Uprooted

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?”

“I wouldn’t imagine so,” the Falcon said. “Our dear archbishop can be a little tedious, I’ll grant you, but his stiff neck is all to the good at the moment. He’d never permit anyone to substitute in a false relic, and the real ones won’t show anything that’s not there.”

Caught in indignation at their impiety — calling the archbishop old prosy! — I missed the chance to ask for an explanation: why would anyone want to show corruption if it wasn’t there? Marek was already spurring his horse onward. The queen’s wagon rattled down the hill behind him, and even though their faces were avid and bright with curiosity, the crowd of onlookers drew back from it like a wave washing back out from the shore, keeping well clear of the wheels. I saw many of them wearing cheap little charms against evil and crossing themselves as we passed.

The queen sat without looking to either side or fidgeting, only rocking back and forth with the wagon’s roll. Kasia had drawn close to her side, darting a look back at me that I returned, equally wide-eyed. We’d never seen so many people in our life. People were pressing in close enough around me to brush against my legs, despite my horse’s big iron-shod hooves.

When we drew up to the platform, the soldiers let us through their ranks and then circled round, leveling their pikes at us. I realized in alarm that there was a tall thick stake raised up in the middle of the platform, and beneath it a heap of straw and tinder. I reached forward and caught a corner of the Falcon’s sleeve in alarm.

“Stop looking like a frightened rabbit, sit up straight, and smile,” he hissed at me. “The last thing we need to do right now is give them any excuse to imagine something’s wrong.”

Marek behaved as though he didn’t even see the sharp steel points not two feet from his head. He dismounted with a flourish of the cape he’d bought, a few towns back, and went to lift the queen down from the wagon. Kasia had to help her along from the other side, and then at Marek’s impatient beckoning, she climbed down after her.

I’d never known it before, but a crowd so large had a steady running noise to it like a river, a murmuring that rose and ebbed without turning into separate voices. But now a complete hush descended. Marek led the queen up the steps onto the platform, the golden yoke still on her, and drew her before the priest in the tall hat.

“My Lord Archbishop,” Marek said, his voice rolling out clear and loud. “At great peril, my companions and I have freed the queen of Polnya from the evil grasp of the Wood. I charge you now to examine her to the utmost, to prove her with all your relics and the power of your great office: be sure that she bears no sign of corruption, which might spread and infect other innocent souls.”

Of course that was exactly what the archbishop was here for, but I don’t think he liked Marek making it seem as though it was all his idea. His mouth pressed down to a thin line. “Be sure that I will, Your Highness,” he said coldly, and turned and beckoned. One of the monks stepped up beside him: a short, anxious-looking man in plain brown linen, with brown hair cut in a round cap around his head. His eyes were enormous and blinking behind large gold-rimmed spectacles. He held a long wooden casket in his hands. He opened it, and the archbishop reached in and lifted out with both hands a fine shining mesh of gold and silver, almost like a net. The whole crowd murmured approvingly, wind rustling in spring leaves.

The archbishop held up the net and prayed long and sonorously, and then he turned and flung the net over the queen’s head. It settled over her gently and the edges unrolled, draping to her feet. Then to my surprise the monk stepped forward and put his hands on the mesh and spoke. “Yilastus kosmet, yilastus kosmet vestuo palta,” he began, and went on from there: a spell that flowed into the lines of the net and lit them up.

The light filled the queen’s whole body from every side, illuminating her. She shone atop the platform, head up straight, blazing. It wasn’t like the light of the Summoning. That was a cold clear brilliance, hard and painful. This light felt like coming back home late in midwinter to find a lamp shining out of the window, beckoning you into the house: it was a light full of love and warmth. A sighing went around the crowd. Even the priests drew back for a moment just to look at the shining queen.

The monk kept his hand on the net, steadily pouring in magic. I kicked my horse until she grudgingly moved in closer to the Falcon’s and leaned from my saddle to whisper, “Who is he?”

“Do you mean our gentle Owl?” he said. “Father Ballo. He’s the archbishop’s delight, as you might imagine: it’s not often you can find a meek and biddable wizard.” He sounded disdainful, but the monk didn’t look so very meek to me: he looked worried and displeased.

“And that net?” I asked.

“You’ve heard of Saint Jadwiga’s veil, surely,” the Falcon said, so offhanded I gawked at him. It was the holiest relic of all Polnya. I had heard the veil was only brought out when they crowned the kings, to prove them free of any influence of evil.

The crowd was jostling the soldiers now to come nearer, and even the soldiers were fascinated, the tips of their pikes rising into the air as they let themselves be pushed up close. The priests were going over the queen inch by inch, bending down to squint at her toes, holding each arm out to inspect her fingers, staring at her hair. But we could all see her shining, full of light; there was no shadow in her. One after another the priests stood up and shook their heads to the archbishop. Even the severity in his face was softening, the wonder of the light in his face.

When they had finished their examination, Father Ballo gently lifted the veil away. The priests brought other relics, too, and now I recognized them: the plate of Saint Kasimir’s armor still pierced with a tooth from the dragon of Kralia that he had slain; the arm bone of Saint Firan in a gold-and-glass casket, blackened from fire; the golden cup Saint Jacek had saved from the chapel. Marek lifted the queen’s hands onto each, one after another, and the archbishop prayed over her.

They repeated each trial on Kasia, but the crowd wasn’t interested in her. Everyone hushed to watch the queen, but they all talked noisily while the priests examined Kasia, more unruly than any crowd I’d ever seen, even though they were in the presence of so many holy relics and the archbishop himself. “Little more to be expected from the Kralia mob,” Solya told my half-shocked expression. There were even bun-sellers going around the crowd hawking fresh rolls, and from atop my horse I could see a couple of enterprising men had set up a stand to sell beer just down the road.

It was beginning to have the feeling of a holiday, of a festival. And finally the priests filled Saint Jacek’s golden cup with wine, and Father Ballo murmured over it: a faint curl of smoke rose up from the wine, and it went clear. The queen drank it all when they put it to her lips, and she didn’t fall down in a fit. She didn’t change her expression at all, but that didn’t matter. Someone in the crowd raised up a cup of sloshing beer and shouted, “God be praised! The queen is saved!” People all began to cheer madly and press in on us, all fear forgotten, so loudly I could barely hear the archbishop giving his grudging permission for Marek to take the queen into the city.

The crowd’s ecstasy was almost worse than the soldiers’ pikes had been. Marek had to shove people out of the way to get the wagon up next to the platform, and lift the queen and Kasia back into it bodily. He abandoned his own horse and jumped into the cart and took the reins. He liberally lashed people away from the heads of the horses with the carter’s whip to make room, and Solya and I had to bring our horses right up to the back of the wagon as the mob closed in again behind us.

They stayed with us all the five miles left towards the city, running alongside and after us, and when any fell off the pace, more came to swell the ranks. By the time we reached the bridge over the Vandalus, grown men and women had abandoned their day’s work to follow, and by the time we reached the outer gates of the castle we were barely moving through a wildly cheering crowd that pressed in on us from all sides, a living thing with ten thousand voices, all of them shouting with joy. The news had traveled already: the queen was saved, the queen was uncorrupted. Prince Marek had saved the queen at last.

We were all living in a song: that was how it felt. I felt it myself, even with the queen’s golden head swaying back and forth with the rocking wagon and making no effort to resist the motion, even knowing how small our real victory had been and how many men had died for it. There were children running beside my horse, laughing up at me — and probably not in any complimentary way, because I was one enormous smudge with tangled hair and a torn skirt — but I didn’t mind. I looked down and laughed with them, too, forgetting my stiff arms and my numb legs.

Marek rode at our head with a nearly exalted expression. I suppose it must have felt to him, too, like his life had become a song. Right then, nobody was thinking about the men who hadn’t come back. Oleg had the stump of his arm still bound up tightly, but he waved the other to the crowd with vigor, and kissed his hand to every pretty girl in sight. Even when we had gone through the gates of the castle, the crowd didn’t abate: the king’s soldiers had come out of their barracks and the noblemen out of their houses, throwing flowers in our path, and the soldiers clashing their swords on their shields in a clamoring applause.

Only the queen paid no attention to it all. They had taken the yoke and chains off her, but she sat no differently, still next thing to a carven figure.

We had to fall into single file to come through the final archway into the inner courtyard of the castle itself. The castle was dizzyingly large, arches rising in three tiers from the ground around me, endless faces leaning over the balconies, smiling down at us. I stared dazzled back up at them, at the embroidered banners in their riot of color everywhere, at the columns and the towers all around. The king himself was standing at the head of a staircase at one side of the courtyard. He wore a mantle of blue clasped at the throat with a great jewel, a red stone in gold with pearls.

The dull roar of cheering was still coming from outside the walls. Inside, the whole court hushed around us like the start of a play. Prince Marek had lifted the queen down from the wagon. He led her forward and up the stairs, courtiers ebbing like a tide before him, and brought her to the king. I found I was holding my own breath.

“Your Majesty,” Marek said, “I restore to you your queen.” The sun was shining brilliantly, and he looked like a warrior saint in his armor and his green cloak, his white tabard. The queen beside him was a tall stiff figure in her plain white shift, her short cloud of golden hair, and her transmuted skin lustrous.

The king looked down at them, his brow drawn. He seemed more worried than jubilant. We were all silent, waiting. At last he drew breath to speak, and only then the queen stirred. She slowly lifted up her head to look him in the face. He stared at her. She blinked her eyes once, and then she sighed a little and sank in on herself as limply as a sack: Prince Marek had to drag her forward by the arm he held and catch her, or she would have fallen down the stairs.

The king let out his breath, and his shoulders straightened a little as if let off a string, relaxing. His voice carried strongly across the courtyard. “Take her to the Grey Rooms, and let the Willow be sent for.” Servants were already swooping in. They carried her away from us and into the castle as if on a wave.

—

And just like that — the play was ended. The noise inside the courtyard climbed back up to a roar to match the crowd outside, everyone talking to everyone else, across all three stories of the courtyard. The bright heady feeling ran out of me like I’d been unstoppered and turned over. Too late I remembered I wasn’t here for a triumph. Kasia sat in the wagon in her white prisoner’s shift, alone, condemned; Sarkan was a hundred leagues away, trying to hold the Wood off from Zatochek without me; and I had no idea how I was going to fix either of those things.

I shook my feet out of my stirrups, heaved my leg over, and slithered to the ground inelegantly. My legs wobbled when I put my weight on them. A groom came for my horse. I let him take her away, a little reluctantly: she wasn’t a good horse, but she was a familiar rock in this ocean of strangeness. Prince Marek and the Falcon were going into the castle along with the king. I had already lost sight of Tomasz and Oleg in the crowd, surrounded by others in uniform.

Kasia was climbing out of the back of the wagon, a small company of guards waiting for her. I pushed through the tide of servants and courtiers and got between them and her.

“What are you going to do with her?” I demanded, shrill with worry. I must have looked absurd to them in my dusty ragged peasant clothes, like a sparrow piping at a pack of hunting tomcats; they couldn’t see the magic in my belly, ready to come roaring out of me.

But however insignificant I looked, I was still part of the triumph, of the queen’s rescue, and anyway they weren’t inclined to cruelty. The chief guard, a man with the most enormous mustaches I had ever seen, the tips waxed into stiff curls, said to me kindly enough, “Are you her maid? Don’t fret; we’re to take her to be with the queen herself, in the Grey Tower, with the Willow to look after them. Everything’s to be done right and by the law.”

That wasn’t much comfort: by the law, Kasia and the queen should both have been put to death at once. But Kasia whispered, “It’s all right, Nieshka.” It wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything else to do. The guards put her among them, four men before and four men after, and marched her away into the palace.

I stared after them hollowly for a moment, and then I realized I’d never find her again in this enormous place if I didn’t see where they took her. I jumped and darted after them. “Here, now,” a door guard said to me as I tried to follow them inside, but I told him, “Param param,” humming it like the song about the tiny fly that no one could catch, and he blinked and I was past him.

I trailed after the guards like a dangling thread, keeping my hum going to tell everyone I passed that I was too small to notice, nothing important. It wasn’t hard. I felt as small and insignificant as could be imagined. The corridor went on and on. There were doors everywhere, heavy wood and hung with iron. Servants and courtiers bustled in and out of enormous rooms hung with tapestries, full of carven furniture and stone fireplaces bigger than my front door. Glittering lamps full of magic hung from the ceilings, and in the hallways, racks of tall white candles stood, burning without melting.

Finally the corridor ended in a small iron door, guarded again. The guards nodded to Kasia’s escort, and let them and rag-tag me through into a narrow circling stairway, their eyes sliding over me. We climbed and climbed, my tired legs struggling to push me up each step, until at last we came crowding onto a small round landing. It was dim and smoky: there wasn’t any window, and only an ordinary oil lamp stood set in a rough niche in the wall. It shone on the dull grey of another heavy iron door, a big round knocker upon it shaped like the head of a hungry imp, the knocker’s ring held in its wide open mouth. A strange chill came off the iron, a cold wind lapping at my skin, even though I was pressed up against the wall in the corner behind the tall guards.

The chief guard knocked, and the door swung inward. “We’ve brought the other girl, milady,” he said.

“All right,” a woman’s voice said, crisply. The guards parted to let Kasia through. A tall slim woman stood in the doorway, yellow coiled braids and a golden headdress atop her head, wearing a blue silk gown delicately jeweled at the neck and waist, with a train sweeping the floor behind her, although her sleeves were practical, laced snug from the elbow to the wrist. She stood to one side and waved Kasia in past her with two impatient flicks of her long hand. I had a brief glimpse of a large room beyond, carpeted and comfortable, and the queen sitting upright in a straight-backed chair. She was looking blankly out a window down at the glitter of the Vandalus.

“And what’s this?” the lady said, turning to look at me. All the guards turned and stared, seeing me. I froze.

“I—” the chief guard stammered, going a little red in the face, with a darted look at the two men who’d been last in their party, a look that promised them trouble for not noticing me. “She’s—” “I’m Agnieszka,” I said. “I came with Kasia and the queen.” The lady gave me one incredulous stare that saw every snagged thread and every mud-spatter on my skirts, even the ones in back, and was astonished to find that I had the gall to speak. She looked at the guard. “Is this one suspected of corruption as well?” she demanded.

“No, milady, not as I know,” he said.

“Then why are you bringing her to me? I’ve enough to do here.” She turned back into the room, her train swashing along after her, and the door slammed shut. Another cold wave washed over me and back to the imp with its greedy mouth, licking away the last of my concealing spell. It devoured magic, I realized: that must have been why they brought corrupted prisoners here.

“How did you get in here?” the chief guard demanded suspiciously, all of them looming around me.

I would have liked to hide myself away again, but I couldn’t with that hungry mouth waiting. “I’m a witch,” I said. They looked even more suspicious. I brought out the letter I still clutched in my skirt pocket: the paper was more than a little grubbier for wear, but the charred letters of the seal still smoked faintly. “The Dragon gave me a letter for the king.”