Uprooted(112)

“No,” Sarkan said, coming to my side. “Stop. I don’t know how you’ve done any of this, and I imagine I’ll be appalled when I learn, but you’ve been too profligate with your magic for one hour.” He pointed his finger out the window at the tiny huddled heap of Kasia’s body, his eyes narrowing. “Tualidetal,” he said, and clenched his hand into a fist, jerked it quickly back, and pointed his finger to an open place on the floor.

Kasia tumbled out of the air where he pointed and spilled to the floor trailing brown dust. She rolled and got up quickly, staggering only a little; there were some bloody scrapes on her arms, but she’d kept hold of her sword. She took one look at the armed men on the other side of the table and caught Stashek by the shoulder; she pulled him behind her and held the sword out like a bar. “Hush, Marishu,” she said, a quick touch of her hand to Marisha’s cheek, to quiet her; the little girl was trying to reach for her.

The big man had only been staring all this while. He said suddenly, “God in Heaven; Sarkan, that’s the young prince.”

“Yes, I imagine so,” Sarkan said. He sounded resigned. I stared at him, still half-disbelieving he was really there. He was thinner than when I’d seen him last, and almost as disheveled as I was. Soot streaked his cheek and neck, and had left a fine thin layer of grey over all his skin, enough that a line showed at the loose collar of his shirt where it gaped open, to divide clean skin from dirty. He wore a rough long coat of leather hanging open. The edges of the sleeves and the bottom hem were singed black, and the whole length of it patterned with scorch marks. He looked as though he’d come straight from burning the Wood: I wondered wildly if I’d somehow summoned him here, with my spell.

Peering from behind Kasia, Stashek said, “Baron Vladimir?” He hitched Marisha up a little in his arms, protectively, and looked at Sarkan. “Are you the Dragon?” he asked, his high young voice wavering and doubtful, as if thinking he didn’t quite look the part. “Agnieszka brought us here to keep us safe,” he added, even more doubtfully.

“Of course she did,” Sarkan said. He looked out the window. Marek and his men were already riding down the sloping trail, and not alone. The long marching line of the army was coming out of the mountain pass, their feet raising a sunset-golden cloud of dust that rolled down towards Olshanka like a fog.

The Dragon turned back to me. “Well,” he said, caustic, “you’ve certainly brought more men.”





Chapter 26


He must have scraped together every soldier in the south of Polnya,” the Baron of the Yellow Marshes said, studying Marek’s army. He was a big, comfortably barrel-bellied man who wore his armor as easily as cloth. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in our village tavern.

He’d just gotten the summons to come to the capital for the king’s funeral when Marek’s magic-sped messenger had arrived, told him that the crown prince was dead, too, and gave him his orders: to go over the mountains, seize Sarkan as corrupted and a traitor, and lay a trap for me and the children. The baron nodded, gave orders for his soldiers to gather, and waited until the messenger had left. Then he’d brought his men over the pass and gone straight to Sarkan, to tell him there was some kind of corrupt deviltry going on in the capital.

They’d come back to the tower together, and those were his soldiers encamped below; they were hastily putting up fortifications for a defense. “But we can’t hold out for longer than a day, not against that,” the baron said, jerking his thumb out the window at the army pouring down the mountainside. “So you’d better have something up your sleeve. I told my wife to write to Marek that I’d lost my mind and gone corrupted, so I hope he won’t behead her and the children, but I’d as soon keep my own head on, too.”

“Can they break down the doors?” I asked.

“If they try long enough,” Sarkan said. “And the walls, for that matter.” He pointed to a pair of wooden carts trundling down the mountainside, carrying the long iron barrels of cannon. “Enchantment won’t hold against cannon-fire forever.”

He turned away from the window. “You know we’ve already lost,” he said to me bluntly. “Every man we kill, every spell and potion we waste, it all serves the Wood. We could take the children to their mother’s family and marshal a fresh defense in the north, around Gidna—”

He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know, hadn’t known even when I’d come flying home like a bird to its burning nest. “No,” I said.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I know your heart is in this valley. I know you can’t let it go—”

“Because I’m bound to it?” I said, sharply. “Me, and all the other girls you chose?” I’d tumbled into his library with an army at my heels and half a dozen people around us, and there hadn’t been time for conversation, but I still hadn’t forgiven him. I wanted to get him alone and shake him until answers came out, and shake him a little more for good measure. He fell silent, and I forced myself to push aside the hot anger. I knew this wasn’t the time.

“That’s not why,” I said, instead. “The Wood could reach into the king’s castle in Kralia, a week’s journey from here. Do you think there’s anywhere we can take the children that the Wood can’t reach? At least here we have a chance of victory. But if we run, if we let the Wood take back the whole valley, we’ll never raise an army anywhere that can fight all the way through to its heart.”