Uprooted(62)

Chapter 14


The soldiers were laughing to one another gaily as we left Dvernik in the hush before dawn the next morning. They had armed themselves, and were all very splendid looking in their bright mail, their nodding plumed helms and long green cloaks, their painted shields hung on their saddles. They knew it, too; they marched their horses proudly through the dark lanes, and even the horses held their necks arched. Of course thirty scarves weren’t easily come by out of a small village, so most of the men were wearing thick itchy woolen ones meant for winter, wrapped haphazardly around their necks and faces as the Dragon had ordered. They kept breaking their careful poise and involuntarily reaching beneath to scratch every so often, surreptitiously.

I’d grown up riding my father’s big slow draft horses, who would only look around at me in mild surprise if I stood upside down on their broad backs, and refused to have anything to do with trotting, much less a canter. But Prince Marek had put us on spare horses his knights had brought with them, and they seemed like entirely different animals. When I accidentally tugged on the reins in some wrong way, my horse jumped up onto its hind legs and lashed out its hooves, crow-stepping forward while I clung in alarm to its mane. It came down after some time, for reasons equally impenetrable to me, and pranced along very satisfied with itself. At least until we passed Zatochek.

There wasn’t a single place where the valley road ended. I suppose it had gone on much farther once—on to Porosna, and maybe to some other nameless long-swallowed village beyond it. But before the creak of the mill-house at Zatochek bridge faded behind us, the weeds and grass began to nibble at the edges, and a mile onward we could barely tell that it was still underfoot. The soldiers were still laughing and singing, but the horses were wiser than we were, maybe. Their pace slowed without any signal from their riders. They whuffed nervously and jerked their heads, their ears pricking forward and back and their skin giving nervous shivers as if flies were bothering them. But there were no flies. Up ahead, the wall of dark trees was waiting.

“Pull up here,” the Dragon said, and as if they’d understood him and were glad of the excuse, the horses halted almost at once, all of them. “Get a drink of water and eat something, if you like. Let nothing more pass your lips once we’re beneath the trees.” He swung down from his horse.

I climbed down from my own, very cautiously. “I’ll take her,” one of the soldiers said to me, a blond boy with a friendly round face marred only by a twice-broken nose. He clucked to my mare, cheerful and competent. All the men were taking their horses to drink from the river, and passing around loaves of bread and flasks with liquor in them.

The Dragon beckoned me over. “Put on your protection spell, as thickly as you can,” he said. “And then try to place it on the soldiers, if you can. I’ll lay another on you as well.”

“Will it keep the shadows out of us?” I said doubtfully. “Even inside the Wood?”

“No. But it will slow them down,” he said. “There’s a barn just outside Zatochek: I keep it stocked with purgatives, against a need to go into the Wood. As soon as we’re out again, we’ll go there and dose ourselves. Ten times, no matter how certain you are that you’re clear.”

I looked at the crowd of young soldiers, talking and laughing among themselves as they ate their bread. “Do you have enough for all of them?”

He turned a cold certain look over them like the sweep of a scythe. “For however many of them will be left,” he said.

I shivered. “You still don’t think this is a good idea. Even after Jerzy.” A thin plume of smoke still rose from the Wood, where the heart-tree burned: we’d seen it yesterday.

“It’s a dreadful idea,” the Dragon said. “But letting Marek lead you and Solya in there without me is a still-worse one. At least I have some idea what to expect. Come: we don’t have much time.”

Kasia silently helped me gather bundles of pine needles for my spell. The Falcon was already building an elaborate shield of his own around Prince Marek, like a shining wall of bricks going up one after another, and when he had raised it above Marek’s head, the whole thing glowed as a whole and then collapsed in on him. If I glanced at Marek sideways I could see the faint shimmer of it clinging to his skin. The Falcon put another one on himself. I noticed he didn’t lay it on any of the soldiers, though.

I knelt and made a smudge-fire of my pine needles and branches. When the smoke was filling the clearing, bitter and throat-drying, I looked up at the Dragon. “Cast yours now?” I asked. The Dragon’s spell settling on my shoulders felt like putting on a heavy coat in front of the fireplace: it left me itchy and uncomfortable, and thinking too much about why I was going to need it. I hummed my protection spell along with his chant, imagining that I was bundling up the rest of the way against the heart of winter: not just coat but mittens, woolen scarf, hat with the ear-covers buttoned down, knitted pants over my boots, and veils wrapped over it all, everything tucked snugly in, leaving no cracks for the cold air to wriggle through.

“All of you pull up your scarves,” I said, without looking away from my smoky fire, forgetting a moment that I was talking to grown men, soldiers; and what was odder still was they did what I said. I pushed the smoke out around me, letting it sink into the wool and cotton of their wraps, carrying protection with it.