Uprooted (44 page)

In the library, Alosha had done a purging spell over the king’s body, then the priests had carried him away to the cathedral for vigil, wrapped hastily in a cloth. The boots had been sticking out of the end of the bundle.

The Magnati kept shouting at me. It didn’t help that I felt I
was
to blame. I’d known something was wrong. If I’d only been quicker, if I’d only burned the book myself when I first found it. I put my stinging hands over my face.

But Marek stood up next to me and shouted the nobles down with the authority of the bloody spear he was still holding. He slammed it down on the council table in front of them. “She slew the beast when it might have killed Solya and another dozen men besides,” he said. “We don’t have time for this sort of idiocy. We march on the Rydva in three days’ time!”

“We march nowhere without the king’s word!” one of the ministers dared to shout back. Lucky for him, he was across the table and out of arm’s reach: even so he shrank back from Marek leaning across the table, mailed hand clenched into a fist, rage illuminating him with righteous wrath.

“He’s not wrong,” Alosha said sharply, putting a hand down in front of Marek, and making him straighten up to face her. “This is no time to be starting a war.”

Half of the Magnati along the table were snarling and clawing at each other; blaming Rosya, blaming me, even blaming poor Father Ballo. The throne stood empty at the head of the table. Crown Prince Sigmund sat to the right of it. His hands were clenched around each other into a single joined fist. He stared at it without speaking while the shouting went on. The queen sat on the left. She still wore Ragostok’s golden circlet, above the smooth shining satin of her black gown. I noticed dully that she was reading a letter: a messenger was standing by her elbow, with an empty dispatch bag and an uncertain face. He’d come into the room just then, I suppose.

The queen stood up. “My lords.” Heads turned to look at her. She held up the letter, a short folded piece of paper; she’d broken the red seal. “A Rosyan army has been sighted coming for the Rydva: they will be there in the morning.”

No one let out a word.

“We must put aside our mourning and our anger,” she said. I stared up at her: the very portrait of a queen, proud, defiant, her chin raised; her voice rang clearly in the stone hall. “This is no hour for Polnya to show weakness.” She turned to the crown prince: his face was turned up towards her just like mine, startled and open as a child’s, his mouth loosely parted over words that weren’t coming. “Sigmund, they have only sent four companies. If you gather the troops already mustering outside the city and ride at once, you will have the advantage in numbers.”

“I should be the one who—!” Marek said, rousing to protest, but Queen Hanna held up her hand, and he stopped.

“Prince Marek will stay here and secure the capital with the royal guard, gathering the additional levies that are coming in,” she said, turning back to the court. “He will be guided by the council’s advice and, I hope, my own. Surely there is nothing else to be done?”

The crown prince stood. “We will do as the queen proposes,” he said. Marek’s cheeks were purpling with frustration, but he blew out a breath and said sourly, “Very well.”

Just that quickly, everything seemed decided. The ministers began at once to take themselves off busily in every direction, glad of order restored. There wasn’t a moment to protest, a moment to suggest any other course; there wasn’t a chance to stop it.

I stood up. “No,” I said, “wait,” but no one was listening. I reached for the last dregs of my magic, to make my voice louder, to make them turn back. “
Wait,
” I tried to say, and the room swam away into black around me.

I woke up in my room and sat straight up in one jerk, all the hair standing on my arms and my throat burning: Kasia was sitting on the foot of my bed, and the Willow was straightening up away from me with a thin, disapproving expression on her face, a potion-bottle in her hand. I didn’t remember how I’d got there; I looked out the window, confused; the sun had moved.

“You fell down in the council-room,” Kasia said. “I couldn’t stir you.”

“You were overspent,” the Willow said. “No, don’t try to rise. You’d better stay just where you are, and don’t try to use magic again for at least a week. It’s a cup that needs to be refilled, not an endless stream.”

“But the queen!” I blurted. “The Wood—”

“Ignore me if you like and spend your last dregs and die, I shan’t have anything to say about it,” the Willow said, dismissive. I didn’t know how Kasia had persuaded her to come and see to me, but from the cold look they exchanged as the Willow swept past her and out the door, I didn’t think it had been very gently.

I knuckled my eyes and lay there in the pillows. The potion the Willow had given me was a churning, glowing warmth in my belly, like I’d eaten something with too many hot peppers in it.

“Alosha told me to get the Willow to look at you,” Kasia said, still leaning worried over me. “She said she was going to stop the crown prince from going.”

I gathered my strength and struggled up, grabbing for Kasia’s hands. The muscles of my stomach were aching and weak. But I couldn’t keep to my bed right now, whether I could use magic or not. A heaviness lingered in the air of the castle, that terrible pressure. The Wood was still here, somehow. The Wood hadn’t finished with us yet. “We have to find her.”

The guards at the crown prince’s rooms were on high alert; they half-wanted to bar us coming in, but I called out, “Alosha!” and when she put her head out and spoke to them, they let us into the skelter of packing under way. The crown prince wasn’t in full armor yet, but he had on his greaves and a mail shirt, and he had a hand on his son’s shoulder. His wife, Princess Malgorzhata, stood with him holding the little girl in her arms. The boy had a sword—a real sword with an edge, made small enough for him to hold. He wasn’t seven years old. I would have given money that a child that young would cut off a finger within a day—his or someone else’s—but he held it as expertly as any soldier. He was presenting it across his palms to his father with an anxious, upturned face. “I won’t be any trouble,” he said.

“You have to stay and look after Marisha,” the prince said, stroking the boy’s head. He looked at the princess; her face was sober. He didn’t kiss her, but he kissed her hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I’m thinking of taking the children to Gidna once the funeral is over,” the princess said: I knew vaguely it was the name of the city she was from, the ocean port the marriage had opened to Polnya. “The sea air will be healthy for them, and my parents haven’t seen Marisha since her christening.” From the words, you would have thought she’d just had the idea a moment ago, but as she said them, they sounded rehearsed.

“I don’t want to go to Gidna!” the boy said. “Papa—”

“Enough, Stashek,” the prince said. “Whatever you think best,” he told the princess, and turned to Alosha. “Will you put a blessing on my sword?”

“I’d rather not,” she said grimly. “Why are you lending yourself to this? After we spoke yesterday—”

“Yesterday my father was alive,” Prince Sigmund said. “Today he’s dead. What do you think is going to happen when the Magnati vote on the succession, if I let Marek go and he destroys this Rosyan army for us?”

“So send a general,” Alosha said, but she wasn’t really arguing; I could tell she was only saying it while she searched for another answer that she believed in. “What about Baron Golshkin—”

“I can’t,” he said. “If I don’t ride out at the head of this army, Marek will. Do you think there’s any general I could appoint who would stand in the way of the hero of Polnya right now? The whole country is ringing with his song.”

“Only a fool would put Marek on the throne instead of you,” Alosha said.

“Men are fools,” Sigmund said. “Give me the blessing, and keep an eye on the children for me.”

We stayed and watched him ride away. The two small children knelt up on a footstool, peering over the window-sill with their mother behind them, her hands on their heads, golden and dark. He went with a small troop of guards for escort, his retinue, the eagle flag in red on white billowing out behind him. Alosha watched silently beside me from the second window until they had gone out of the courtyard. Then she turned to me and said dourly, “There’s always a price.”

“Yes,” I said, low and tired. And I didn’t think we were done paying.

Chapter 24

I
couldn’t do anything more, just then, but sleep. Alosha told me to lie down right there in the room, despite the princess’s dubious looks, and I fell asleep on the soft wool rug before the fireplace: it was woven in a strange dancing pattern of enormous curved raindrop shapes, or perhaps tears. The stone floor beneath was hard, but I was too tired to care.

I slept the whole evening and night and woke in the early hours of the morning: still tired but my head less thick, and my lightning-scorched palms felt cool to the touch again. Magic ran whispering and slow over rocks, deep inside me. Kasia was sleeping on the rug at the foot of the bed; through the bedcurtains I could see the princess with the two children gathered close to her. There were two guards drowsing on either side of the door.

Alosha was sitting up in a chair by the fire with the hungry sword on her lap, sharpening it with her finger. I could feel the whisper of her magic as she ran the pad of her thumb near the edge of the blade. A thin line of blood welled up on her dark skin, even though she wasn’t actually touching the steel, and it lifted in a faint red mist to sink into the blade. Her chair was turned to have full view of the doors and windows, as though she’d been watching all night.

“What do you fear?” I asked her, softly.

“Everything,” she said. “Anything. Corruption in the palace—the king dead, Ballo dead, the crown prince lured off to a battlefield where anything might happen. It’s late enough to start being cautious. I can miss a few nights’ sleep. Are you better?” I nodded. “Good. Listen to me: we need to root out this corruption in the palace, and quickly. I don’t believe we made an end of it when we destroyed that book.”

I sat up and hugged my knees. “Sarkan thought it might be the queen after all. That she might have been—tortured into helping, instead of corrupted.” I wondered if he was right: if the queen had smuggled out a small golden fruit somehow, plucked up off the ground in the Wood, and now in some dark corner of the palace gardens a thin silver sapling had broken the earth, scattering corruption all around. It was hard for me to imagine the queen so lost to everything she’d been that she would bring the Wood with her, that she’d turn it on her own family and kingdom.

But Alosha said, “She might not have needed much torment to help see her husband dead, after he abandoned her for twenty years in the Wood. And perhaps her elder son, too,” she added, as I flinched in protest. “I notice Marek is the one she kept back from the front. In any case, it’s safe enough to say she’s at the center of what’s happening. Can you put this
Summoning
of yours on her?”

I was silent. I remembered the throne room, where I’d thought of casting the
Summoning
on the queen. Instead I’d chosen to give the court an illusion, a theatrical, to win Kasia’s pardon. Maybe that had been the mistake, after all.

“But I don’t think I can do it alone,” I said. I had a feeling the
Summoning
wasn’t really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.

Alosha shook her head. “I can’t help you. I won’t leave the princess and the royal children unguarded until I see them safely to Gidna.”

Reluctantly I said, “Solya might help me.” The last thing I wanted was to cast a spell with him, and give him any more reasons to keep grasping at my magic, but maybe his sight would make the spell stronger.

“Solya.” Alosha loaded his name with disapproval. “Well, he’s been a fool, but he’s not stupid. You may as well try him. If not, go to Ragostok. He’s not as strong as Solya, but he might be able to manage it.”

“Will he help me?” I said doubtfully, remembering the circlet on the queen’s head. He hadn’t liked me much, either.

“When I say so, he will,” Alosha said. “He’s my great-great-grandson; if he argues, tell him to come speak to me. Yes, I know he’s an ass,” she added, misunderstanding my stare, and sighed. “The only child of my line to show magic, at least in Polnya.” She shook her head. “It’s cropped up in my favorite granddaughter’s children and grandchildren, but she married a man from Venezia and went south with him. It would take more than a month to send for one of them.”

“Do you have much family left, besides them?” I asked timidly.

“Oh, I have—sixty-seven great-great grandchildren, I think?” she said after a moment’s thought. “Perhaps more by now; they drift away little by little. A few of them write to me dutifully every Midwinter. Most of them don’t remember that they’re descended from me, if they ever knew. Their skin has a little tea mixed in with the milk, but it only keeps them from burning in the sun, and my husband is a hundred and forty years dead.” She said it easily, as if it didn’t matter anymore; I suppose it didn’t.