Uprooted

Chapter 18

They took me downstairs and put me into a small unused stateroom, for lack of anyplace better. The guards kept watch outside the door while their captain went off, my letter in hand, to find out what ought to be done with me. My legs were ready to give out on me, but there was nothing to sit on but a few alarming chairs pushed up against the wall, delicate fragile-looking confections of white paint and gilt and red velvet cushions. I would have thought any one of them a throne, if there hadn’t been four in a row.

I leaned against the wall for a while instead, and then I tried sitting on the hearth, but the fire hadn’t been lit in here for a long time. The ashes were dead and the stone was cold. I went back to the wall. I went back to the hearth. Finally I decided that no one could put a chair in a room and not mean anyone to sit on it, and I gingerly perched on the edge of one of the chairs, holding my skirts close against me.

The moment I sat, the door opened and a servant came in, a woman in a crisp black dress, something like Danka’s age with a small pursed mouth of disapproval. I sprang up guiltily. Four long gleaming red threads followed me unraveling from the cushion, caught on a burr on my skirt, and a long sharp white-painted splinter snagged in my sleeve and broke off. The woman’s mouth pursed harder, but she only said, “This way, please,” stiffly.

She led me out past the guards, who didn’t look sorry to see the back of me, and took me back up yet another different staircase — I’d seen half a dozen in the castle already — and showed me to a tiny dark cell of a room on the second floor. It had a narrow window that looked out on the stone wall of the cathedral: a rainspout shaped like a wide-mouthed and hungry gargoyle sneered in at me. She left me there before I could think to ask her what to do next.

I sat down on the cot. I must have slept, because by the next thought I had, I was flat on the cot instead, but it wasn’t a deliberate choice; I didn’t even remember lying down. I struggled up still sore and weary, but too conscious that I had no time to waste, and no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to make anyone pay attention to me, unless I went to the middle of the courtyard and began to lob fire spells at the walls. I doubted that would make the king any more inclined to let me speak at Kasia’s trial.

I was sorry now that I’d given the Dragon’s letter away, my only tool and talisman. How did I know it had even been delivered? I decided to go find it: I remembered the guard captain’s face, or at least his mustache. There couldn’t be many mustaches like that even in all Kralia. I stood up and pulled the door open boldly, walked out into the hallway, and nearly ran straight into the Falcon. He was just raising his hand to the latch on my door. He flowed deftly back out of my way, saving us both, and gave me a small, gentle smile that I didn’t trust at all.

“I hope you’re feeling refreshed,” he said, and offered me his arm.

I didn’t take it. “What do you want?”

He turned the gesture neatly into a long inviting sweep of his hand towards the hallway. “To escort you to the Charovnikov. The king has given orders you’re to be examined for the list.”

I was so relieved that I didn’t quite believe him. I eyed him sidelong, half-expecting a trick. But he kept standing there with his arm and smile, waiting for me. “At once,” he added, “although perhaps you’d care to change first?”

I would have liked to tell him what to do with his mocking little hint, but I looked down at myself: all mud and dust and sweat-stained creases, and underneath the mess a homespun skirt that stopped just below my knee and a faded brown cotton shift, worn old clothes I’d begged off a girl in Zatochek. I didn’t look like one of the servants; the servants were far better dressed than me. Meanwhile Solya had exchanged his black riding clothes for a long robe of black silk with a long sleeveless coat embroidered in green and silver over it, and his white hair spilled over it in a graceful fall. If you had seen him from a mile away, you would have known him for a wizard. And if they didn’t think me a wizard, they wouldn’t let me testify.

“Try and present a respectable appearance,” Sarkan had said.

Vanastalem gave me clothes to match the mood of my sullen muttering: a stiff and uncomfortable gown of rich red silk, endless flounces edged in flame-orange ribbons. I could have used an arm to lean on, at that, trying to negotiate stairs in the enormous skirt without being able to see my feet, but I grimly ignored Solya’s subtly renewed offer at the head of the staircase, and picked my way slowly down, feeling for the edges of the steps with my tight-slippered toes.

He clasped his hands behind his back instead and paced me. He remarked idly, “The examinations are often challenging, of course. I suppose Sarkan prepared you for them?” He threw me a mildly inquiring glance; I didn’t answer him, but I couldn’t quite keep myself from dragging my bottom lip through my teeth. “Well,” he said, “if you do find them difficult, we might provide a — joint demonstration to the examiners; I’m sure they would find that reassuring.”

I only glared at him and didn’t answer. Anything we did, I was sure he’d take the credit for. He didn’t press the matter, smiling on as though he hadn’t even noticed my cold looks: a circling bird high above waiting for any opening. He took me through an archway flanked by two tall young guards who looked at me curiously, and into the Charovnikov, the Hall of Wizards.

I slowed involuntarily coming into the cavernous room. The ceiling was like an opening into Heaven, painted clouds spilling over a blue sky and angels and saints stretched across it. Enormous windows poured in the afternoon sunlight. I stared up, dazzled, and almost ran myself into a table, reaching blindly to catch myself with my hands on the corner and feeling my way around it. All the walls were covered in books, and a narrow balcony ran the full length of the room, making an even taller second level of bookcases. Ladders hung down from the ceiling on little wheels all along it. Great worktables stood along the length of the room, heavy solid oak with marble topping them.

“This is only an exercise in delaying what we all know has to be done,” a woman was saying, somewhere out of sight: her voice was deep for a woman, a lovely warm sound, but there was an angry edge to her words. “No, don’t start bleating at me again about the relics, Ballo. Any spell can be defeated — yes, even the one on holy blessed Jadwiga’s shawl, and stop looking scandalized at me for saying so. Solya’s gone drunk on politics to lend himself to this enterprise in the first place.”

“Come, Alosha. Success excuses all risks, surely,” the Falcon said mildly as we rounded a corner and found three wizards gathered at a large round table in an alcove, with a wide window letting in the afternoon sun. I squinted against it, after the dim light of the palace hallways.

The woman he’d called Alosha was taller even than me, with ebony-dark skin and shoulders as broad as my father’s, her black hair braided tightly against her skull. She wore men’s clothes: full red cotton trousers tucked into high leather boots, and a leather coat over it. The coat and the boots were beautiful, embossed with gold and silver in intricate patterns, but they still looked lived-in; I envied them in my ridiculous dress.

“Success,” she said. “Is that what you call this, bringing a hollow shell back to the court just in time to burn her at the stake?”

My hands clenched. But the Falcon only smiled and said, “Perhaps we’d best defer these arguments for the moment. After all, we aren’t here to judge the queen, are we? My dear, permit me to present to you Alosha, our Sword.”

She looked at me unsmiling and suspicious. The other two were men: one of them the same Father Ballo who’d examined the queen. He didn’t have a single line creasing his cheeks, and his hair was still solidly brown, but he somehow contrived to look old anyway, his spectacles sliding over a round nose in a round face as he peered up and down at me doubtfully. “Is this the apprentice?”

The other man might have been his opposite, long and lean, in a rich wine-red waistcoat embroidered elaborately in gold and a bored expression; his narrow pointed black beard curled up carefully at the tip. He was stretched in a chair with his boots up on the table. There was a heap of short stubby golden bars on the table beside him and a small black velvet bag heaped with tiny glittering red jewels. He was working two bars in his hands, magic whispering out of him; his lips were moving faintly. He was running the ends of the gold together, the bars thinning under his fingers into a narrow strip. “And this is Ragostok, the Splendid,” Solya said.

Ragostok said nothing, and didn’t even lift his head save for one brief glance that took me in from head to feet and dismissed me at once and forever as beneath his notice. But I preferred his disinterest to the hard suspicious line of Alosha’s mouth. “Where exactly did Sarkan find you?” she demanded.

They’d heard some version of the rescue by then, it seemed, but Prince Marek and the Falcon hadn’t bothered with the parts of the story that didn’t suit them, and there was more they hadn’t known. I stumbled through an awkward explanation of how I’d met Sarkan, uncomfortably aware of the Falcon’s eyes on me, bright and attentive. I wanted to say as little as I could about Dvernik, about my family; he already had Kasia as a tool to use against me.

I borrowed Kasia’s secret fear and tried to hint that my family had chosen to offer me to the Dragon; I made sure to say my father was a woodcutter, which I already knew they would disdain, and I didn’t tell them any names. I said the village headwoman and one of the herdsmen instead of Danka and Jerzy, and made it sound as though Kasia was my only friend, and not just my dearest, before I haltingly told them of her rescue.

“And I suppose you asked nicely, and the Wood gave her back to you?” said Ragostok without looking up from his work: he was pressing the tiny red jewels into the gold with his thumbs, one after another.

“The Dragon — Sarkan—” I found myself grateful for the small lift I felt, from the thunder of his name on my tongue. “—he thought the Wood gave her to me for the chance of setting a trap.”

“So he hadn’t lost his mind entirely by then,” Alosha said. “Why didn’t he put her to death at once? He knows the law as well as anyone.”

“He let — he let me try,” I said. “He let me try to purge her. And then it worked—”

“Or so you imagine,” she said. She shook her head. “And so does pity lead straight to disaster. Well, I’m surprised to hear it of Sarkan; but better men than he have lost their heads over a girl not half their age.”

I didn’t know what to say: I wanted to protest, to say That’s not it, there’s nothing like that, but the words stuck in my throat. “And do you suppose that I lost my head over her as well?” the Falcon said, in amused tones. “And Prince Marek in the bargain?”

She looked at him, an edge of contempt. “When Marek was a boy of eight, he wept for a month demanding his father take the army and every wizard in all Polnya into the Wood to bring his mother back,” she said. “But he’s not a child anymore. He should have known better, and so should you. How many men did this crusade of yours cost us? You took thirty veterans, cavalrymen, every one of them a prime soldier, every one of them carrying blades from my forge—”

“And we brought back your queen,” the Falcon said, a sudden hard bite in his voice, “if that means anything to you?”

Ragostok heaved a noisy and pointed sigh without even looking up from his golden circlet. “What difference does it make at the moment? The king wants the girl tried — so try her already and let’s be done with it.” His tone made clear he didn’t expect it to take long.

Father Ballo cleared his throat; he reached for a pen, dipped it into an inkwell, and leaned in towards me, peering through his small spectacles. “You do seem rather young to be examined. Tell me, my dear, how long have you been studying under your master?”

“Since the harvest,” I said, and stared back at their incredulous eyes.

—

Sarkan hadn’t mentioned to me that wizards ordinarily took seven years of study before asking to be admitted to the list. And after I spent a good three hours flubbing half the spells they set me on, exhausting myself in the meantime, even Father Ballo was inclined to believe that Sarkan had gone stupidly in love with me, or was having some sort of joke at their expense, to send me to be tested.

The Falcon was of no help: he watched their deliberations from the sideline with a mild air of interest, and when they asked him what magic he had seen me use, he only said, “I don’t think I can properly attest — it’s always difficult to separate the workings of an apprentice from a master, and Sarkan was there all the while, of course. I should prefer you all to make your own judgments.” And then he looked at me from under his lashes, a reminder of that hint he’d given me in the hallway.

I gritted my teeth and tried again to appeal to Ballo: he seemed the best chance for any sympathy, although even he was growing irritated. “Sir, I’ve told you, I’m no use at these kinds of spells.”

“These are not any kind of spell,” he said, peevish and purse-mouthed. “We have set you at everything from healing magic to inscription, under every element and every quarter of affinity. There is no category which encompasses all these spells.”

“But they’re your sort of magic. Not — not Jaga’s,” I said, seizing upon the example they would surely know.

Father Ballo peered at me even more dubiously. “Jaga? What on earth has Sarkan been teaching you? Jaga is a folk story.” I stared at him. “Her deeds are borrowed from a handful of real wizards, mixed in with fanciful additions, and exaggerated over the years into mythic stature.”

I gaped at him, helplessly: he was the only one who had been polite to me at all, and now he was telling me with a straight face that Jaga wasn’t real.

“Well, this has been a waste of time,” Ragostok said. He hadn’t any right to complain about that, though: he hadn’t stopped working once, and by now his jeweled piece had become a tall circlet with a large socket in the middle waiting for a larger gemstone. It hummed faintly with trapped sorcery. “Pushing out a handful of cantrips isn’t enough magic to make her worthy of the list, now or ever. Alosha had it right in the first place, what’s happened to Sarkan.” He eyed me up and down. “Without much excuse, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

I was mortified, and angry, and afraid even more than angry: for all I knew, the trial might start in the morning. I dragged in a breath against the hard whalebone grip of the corsets, pushed back my chair and stood, and under my skirts I stamped my foot on the ground and said, “Fulmia.” My heel came down jarring against the stone, a blow that rang through me and back out on a wave of magic. All around us the castle shuddered like a sleeping giant, a tremor that made the hanging jewels on the lamp above our heads chime softly against one another, and brought books thumping down off the shelves.

Ragostok had jerked up to his feet, his chair going over, his circlet clattering out of his hands onto the table. Father Ballo stared around at the corners of the room with startled blinking confusion before he transferred his astonishment to me, as if surely there had to be some other explanation. I stood panting with my hands clenched at my sides, still ringing head-to-foot, and said, “Is that magic enough to put me on the list? Or do you want to see more?”

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—”

One of the tall strong footmen by the throne almost at once got my arm, bowing to the king with a fixed smile on his face, and tried to tug me away. I planted my feet, muttering a sliver of Jaga’s earth spell, and ignored him. “We have a real chance to destroy the Wood, now,” I said, “but he hasn’t any soldiers, and — yes, I’ll go in a moment!” I hissed at the footman, who’d now got me by both my arms and was trying to rock me off the dais. “I only need to explain—”

“All right, Bartosh, stop breaking your back on her,” the king said. “We can give our newest witch a moment.” He was really looking at me now, for the first time, and sounding faintly amused. “We have indeed read the letter. It could have used a few more lines. Not least about you.” I bit my lip. “What would you ask of your king?”

My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask. Let Kasia go! I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.

I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”

“We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.

I tottered away suffused with relief — the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him — and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.

He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.

“When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.

He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.

“But isn’t there — it must start soon?” I tried.

He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”