Uprooted (21 page)

She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn’t set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn’t forced me to go three hours’ walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn’t turned her back to me when I’d cried, and told me I had to be brave. My mother hadn’t brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she
wanted
me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love—oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.

And then—and then she’d even hated me for being taken. She hadn’t been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place, everyone whispering; she had never imagined herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn’t meant to welcome her back. She’d made up her mind to pay the price, and be brave; but now there was nothing left to be brave for, no glittering future ahead. The older village boys smiled at her with a kind of strange, satisfied confidence. Half a dozen of them had spoken to her during the feast: boys who’d never said a word to her, or had only looked at her from afar as though they didn’t dare to touch, now came and spoke to her familiarly, as if she had nothing to do but sit there and be chosen by someone else instead. And I’d come back in silk and velvet, my hair caught in a net of jewels, my hands full of magic, the power to do as I liked, and she’d thought,
That should be me, it should have been me,
as though I was a thief who’d taken something that belonged to her.

It was unbearable, and I saw her recoil from it, too; but somehow we had to bear it. “Kasia!” I called to her, choked out, and held the light steady for her to see. I saw her stand there hesitating a moment longer, and then she came stumbling towards me, hands reaching forward. The Wood tore at her as she came, though, branches clawing and vines tangling around her legs, and I could do nothing. I could only stand there and hold the light while she fell and struggled up again, and fell again, terror rising in her face.

“Kasia!” I cried. She was crawling now, still coming, her jaw set with determination, leaving a bloody trail on the fallen leaves and dark moss behind her. She grabbed at roots and pulled herself forward, even while the branches lashed her back, but she was still so far away.

And then I looked back up at her body, at the face inhabited by the Wood, and it smiled at me. She couldn’t escape. The Wood was deliberately letting her try, feasting on her very courage, on my own hope. It could drag her back at any moment. It would let her come close enough to see me, maybe even to feel her own body, the air on her face, and then vines would spring up and lash around her, a storm of falling leaves would shroud her, and the Wood would close up around her again. I moaned a protest, and I almost lost the thread of the spell, and then the Dragon said behind me, his voice strange and remote, as though he spoke from far away, “Agnieszka, the purging.
Ulozishtus
. Try it. I can finish alone.”

I carefully drew my magic back from the
Summoning,
carefully, carefully, like tipping up a bottle without letting it drip down the neck. The light held, and I whispered,
“Ulozishtus
.
”
It was one of the Dragon’s spells, not the kind that came to me easily; I didn’t remember the rest of the words he’d said over me. But I let the word roll over my tongue, shaping it carefully, and remembered the feeling of it—the fire that had burned in my veins, the terrible sweetness of the potion on my tongue.
“Ulozishtus,”
I said again, drawing it out slowly,
“Ulozishtus,”
and made each syllable a small spark struck on tinder, a scrap of magic flying out. And inside the Wood, I saw a thin trail of smoke going up from one patch of the undergrowth closing around Kasia; I whispered
“Ulozishtus,”
to it, and to another thread of smoke that rose ahead of her, and when I did it to a third, a tiny struggling yellow flame bloomed near her grasping arm.

“Ulozishtus,”
I said to it again, giving it another bit of magic, like laying scraps of kindling to a new fire in a dead hearth. The flame grew stronger, and where it touched the vines recoiled, pulling back.
“Ulozishtus, ulozishtus,”
I chanted, feeding it, building it higher, and as it climbed I took burning branches from it and set the rest of the Wood alight.

Kasia staggered up, pulling her arms free of smoking vines, her own flesh marked pink with the heat. But she could move quicker again, and she came towards me through the smoke, through the crackling leaves, running as the trees went up, as scorching branches fell around her. Her hair was burning, and her torn clothing, tears running down her face as her skin reddened and blistered. Her body before me was jerking in the manacles, writhing in a scream of rage, and I wept and shouted,
“Ulozishtus!”
again. The fire was growing, and I knew that just as the Dragon might have killed me, purging me of the shadows, Kasia might die here now, might burn to death at my hands.

I was grateful now for the long terrible months trying to find something, anything; I was grateful for all the failures, for every minute I had spent here in this tomb with the Wood laughing at me. It gave me the strength to keep the spell going. The Dragon’s voice was steady behind me, an anchor, chanting to the end of the
Summoning
. Kasia was coming nearer, and all around her the Wood was burning. I could see very little of the trees now—she was close enough that she was looking out of her own eyes, and there were flames licking at her skin, roaring, crackling. Her body arched against the stone, thrashing. Her fingers stiffened, going wide, and suddenly her veins ran brilliant green in her arms.

Drops of sap burst trickling from her eyes and nose in rivulets down her face like tears, the bright fresh sweet smell horribly wrong. Her mouth hung open in a silent round cry, and then tiny white rootlets crept out from beneath her nails, like an oak-tree growing overnight. They climbed with sudden horrible speed all over the manacles, hardening into grey wood even as they went, and with a noise like ice breaking in midsummer, the chains broke.

I did nothing. There was no time to do anything: it happened quicker than I could even see it. One moment Kasia was chained, the next she was leaping for me. She was impossibly strong, flinging me to the ground. I caught her shoulders and held her off with a scream. Sap was running from her face, staining her dress, and it fell on me with a pattering like rain. It crawled over my skin, beading up against my protection spell. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. Her hands closed around my throat like brands, hot, burning hot, and those strangling rootlets began to crawl over me. The Dragon was chanting faster, running through the final words, racing to the end of the spell.

I strangled out,
“Ulozishtus!”
again, looking up into the Wood and into Kasia’s face, twisting half in rage and half in agony, as her hands tightened. She stared down at me. The light of the
Summoning
was brightening, filling every corner of the room, impossible to evade, and we looked full into each other, every secret petty hate and jealousy laid open, and tears were mingling with the sap on her face. I was weeping, too, tears sliding from my eyes even as she pressed the air out of me and darkness started to creep in over my sight.

She said, strangled, “Nieshka,” in her own voice, shuddering with determination, and one by one she forced her fingers open and away from my throat. My vision cleared, and looking into her face I saw the shame falling away. She looked at me with fierce love, with courage.

I sobbed again, once. The sap was running dry, and the fire was consuming her. The little rootlets had withered and crumbled to ash. Another purging would kill her. I knew it: I could see it. And Kasia smiled at me, because she couldn’t speak again, and lowered her head in a single slow nod. I felt my own face crumpling and ugly and wretched, and then I said,
“Ulozishtus.”

I looked up into Kasia’s face, hungry for one last sight of her, but the Wood looked out of her eyes at me: black rage, full of smoke, burning, roots planted too deep to uproot. Kasia still held her own hands away from my throat.

And then—the Wood was gone.

Kasia fell upon me. I screamed with joy and threw my arms around her, and she clutched at me shaking, sobbing. She was still feverish, her whole body trembling, and she vomited onto the floor even as I held her, crying weakly. Her hands hurt me: they were scorching hot and hard, and she clung to me too tight, my ribs creaking painfully under my skin. But it was her. The Dragon closed the book with a final heavy thump. The room was full of blazing light: there was nowhere for the Wood to hide. It was Kasia, and only Kasia. We had won.

Chapter 11

T
he Dragon was strange and silent afterwards, as we wrestled Kasia slowly and wearily up the stairs. She was almost insensible, jerking out of a daze only to claw the air before subsiding again. Her limp body was unnaturally heavy: heavy as solid oak, as though the Wood had somehow left her transmuted and changed. “Is it gone?” I said to him, desperately. “Is it gone?”

“Yes,” he said shortly as we heaved her up the long spiraling stairs: even with his own peculiar strength, every step was a struggle, as though we were trying to carry a fallen log between our hands, and we were both weary. “The
Summoning
would have shown us otherwise.” He said nothing more until we had taken her upstairs to the guest chamber, and then he stood by the side of the bed looking down at her, his brow drawn, and then he turned and left the room.

I had little time to think of him. Kasia lay feverish and sick for a month. She would start up half-awake and lost in nightmares, still in the Wood, and she could throw even the Dragon off her and nearly across the room. We had to tie her down in the heavy postered bed, with ropes and finally with chains. I slept curled up on the rug at the foot, leaping up to give her water whenever she cried out, and to try and press a few morsels of food into her mouth: she couldn’t keep down more than a bite or two of plain bread, at first.

My days and nights ran into each other, broken with her wakings—every hour at first, and ten minutes to settle her, so I could never sleep properly, and I staggered dazed through the hours. It was only after the first week that I began to be sure she would live, and I stole a few moments to scribble a note to Wensa to let her know that Kasia was free, that she was getting well. “Will she keep it to herself?” the Dragon demanded, when I asked him to send it; and I was too drained to ask why he cared; I only opened the letter and scribbled on a line,
Tell no one yet,
and handed it to him.

I should have asked; he should have pressed me harder to be cautious. But we were both frayed like worn cloth. I didn’t know what he was working on, but I saw his light burning in the library late at night, as I stumbled down to the kitchens for more broth and back up again, and loose pages covered with diagrams and inscriptions stacked into heaps on his table. One afternoon, following the smell of smoke, I found him asleep in his laboratory, the bottom of an alembic flask blackening over a candle in front of him, already run dry. He jumped when I woke him, and he knocked the whole thing over and started a fire with what for him was wholly uncharacteristic clumsiness. We had to scramble to put it out together, and his shoulders were as stiff as a cat’s, disliking the insult to his dignity.

Three weeks later, though, Kasia woke after a full four hours of sleep and turned her head to me and said, “Nieshka,” exhausted but herself, her dark brown eyes warm and clear. I cupped her face in my hands, smiling through tears, and she managed to close her claw-like hands around mine and smile back.

From then she began to recover quickly. Her strange new strength made her clumsy at first, even once she could stand up. She blundered into furniture and fell all the way down the stairs the first time she tried to make her own way down to the kitchens, once when I was downstairs cooking more soup. But when I whirled from the fire and flew to her calling in alarm, I found her at the foot of the stairs unhurt, not even bruised, and only struggling to get back onto her feet again.

I took her to the great hall to learn how to walk again, and tried to steady her as we went slowly around the room, although more often than not she knocked me down by accident instead. The Dragon was coming down the stairs to get something from the cellars. He stood and watched our awkward progress for a little while from the archway, his face hard and unreadable. After I got her back upstairs and she crawled carefully into bed and fell asleep again, I went down to the library to speak to him. “What’s wrong with her?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” the Dragon said flatly. “As far as I can tell, she is uncorrupted.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased.

I didn’t understand. I wondered if it bothered him to have someone else staying in the tower. “She’s already better,” I said. “It won’t be for long.”

He looked at me with bright irritation. “Not for long?” he said. “What do you mean to do with her?”