Page 31 of Uprooted

The Dragon was strange and silent afterwards, as we wrestled Kasia slowly and wearily up the stairs.

She was almost insensible, jerking out of a daze only to claw the air before subsiding again.

Her limp body was unnaturally heavy: heavy as solid oak, as though the Wood had somehow left her transmuted and changed.

“Is it gone?” I said to him, desperately. “Is it gone?”

“Yes,” he said shortly as we heaved her up the long spiraling stairs: even with his own peculiar strength, every step was a struggle, as though we were trying to carry a fallen log between our hands, and we were both weary.

“The Summoning would have shown us otherwise.” He said nothing more until we had taken her upstairs to the guest chamber, and then he stood by the side of the bed looking down at her, his brow drawn, and then he turned and left the room.

I had little time to think of him. Kasia lay feverish and sick for a month.

She would start up half-awake and lost in nightmares, still in the Wood, and she could throw even the Dragon off her and nearly across the room.

We had to tie her down in the heavy postered bed, with ropes and finally with chains.

I slept curled up on the rug at the foot, leaping up to give her water whenever she cried out, and to try and press a few morsels of food into her mouth: she couldn’t keep down more than a bite or two of plain bread, at first.

My days and nights ran into each other, broken with her wakings—every hour at first, and ten minutes to settle her, so I could never sleep properly, and I staggered dazed through the hours.

It was only after the first week that I began to be sure she would live, and I stole a few moments to scribble a note to Wensa to let her know that Kasia was free, that she was getting well.

“Will she keep it to herself?” the Dragon demanded, when I asked him to send it; and I was too drained to ask why he cared; I only opened the letter and scribbled on a line, Tell no one yet, and handed it to him.

I should have asked; he should have pressed me harder to be cautious.

But we were both frayed like worn cloth.

I didn’t know what he was working on, but I saw his light burning in the library late at night, as I stumbled down to the kitchens for more broth and back up again, and loose pages covered with diagrams and inscriptions stacked into heaps on his table.

One afternoon, following the smell of smoke, I found him asleep in his laboratory, the bottom of an alembic flask blackening over a candle in front of him, already run dry.

He jumped when I woke him, and he knocked the whole thing over and started a fire with what for him was wholly uncharacteristic clumsiness.

We had to scramble to put it out together, and his shoulders were as stiff as a cat’s, disliking the insult to his dignity.

Three weeks later, though, Kasia woke after a full four hours of sleep and turned her head to me and said, “Nieshka,” exhausted but herself, her dark brown eyes warm and clear.

I cupped her face in my hands, smiling through tears, and she managed to close her claw-like hands around mine and smile back.

From then she began to recover quickly. Her strange new strength made her clumsy at first, even once she could stand up.

She blundered into furniture and fell all the way down the stairs the first time she tried to make her own way down to the kitchens, once when I was downstairs cooking more soup.

But when I whirled from the fire and flew to her calling in alarm, I found her at the foot of the stairs unhurt, not even bruised, and only struggling to get back onto her feet again.

I took her to the great hall to learn how to walk again, and tried to steady her as we went slowly around the room, although more often than not she knocked me down by accident instead.

The Dragon was coming down the stairs to get something from the cellars.

He stood and watched our awkward progress for a little while from the archway, his face hard and unreadable.

After I got her back upstairs and she crawled carefully into bed and fell asleep again, I went down to the library to speak to him. “What’s wrong with her?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” the Dragon said flatly. “As far as I can tell, she is uncorrupted.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased.

I didn’t understand. I wondered if it bothered him to have someone else staying in the tower. “She’s already better,” I said. “It won’t be for long.”

He looked at me with bright irritation. “Not for long?” he said. “What do you mean to do with her?”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. “She’ll—”

“Go home ?” the Dragon said. “Marry a farmer, if she can find one who won’t mind his wife is made of wood?”

“She’s still flesh, she’s not made of wood!

” I said, protesting, but I was already realizing, quicker than I wanted to, that he was right: there was no more place for Kasia back in our village than there was for me.

I sat slowly down, my hands braced on the table.

“She’ll—take her dowry,” I said, fumbling for some answer.

“She’ll have to go away—to the city, to University, like the other women—”

He had been about to speak; he paused and said, “What?”

“The other chosen ones, the other ones you took,” I said, without thinking anything of it: I was too worried for Kasia: what could she do? She wasn’t a witch; at least people understood what that was. She was simply changed, dreadfully, and I didn’t think she could conceal it.

He broke in on my thoughts. “Tell me,” he bit out, caustic, and I startled and looked up at him, “did all of you assume I forced myself on them?”

I only gaped at him, while he glared at me, his face hard and offended.

“Yes?” I said, bewildered at first. “Yes, of course we did. Why wouldn’t we?

If you didn’t, why wouldn’t you—why don’t you just hire a servant—” Even as I said it, I began to wonder if that other woman, the one who’d left me the letter, had been right.

That he just wanted a little human company—but only a little, on his own terms; not someone who could leave him when they liked.

“Hired servants were inadequate,” he said, irritable and evasive; he didn’t say why. He made an impatient gesture, not looking at me; if he had seen my face, perhaps he would have stopped. “I don’t take puling girls who want only to marry a village lover, or ones who cringe from me—”

I stood straight up, the chair clattering back over the floor away from me.

Slow and late and bubbling, a ferocious anger had risen in me, like a flood.

“So you take the ones like Kasia,” I burst out, “the ones brave enough to bear it, who won’t hurt their families worse by weeping, and you suppose that makes it right?

You don’t rape them, you only close them up for ten years, and complain that we think you worse than you are? ”

He stared up at me, and I stared back, panting.

I hadn’t even known those words were in me to be spoken; I hadn’t known they were in me to be felt.

I would never have thought of speaking so to my lord, the Dragon: I had hated him, but I wouldn’t have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house.

He wasn’t a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.

But he had stepped down from that plane; he had given me real kindness.

He’d let his magic mingle with my own again, that strange breathtaking intimacy, all to save Kasia with me.

I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human.

“It’s not right,” I said loudly. “It’s not right!”

He stood up and for a moment we faced each other across the table, both of us furious, both of us, I think, equally shocked; then he turned and walked away from me, bright angry streaks of red color in his cheeks, his hand gripping hard on the window-sill as he stared out of the tower.

I flung myself out of the room and ran upstairs.

—

For the rest of the day, I stayed by Kasia’s bedside while she slept, perched on the bed with her thin hand in mine.

She was still warm and alive, but he hadn’t misspoken.

Her skin was soft, but beneath it her flesh was unyielding: not like stone but like a smooth-polished piece of amber, hard but flowing, with the edges rounded away.

Her hair shone in the deep golden cast of the candle-glow, curling into whorls like the knots of a tree.

She might have been a carved statue. I had told myself she wasn’t so altered, but I knew I was wrong.

My eyes were too loving: I looked and only saw Kasia.

Someone who didn’t know her would see a strangeness in her at once.

She had always been beautiful; now she was unearthly so, preserved and shining.

She woke and looked at me. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

I didn’t know what to do for her. I wondered if the Dragon would let her stay here: we could share my room, upstairs.

Perhaps he would be glad of a servant who could never leave, since he disliked training a new one.

It was a bitter thought, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

If a stranger had come into our village looking like her, we’d have thought them corrupted for sure, some new kind of monstrosity put forth by the Wood.