Uprooted (45 page)

“And that’s all?” I said. I felt almost desperate. Great-great-grandchildren, half of them lost and the rest of them so distant that she could sigh over Ragostok, and feel nothing more than a mild irritation. They didn’t seem enough to keep her rooted to the world.

“I didn’t have any other kin to begin with. My mother was a slave from Namib, but she died having me, so that’s all I know of her. A baron in the south bought her from a Mondrian trader to give his wife consequence. They were kind enough to me, even before my gift came out, but it was the kindness of masters: they weren’t kin.” She shrugged. “I’ve had lovers now and then, mostly soldiers. But once you’re old enough, they’re like flowers: you know the bloom will fade even as you put them in the glass.”

I couldn’t help bursting out, “Then why—be here at all? Why do you care about Polnya, or—or anything?”

“I’m not dead,” Alosha said tartly. “And I’ve always cared about good work. Polnya’s had a line of good kings. They’ve served their people, built libraries and roads, raised up the University, and been good enough at war to keep their enemies from overrunning them and smashing everything. They’ve been worthy tools. I might leave, if they grew wicked and bad; I certainly wouldn’t put swords in men’s hands to follow that damned hothead Marek into a dozen wars for glory. But Sigmund—he’s a sensible man, and good to his wife. I’m glad enough to help him hold up the walls.”

She saw the misery on my face, and with rough kindness added, “You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things. Like poor Ballo,” she said, with a kind of dusty, wistful regret, not strong enough to call grief. “He lived for forty years in a monastery illuminating manuscripts before anyone noticed he wasn’t growing older. He was always a little surprised to find himself a wizard, I think.”

She went back to her sharpening, and I went out of the room, sore and more unhappy than before I’d asked. I thought of my brothers growing old, of my little nephew Danushek bringing me his ball with his frowning little serious face; that face becoming an old man’s, tired and folded and worn with years. Everyone I knew buried, and only their children’s children left to love.

But better that than no one left at all. Better those children running in the forest, safe to run there. If I was strong, if I’d been given strength, I could be a shield for them: for my family, for Kasia, for those two small children sleeping in the bed and all the others who slept in the shadow of the Wood.

I told myself that, and tried to believe it would be enough, but it was still a cold and bitter thought to have, alone in the dark hallways. A few of the lower maids were just beginning to get the day’s work under way, creeping quietly in and out of the nobles’ rooms to stir up the fires, just the same as the day before, even though the king was dead. Life went on.

Solya said, “We don’t need the fire tended, Lizbeta: just bring us some hot tea and breakfast, there’s a girl,” when I opened up his door. His fire was already up and mouthing a pair of fresh logs in a large stone fireplace.

No small gargoyle-haunted cell of a room for him: he had a pair of chambers, each three times as large as the one they’d crammed me into. His stone floors were covered in piled white rugs, soft and thick: he must have used magic to keep them clean. A large canopied bed, rumpled and untidy, was visible in the second room through a pair of open doors. Along the broad wooden panel at its foot, a carved falcon flew, its eye made of a single large smooth-polished golden stone with a black slitted pupil staring out of it.

A round table stood in the middle of his room, and Marek was sitting at it next to Solya, sprawled long and sulky in a chair with his boots up, in a nightshift and fur-edged dressing-gown over his trousers. A silver stand on the table held a tall oval mirror as long as my arm. After a moment I realized I wasn’t looking from some peculiar angle and seeing the bedcurtains; the mirror wasn’t showing a reflection at all. Like some impossible window, it looked out into a tent, the swaying pole in the middle holding up the draped sides, and a front opening in a narrow triangle-slice looking out onto a green field.

Solya was looking into the mirror intently, a hand on the frame and his eyes nothing but black wells of pupil, absorbing everything; Marek watched his face. Neither one of them noticed me until I was at their elbows, and even then Marek barely glanced away. “Where have you been?” he said, and without waiting for an answer added, “Stop disappearing before I have to put a bell on you. Rosya must have a spy in this castle to have learned we were going for the Rydva—if not half a dozen of them. I want you by me from now on.”

“I’ve been sleeping,” I said tartly, before I remembered he’d lost his father yesterday, and felt a little sorry. But he didn’t look much like he’d been mourning. I suppose being king and prince had made them something other than father and son to one another, and he’d never forgiven his father letting the queen fall into the Wood. But I still would have expected to find him a little red-eyed—from confusion if not from love.

“Yes, well, what else is there to do but sleep?” he said sourly, and glared at the mirror again. “Where the hell are all of them?”

“On the field by now,” Solya said absently without drawing his eyes away.

“Where
I
should be, if Sigmund wasn’t a lickspittle politician,” Marek said.

“You mean if Sigmund were a perfect idiot, which he’s not,” Solya said. “He couldn’t possibly hand you a triumph right now unless he wanted to hand you the crown along with it. I assure you he knows we’ve got fifty votes in the Magnati already.”

“And what of it? If he can’t hold the nobles, he doesn’t deserve it,” Marek snapped, folding his arms across his chest. “If I were only
there
—”

He looked longingly at the unhelpful mirror again while I stared at them both in rising indignation. So it wasn’t just Sigmund worrying the Magnati would give Marek the throne; Marek was
trying
to take it. Suddenly I understood the crown princess, why she’d looked sidelong at me—I was Marek’s ally, as far as she knew. But I swallowed the first ten remarks that came to my tongue and said shortly to Solya, “I need your help.”

That won me a look from one of those pit-black eyes, at least, with an arched eyebrow to go over it. “I’m equally delighted to help you, my dear, and to hear you say so.”

“I want you to cast a spell with me,” I said. “We need to put the
Summoning
on the queen.”

He paused, much less delighted; Marek turned and threw me a hard look. “Now what’s gotten into your head?”

“Something’s wrong!” I said to him. “You can’t pretend not to have seen: since we came back there’s been one disaster after another. The king, Father Ballo, the war against Rosya—this has all been the Wood’s design. The
Summoning
will show us—”

“What?” Marek snapped, standing up. “What do you think it will show us?”

He loomed over me; I stood my ground and flung my head back. “The truth!” I said. “It’s not three days since we let her out of the tower, and the king is dead, there are monsters in the palace, and Polnya’s at war. We’ve missed something.” I turned to Solya. “Will you help me?”

Solya glanced between Marek and me, calculations ticking in his eyes. Then he said mildly, “The queen is pardoned, Agnieszka; we can’t simply go enchanting her with no cause, only because you’re alarmed.”

“You must see something’s wrong!” I said to him, furiously.

“There
was
something wrong,” Solya said, condescending and complacent; I could have shaken him with pleasure. Too late, I had to be sorry I
hadn’t
made a friend of him. I couldn’t tempt him: he knew perfectly well by now that I didn’t mean to make any regular occasion of sharing magic with him, even if I’d suffer through it for something important. “Very wrong: that corrupted book you found, now destroyed. There’s no need to imagine dark causes when we have one already known.”

“And the last thing Polnya needs now is more black gossip flying around,” Marek said, more calmly; his shoulders were relaxing as he listened to Solya, swallowing down that poisonously convenient explanation. He dropped back into his chair and put his boots up on the table again. “About my mother or about you, for that matter. The Magnati have all been summoned for the funeral, and I’ll be announcing our betrothal once they’re gathered.”

“What?” I said. He might have been giving me some piece of mildly interesting news which concerned me only a little.

“You’ve earned it, slaying that monster, and it’s the sort of thing commoners love. Don’t make a fuss,” he added, without even looking at me. “Polnya is in danger, and I need you at my side.”

I only stood there, too angry to even find my voice, but they had stopped paying attention to me anyway. In the mirror, someone was ducking into the tent. An old man in a much-decorated uniform sank heavily into the chair on the other side, his face pulled down on all sides by age: jowls sagging, mustaches sagging, pouches beneath his eyes and the corners of his mouth; there were lines of sweat running through the dust caked on his face. “Savienha!” Marek said, leaning in, fiercely intent. “What’s happening? Did the Rosyans have time to fortify their positions?”

“No,” the old general said, wiping a tired hand across his forehead. “They didn’t fortify the crossings: they laid an ambush on the Long Bridge instead.”

“Stupid of them,” Marek said, intently. “Without fortifications, they can’t possibly hold the crossings for more than a couple of days. Another two thousand levies came in overnight, if I ride out with them at once—”

“We overran them at dawn,” Savienha said. “They are all dead: six thousand.”

Marek paused, evidently taken aback: he hadn’t expected that. He exchanged a look with Solya, scowling a little, as though he didn’t like hearing it. “How many did you lose?” he demanded.

“Four thousand, too many horses. We overran them,” Savienha repeated, his voice breaking, sagging where he sat. Not all the tracks on his face were sweat. “Marek, forgive me. Marek—your brother is dead. They killed him in the first ambush, when he went to survey the river.”

I backed away from the table as if I could escape from the words. The little boy upstairs holding out his sword,
I won’t be any trouble,
his round face upturned. The memory jabbed me, knife-sharp.

Marek had gone silent. His face was bewildered more than anything. Solya went on speaking with the general a little longer. I could scarcely bear to hear them go on talking. Finally Solya reached up and drew a heavy cloth down over the mirror. He turned to look at Marek.

The bewilderment was fading. “By God,” Marek said after a moment, “I would rather not have it, than have it so.” Solya only inclined his head, watching him with a gleam in his eye. “But that’s not the choice, after all.”

“No,” Solya agreed softly. “It’s just as well the Magnati are on their way: we’ll hold the confirmation vote at once.”

There was salt in my mouth: I’d been crying without knowing it. I backed up farther. The doorknob came into my hand, the hollows and bumps of its carved hawk’s head pressing into my palm. I turned it and slipped out the door and shut it behind me quietly. I stood trembling in the hallway. Alosha had been right. One trap after another, long-buried under a carpet of thick leaves, finally springing shut. Tiny seedlings pushing grasping branches out of the dirt.

One trap after another.

All at once, I was running. I ran, my boots slapping on stone, past startled servants and the morning sun bright in all the windows. I was panting by the time I rounded the corner to the quarters of the crown prince. The door was shut, but unguarded. A thin grey haze trickled from underneath it into the hallway. The knob was hot under my hand as I threw the door open.

The bedhangings were aflame, and the carpet scorched; the guards were dead huddled heaps on the floor. There were ten men in a silent knot around Alosha. She was burned horribly: half her armor melted onto her skin, and somehow still fighting. Behind her, the princess lay dead, barring the door to the wardrobe with her own body; Kasia was next to her corpse, her own clothes sliced in a dozen places but her skin unmarked. She was holding a chipped sword and swinging it fiercely at two men trying to get past her.

Alosha was holding off the rest with two long knives that sang wildly in the air and left crackles of fire behind them. She’d cut them all to ribbons, blood slick on the floor, but they weren’t falling down. The men wore Rosyan uniforms, but their eyes were green and lost. The room smelled like a fresh birch-tree branch broken open down the middle.

I wanted to scream, to weep. I wanted to drag my hand across the world and wipe it all away.
“Hulvad,”
I said, my hands pushing, pushing magic out with it.
“Hulvad,”
remembering how Alosha had pulled that thin cloud of corruption out of Ballo’s apprentice. And wisps of black smoke came streaming out of the men, out of every slash and knife-wound. The smoke blew away through the open window into the sunlight; and then they were only men again, hurt too much to live; they fell to the ground, one after another.

With her attackers gone, Alosha turned and threw her knives at the men trying to kill Kasia. The knives sank deep into their backs, and more of that evil smoke billowed out from around the blades. They fell, one and two.