Page 40 of Uprooted

“Something dead,” Kasia said, and dropped her eyes to her saddle, her hands clenched on the reins.

The light was brightening around us, and the track widened beneath the horses’ feet.

Their shoes clopped hollowly. I looked down and saw cobblestones half-buried beneath moss, broken.

When I looked back up, I flinched: in the distance, through the trees, a ghostly grey face stared back at me, with a huge hollow eye above a wide square mouth: a gutted barn.

“Get off the track,” the Dragon said sharply. “Go around: north or south, it doesn’t matter. But don’t ride through the square, and keep moving.”

“What is this place?” Marek said.

“Porosna,” the Dragon said. “Or what’s left of it.”

We turned our horses and went north, picking our way through brambles and the ruins of small poor houses, sagging on their beams, thatched roofs fallen in.

I tried not to look at the ground. Moss and fine grass covered it thickly, and tall young trees were stretching up for sun, already spreading out overhead and breaking the sunlight into moving, shifting dapples.

But there were shapes still half-buried beneath the moss, here and there a hand of bones breaking the sod, white fingertips poking through the soft carpeting green that caught the light and gleamed cold.

Above the houses, if I looked towards where the village square would have stood, a vast shining silver canopy spread, and I could hear the far-off rustling whisper of the leaves of a heart-tree.

“Couldn’t we stop and burn it?” I whispered to the Dragon, as softly as I could.

“Certainly,” he said. “If we used fire-heart, and retreated the way we came at once. It would be the wise thing to do.”

He didn’t keep his voice down. But Prince Marek didn’t look around, though a few of the soldiers glanced at us. The horses stretched their necks, trembling, and we rode on quickly, leaving the dead behind us.

We stopped a little while later to give the horses a rest. They were all tired, from fear as much as effort.

The path had widened around some marshy ground, the end of a spring creek that was drying up now as the snowmelt stopped running.

A small trickle still came bubbling along and made a wide clear pool over a bed of rocks.

“Is it safe to let the horses drink?” Prince Marek asked the Dragon, who shrugged.

“You may as well,” he said. “It’s not much worse than having them beneath the trees. You’d have to put them all down after this in any case.”

Janos had already slid down from his horse; he had a hand on its nose, calming the animal. He jerked his head around. “These are trained warhorses! They’re worth their weight in silver.”

“And purging elixir is worth their weight in gold,” the Dragon said. “If you felt tender towards them, you shouldn’t have brought them into the Wood. But don’t distress yourself overly. Chances are the question won’t arise.”

Prince Marek threw him a hard look, but he didn’t quarrel; instead he caught Janos aside and spoke to him consolingly.

Kasia had gone to stand by the edge of the clearing where a handful of deer tracks continued on; she was looking away from the pool.

I wondered if she’d seen this place, too, in her long wandering imprisonment.

She stared into the dark trees. The Dragon came past her; he glanced at her and spoke; I saw her head turn towards him.

“I wonder if you know what he owes you,” the Falcon said unexpectedly, behind me; I startled and turned my head around. My horse was drinking thirstily; I gripped the reins and edged a little closer to its warm side. I didn’t say anything.

The Falcon only raised one narrow eyebrow, black and neat.

“The kingdom hasn’t a limitless store of wizards.

By law, the gift places you beyond vassalage.

You have a right to a place at court, now, and the patronage of the king himself.

You should never have been kept here in this valley in the first place, much less treated like a drudge.

” He waved a hand up and down at my clothes.

I had dressed myself as I would have to go gleaning, in tall mud-boots, loose work trousers sewn of sacking, and a brown smock over it all.

He still wore his white cloak, although the Wood’s malice was stronger than whatever charm he’d used to keep it neat in the ordinary woods; there were threads snagged along the edge of it.

He misunderstood my doubtful look. “Your father is a farmer, I suppose?”

“A woodcutter,” I said.

He flicked a hand as if to say it made not the least difference.

“Then you know nothing of the court, I imagine. When the gift rose in me, the king raised my father to a knighthood, and when I finished my training, to a barony. He will not be less generous to you.” He leaned towards me, and my horse snorted bubbles in the water as I leaned hard against her.

“Whatever you may have heard, growing up in this backwater, Sarkan is by no means the only wizard of note in Polnya. I assure you that you needn’t feel bound to him, simply because he’s found an—interesting way to use you.

I’m certain there are many other wizards you could align yourself with.

” He extended his hand towards me, and raised a thin spiraling flame in the palm of his hand with a murmured word. “Perhaps you’d care to try?”

“With you ?” I blurted, undiplomatically; his eyes narrowed a little at the corners. I didn’t feel at all sorry, though. “After what you did to Kasia?”

He put on injured surprise like a second cloak.

“I’ve done her and you a favor. Do you imagine anyone would have been willing to take Sarkan’s word for her cure?

Your patron might charitably be called eccentric, burying himself out here and coming to court only when he’s summoned, gloomy as a storm and issuing warnings of inevitable disasters that somehow never come.

He hasn’t any friends at court, and the few who would stand beside him are the very doom-sayers who insisted on having your friend put to death at once.

If Prince Marek hadn’t intervened, the king would have sent an executioner instead, and summoned Sarkan to the capital to answer for the crime of letting her live this long. ”

He’d come to be exactly that executioner, but apparently he didn’t mean to let that stand in the way of claiming he’d done me a kindness.

I didn’t know how to answer anything so brazen; the only thing I could have managed would have been an inarticulate hiss.

But he didn’t force me to that point. He said only, in a gentle voice that suggested I was being unreasonable, “Think a little about what I’ve told you.

I don’t blame you for your anger, but don’t let it make you spurn good advice,” and gave me a courtly bow.

He withdrew gracefully even as Kasia rejoined me.

The soldiers were getting back on their horses.

Her face was sober, and she was rubbing her arms. The Dragon had gone to mount his own horse; I glanced over at him, wondering what he’d said to her. “Are you all right?” I asked Kasia.

“He told me not to fear I was still corrupted,” she said.

Her mouth moved a little, the ghost of a smile.

“He said if I could fear it, I probably wasn’t.

” Then even more unexpectedly she added, “He told me he was sorry I’d been afraid of him—of being chosen, I mean. He said he wouldn’t take anyone again.”

I had shouted at him over that; I hadn’t ever expected him to listen. I stared at her, but I didn’t have any time to wonder: Janos had mounted, looked his men over, and he said abruptly, “Where’s Michal?”

We counted heads and horses, and called loudly in every direction. There was no answer, and no trail of broken branches or stirred leaves to show which way he’d gone. He’d been seen only a few moments before, waiting to give his horse water. If he’d been snatched, it had been silently.

“Enough,” the Dragon said at last. “He’s gone.”

Janos looked at the prince in protest. But after a silent moment, Marek said finally, “We go on. Ride two by two, and keep in each other’s sight.”

Janos’s face was hard and unhappy as he wrapped the scarf closely over his nose and mouth again, but he jerked his head at the first two soldiers, and after a moment they started into motion down the path. We rode on into the Wood.

Beneath the boughs it was hard to tell what time it was, how long we’d been riding.

The Wood was silent as no forest ever was: no hum of insects, not even the occasional twig-snap under a rabbit’s foot.

Even our own horses made very little noise, hooves coming down on soft moss and grass and saplings instead of bare dirt.

The track was running out. The men in the front had to hack at the brush all the time to give us a way through at all.

A faint sound of rushing water came to us through the trees. The track abruptly widened again. We halted; I stood up in my stirrups, and over the shoulders of the soldier in front of me I could just see a break in the trees. We were on the bank of the Spindle again.

We came out of the forest nearly a foot above the river, on a soft sloping bank.

Trees and brush overhung the water, willows trailing long weedy branches into the reeds that clustered thickly at the water’s edge, between the pale tangle of exposed tree-roots against the wet dirt.

The Spindle was wide enough that over the middle, sunlight broke through the interlaced canopy of the trees.

It glittered on the river’s surface without penetrating, and we could tell most of the day had gone.

We sat for a long moment in silence. There was a wrongness to meeting the river like this, cutting across our path.

We’d been riding east; we should have been alongside it.