Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

  Ragostok heaved a noisy and pointed sigh without even looking up from his golden circlet. “What difference does it make at the moment? The king wants the girl tried—so try her already and let’s be done with it.” His tone made clear he didn’t expect it to take long.

  Father Ballo cleared his throat; he reached for a pen, dipped it into an inkwell, and leaned in towards me, peering through his small spectacles. “You do seem rather young to be examined. Tell me, my dear, how long have you been studying under your master?”

  “Since the harvest,” I said, and stared back at their incredulous eyes.

  Sarkan hadn’t mentioned to me that wizards ordinarily took seven years of study before asking to be admitted to the list. And after I spent a good three hours flubbing half the spells they set me on, exhausting myself in the meantime, even Father Ballo was inclined to believe that Sarkan had gone stupidly in love with me, or was having some sort of joke at their expense, to send me to be tested.

  The Falcon was of no help: he watched their deliberations from the sideline with a mild air of interest, and when they asked him what magic he had seen me use, he only said, “I don’t think I can properly attest—it’s always difficult to separate the workings of an apprentice from a master, and Sarkan was there all the while, of course. I should prefer you all to make your own judgments.” And then he looked at me from under his lashes, a reminder of that hint he’d given me in the hallway.

  I gritted my teeth and tried again to appeal to Ballo: he seemed the best chance for any sympathy, although even he was growing irritated. “Sir, I’ve told you, I’m no use at these kinds of spells.”

  “These are not any kind of spell,” he said, peevish and purse-mouthed. “We have set you at everything from healing magic to inscription, under every element and every quarter of affinity. There is no category which encompasses all these spells.”

  “But they’re your sort of magic. Not—not Jaga’s,” I said, seizing upon the example they would surely know.

  Father Ballo peered at me even more dubiously. “Jaga? What on earth has Sarkan been teaching you? Jaga is a folk story.” I stared at him. “Her deeds are borrowed from a handful of real wizards, mixed in with fanciful additions, and exaggerated over the years into mythic stature.”

  I gaped at him, helplessly: he was the only one who had been polite to me at all, and now he was telling me with a straight face that Jaga wasn’t real.

  “Well, this has been a waste of time,” Ragostok said. He hadn’t any right to complain about that, though: he hadn’t stopped working once, and by now his jeweled piece had become a tall circlet with a large socket in the middle waiting for a larger gemstone. It hummed faintly with trapped sorcery. “Pushing out a handful of cantrips isn’t enough magic to make her worthy of the list, now or ever. Alosha had it right in the first place, what’s happened to Sarkan.” He eyed me up and down. “Without much excuse, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

  I was mortified, and angry, and afraid even more than angry: for all I knew, the trial might start in the morning. I dragged in a breath against the hard whalebone grip of the corsets, pushed back my chair and stood, and under my skirts I stamped my foot on the ground and said, “Fulmia.” My heel came down jarring against the stone, a blow that rang through me and back out on a wave of magic. All around us the castle shuddered like a sleeping giant, a tremor that made the hanging jewels on the lamp above our heads chime softly against one another, and brought books thumping down off the shelves.

  Ragostok had jerked up to his feet, his chair going over, his circlet clattering out of his hands onto the table. Father Ballo stared around at the corners of the room with startled blinking confusion before he transferred his astonishment to me, as if surely there had to be some other explanation. I stood panting with my hands clenched at my sides, still ringing head-to-foot, and said, “Is that magic enough to put me on the list? Or do you want to see more?”

  They stared at me, and in the silence I heard shouts outside in the courtyard, running feet. The guards were looking in with their hands on their sword-hilts, and I realized I’d just shaken the king’s castle, in the king’s city, and shouted at the highest wizards of the land.

  They did, after all, put me on the list. The king had demanded an explanation for the earthquake, and been told it was my fault; after that, they couldn’t very well also say I wasn’t much of a witch. But they weren’t very happy about it. Ragostok seemed to have taken offense enough to build a grudge on, which I thought was unreasonable: he’d been the one insulting me. Alosha regarded me with even more suspicion, as if she imagined I’d been hiding my power for some devious reason, and Father Ballo just disliked having to admit me on the grounds of my being outside his experience. He wasn’t unkind, but he had all Sarkan’s obsessive hunger for explanation, with none of his willingness to bend. If Ballo couldn’t find it in a book, that meant it couldn’t be so, and if he found it in three books, that meant it was the unvarnished truth. Only the Falcon smiled at me, with that irritating air of secret amusement, and I could have done very well without his smiles.

  I had to face them in the library again the very next morning for the naming ceremony. With the four of them around me I felt lonelier than in those early days in the Dragon’s tower, cut away from everything I’d known. It was worse than being alone to feel that none of them were my friend, or even wished me anything good at all. If I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, they would have been relieved, or at least not distressed. But I was determined not to care: the only thing that really mattered was being able to speak in Kasia’s defense. I knew by now that no one else here would give her a moment’s thought: she didn’t matter.

  The naming itself seemed more like another test than a ceremony. They set me at a worktable and put out a bowl of water, three bowls of different powders in red and yellow and blue, a candle, and an iron bell inscribed around in letters of gold. Father Ballo placed the naming spell on a sheet of parchment in front of me: the incantation was nine long tangled words, with detailed annotations that gave precise instructions on the pronunciation of every syllable, and how one ought to stress each word.

  I muttered it over to myself, trying to feel out the important syllables, but they sat inert on my tongue: it just didn’t want to come apart. “Well?” Ragostok said, impatiently.

  I slogged my awkward tongue-twisted way through the entire incantation and started to put the powder in the water, a pinch here and there. The magic of the spell gathered sluggish and reluctant. I made a brownish mess of the water, spilled some of all three kinds of powder on my skirts, and finally gave up trying to make anything better. I lit the powder, squinted through the cloud of smoke, and groped for the bell.

  Then I let the magic go, and the bell clanged in my hand: a long deep note that came strangely out of so small a bell; it sounded like the great church bell in the cathedral that rang matins every morning over the city, a sound that filled the room. The metal hummed beneath my fingers as I put it down and looked around expectantly; but the name didn’t write itself on the parchment, or appear in letters of flame, or anywhere at all.

  The wizards were all looking annoyed, although for once not at me; Father Ballo said to Alosha in some irritation, “Was that meant for a joke?”

  She was frowning; she reached out to the bell and picked it up and turned it over: there wasn’t a clapper inside it at all. They all stared into it, and I stared at them. “Where will the name come from?” I asked.

  “The bell should have sounded it,” Alosha said shortly. She put it down; it clanged again softly, an echo of that deep note, and she glared at it.

  No one knew what to do with me, after that. After they all stood in silence for a moment while Father Ballo made noises about the irregularity, the Falcon—he still seemed determined to be amused by everything to do with me—said lightly, “Perhaps our new witch should choose a name for herself.”

  Ragostok said, “I think it more appropriate we cho
ose a name for her.”

  I knew better than to let him have any part in picking my name: surely I’d end up as the Piglet or the Earthworm. But it all felt wrong to me, anyway. I’d gone along with the elaborate dance of the thing, but I knew abruptly I didn’t want to change my name for a new one that trailed magic around behind it, any more than I wanted to be in this fancy gown with its long dragging train that picked up dirt from the hallways. I took a deep breath and said, “There’s nothing wrong with the name I already have.”

  So I was presented to the court as Agnieszka of Dvernik.

  I half-regretted my refusal during the presentation. Ragostok had told me, I think meaning to be nasty, that the ceremony would only be a little thing, and that the king didn’t have much time to spare for such events when they came out of the proper season. It seems ordinarily new wizards were put onto the list in the spring and the fall, at the same time as the new knights. If he was telling the truth, I could only be grateful for it, standing at the end of that great throne room with a long red carpet like the lolling tongue of some monstrous beast stretched out towards me, and crowds of glittering nobility on either side of it, all of them staring at me and whispering to one another behind their voluminous sleeves.

  I didn’t feel like my real self at all; I would almost have liked another name on me then, a disguise to go with my clumsy, wide-skirted dress. I set my teeth and picked my way down the endless hall until I came to the dais and knelt at the king’s feet. He still looked weary, as he had in the courtyard when we’d come. The dark gold crown banded his forehead, and it must have been an enormous weight, but it wasn’t that simple kind of tiredness. His face beneath his brown-and-grey beard had lines like Krystyna’s, the lines of someone who couldn’t rest for worrying about the next day.

  He put his hands around mine, and I squeaked out the words of the oath of fealty, stumbling over them; he answered me with long and easy practice, took his hands back, and nodded for me to go.

  A page began making little beckoning motions at me from the side of the throne, but I realized belatedly that this was the first and just as likely only chance I had to ask the king anything.

  “Your Majesty, if you please,” I said, trying hard to ignore the looks of puffing indignation from everyone near enough the throne to hear me, “I don’t know if you read Sarkan’s letter—”

  One of the tall strong footmen by the throne almost at once got my arm, bowing to the king with a fixed smile on his face, and tried to tug me away. I planted my feet, muttering a sliver of Jaga’s earth spell, and ignored him. “We have a real chance to destroy the Wood, now,” I said, “but he hasn’t any soldiers, and—yes, I’ll go in a moment!” I hissed at the footman, who’d now got me by both my arms and was trying to rock me off the dais. “I only need to explain—”

  “All right, Bartosh, stop breaking your back on her,” the king said. “We can give our newest witch a moment.” He was really looking at me now, for the first time, and sounding faintly amused. “We have indeed read the letter. It could have used a few more lines. Not least about you.” I bit my lip. “What would you ask of your king?”

  My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask. Let Kasia go! I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.

  I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”

  “We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.

  I tottered away suffused with relief—the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him—and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.

  He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.

  “When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.

  He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.

  “But isn’t there—it must start soon?” I tried.

  He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”

  Chapter 19

  Three days later, the trial still hadn’t begun, and I hated everyone around me.

  Sarkan had told me there was power to be had here, and I suppose for someone who understood the court there would have been. I could see there was a kind of magic in having my name written down in the king’s book. After speaking to the secretary, I had gone back to my tiny room, baffled and uncertain what to do next, and before I had been sitting on my bed for half an hour the maids had knocked five times carrying cards of invitation to dinners and parties. I thought the first one was a mistake. But even after I realized they couldn’t all have gone astray, I still had no idea what to do with them, or why they were coming.

  “I see you’re already in demand,” Solya said, stepping out of a shadow and through my doorway before I could close it after yet another maid, delivering yet another card.

  “Is this something we’re supposed to do?” I asked warily. I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was a duty of the king’s wizards. “Do these people need some kind of magic done?”

  “Oh, it might come to that eventually,” he said. “But at the moment, all they want is the privilege of displaying the youngest royal witch ever named. There are already a dozen rumors flying about your appointment.” He plucked the cards out of my hands, shuffled through them, and handed one out to me. “Countess Boguslava is by far the most useful: the count has the king’s ear, and he’s sure to be consulted about the queen. I’ll take you to her soirée.”

  “No, you won’t!” I said. “You mean they just want me to come and visit? But they don’t even know me.”

  “They know enough,” he said, in patient tones. “They know you’re a witch. My dear, I really think you would be better off accepting my escort for your first outing. The court can be—difficult to navigate, if you’re unfamiliar with its ways. You know that we want the same thing: we want the queen and Kasia acquitted.”

  “You wouldn’t give a crust of bread to save Kasia,” I said, “and I don’t like the way you go about getting the things you want.”

  He didn’t let me chase away his manners. He only politely bowed himself backwards into the shadows in the corner of my room. “I hope you’ll learn to think better of me, by and by.” His voice floated distantly out of the dark, even as he vanished. “Do keep in mind that I am ready to be your friend, if you find yourself at sea.” I threw the card from Countess Boguslava after him. It fluttered to the ground in the empty corner.

  I didn’t trust him at all, though I couldn’t help but worry he was telling me part of the truth. I was beginning to understand how little I understood about the life of the court. To listen to Solya, if I showed my face at a party given by a woman who didn’t know me, she would be pleased, and tell h
er husband so, and he’d—tell the king that the queen shouldn’t be put to death? And the king would listen? None of that made sense to me, but neither did strangers sending me a pile of invitations, all because a man had written my name down in a book. But here were the invitations, so plainly I was missing steps along the way.

  I wished I could speak to Sarkan: half for advice, half to complain at him. I even opened up Jaga’s book and hunted through it for a spell that would let me reach him, but I didn’t find anything that seemed as though it could work. The closest was one called kialmas, with the note, to be heard in the next village, but I didn’t think anyone would appreciate me shouting so loudly that my voice would go a week’s distance across the country, and I didn’t think the mountains would let the noise through anyway, even if I deafened everyone in Kralia.

  In the end, I picked out the earliest dinner invitation, and went. I was hungry, anyway. The last of the bread I’d saved in my skirt pocket was so stale by now that even magic couldn’t make it go down easily, or really fill my belly. There had to be kitchens somewhere in the castle, but the servants eyed me oddly when I went too far down the wrong hallway; I didn’t want to imagine their faces if I went sailing into the kitchens. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop one of those maids, a girl just like me, and ask her to serve me—as though I really thought myself a fine lady, instead of just dressed up pretending to be one.

  I roamed up and down stairs and through hallways until I found my way back out to the courtyard, and there I girded myself and went to one of the guards on the door, and asked him the way, showing him my invitation. He gave me the same odd look the servants did, but he looked at the address and said, “It’s the yellow one third in from the outer gate. Go down the road and you’ll see it after you get around the cathedral. Do you want a chair? Milady?” He tacked on the last, doubtfully.

  “No,” I said, confused by the question, and set off.