Uprooted(113)

“Unfortunately,” he said, sharp, “the one we have now is pointing the wrong way.”

“Then we need to persuade Marek to turn it around,” I said.

Kasia and I took the children down to the cellars, the safest place, and we made up a pallet for them of straw and spare blankets from the shelves. The kitchen stores were untouched by time, and we were all hungry enough after our day of running that not even worry could stifle our appetite. I took a rabbit from the cold store in back and put it in a pot with some carrots and dried buckwheat and water and threw lirintalem at it, to make it into something edible. We all wolfed it down together without bothering with bowls, and almost at once the children collapsed into an exhausted sleep, curled together. “I’ll stay with them,” Kasia said, sitting down beside the pallet. She put her sword unsheathed next to her, and rested a hand on Marisha’s sleeping head. I mixed up a simple dough in a big bowl, just flour paste and salt, and I carried it upstairs to the library.

Outside, the soldiers had put up Marek’s tent, a white pavilion with two tall spell-lamps planted in the ground before it. Their blue light gave the white fabric an unearthly glow, as though the whole pavilion had descended straight from Heaven, which I imagine was the idea. The king’s banner was snapping in the wind atop the highest point, the red eagle with its mouth and its talons open, crowned. The sun was sinking. The long shadow of the western mountains was creeping slowly over the valley.

A herald came out and stood between the lamps, official and stark in a white uniform with a heavy golden chain of office around his neck. Another piece of Ragostok’s working: it threw his voice against the tower walls like a blast of righteous trumpets. He was recounting all our crimes: corruption, treason, murdering the king, murdering Princess Malgorzhata, murdering Father Ballo, conspiring with the traitor Alosha, the abduction of Prince Kasimir Stanislav Algirdon and Princess Regelinda Maria Algirdon—it took me a moment to realize they meant Stashek and Marisha—consorting with the enemies of Polnya, and going on from there. I was glad to hear them name Alosha a traitor: maybe that meant she was still alive.

The list finished with a demand for the return of the children and our immediate surrender. Afterwards, the herald paused for breath and to take a drink of water; then he began to recite the gruesome litany all over again. The baron’s men milled uneasily around the base of the tower where they were encamped, and looked up askance towards our windows.

“Yes, Marek seems eminently persuadable,” Sarkan said as he came into the room. Faint smears of oil glistened on his throat and the back of his hand and across his forehead: he had been brewing up potions of sleep and forgetfulness in his laboratory. “What do you mean to do with that? I doubt Marek is going to eat a poisoned loaf of bread, if that was your notion.”

I turned my dough out onto the smooth marble top of the long table. I had the vague thought of the oxen in my head, the way I’d cobbled them together; they’d crumbled, but they’d only been made of mud. “Do you have any sand?” I asked. “And maybe some small pieces of iron?”

I kneaded iron shavings and sand into my dough while the herald chanted on outside. Sarkan sat across from me, his pen scratching out a long incantation of illusion and dismay put together from his books. An hourglass streamed sand between us, marking time while his potions brewed. A few unhappy soldiers from the baron were waiting for him while he worked, shifting from foot to foot uneasily in the corner of the room. He put down his pen just as the last few grains of sand spilled, precisely timed. “All right, come with me,” he told them, and took them along to the laboratory, to give them the flasks to carry downstairs.

But I hummed my mother’s baking songs while I worked, folding and folding in a steady rhythm. I thought of Alosha, forging her blade again and again, working a little more magic in each time. When my dough was pliable and smooth, I broke off a piece, rolled it into a tower in my hands, and planted it in the middle, folding up the dough on one side to make the wall of the mountains behind us.

Sarkan came back into the room and scowled down at my work. “A charming model,” he said. “I’m sure the children will be entertained.”

“Come and help me,” I said. I pinched up a wall around the tower out of the soft dough and started to murmur a chant of earth spells over it: fulmedesh, fulmishta, back and forth in a steady rhythm. I built a second wall farther out, then a third; I kept humming softly to them. A groaning sound, like trees in a high wind, came in from outside the window, and the floor trembled faintly beneath us: earth and stone, waking up.

Sarkan watched, frowning a while longer. I felt his eyes on the back of my neck. The memory curled in me of the last time we’d worked together in this room: roses and thorns sprawling furiously everywhere between us. I wanted and didn’t want his help. I wanted to stay angry at him a while longer, but I wanted the connection more; I wanted to touch him, wanted the brilliant crisp bite of his magic in my hands. I kept my head down and kept working.

He turned and went to one of his cabinets; he brought over a small drawer full of chips of stone that looked like the same grey granite as the tower, of varied sizes. He began to gather the chips up and with his long fingers pressed them into the walls I’d built. He recited a spell of repairing as he worked, a spell of mending cracks and patching stone. His magic came running through the clay, vivid and bright where it brushed against mine. He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.