Uprooted(10)

He shoved me hard against the bed and bent low. “Don’t dare lie to me!” he hissed. “I will tear the truth out of your throat—”

His fingers were resting on my neck; his leg was on the bed, between mine. In a great gulp of terror I put my hands on his chest and shoved with all my body against the bed, and heaved us both off it. We fell heavily together to the ground, him beneath me, and I was up like a rabbit scrambling off him and running for the door. I fled for the stairs. I don’t know where I thought I was going: I couldn’t have gotten out the front door, and there was nowhere else to go. But I ran anyway: I scrambled down two flights, and as his steps pursuing me came on, I flung myself into the dim laboratory, with all its hissing fumes and smoke. I crawled away desperately under the tables into a dark corner behind a high cabinet, and pulled my legs in towards me.

I’d closed the door behind me, but that didn’t seem to keep him from knowing where I’d gone. He opened it and looked into the room, and I saw him over the edge of one table, his cold and angry eye between two beakers of glass, his face painted in shades of green by the fires. He came with a steady unhurried step around the table, and as he rounded the end I darted forward scrambling the other way, trying for the door—I had some thought of locking him in. But I jarred the narrow shelf against the wall. One of the stoppered jars struck my back, rolled off, and smashed on the floor at my feet.

Grey smoke billowed up around me and into my nose and mouth, choking me, stilling me. It stung in my eyes, and I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t reach up to rub them, my arms refusing to answer. The coughs caught in my throat and stopped; my whole body froze slowly into place, still in a crouch on the floor. But I didn’t feel afraid anymore, and after a moment not even uncomfortable. I was somehow at once endlessly heavy and weightless, distant. I heard the Dragon’s footsteps very faintly and far-off as he came and stood over me, and I didn’t care what he would do.

He stood there looking down at me with cold impatience. I didn’t try to guess what he would do; I could neither think nor wonder. The world was very grey and still.

“No,” he said after a moment, “—no, you can’t possibly be a spy.”

He turned and left me there, for some time—I couldn’t have told you how long, it could have been an hour or a week or a year, though later I learned it had been only half a day. Then at last he returned, with a displeased set look to his mouth. He held up a small raggedy thing that had once been a piglet, knitted of wool and stuffed with straw, before I had dragged it behind me through the woods for the first seven years of my life. “So,” he said, “no spy. Only a witling.”

Then he laid his hand on my head and said, “Tezavon tahozh, tezavon tahozh kivi, kanzon lihush.”

He didn’t so much recite the words as chant them, almost like a song, and as he spoke color and time and breath came back into the world; my head came free and I shied out from under his hand. The stone was slowly fading out of my flesh. My arms came loose, flailing for a grip on anything while my still-stone legs held me locked in place. He caught my wrists, so when I finally came loose all the way I was held by his hand, with no chance of flight.

I didn’t try to run, though. My suddenly free thoughts ran around in a dozen directions, as though they were catching up with lost time, but it seemed to me he might have just left me stone, if he’d wanted to do something terrible to me, and at least he had stopped thinking me some sort of spy. I didn’t understand why he thought anyone would have wanted to spy on him, much less the king; he was the king’s wizard, wasn’t he?

“And now you’ll tell me: what were you doing?” he said. His eyes were still suspicious and cold and glittering.

“I only wanted a book to read,” I said. “I didn’t—I didn’t think there was any harm—”

“And you happened to take Luthe’s Summoning off the shelf for a little reading,” he said, cuttingly sarcastic, “and merely by chance—” until perhaps my alarmed and blank look convinced him, and he halted and looked at me with unconcealed irritation. “What an unequaled gift for disaster you have.”

Then he scowled down, and I followed his look to the shards of the glass jar around our feet: he hissed his breath out between his teeth and said abruptly, “Clean that up, and then come to the library. And don’t touch anything else.”

He stalked away, leaving me to go hunt out some rags from the kitchens to pick up the glass with, and a bucket: I washed the floor as well, though there wasn’t a trace of anything spilled, as though the magic had burned off like the liquor on a pudding. I kept stopping and lifting my hand up from the stone floor to turn it over front and back, making sure the stone wasn’t creeping back up my fingertips. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had a jar of that on his shelf, and whether he’d ever used it on someone else—someone who had become a statue somewhere, standing with fixed eyes, time eddying past them; I shuddered.

I was very, very careful not to touch anything else in the room.

The book I’d taken was back upon the shelf when at last I girded myself and went into the library. He was pacing, his own book on its small table thrust aside and neglected, and when I came in he scowled at me again. I looked down: my skirt was marked with wet tracks from the mopping, and it had been too short to begin with, barely halfway down my calves. The sleeves of my shift were worse: I’d got some egg on the ends that morning, making his breakfast, and had singed the elbow a little getting the toast off before it burned.