Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

  “Are you grown suddenly deaf?” he snapped. “Stop fussing with those plates and take yourself off. And keep to your rooms until I summon you again.”

  My dress was stained and crumpled, a ruin of tangled ribbons, but he hadn’t even turned to look at me. I snatched up the tray and fled the room, needing no more excuse. I ran up the stairs, feeling almost as if I were flying without that terrible weariness dragging at my heels. I went into my room and shut the door and tore off my silken finery, put back on my homespun, and sank down on the bed, hugging myself with relief like a child who’d escaped a whipping.

  And then I saw the tray discarded on the floor, the knife lying bare and gleaming. Oh. Oh, what a fool I’d been, even to think about it. He was my lord: if by some horrible chance I had killed him, I would surely be put to death for it, and like as not my parents along with me. Murder was no escape at all; better to just throw myself out the window.

  I even turned and looked out the window, miserably, and then I saw what the Dragon had been watching with such distaste. There was a cloud of dust on the road coming to the tower. It wasn’t a wagon but a great covered carriage almost like a house on wheels: harnessed to a team of steaming horses, with two horsemen riding before the driver, all of them in coats of grey and brilliant green. Four more horsemen followed it, in similar coats.

  The carriage drew up outside the great doors: there was a green crest on it, a monster with many heads, and all the outriders and guards came rolling down off their horses and went into an enormous bustle of work. They all flinched away a little when the tower doors swung lightly open, those huge doors I couldn’t even shift. I craned my head to peer down and saw the Dragon step out from the doors alone, onto the threshold.

  A man came ducking out of the belly of the carriage: tall, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, with a long cloak all of that same brilliant green; he jumped down over the steps which had been put out for him, took with one hand the sword which another of his servants held across the palms, and strode quickly between his men and up to the door even as he belted it on, with no hesitation.

  “I loathe a coach more than a chimaera,” he said to the Dragon, clear enough that I heard his voice rising to my window, over the snorting stamping horses. “A week shut up in the thing: why can’t you ever come to court?”

  “Your Highness will have to forgive me,” the Dragon said, coldly. “My duties here occupy me.”

  I was leaning out far enough by then I might have easily fallen out just by accident, with all my fear and misery forgot. The king of Polnya had two sons, but Crown Prince Sigmund was nothing but a sensible young man. He had been well educated and had married the daughter of some reigning count in the north, which had brought us an ally and a port. They had already assured the succession with a boy and a girl for spare; he was supposedly an excellent administrator, and would be an excellent king, and no one cared anything about him.

  Prince Marek was enormously more satisfying. I had heard at least a dozen stories and songs of how he had slain the Vandalus Hydra, none of them alike but all of them, I was assured, true in every particular; and besides that he had killed at least three or four or nine giants in the last war against Rosya. He had even ridden out to try and kill a real dragon once, only it had turned out to be some peasants pretending to have been attacked by a dragon and hiding the sheep they claimed it had eaten, to get out of tax. And he hadn’t even executed them, but had chastised their lord for levying too high a tax.

  He went into the tower with the Dragon, and the doors closed behind them; the prince’s men began encamping on the level field before the doors. I turned back into my small room and paced the floor in circles; at last I went and crept down the stairwell to try and listen, edging down until I heard their voices drifting out of the library. I couldn’t catch more than one word in five, but they were speaking of the wars with Rosya, and of the Wood.

  I didn’t try very hard to eavesdrop; I didn’t much care what they were talking about. Far more important to me was the faint hope of rescue stirring: whatever the Dragon was doing to me, this horror of life-draining, it was surely against the king’s law. He’d told me to keep away, to keep out of sight; what if that wasn’t only because I was a discreditable mess, which he could have repaired with a word, but because he didn’t want the prince to know what he was doing? What if I threw myself on the prince’s mercy, and he took me away—

  “Enough,” Prince Marek said, his voice breaking in on my thoughts: the words had come clearer as if he was moving closer to the door. He sounded angry. “You and my father and Sigmund, all of you bleating like sheep—no, enough. I don’t mean to let this rest.”

  I hastily flew back up the stairwell on bare feet as noiseless as I could make them: the guest chambers were on the third floor, the one between mine and the library. I sat at the top of the stairwell listening to their boots on the steps below until the sounds died away. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to disobey the Dragon directly: if he caught me trying to go knock on the prince’s door, he’d surely do something terrible to me. But he was already doing something terrible to me. Kasia would have seized the chance, I was sure—if she’d been here, she would go and open the door and kneel at the prince’s feet and beg him for rescue, not like a frightened blubbering child but like a maiden out of the stories.

  I went back to my room and practiced the scene, murmuring words under my breath, while the sun sank down. And when at last it was dark and late, I crept down the stairs with my heart pounding. But I was still afraid. First I went down and looked to make sure the lights were out in the library and in the laboratory: the Dragon wasn’t awake. On the third floor, a dim fire’s glow showed orange beneath the first guest chamber, and I couldn’t see anything of the Dragon’s bedroom door at all; it was lost in the shadows at the end of the hall. But still I hesitated on the landing—and then I went down to the kitchens instead.

  I told myself I was hungry. I ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese to fortify myself, while I stood shivering in front of the fire, and then I went back upstairs. All the way upstairs, back to my room.

  I couldn’t make myself really imagine it, me at the prince’s door, me kneeling and making a graceful speech. I wasn’t Kasia, wasn’t anyone special. I’d only burst into tears and look like a lunatic, and he’d probably throw me out or, worse, call the Dragon to have me properly chastised. Why would he believe me? A peasant girl in a homespun smock, a low servant in the Dragon’s house, waking him in the middle of the night with a wild story of the great wizard tormenting me?

  I went desolately back into my room and stopped short. Prince Marek was standing in the middle of the chamber, studying the painting: he’d pulled down the cover I’d put over it. He turned around and looked me over with a doubtful expression. “My lord, Highness,” I said, but not really. The words came out in such a whisper he couldn’t have heard them except as an inarticulate noise.

  He didn’t seem to care. “Well,” he said, “you aren’t one of his beauties, are you.” He crossed the room, barely two steps needed: he made it seem smaller by being there. He put his hand under my chin, turned my face side-to-side inspecting it. I stared up at him dumbly. He was strange to be so close to, overwhelming: taller than I was, broad with the weight of a man who nearly lived in armor, handsome as a portrait and clean-shaven, freshly bathed; his golden hair was dark and damply curling at the base of his neck. “But perhaps you’ve some particular skill, sweet, that makes up for it? That’s his usual line, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t sound cruel, only teasing, and his smile down at me was conspiratorial. I didn’t feel wounded at all, only dazed from so much attention, as though I’d already been saved without having to say a word. And then he laughed, and kissed me, and reached efficiently for my skirts.

  I startled like a fish trying to jump out of a net and struggled against him. It was like struggling against the tower doors, impossible; he scarcely even noticed me trying. He laughed again and kissed
my throat. “Don’t worry, he can’t object,” he said, as though that was my only reason to protest. “He’s still my father’s vassal, even if he likes to stay out here in the hinterlands lording it over you all alone.”

  It’s not that he was taking pleasure in overcoming me. I was still mute and my resistance was more confused batting at him, half-wondering: surely he couldn’t, Prince Marek couldn’t, the hero; surely he couldn’t even really want me. I didn’t scream, I didn’t plead, and I think he scarcely imagined that I would resist. I suppose in an ordinary noble house, some more-than-willing scullery maid would already have crept into his bedchamber and saved him the trouble of going looking. For that matter, I’d probably have been willing myself, if he’d asked me outright and given me enough time to get over my surprise and answer him: I struggled more by reflex than because I wanted to reject him.

  But he did overcome me. Then I began to be really afraid, wanting only to get away; I pushed at his hands, and said, “Prince, I don’t, please, wait,” in disjointed bursts. And though he might not have wanted resistance, when he met it, he cared nothing: he only grew impatient.

  “There, there; all right,” he said, as though I were a horse to be reined in and made calm, while he pinned my hand by my side. My homespun dress was tied up with a sash in a simple bow; he already had it loose, and then he dragged up my skirts.

  I was trying to thrust my skirts back down, push him away, drag myself free: useless. He held me with such casual strength. And then he reached for his own hose, and I said aloud, desperate, without thinking, “Vanastalem.”

  Power shuddered out of me. Crusted pearls and whalebone closed up beneath his hands like armor, and he jerked his hands off me and stepped back as a wall of velvet skirts fell rustling between us. I caught myself on the wall trembling and struggling to get my breath while he stared at me.

  And then he said, in a very different voice, a tone I couldn’t understand, “You’re a witch.”

  I backed from him like a wary animal, my head spinning: I couldn’t get my breath properly. The gown had saved me but the stays were strangling-tight, the skirts dragging and heavy, as though they’d deliberately made themselves impossible to remove. He came towards me more slowly, a hand outstretched, saying, “Listen to me—” but I hadn’t the least intention of listening. I snatched up the breakfast tray, still sitting atop my dresser, and swung it wildly at his head. The edge of it clanged loudly against his skull and knocked him staggering sideways. I gripped it with both hands and lifted it up and swung again and again, blindly, desperate.

  I was still swinging when the door burst open and the Dragon was there, in a long magnificent dressing-gown flung over his nightshift, his eyes savage. He took one step into the room and halted, staring. I halted too, panting, the tray still upraised mid-swing. The prince had sunk to his knees before me. A maze of blood was running down over his face, bloody bruises across his forehead. His eyes were closed. He fell over onto the floor before me unconscious with a thump.

  The Dragon took in the scene, looked at me, and said, “You idiot, what have you done now?”

  We heaved the prince onto my narrow bed together. His face was already blackening with bruises: the tray upon the floor was dented badly with the curve of his skull. “Splendid,” the Dragon said through his teeth, inspecting him—the prince’s eyes were staring and strange, dull, when he lifted their lids, and his arm, lifted, fell limply back to the cot and dangled off the side.

  I stood watching, panting against the bodice, my desperate fury gone and only horror left. As strange as it may sound, I wasn’t only afraid of what would happen to me; I didn’t want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who’d just been pawing at me. “He’s not—he’s not—”

  “If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly,” the Dragon snapped. “Go down to the laboratory and bring me the yellow elixir in the clear flask from the shelf in the back. Not the red one, and not the violet one—and try if possible not to break it as you bring it up the stairs, unless you want to try and persuade the king that your virtue was worth the life of his son.”

  He laid his hands on the prince’s head and began to chant softly, words that shivered along my spine. I ran for the stairs clutching my skirts up against me. I brought the elixir back up in only moments, panting with haste and the confinement of my stays, and found the Dragon still working: he didn’t interrupt his chanting, only held a hand out towards me impatiently, beckoning sharply; I lay the flask in his hand. With the fingers of one hand, he worked out the cork and tipped a swallow into the prince’s mouth.

  The smell of it was horrible, like rotting fish; I nearly choked with nausea just from standing nearby. The Dragon shoved the flask and cork back at me without even looking, and I had to hold my breath to close it. He was clamping the prince’s jaw shut with both hands. Even unconscious and wounded, the prince jerked and tried to spit. The elixir was glowing somehow from inside his mouth, so bright that I could see his jaw and teeth outlined like a skull.

  I managed to shut the flask again without retching, and then sprang to help: I pinched the prince’s nose shut, and after a moment he finally swallowed. The brilliant glow went down his throat and into his belly. I could make it out still traveling all throughout his body, a light underneath his clothes, thinning out as it branched away into his arms and legs, until at last it died away too dim to see.

  The Dragon let go of the prince’s head and stopped chanting the spell. He sagged back against the wall with his eyes shut: he looked drained as I had never seen him before. I stood hovering anxiously over the bed, over both of them, and finally I blurted, “Will he—”

  “No thanks to you,” the Dragon said, but that was good enough: I let myself sink to the ground in my heap of cream velvet, and buried my head on the bed in my arms sheathed in embroidered golden lace.

  “And now you’re going to blubber, I suppose,” the Dragon said over my head. “What were you thinking? Why did you put yourself into that ludicrous dress if you didn’t want to seduce him?”

  “It was better than staying in the one he tore off me!” I cried, lifting my head: not in tears at all; I had spent all my tears by then, and all I had left was anger. “I didn’t choose to be in this—”

  I stopped, a heavy fold of silk caught up in my hands, staring at it. The Dragon had been nowhere near; he hadn’t worked any magic, cast any spell. “What have you done to me?” I whispered. “He said—he called me a witch. You’ve made me a witch.”

  The Dragon snorted. “If I could make witches, I certainly wouldn’t choose a half-wit peasant girl as my material. I haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he—

  While he taught me magic. Still on my knees, I stared up at him, bewildered and yet unwillingly beginning to believe. “But then why would you teach me?”

  “I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited.” To my blank look, he scowled. “Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would have been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.”

  While I flinched away appalled from this idea, he turned his scowl on the prince, who had just groaned a little and stirred in his sleep: he was beginning to wake, lifting a groggy hand to rub at his face. I scrambled up to my feet and edged away from the bed in alarm, closer towards the Dragon.

  “Here,” the Dragon said. “Kalikual. It’s better than beating paramours into insensibility.”

  He looked at me expectantly. I stared at him, and at the slowly rousing prince, and back. “If I wasn’t a
witch,” I said, “—if I wasn’t a witch, would you let me—could I go home? Couldn’t you take it out of me?”

  He was silent. I was used to the contradiction of his wizard’s face by now, young and old together. For all his years, he only had folds at the corners of his eyes, a single crease between his brows; sharp frown lines around his mouth: nothing else. He moved like a young man, and if people grew milder or kinder with age, he certainly hadn’t. But for a moment now, his eyes were purely old, and very strange. “No,” he said, and I believed him.

  Then he shook it off and pointed: turning, I found the prince pushing himself up onto his elbow, and blinking at us both: still dazed and unknowing, but even as I looked, the spark of recognition came back into his face, remembering me. I whispered, “Kalikual.”

  The power rushed out of me. Prince Marek sank back down against the pillows, eyes closing back into sleep. I staggered over to the wall and slid down it to the floor. The butcher knife was still there lying on the ground where it had fallen down. I picked it up and at last used it: to cut through the dress and the laces of my stays. My dress gaped open all along my side, but at least I could breathe.

  I lay back against the wall with my eyes shut for a moment. Then I looked up at the Dragon, who had turned away in impatience from my fatigue: he was looking down at the prince with irritation. “Won’t his men ask for him in the morning?” I said.

  “Did you imagine you were going to keep Prince Marek locked up fast asleep in my tower indefinitely?” the Dragon said over his shoulder.

  “But then, when he wakes,” I said, then stopped and asked, “Could you—can you make him forget?”

  “Oh, certainly,” the Dragon said. “He won’t at all notice anything peculiar if he wakes up with a splitting headache and an enormous gap in his memory to go with it.”

  “What if—” I struggled back up to my feet, still clutching the knife, “—what if he remembered something else? Just going to bed in his own room—”