Uprooted(98)
Author: Naomi Novik

There wasn’t a place for us among them; we were only in their way. I didn’t try to speak to any of them, after all; I silently followed the Dragon back to the tower.

He shut the great doors behind us, the thump of the bar falling into the iron braces echoing against the marble. The entry and the great hall were unchanged, the unwelcoming narrow wooden benches standing against the walls, the hanging lamps above. Everything as stiff and formal as the first day I’d come wandering through here with my tray of food, so frightened and alone. Even the baron preferred to sleep outside with his men in the warm weather. I could hear their voices outside through the arrow-slit windows, but only faintly, as if they came from far away. Some of the soldiers were singing a song together, a bawdy song probably, but full of glad working rhythm. I couldn’t make out the words.

“We’ll have a little quiet, at least,” Sarkan said, turning from the doors, towards me. He wiped a hand across his forehead, streaking a clean line through the fine layer of grey stone dust clinging to his skin; his hands were stained with green powder and iridescent traces of oil that shone in the lamp-light. He looked down at them with a grimace of distaste, at the loose sleeves of his work-shirt coming unrolled.

For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.

“They’ll most likely attack at the first light of morning,” he said too quickly, cutting me off before I could say anything more. His face was as closed up as the doors. He stepped back from me and gestured at the stairs. “The best thing you can do at the moment is get some sleep.”

Chapter 27

What perfectly sensible advice. It sat in my stomach, an indigestible lump. I went down to the cellars to lie down with Kasia and the children, and curled up quietly seething around it. Their small even breaths came behind me. The sound should have been comforting; instead it just taunted me: They’re asleep and you aren’t! The cellar floor couldn’t cool my feverish skin.

My body remembered the endless day; I’d woken up that morning on the other side of the mountains, and I still felt the echoes of hoofbeats on stone behind me, coming closer, the strain of my panicked breaths struggling against my ribs as I’d run with Marisha in my arms. I had bruises where her heels had banged against the sides of my legs. I should have been spent. But magic was still alive and shivering in my belly, too much of it with nowhere to go, as if I were an over-ripe tomato that wanted to burst its skin for relief, and there was an army outside our doors.

I didn’t think Solya had spent the evening preparing defenses and sleep spells. He’d fill our trenches with white fire, and tell Marek where to point the cannon so they would kill the most men. He was a war-wizard; he’d been at dozens of battles, and Marek had the entire army of Polnya behind him, six thousand men to our six hundred. If we didn’t stop them; if Marek came through the walls we’d built and smashed the doors, killed us all and took the children—

I threw off the covers and got up. Kasia’s eyes opened just briefly to see me, and then closed again. I slipped away to sit by the ashes in the hearth, shivering. I couldn’t stop thinking in circles about how easy it would be to lose, about the Wood rolling dark and terrible over the valley, a green swallowing wave. I tried not to see it, but in my mind’s eye a heart-tree rose up in the square in Dvernik, sprawling and monstrous as that terrible tree in Porosna behind the borders of the Wood, and everyone I loved was tangled beneath its grasping roots.

I stood and fled from my own imagining, up the stairs. In the great hall, the arrow-slit windows were dark; there wasn’t even a snatch of song outside to drift in. All the soldiers were sleeping. I kept climbing, past the laboratory and the library, green and violet and blue lights still flickering behind their doors. But they were empty; there was no one there for me to shout at, no one to snap back at me and tell me I was being a fool. I went up another flight and stopped at the edge of the next landing, near the fringed end of the long carpet. A faint gleam showed from underneath the farthest door, at the end of the hallway. I had never gone that way, towards Sarkan’s private bedroom. It had been an ogre’s chamber, once.

The carpet was thick and dark, with a pattern woven into it with golden-yellow thread. The pattern was all one line: it began in a tight spiral like the curl of a lizard’s tail. The golden line grew thicker as it unwound, and then went twisting back and forth along the length of the rug almost like a pathway, leading into the shadows down the hallway. My feet sank deep in the soft wool. I followed the golden line as it broadened beneath my feet and took on a pattern like scales, faintly gleaming. I passed the guest chambers, two doors opposite one another, and beyond them the hallway darkened around me.

I was walking past a kind of pressure, a wind blowing against me. The pattern in the carpet was forming into clearer shapes. I walked over one great ivory-clawed limb, over the sweep of pale golden wings veined in dark brown.

The wind grew colder. The walls disappeared, fading into part of the dark. The carpet widened until it filled all the hallway I could see and stretched away beyond. It didn’t feel like wool anymore. I stood on warm lapping scales, soft as leather, rising and falling beneath my feet. The sound of breathing echoed back from cavern walls out of sight. My heart wanted to hammer with instinctive terror. My feet wanted to turn and run.

I shut my eyes instead. I knew the tower by now, how long the hallway should have been. I took three more steps along the scaled back, and then I turned and put out my hand, reaching for the door I knew was there. My fingers found a doorknob, warm metal beneath my fingers. I opened my eyes again and I was back in the hallway, looking at a door. A few steps farther on, the hall and the carpet ended. The golden pattern turned back on itself, and a gleaming green eye looked up at me from a head filled with rows of silver teeth, waiting for anyone who didn’t know where to turn.

I opened the door. It swung silently. The room wasn’t large. The bed was small and narrow, canopied and curtained in with red velvet; a single chair stood before the fireplace, beautifully carved, alone; a single book on the small table beside it with a single cup of wine, half-drunk. The fire was banked down to glowing coals, and the lamps were out. I went to the bed and drew aside the curtain. Sarkan was sleeping stretched across the bed still in his breeches and his loose shirt; he’d only thrown off his coat. I stood holding the curtain. He blinked awake at me unguarded for a moment, too startled to be indignant, as if he’d never imagined anyone could barge in on him. He looked so baffled I didn’t want to shout at him anymore.