Uprooted(12)

I’d been making a desperate effort to keep myself tidy so I could at least avoid the first spell. Today I had only acquired a few small smudges making breakfast, and one streak of oil. I held a fold of my dress shut around that. But he was looking at me with distaste anyway, and when I followed the line of his gaze I saw to my dismay that while I had been hiding in the back of the kitchens, I had evidently picked up a cobweb—the one cobweb in all the tower, I suppose—which was now trailing from the back of my skirt like a thin ragged veil.

“Vanastalem,” I repeated with him, dully resigned, and watched a riotously beautiful wave of orange and yellow silk come sweeping up from the floor to surround me, like leaves blown down an autumn path. I swayed, breathing heavily, as he sat down again.

“Now then,” he said. He had set a stack of books upon the table, and with a shove he toppled them over into a loose and scattered heap. “To order them: darendetal.”

He waved his hand at the table. “Darendetal,” I mumbled along with him, and the spell came strangling out of my throat. The books on the table shuddered, and one after another lifted and spun into place like unnatural jeweled birds in their bindings of red and yellow and blue and brown.

This time, I didn’t sink to the floor: I only gripped the edge of the table with both hands and leaned against it. He was frowning at the stack. “What idiocy is this?” he demanded. “There’s no order here—look at this.”

I looked at the books. They were piled into a single stack neatly enough, with like colors next to each other—

“—color?” he said, his voice rising. “By color? You—” He was as furious with me as if it had been my fault. Maybe it did something to his magic, when he pulled strength from me to fuel it? “Oh, get out!” he snarled, and I hurried away full of resentful secret delight: oh, I was glad if I was spoiling his magic somehow.

I had to stop halfway up the stairs to catch my breath inside the stays, but when I did, I realized abruptly that I wasn’t crawling. I was still tired, but the fog hadn’t descended. I even managed to climb the rest of the way to the top of the stairs without another pause, and though I fell onto my bed and drowsed away half of the day, at least I didn’t feel like a mindless husk.

The fog lifted more and more as the next few weeks passed, as though practice was making me stronger, better able to bear whatever he was doing to me. The sessions began little by little to be—not pleasant, but not terrifying; only a tiresome chore, like having to scrub pots in cold water. I could sleep at night again, and my spirit began to recover, too. Every day I felt better, and every day more angry.

I couldn’t get back into the ridiculous gowns in any kind of reasonable way—I’d tried, but I couldn’t even reach the buttons and laces in the back, and I usually had to burst threads and crumple the skirts even to get out of them. So every night I shoved them into a piled-up heap out of the way, and every morning I would put on another of the homespun ones and try and keep as tidy as I could, and every few days he would lose patience with my untidiness and change that one, too. And now I had reached the last of my homespun gowns.

I held that last gown of plain undyed wool in my hands, feeling like it was a rope I was clinging to, and then in a burst of defiance I left it on my bed, and pulled myself into the green-and-russet gown.

I couldn’t fasten the buttons in back, so I took the long veil from the headdress, wound it twice around my waist and made a knot, just barely good enough to keep the whole thing from falling off me, and marched downstairs to the kitchens. I didn’t even try to keep myself clean this time: I carried the tray up to the library defiantly bespattered with egg and bacon-grease and splotches of tea, my hair in snarls, looking like some sort of mad noblewoman who’d run off to the woods from a ball.

Of course, it didn’t last long. As soon as I resentfully said vanastalem along with him, his magic seized me and shook off my stains, squashed me back into stays, piled my hair back upon my head, and left me once again looking like a doll for some princess to play with.

But I felt happier that morning than I had in weeks, and from then on it became my private defiance. I wanted him to be bitterly annoyed every time he looked at me, and he rewarded me with every incredulous scowl. “How do you do this to yourself?” he asked me, almost marveling, one day when I wandered in with a clump of rice pudding on top of my head—I had accidentally hit a spoon with my elbow and flung some into the air—and a huge red streak of jam going all the way down my front of beautiful cream silk.

The last homespun dress, I kept in my dresser. Every day after he had done with me, I went upstairs. I would wrestle my way out of the ballgown, drag my hair out of the nets and headdresses, scattering jeweled pins on the floor, and then I would put on the soft well-worn letnik and the homespun smock, which I kept washed and clean by hand. And then I went down to the kitchens to make my own bread, and I rested by the warm fireplace while it baked, careless of a few smudges of ash and flour on my skirts.

I began to have enough energy for boredom once again. I didn’t even think of taking another book from the library, though. Instead, I went for a needle, much as I loathed to sew. As long as I was going to be drained to the belly every morning to make dresses, I thought I might as well tear them apart and make something less useless of them: sheets, perhaps, or handkerchiefs.

The mending-basket had stood untouched inside the box in my room: there was nothing in the castle to mend but my own clothes, which until now I had been sullenly glad to leave torn. But when I opened it, I found tucked inside a single scrap of paper, written on with a bit of stubby charcoal: the hand of my friend from the kitchen.