Page 36 of Uprooted

“I’m not going to give you a sword to fall on,” the Dragon said. “If that’s what you insist on doing, you can do so with considerably less damage to anyone else by using the one you already have.”

Prince Marek’s shoulders clenched, the muscles around his neck knotting visibly; he let go of Kasia’s hand and took a step onto the dais.

The Dragon’s face stayed cold and unyielding.

I think the prince would have struck him, gladly, but the Falcon pushed himself up from his chair.

“I beg your pardon, Your Highness, there’s no need for this.

If you recall the enchantment I used in Kyeva, when we captured General Nichkov’s camp—that will serve just as well here.

It will show me how the spell was done.” He smiled at the Dragon without teeth, lips drawn tight.

“I think Sarkan will admit that even he can’t hide things from my sight. ”

The Dragon didn’t deny it, but bit out, “I’ll admit that you’re a far more extravagant fool than I gave you credit for being, if you intend to lend yourself to this lunacy.”

“I would hardly call it extravagant to make every reasonable attempt to rescue the queen,” the Falcon said.

“We’ve all bowed our heads to your wisdom before now, Sarkan: there was certainly no sense in taking risks to bring out the queen only to have to put her to death.

Yet now here we are,” he gestured to Kasia, “with evidence of another possibility plain before us. Why have you been concealing it so long?”

Just like that, when the Falcon had so plainly come here in the first place expressly to insist that there was no other possibility, and to condemn the Dragon for letting Kasia live at all!

I nearly gawked at him, but he showed not the least consciousness of having altered his position.

“If there is any hope for the queen, I would call it treason not to make the attempt,” the Falcon added. “What was done, can be done again.”

The Dragon snorted. “By you?”

Well, even I could tell that was hardly the way to induce the Falcon to hesitate. His eyes narrowed, and he turned coldly and said to the prince, “I will retire now, Your Highness; I must recover my strength before I cast the enchantment in the morning.”

Prince Marek dismissed him with a wave of his hand: I saw to my alarm that while I’d been busy watching the sparring, he had been speaking to Kasia, gripping her hand in both of his.

Her face still had that unnatural stillness, but I had learned to read it well enough by now to see that she was troubled.

I was about to go to her rescue when he let her hand go and left the hall himself, a quick wide stride, the heels of his boots ringing on the steps as he went upstairs.

Kasia came to me, and I caught her hand in mine.

The Dragon was scowling at the stairs, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair in irritation.

“Can he do it?” I asked him. “Can he see how the spell was done?”

Drum, drum, drum, went his fingers. “Not unless he finds the tomb,” the Dragon said finally.

After a moment he added grudgingly, “Which he may be able to do: he has an affinity for sight magic. But then he’ll have to find a way into it.

I imagine it will take him a few weeks, at least; long enough for me to get a message to the king, and I hope forestall this nonsense. ”

He waved me away, and I was glad to go, pulling Kasia all the way up the stairs behind me with a wary eye on the turning up ahead.

At the second landing I put my head out and made sure neither the prince nor the Falcon was in the hallway any longer before I drew Kasia across it, and when we came to my room I told her to wait outside until I had flung the door open and looked in: empty.

I let her in and shut and barred the door behind us, and pushed a chair beneath the doorknob.

I would have liked to seal it with magic, if the Dragon hadn’t warned me against using spells, but as little as I wanted another visit from Prince Marek, I wanted him to remember what had really happened in the last one even less.

I didn’t know if the Falcon could notice it if I cast a tiny spell of closing up here in my room, but I had felt his magic from the kitchens, so I didn’t mean to take chances.

I turned to Kasia: she was sitting on the bed heavily. Her back was straight—it was always straight now—but her hands were pressed flat together in her lap, and her head was bowed forward. “What did he say to you?” I demanded, a shudder of anger building in my belly, but Kasia shook her head.

“He asked me to help him,” she said. “He said he would speak to me again tomorrow.” She lifted her head and looked at me. “Nieshka, you saved me— could you save Queen Hanna?”

For a moment I was in the Wood again, deep beneath the branches, the weight of its hatred pressing on me and shadows creeping into me with every breath.

Fear closed my throat. But I thought also of fulmia, rolling like thunder deep in my belly; of Kasia’s face and another tree grown tall, a face under the bark softened and blurred by twenty years of growth, vanishing like a statue under running water.

The Dragon was in his library, writing and irritated, and not less so when I came down and asked him the same question. “Try not to borrow more folly than you already possess,” he said. “Are you still incapable of recognizing a trap? This is the Wood’s doing.”

“You think the Wood has—Prince Marek?” I asked, wondering if that would explain it; if that was why he’d—

“Not yet it doesn’t,” the Dragon said. “But he’ll hand himself over and a wizard to boot: a magnificent trade for a peasant girl, and how much the better if you threw yourself in as well! The Wood will plant heart-trees in you and Solya, and swallow the valley in a week. That’s why it let her go.”

But I remembered that ferocious resistance. “It didn’t let her go!” I said. “It didn’t let me take her—”

“To a point,” he said. “The Wood might have done whatever it could to preserve a heart-tree, exactly as a general would to preserve a stronghold. But once the tree was lost—and it was surely already too far gone, whether the girl lived or died—then of course it would try to find a way to turn the loss to good account.”

We wrangled it back and forth. It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong; it seemed exactly the twisted sort of thing the Wood would do, turning love into a weapon.

But that didn’t mean, I thought, that it wasn’t a chance worth taking.

Freeing the queen could end the war with Rosya, could strengthen both nations, and if we destroyed another heart-tree in doing it, might be the chance to break the power of the Wood for a long time.

“Yes,” he said, “and if a dozen angels would only sweep down from above and lay waste to the entire Wood with flaming swords, the situation would be infinitely improved as well.”

I huffed in annoyance and went for the big ledger: I thumped it down on the table between us and opened it to the last pages, full of entries in his careful narrow hand, and put my hands down on it.

“It’s been winning, hasn’t it, with all you can do?

” His cold silence was enough answer. “We can’t wait.

We can’t keep the secret of this locked up in the tower, waiting until we’re perfectly ready.

If the Wood is trying to strike, we should strike back, and quickly. ”

“There’s a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste,” he said.

“What you really mean is you’ve heard too many clandestine ballads of the sad lost queen and the grief-stricken king, and you think you’re living in one of them with the chance to be the hero of the piece.

What do you think will even be left of her, after twenty years being gnawed by a heart-tree? ”

“More than will be left after twenty and one!” I flared back at him.

“And if there’s enough left of her to know when they put her child into the tree with her?” he said, unsparing, and the horror of the thought silenced me.

“That is my concern, and not yours,” Prince Marek said.

We both jerked around from the table: he was standing in the doorway, silent on bare feet in his nightshift.

He looked at me, and I could see the spell of false memory crumbling: he remembered me, and abruptly I, too, remembered the way his face had changed when I’d used magic in front of him, his voice when he’d said, “You’re a witch .

” All along, he’d been looking for someone who would help him.

“You did this, didn’t you?” he said to me, his eyes gleaming. “I should have known this desiccated old serpent would never have put his neck out, even for so lovely a piece of work. You freed that girl.”

“We—” I stammered, darting a desperate look at the Dragon, but Marek snorted.

He came into the library, came towards me.

I could see the faint scar at his hairline, where I’d battered him senseless with the heavy tray; there was a tiger of magic in my belly, ready to come out roaring.

But my chest still seized up with involuntary fear.

My breath came short as he neared me: if he’d come closer, if he’d touched me, I think I would have screamed—some kind of curse: a dozen of Jaga’s nastier ones were flitting through my head like fireflies, waiting to be snatched up by my tongue.

But he stopped at arm’s length and only leaned towards me.

“That girl’s condemned, you know,” he said, looking at my face.

“The king takes a dim view of letting wizards claim they’ve cleansed the corrupted: too many of them turn up corrupted themselves in no short order.

The law says she must be put to death, and the Falcon certainly won’t testify on her behalf. ”