Uprooted(102)

The room had emptied considerably by the time she was done, and everyone left had backed away to the walls, except the pale unhappy guards still holding the apprentice. “All right, give him some bandages. Stop shouting, Jakub,” she said. “I was there when she found it, you idiot: the book was here in our own library for years, lurking like a rotting apple. Ballo was going to purge it. What happened?”

Jakub didn’t know: he’d been sent to fetch supplies. The king hadn’t been there when he’d left; when he’d come back, carrying more salt and herbs, the king and his guards had been standing by the podium with blank faces, and Ballo was reading the book aloud, already changing: clawed legs coming from beneath his robe, and two more sprouting from his sides, tearing their way out, his face lengthening into a snout, the words still coming even as they garbled and choked in his throat—

Jakub’s voice rose higher and higher as he spoke, until it broke and stopped. His hands were shaking.

Alosha poured more nalevka into a glass for him to drink. “It’s stronger than we thought,” she said. “We have to burn it at once.”

I struggled up off my footstool, but Alosha shook her head at me. “You’re overspent. Go sit on the hearth, and keep watch on me: don’t try to do anything unless you see it’s taking me.”

The book still lay placidly on the floor between the shattered pieces of the stone table, illuminated and innocent. Alosha took a pair of gauntlets from one of the guards and picked it up. She took it to the hearth and called fire: “Polzhyt, polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,” and on further from there, a long incantation, and the dull ashes in the hearth roared up like the blaze of her forge. The fire licked at the pages and gummed them, but the book only flung itself open in the fire and its pages ruffled like flags in a high wind, snapping, pictures of beasts trying to catch the eye, illuminated with firelight behind them.

“Get back!” Alosha said sharply to the guards: a few of them had been about to take a step closer, their eyes vague and caught. She reflected firelight into their faces from the flat of her dagger, and they blinked and then startled back, pale and afraid.

Alosha watched with a wary eye until they moved farther away, then turned back and kept chanting her fire spell, over and over, her arms spread wide to hold the fire in. But the book still hissed and spat on the hearth like wet green wood, refusing to catch; the fresh smell of spring leaves crept into the room, and I could see veins standing out on Alosha’s neck, strain showing in her face. She had her eyes fixed on the mantelpiece, but they kept drifting downwards towards the glowing pages. Each time, she pressed her thumb against the edge of her dagger. Blood dripped. She lifted her gaze back up.

Her voice was going hoarse. A handful of orange sparks landed on the carpet and smoldered. Sitting tired on the footstool, I looked at them and slowly I began to hum the old song about the spark on the hearth, telling its long stories: Once there was a golden princess, loved a simple player; the king gave them a splendid wedding, and the story ends there! Once there was old Baba Jaga, house made out of butter; and in that house so many wonders—tsk! The spark is gone now. Gone, taking the story with it. I sang it once through softly and said, “Kikra, kikra,” and then sang it again. The flying sparks began to drop onto the pages like rain, each one darkening a tiny spot before they went out. They fell in glowing showers, and when they fell in clusters, thin plumes of smoke went up.

Alosha slowed and stopped. The fire was catching at last. The pages were curling in on themselves at the edges like small animals huddling to die, with a burnt-sugar smell of sap in the fire. Kasia took my arm gently, and we backed away from the fire while it slowly ate the book up like someone forcing herself to eat stale bread.

“How did this bestiary come to your hands?” one minister bellowed at me, seconded by half a dozen more. “Why was the king there?” The council chamber was full of nobles shouting at me, at Alosha, at one another, afraid, demanding answers that weren’t to be had. Half of them still suspected me of having set a trap for the king, and talked of throwing me in the dungeon; some others decided, on no evidence at all, that shivering Jakub was a Rosyan agent who’d lured the king to the library and tricked Father Ballo into reading the book. He began to weep and make protests, but I didn’t have the strength to defend myself against them. My mouth stretched into an involuntary yawn instead, and made them angrier.

I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t think. My hands were still stinging with lightning and my nose was full of smoke, of burning paper. None of it seemed real to me yet. The king dead, Father Ballo dead. I had seen them barely an hour ago, walking away from the war-conference, whole and healthy. I remembered the moment, too vividly: the small worried crease in Father Ballo’s forehead; the king’s blue boots.

In the library, Alosha had done a purging spell over the king’s body, then the priests had carried him away to the cathedral for vigil, wrapped hastily in a cloth. The boots had been sticking out of the end of the bundle.

The Magnati kept shouting at me. It didn’t help that I felt I was to blame. I’d known something was wrong. If I’d only been quicker, if I’d only burned the book myself when I first found it. I put my stinging hands over my face.

But Marek stood up next to me and shouted the nobles down with the authority of the bloody spear he was still holding. He slammed it down on the council table in front of them. “She slew the beast when it might have killed Solya and another dozen men besides,” he said. “We don’t have time for this sort of idiocy. We march on the Rydva in three days’ time!”