Uprooted (24 page)

The Falcon paused, and the Dragon rose deliberately from his chair. The hall darkened around him with sudden, frightening speed, shadows creeping over and swallowing the tall candles, the shining magical lights. He came down from the dais, each step striking like the deep terrible ring of some great bell, one after another. Prince Marek and the Falcon backed away involuntarily; the prince gripped the hilt of his sword. “If I had fallen to the Wood,” the Dragon said, “what did you imagine you would do, here in my tower?”

The Falcon had already brought his hands together, thumb and forefingers in a triangle; he was murmuring under his breath. I felt the hum of his magic building, and thin sparkling lines of light began to flicker across the space framed by his hands. They went faster and faster, until all that triangle caught, and as if that had provided an igniting spark, a halo of white fire went up to wreath his body. He spread his hands apart, the fire sizzling and crackling over them, sparks falling like rain to the ground, as if he was making ready to throw. The working had the same hungry feeling as the fire-heart in its bottle, as if it wanted to devour the very air.

“
Triozna greszhni,
” the Dragon said, the words slicing out, and the flames went out like guttering candles: a cold sharp wind whistled through the hall, chilling my skin, and was gone.

They stared at him, halted—and then the Dragon spread his arms in a wide shrug. “Fortunately,” the Dragon said, in his ordinary cutting tones, “I haven’t been nearly as stupid as you imagined. Much to your good fortune.” He turned and went back to his chair, the shadows retreating from his feet, spilling back. The light returned. I could see the Falcon’s face clearly: he didn’t seem to feel particularly thankful. His face was as still as ice, his mouth pressed into a straight line.

I suppose he was tired of being thought the second wizard of Polnya. I had even heard of him a little—he was often named in songs about the war with Rosya—although of course in our valley the bards didn’t talk overmuch about another wizard. We wanted to hear stories about the Dragon, about
our
wizard, proprietary, and we took pride and satisfaction in hearing, yet again, that he was the most powerful wizard of the nation. But I hadn’t thought before what that really meant, and I had forgotten to fear him, from too much time spent too close. It was a forcible reminder now, watching how easily he smothered the Falcon’s magic, that he was a great power in the world who could make even kings and other wizards fear.

Prince Marek, I could tell, liked that reminder as little as the Falcon had; his hand lingered on his sword-hilt, and there was a hardness in his face. But he looked at Kasia again. I flinched and made an abortive grab for her arm as she stepped away from me, out of the alcove, and went to him across the floor. I swallowed the warning I wanted to hiss, too late, as she made him a curtsy, her golden head bowed. She straightened up and looked him full in the face: exactly as I had tried to imagine doing myself, all those long months ago. She didn’t stammer. “Sire,” she said, “I know you must doubt me. I know I look strange. But it’s true: I am free.”

There were spells running in the back of my head, a litany of desperation. If he drew his sword against her—if the Falcon tried to strike her down—

Prince Marek looked at her: his face was hard and downturned, intent. “You were in the Wood?” he demanded.

She inclined her head. “The walkers took me.”

“Come look at her,” he said over his shoulder, to the Falcon.

“Your Highness,” the Falcon began, coming to his side. “It is plain to any—”

“Stop,” the prince said, his voice sharp as a knife. “I don’t like him any better than you do, but I didn’t bring you here for politics.
Look
at her. Is she corrupted or not?”

The Falcon paused, frowning; he was taken aback. “One held overnight in the Wood is invariably—”

“Is she corrupted?”
the prince said to him, every word bitten out crisp and hard. Slowly the Falcon turned and looked at Kasia—really looked at her, for the first time, and his brow slowly gathered with confusion. I looked at the Dragon, hardly daring to hope and hoping anyway: if they were willing to listen—

But the Dragon wasn’t looking at me, or at Kasia. He was looking at the prince, and his face was grim as stone.

The Falcon began testing her at once. He demanded potions from the Dragon’s stores and books from his shelves, all of which the Dragon sent me running after, without argument. The Dragon ordered me to stay in the kitchens the rest of the time; I thought at first that he meant to spare me watching the trials, some of them as dreadful as the breath-stealing magic he had used on me after I had come back from the Wood. Even in the kitchens, I could hear the chanting and the crackle of the Falcon’s magic running overhead. It sounded in my bones, like a large drum played far away.

But the third morning I caught sight of myself in the side of one of the big copper kettles and noticed I was an untidy mess: I hadn’t thought to mutter up some clean clothes for myself, not with the rumbling above and all my worry for Kasia. I didn’t wonder that I’d accumulated spots, stains, tears, and I didn’t mind it, either; but the Dragon hadn’t said anything. He’d come down to the kitchens more than once, to tell me what to go and fetch. I stared at the reflection, and the next time he came down I blurted, “Are you keeping me out of the way?”

He paused, not even off the bottom step, and said, “Of course I’m keeping you out of the way, you idiot.”

“But he doesn’t remember,” I said, meaning Prince Marek. It came out an anxious question.

“He will, given half a chance,” the Dragon said. “It matters too much to him. Keep out of the way, behave like an ordinary serving-girl, and don’t use magic anywhere he or Solya can see you.”

“Kasia’s all right?”

“As well as anyone would be,” he said. “Make that the least of your concerns: she’s a good deal harder to harm now than an ordinary person, and Solya isn’t egregiously stupid. In any case, he knows very well what the prince wants, and all being equal he’d prefer to give it to him. Go get three bottles of milk of fir.”

Well, I didn’t know what the prince wanted, and I didn’t like the idea of him getting it, either, whatever it was. I went up to the laboratory for the milk of fir: it was a potion the Dragon brewed out of fir needles, which somehow under his handling became a milky liquid without scent, although the one time he’d tried to teach me to do it, I’d produced only a wet stinking mess of fir needles and water. Its virtue was to fix magic in the body: it went into every healing potion and into the stone-skin potion. I brought the bottles down to the great hall.

Kasia stood in the center of the room, inside an elaborate double ring drawn on the floor in herbs crushed in salt. They had put a heavy collar around her neck like a yoke for oxen, of black-pitted iron engraved with spell-writing in bright silvery letters, with chains that hung from it to her manacled wrists. She didn’t have so much as a chair to sit on, and it should have bowed her double, but she stood straight up underneath it, easily. She gave me a small smile when I came into the room:
I’m all right.

The Falcon looked more weary than she did, and Prince Marek was rubbing his face through an enormous yawn, though he was only sitting in a chair watching. “Over there,” the Falcon said in my direction, waving a hand to his heaped worktable, paying me no more attention than that. The Dragon sat on his high seat, and threw me a sharp look when I hesitated. Mutinous, I put the bottles on the table, but I didn’t leave the room: I retreated to the doorway and watched.

The Falcon infused spells of purification into the bottles, three different ones. He worked with a kind of sharp directness: where the Dragon folded magic into endless intricacies, the Falcon drew a straight line across. But his magic worked in the same sort of way: it seemed to me he was only choosing a different road of many, not wandering in the trees as I did. He handed the bottles across the line to Kasia with a pair of iron tongs: he seemed to have grown more rather than less cautious as he went along. Each one glowed through her skin as she drank it, and the glow lingered, held; by the time she had drunk all three, she lit up the whole room. There was no hint of shadow in her, no small feathery strand of corruption lingering.

The prince sat slouched in his chair, a large goblet of wine at his elbow, careless and easy, but I noticed now that the wine was untouched, and his eyes never left Kasia’s face. It made my hands itch to reach for magic: I would have gladly slapped his face just to keep him from looking at her.

The Falcon stared at her a long time, and then he took a blindfold out of a pocket of his doublet and tied it over his eyes: thick black velvet ornamented with silver letters, large enough that it covered his forehead. He murmured something as he put it on; the letters glowed, and then an eyehole opened in the mask just over the center of his forehead. A single eye was looking out of it: large and oddly shaped, roundish, the ring around the enormous pupil dark enough to make it seem almost entirely black, shot through with small flickers of silver. He came to the very edge of the circle and stared at Kasia with it: up and down, and walking in a circle around her three times.

At last he stepped back. The eye closed, then the eyehole, and he raised shaking arms to take off the blindfold, fumbling at the knot. He took it off. I couldn’t help staring at his forehead: there wasn’t any sign of another eye there, or any mark at all, although his own eyes were badly bloodshot. He sat down heavily into his chair.

“Well?” the prince said, sharply.

The Falcon said nothing for a moment. “I can find no signs of corruption,” he said finally, grudging. “I won’t swear there is none present—”

The prince wasn’t listening. He’d stood up and picked up a heavy key from the table. He crossed the room to Kasia. The shining light was fading from her body, but it had not yet gone; his boots smeared the ring of salt open as he crossed it and unlocked the heavy collar and the manacles. He lifted them off her and to the ground, and then held out his hand, as courtly as if she were a noblewoman, his eyes devouring her. Kasia hesitated—I knew she was worried she would break his hand by accident; myself, I hoped she
would
—and carefully put her hand in his.

He gripped it tight and turning led her forward, to the foot of the Dragon’s dais. “And now, Dragon,” he said softly, “you will tell us how this was done,” with a shake of Kasia’s arm, raised up in his own. “And then we will go into the Wood: the Falcon and I, if you’re too much a coward to come with us, and we will
bring my mother out.
”

Chapter 13

I
’m not going to give you a sword to fall on,” the Dragon said. “If that’s what you insist on doing, you can do so with considerably less damage to anyone else by using the one you already have.”

Prince Marek’s shoulders clenched, the muscles around his neck knotting visibly; he let go of Kasia’s hand and took a step onto the dais. The Dragon’s face stayed cold and unyielding. I think the prince would have struck him, gladly, but the Falcon pushed himself up from his chair. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness, there’s no need for this. If you recall the enchantment I used in Kyeva, when we captured General Nichkov’s camp—that will serve just as well here. It will show me how the spell was done.” He smiled at the Dragon without teeth, lips drawn tight. “I think Sarkan will admit that even he can’t hide things from
my
sight.”

The Dragon didn’t deny it, but bit out, “I’ll admit that you’re a far more extravagant fool than I gave you credit for being, if you intend to lend yourself to this lunacy.”

“I would hardly call it
extravagant
to make every reasonable attempt to rescue the queen,” the Falcon said. “We’ve all bowed our heads to your wisdom before now, Sarkan: there was certainly no sense in taking risks to bring out the queen only to have to put her to death. Yet now here we are,” he gestured to Kasia, “with evidence of another possibility plain before us. Why have you been concealing it so long?”

Just like that, when the Falcon had so plainly come here in the first place expressly to insist that there
was
no other possibility, and to condemn the Dragon for letting Kasia live at all! I nearly gawked at him, but he showed not the least consciousness of having altered his position. “If there is any hope for the queen, I would call it treason not to make the attempt,” the Falcon added. “What was done, can be done again.”

The Dragon snorted. “By you?”

Well, even I could tell that was hardly the way to induce the Falcon to hesitate. His eyes narrowed, and he turned coldly and said to the prince, “I will retire now, Your Highness; I must recover my strength before I cast the enchantment in the morning.”

Prince Marek dismissed him with a wave of his hand: I saw to my alarm that while I’d been busy watching the sparring, he had been speaking to Kasia, gripping her hand in both of his. Her face still had that unnatural stillness, but I had learned to read it well enough by now to see that she was troubled.

I was about to go to her rescue when he let her hand go and left the hall himself, a quick wide stride, the heels of his boots ringing on the steps as he went upstairs. Kasia came to me, and I caught her hand in mine. The Dragon was scowling at the stairs, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair in irritation.