Uprooted(86)
Author: Naomi Novik

And then he sprang forward, shouting, “Send for the Willow! Send for—” sliding to his knees next to the farthest body; he stopped as he turned it over and the light fell on the man’s face: on the king’s face.

The king was dead.

Chapter 23

There were people everywhere shouting: guards, servants, ministers, physicians, all crowding around the body of the king as close as they could get. Marek had set the three guards to watch him and vanished. I was pushed up to the side of the room like flotsam on the tide, my eyes closing as I sagged against a bookcase. Kasia pushed through to my side. “Nieshka, what should I do?” she asked me, helping me to sit on a footstool.

I said, “Go and get Alosha,” instinctively wanting someone who would know what to do.

It was a lucky impulse. One of Ballo’s assistants had survived: he’d fled and pulled himself up into the stone chimney of the library’s great fireplace to escape. A guard noticed the claw marks on the hearth and the ashes of the fire all raked out over the floor, and they found him still up there, shaking and terrified. They brought him out and gave him a drink, and then he stood up and pointed at me and blurted, “It was her! She was the one who found it!”

I was dizzy and ill and still shaking with thunder. They all began shouting at me. I tried to tell them about the book, how it had been hiding in the library all this time; but they wanted someone to blame more than they wanted someone to explain. The smell of pine needles came into my nostrils. Two guards seized me by the arms, and I think they would have dragged me to the dungeons in a moment, or worse: someone said, “She’s a witch! If we let her get her strength back again—”

Alosha made them stop: she came into the room and clapped her hands three times, each clap making a noise like a whole troop of men stamping. Everyone quieted long enough to listen to her. “Put her down in that chair and stop behaving like fools,” she said. “Take hold of Jakub instead. He was here in the middle of it. Didn’t any of you have the wits to suspect he’d been touched with corruption, too?”

She had authority: they all knew her, especially the guards, who went as stiff and formal as if she were a general. They let go of me and caught poor protesting Jakub instead; they dragged him up to Alosha still bleating, “But she did! Father Ballo said she found the book—”

“Be quiet,” Alosha said, taking out her dagger. “Hold his wrist,” she told one of the guards, and had them pin the apprentice’s arm to a table by the wrist, palm up. She muttered a spell over it and nicked his elbow, then held the blade beside the bleeding cut. He squirmed and struggled in their grip, moaning, and then thin black wisps of smoke came seeping out with the blood, and rose to catch on the glowing blade. She rotated the dagger slowly, collecting up the wisps like thread on a bobbin until the smoke stopped coming. Alosha held the dagger up and looked at it with narrowed eyes, said, “Hulvad elolveta,” and blew on it three times: the blade grew brighter and brighter with every breath, glowing hot, and the smoke burned off with a smell of sulfur.

The room had emptied considerably by the time she was done, and everyone left had backed away to the walls, except the pale unhappy guards still holding the apprentice. “All right, give him some bandages. Stop shouting, Jakub,” she said. “I was there when she found it, you idiot: the book was here in our own library for years, lurking like a rotting apple. Ballo was going to purge it. What happened?”

Jakub didn’t know: he’d been sent to fetch supplies. The king hadn’t been there when he’d left; when he’d come back, carrying more salt and herbs, the king and his guards had been standing by the podium with blank faces, and Ballo was reading the book aloud, already changing: clawed legs coming from beneath his robe, and two more sprouting from his sides, tearing their way out, his face lengthening into a snout, the words still coming even as they garbled and choked in his throat—

Jakub’s voice rose higher and higher as he spoke, until it broke and stopped. His hands were shaking.

Alosha poured more nalevka into a glass for him to drink. “It’s stronger than we thought,” she said. “We have to burn it at once.”

I struggled up off my footstool, but Alosha shook her head at me. “You’re overspent. Go sit on the hearth, and keep watch on me: don’t try to do anything unless you see it’s taking me.”

The book still lay placidly on the floor between the shattered pieces of the stone table, illuminated and innocent. Alosha took a pair of gauntlets from one of the guards and picked it up. She took it to the hearth and called fire: “Polzhyt, polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,” and on further from there, a long incantation, and the dull ashes in the hearth roared up like the blaze of her forge. The fire licked at the pages and gummed them, but the book only flung itself open in the fire and its pages ruffled like flags in a high wind, snapping, pictures of beasts trying to catch the eye, illuminated with firelight behind them.

“Get back!” Alosha said sharply to the guards: a few of them had been about to take a step closer, their eyes vague and caught. She reflected firelight into their faces from the flat of her dagger, and they blinked and then startled back, pale and afraid.

Alosha watched with a wary eye until they moved farther away, then turned back and kept chanting her fire spell, over and over, her arms spread wide to hold the fire in. But the book still hissed and spat on the hearth like wet green wood, refusing to catch; the fresh smell of spring leaves crept into the room, and I could see veins standing out on Alosha’s neck, strain showing in her face. She had her eyes fixed on the mantelpiece, but they kept drifting downwards towards the glowing pages. Each time, she pressed her thumb against the edge of her dagger. Blood dripped. She lifted her gaze back up.

Her voice was going hoarse. A handful of orange sparks landed on the carpet and smoldered. Sitting tired on the footstool, I looked at them and slowly I began to hum the old song about the spark on the hearth, telling its long stories: Once there was a golden princess, loved a simple player; the king gave them a splendid wedding, and the story ends there! Once there was old Baba Jaga, house made out of butter; and in that house so many wonders—tsk! The spark is gone now. Gone, taking the story with it. I sang it once through softly and said, “Kikra, kikra,” and then sang it again. The flying sparks began to drop onto the pages like rain, each one darkening a tiny spot before they went out. They fell in glowing showers, and when they fell in clusters, thin plumes of smoke went up.