Uprooted(17)

He spoke disdainfully, but he’d certainly been angry enough when he came storming into the room. “Why would he want to insult you?” I timidly asked. “Didn’t he come to—to ask you for some magic?”

“No, he came to enjoy the view of the Wood,” the Dragon said. “Of course he came for magic, and I sent him about his business, which is hacking at enemy knights and not meddling in things he scarcely understands.” He snorted. “He’s begun to believe his own troubadours: he wanted to try and get back the queen.”

“But the queen is dead,” I said, confused. That had been the start of the wars. Crown Prince Vasily of Rosya had come to visit Polnya on an embassy, nearly twenty years ago now. He’d fallen in love with Queen Hanna and they’d run away together, and when the king’s soldiers had drawn near on their trail they’d fled into the Wood.

That was the end of the story: no one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves. Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.

The queen and Prince Vasily hadn’t come out at all. The king of Polnya blamed Rosya’s heir for abducting her, the king of Rosya had blamed Polnya for his heir’s death, and since then we’d had one war after another, broken only by occasional truces and a few short-lived treaties.

Here in the valley, we shook our heads over the story; everyone agreed it had all been the Wood’s doing from the start. The queen, with two small children, to run away? To start a war with her own husband? Their own courtship had been famous; there had been a dozen songs of their wedding. My mother had sung me one of them, the parts she remembered; none of the traveling singers would perform them anymore, of course.

The Wood had to be behind it. Perhaps someone had poisoned the two of them with water taken from the river just where it went into the Wood; perhaps some courtier traveling along the mountain pass to Rosya had accidentally spent a night under the dark trees near the edge, and gone back to the court with something else inside him. We knew it was the Wood, but that didn’t make a difference. Queen Hanna was still gone, and she’d gone with the prince of Rosya, and so we were all at war and the Wood crept a little farther into both realms every year, feeding on their deaths and all the deaths since then.

“No,” the Dragon said, “the queen’s not dead. She’s still in the Wood.”

I stared at him. He sounded matter-of-fact, certain, although I’d never heard of anything like it. But it was enough of a horror for me to believe it: to be trapped in the Wood, for twenty years, imprisoned endlessly in some way—it was the kind of thing the Wood would do.

The Dragon shrugged and waved a hand at the prince. “There’s no getting her out again, and he’d only start something worse by going in, but he won’t hear it.” He snorted. “He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero.”

None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.

“In any case,” the Dragon said, “I suppose he does feel aggrieved; lords and princes loathe magic anyway, and all the more for how badly they need it. Yes: some petty revenge of that sort is the most likely.”

I could easily believe it, and I did grasp the Dragon’s point. If the prince had meant to enjoy the Dragon’s companion, whoever that girl might be—I felt a surge of indignation, thinking of Kasia in my place, without even unwanted magic to save her—then he wouldn’t have simply gone to bed. That memory wouldn’t fit neatly into his head, like a wrong puzzle piece.

“However,” the Dragon added, in a tone of mild condescension, as if I were a puppy that had managed not to chew a shoe, “it’s not an entirely useless idea: I ought to be able to alter his memory in the other direction.”

He raised a hand, and, puzzled, I said, “The other direction?”

“I’ll give him a memory of enjoying your favors,” the Dragon said. “Full of suitable enthusiasm on your part and the satisfaction of making a fool of me. I’m sure he won’t have any difficulty swallowing that.”

“What?” I said. “You’ll have him—no! He’ll—he’ll—”

“Do you mean to tell me you care what he thinks of you?” the Dragon demanded, an eyebrow rising.

“If he thinks I’ve lain with him, what’s to stop him from—from wanting it again!” I said.

The Dragon waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll make it an unpleasant memory—all elbows and shrill maidenly giggling, over quickly. Or do you have any better notions?” he added, waspish. “Perhaps you’d rather he woke up remembering you doing your best to murder him?”

So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. I’d been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don’t mean a token of my regard.

But the Dragon hadn’t been wrong to be wary: even with such a comfortable memory written into his head, the prince hesitated on the carriage steps and looked back up at me with a slight frown, as though something troubled him, before at last he ducked inside and allowed himself to be bundled off. I stood at the window watching the dust of his carriage recede along the road until it really and truly vanished behind the hills, and only then did I step away, and feel like I was safe again—an absurd feeling to have, in an enchanted tower with the dark wizard and magic lurking under my own skin.