Uprooted(108)

I stood up, shaking. I knew she was right. I felt it. The king, the crown prince; now the princess. The Wood meant to kill all of them, Alosha’s good kings, and slaughter Polnya’s wizards, too. I looked at the dead soldiers in their Rosyan uniforms. Marek would blame Rosya again, as he was meant to do. He’d put on his crown and march east, and after he’d spent our army slaughtering as many Rosyans as he could, the Wood would devour him, too, and leave the country torn apart, the succession broken.

I was in the Wood again, underneath the boughs, that cold hateful presence watching me. The momentary silence in the room was only its pause for breath. Stone walls and sunlight meant nothing. The Wood’s eyes were on us. The Wood was here.





Chapter 25


We wrapped ourselves in torn cloaks we took off the dead guards and ran for it, our hems leaving streaks of blood on the floor behind us. I had shoved Alosha’s sword back into its strange waiting-place, hatol opening a pocket in the world for me to put it in. Kasia carried the little girl and I held Stashek’s hand. We went down a tower staircase, past a landing where two men in a hallway glanced over at us, puzzled and frowning; we hurried on down another turning, fast, and came into the narrow hallway to the kitchens, servants going back and forth. Stashek tried to pull back from me. “I want my father!” he said, his voice trembling. “I want Uncle Marek! Where are we going?”

I didn’t know. I was only in flight; all I knew was we had to get away. The Wood had scattered too many seeds, all around us; they’d lain quiet in fallow ground, but now they were all coming to fruit. Nowhere was safe when corruption lived in the king’s castle. The princess had meant to take them to her parents, to Gidna on the northern sea. The ocean is inimical to corruption, Alosha had said. But trees still grew in Gidna, and the Wood would pursue the children to the shore.

“To the tower,” I said. I didn’t plan on saying it; the words came out of me like Stashek’s cry. I wanted the stillness of Sarkan’s library, the faint spice-and-sulfur smell of his laboratory; those close, narrow hallways, the clean lines and the emptiness. The tower standing tall and lonely against the mountains. The Wood had no foothold there. “We’re going to the Dragon’s tower.”

Some of the servants were slowing, looking at us. There were footsteps on the stairs coming after us; a man called down with authority, “You, there!”

“Hold on to me,” I told Kasia. I put my hand on the castle wall and whispered us through, straight out into the kitchen gardens, one staring gardener kneeling up from the dirt. I ran between rows of beanstakes with Stashek wide-eyed running with me, catching our fear; Kasia ran behind us. We reached the outer wall of heavy brick; I took us through. The castle bells began to clang alarm behind us as we scrambled in a hail of dirt all the way down the steep slope, to the Vandalus running below.

The river rushed quick and deep here around the castle, leaving the city behind, going east. A hunting bird cried high above, a falcon wheeling in wide circles around the castle: was that Solya looking down at us? I snatched up a handful of reeds from the bank, without any incantations or charms: they had all gone out of my head. Instead I pulled a thread out of my cloak and tied the reeds at two ends. I threw the bundle down on the bank, halfway in the water, and flung magic at it. It grew into a long, light boat, and we scrambled in even as the river tugged it off the bank and dragged us along, rushing, bouncing off rocks on either side. There were shouts behind us, guards appearing on the outer walls of the castle high above.

“Down!” Kasia shouted, and pushed the children down flat and covered them with her body. The guards were firing arrows at us. One tore through her cloak and hit her back. Another landed just beside me and stuck into the side of the boat, quivering. I snatched the feathers off the arrow-shaft and threw them up into the air above us. They remembered what they’d once been and turned into a cloud of half-birds that whirled and sang, covering us from view for a few moments. I held on to the sides of the boat and called up Jaga’s quickening charm.

We shot forward. In one lurch, the castle and the city blurred back and away, turned into children’s toys. In a second, they had vanished around a curve of the river. In a third, we struck on the empty riverbank. My boat of reeds fell apart around us and dumped us all into the water.

I nearly sank. The weight of my clothes dragged me backwards, down into the murky water, light blurring above me. The cloud of Kasia’s skirts billowed next to me. I thrashed for the surface, blindly grabbing, and found a small hand grabbing back: Stashek put my hand on a tree-root. I pulled myself up coughing and managed to put my feet down in the water. “Nieshka!” Kasia was calling; she was holding Marisha in her arms.

We slogged up the soft muddy bank, Kasia’s feet sinking deep with every step, gouging holes in the earth that filled slowly in with water behind her. I sank down on the mucky grass. I was trembling with magic that wanted to spill out of me in every direction, uncontrolled. We’d moved too quickly. My heart was racing, still back there under the raining arrows, still in desperate flight, and not on a quiet deserted riverbank with waterbugs jumping over the ripples we’d made, mud staining my skirts. I’d been so long inside the castle, people and stone walls everywhere. The riverbank almost didn’t seem real.

Stashek sat down in a heap next to me, his small serious face bewildered, and Marisha crept over to him and huddled against him. He put an arm around her. Kasia sat down on their other side. I could gladly have lain down and slept for a day, a week. But Marek knew which way we’d gone. Solya would send eyes down the river to look for us. There was no time to rest.