Page 3 of Uprooted

My father’s hand was warm on my shoulder as he stood beside me and bowed; my mother’s hand was clenched tight on mine on the other side.

They reluctantly stepped back with the other parents.

Instinctively the eleven of us all edged closer to one another.

Kasia and I stood near the end of the line.

I didn’t dare take her hand, but I stood close enough that our arms brushed, and I watched the Dragon and hated him and hated him as he stepped down the line and tipped up each girl’s face, under the chin, to look at her.

He didn’t speak to all of us. He didn’t say a word to the girl next to me, the one from Olshanka, even though her father, Borys, was the best horse-breeder in the valley, and she wore a wool dress dyed brilliant red, her black hair in two long beautiful plaits woven with red ribbons.

When it was my turn, he glanced at me with a frown—cold black eyes, pale mouth pursed—and said, “Your name, girl?”

“Agnieszka,” I said, or tried to say; I discovered my mouth was dry. I swallowed. “Agnieszka,” I said again, whispering. “My lord.” My face was hot. I dropped my eyes. I saw that for all the care I’d taken, my skirt had three big mud stains creeping up from the hem.

The Dragon moved on. And then he paused, looking at Kasia, the way he hadn’t paused for any of the rest of us.

He stayed there with his hand under her chin, a thin pleased smile curving his thin hard mouth, and Kasia looked at him bravely and didn’t flinch.

She didn’t try to make her voice rough or squeaky or anything but steady and musical as she answered, “Kasia, my lord.”

He smiled at her again, not pleasantly, but with a satisfied-cat look.

He went on to the end of the line only perfunctorily, barely glancing at the two girls after her.

I heard Wensa drag in a breath that was nearly a sob, behind us, as he turned and came back to look at Kasia, still with that pleased look on his face.

And then he frowned again, and turned his head, and looked straight at me.

I’d forgotten myself and taken Kasia’s hand after all.

I was squeezing the life out of it, and she was squeezing back.

She quickly let go and I tucked my hands together in front of me instead, hot color in my cheeks, afraid.

He only narrowed his eyes at me some more.

And then he raised his hand, and in his fingers a tiny ball of blue-white flame took shape.

“She didn’t mean anything,” Kasia said, brave brave brave, the way I hadn’t been for her. Her voice was trembling but audible, while I shook rabbit-terrified, staring at the ball. “Please, my lord—”

“Silence, girl,” the Dragon said, and held his hand out towards me. “Take it.”

“I—what?” I said, more bewildered than if he’d flung it into my face.

“Don’t stand there like a cretin,” he said. “Take it.”

My hand was shaking so when I raised it that I couldn’t help but brush against his fingers as I tried to pluck the ball from them, though I hated to; his skin felt feverish-hot.

But the ball of flame was cool as a marble, and it didn’t hurt me at all to touch.

Startled with relief, I held it between my fingers, staring at it.

He looked at me with an expression of annoyance.

“Well,” he said ungraciously, “you then, I suppose.” He took the ball out of my hand and closed his fist on it a moment; it vanished as quickly as it had come. He turned and said to Danka, “Send the tribute up when you can.”

I still hadn’t understood. I don’t think anyone had, even my parents; it was all too quick, and I was shocked by having drawn his attention at all.

I didn’t even have a chance to turn around and say a last good-bye before he turned back and took my arm by the wrist. Only Kasia moved; I looked back at her and saw her about to reach for me in protest, and then the Dragon jerked me impatiently and ungently stumbling after him, and dragged me with him back into thin air.

I had my other hand pressed to my mouth, retching, when we stepped back out of the air.

When he let go my arm, I sank to my knees and vomited without even seeing where I was.

He made a muttered exclamation of disgust—I had spattered the long elegant toe of his leather boot—and said, “Useless. Stop heaving, girl, and clean that filth up.” He walked away from me, his heels echoing upon the flagstones, and was gone.

I stayed there shakily until I was sure nothing more would come up, and then I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and lifted my head to stare.

I was on a floor of stone, and not just any stone, but a pure white marble laced through with veins of brilliant green.

It was a small round room with narrow slitted windows, too high to look out of, but above my head the ceiling bent inward sharply. I was at the very top of the tower.

There was no furniture in the room at all, and nothing I could use to wipe up the floor.

Finally I used the skirt of my dress: that was already dirty anyway.

Then after a little time sitting there being terrified and more terrified, while nothing at all happened, I got up and crept timidly down the hallway.

I’d have taken any way out of the room but the one he had used, if there had been any other way. There wasn’t.

He’d already gone on, though. The short hallway was empty.

It had the same cold hard marble underfoot, illuminated with an unfriendly pale white light from hanging lamps.

They weren’t real lamps, just big chunks of clear polished stone that glowed from inside.

There was only one door, and then an archway at the end that led to stairs.

I pushed the door open and looked in, nervously, because that was better than going past it without knowing what was inside.

But it only opened into a small bare room, with a narrow bed and a small table and a wash-basin.

There was a large window across from me, and I could see the sky.

I ran to it and leaned out over the sill.

The Dragon’s tower stood in the foothills on the western border of his lands.

All our long valley lay spread out to the east, with its villages and farms, and standing in the window I could trace the whole line of the Spindle, running silver-blue down the middle with the road dusty brown next to it.

The road and the river ran together all the way to the other end of the Dragon’s lands, dipping into stands of forest and coming out again at villages, until the road tapered out to nothing just before the huge black tangle of the Wood.

The river went on alone into its depths and vanished, never to come out again.

There was Olshanka, the town nearest the tower, where the Grand Market was held on Sundays: my father had taken me there, twice.

Beyond that Poniets, and Radomsko curled around the shores of its small lake, and there was my own Dvernik with its wide green square.

I could even see the big white tables laid out for the feasting the Dragon hadn’t wanted to stay for, and I slid to my knees and rested my forehead on the sill and cried like a child.

But my mother didn’t come to rest her hand on my head; my father didn’t pull me up and laugh me out of my tears.

I just sobbed myself out until I had too much of a headache to go on crying, and after that I was cold and stiff from being on that painfully hard floor, and I had a running nose and nothing to wipe it with.

I used another part of my skirt for that and sat down on the bed, trying to think what to do.

The room was empty, but aired-out and neat, as if it had just been left.

It probably had. Some other girl had lived here for ten years, all alone, looking down at the valley.

Now she had gone home to say good-bye to her family, and the room was mine.

A single painting in a great gilt frame hung on the wall across from the bed.

It made no sense, too grand for the little room and not really a picture at all, just a broad swath of pale green, grey-brown at the edges, with one shining blue-silver line that wove across the middle in gentle curves and narrower silver lines drawn in from the edges to meet it.

I stared at it and wondered if it was magic, too. I’d never seen such a thing.

But there were circles painted at places along the silver line, at familiar distances, and after a moment I realized the painting was the valley, too, only flattened down the way a bird might have looked down upon it from far overhead.

That silver line was the Spindle, running from the mountains into the Wood, and the circles were villages.

The colors were brilliant, the paint glossy and raised in tiny peaks.

I could almost see waves on the river, the glitter of sunlight on the water.

It pulled the eye and made me want to look at it and look at it.

But I didn’t like it, at the same time. The painting was a box drawn around the living valley, closing it up, and looking at it made me feel closed up myself.

I looked away. It didn’t seem that I could stay in the room.

I hadn’t eaten a bite at breakfast, or at dinner the night before; it had all been ash in my mouth.

I should have had less appetite now, when something worse than anything I’d imagined had happened to me, but instead I was painfully hungry, and there were no servants in the tower, so no one was going to get my dinner.

Then the worse thought occurred to me: what if the Dragon expected me to get his?

And then the even worse thought than that: what about after dinner?

Kasia had always said she believed the women who came back, that the Dragon didn’t put a hand on them.

“He’s taken girls for a hundred years now,” she always said firmly.

“ One of them would have admitted it, and word would have got out.”