were all busy themselves.

The Charovnikov wasn’t welcoming to me, colder than the Dragon’s library and too impersonal, but at least it was a place I understood. I still didn’t know how I was going to save Kasia, but I knew I had more chance of finding a way to do it here than I did in a ballroom.

I took hold of the nearest ladder and dragged it squeaking all the way to the very front of the very first shelf, then I tucked up my skirts, climbed up to the top, and began to rummage. It was a familiar kind of searching. I didn’t go gleaning in the forest to find something in particular; I went to find whatever there was to find, and to let ideas come to me: if I found a heap of mushrooms, we’d have mushroom soup the next day, and if I found flat stones the hole in the road near our house would get mended. I thought surely there had to be at least a few books here that would speak out to me like Jaga’s book; maybe they even had another one of hers somewhere hidden away among all these fancy gold-stamped volumes.

I worked as quickly as I could. I looked at the dustiest books, the ones least-used. I ran my hands over all of them, read the titles off their spines. But it was slow going no matter what, and full of frustration. After I had gone through twelve wide bookcases, ceiling-to-floor, thirty shelves on each, I began to wonder if I would find anything here, after all: there was a dry stiff feeling to all the books beneath my hands, and nothing that invited me to keep looking.

It had grown late while I worked. The handful of other students were gone, and the magical lights had dimmed down to the faint glow of hot ash all along the library, as though they had gone to sleep. Only the one on my shelf still shone firefly-bright, and my back and ankles were complaining. I was twisted up on the ladder, my foot hooked around a rail, so I could reach out and grab the farthest books. I’d barely made it a quarter of the way down one side of the room, and that was going as quick and slipshod as I could, not a tenth of the books looked at properly; Sarkan would have muttered something uncomplimentary.