Uprooted(78)

Only the queen paid no attention to it all. They had taken the yoke and chains off her, but she sat no differently, still next thing to a carven figure.

We had to fall into single file to come through the final archway into the inner courtyard of the castle itself. The castle was dizzyingly large, arches rising in three tiers from the ground around me, endless faces leaning over the balconies, smiling down at us. I stared dazzled back up at them, at the embroidered banners in their riot of color everywhere, at the columns and the towers all around. The king himself was standing at the head of a staircase at one side of the courtyard. He wore a mantle of blue clasped at the throat with a great jewel, a red stone in gold with pearls.

The dull roar of cheering was still coming from outside the walls. Inside, the whole court hushed around us like the start of a play. Prince Marek had lifted the queen down from the wagon. He led her forward and up the stairs, courtiers ebbing like a tide before him, and brought her to the king. I found I was holding my own breath.

“Your Majesty,” Marek said, “I restore to you your queen.” The sun was shining brilliantly, and he looked like a warrior saint in his armor and his green cloak, his white tabard. The queen beside him was a tall stiff figure in her plain white shift, her short cloud of golden hair, and her transmuted skin lustrous.

The king looked down at them, his brow drawn. He seemed more worried than jubilant. We were all silent, waiting. At last he drew breath to speak, and only then the queen stirred. She slowly lifted up her head to look him in the face. He stared at her. She blinked her eyes once, and then she sighed a little and sank in on herself as limply as a sack: Prince Marek had to drag her forward by the arm he held and catch her, or she would have fallen down the stairs.

The king let out his breath, and his shoulders straightened a little as if let off a string, relaxing. His voice carried strongly across the courtyard. “Take her to the Grey Rooms, and let the Willow be sent for.” Servants were already swooping in. They carried her away from us and into the castle as if on a wave.

And just like that—the play was ended. The noise inside the courtyard climbed back up to a roar to match the crowd outside, everyone talking to everyone else, across all three stories of the courtyard. The bright heady feeling ran out of me like I’d been unstoppered and turned over. Too late I remembered I wasn’t here for a triumph. Kasia sat in the wagon in her white prisoner’s shift, alone, condemned; Sarkan was a hundred leagues away, trying to hold the Wood off from Zatochek without me; and I had no idea how I was going to fix either of those things.

I shook my feet out of my stirrups, heaved my leg over, and slithered to the ground inelegantly. My legs wobbled when I put my weight on them. A groom came for my horse. I let him take her away, a little reluctantly: she wasn’t a good horse, but she was a familiar rock in this ocean of strangeness. Prince Marek and the Falcon were going into the castle along with the king. I had already lost sight of Tomasz and Oleg in the crowd, surrounded by others in uniform.

Kasia was climbing out of the back of the wagon, a small company of guards waiting for her. I pushed through the tide of servants and courtiers and got between them and her.

“What are you going to do with her?” I demanded, shrill with worry. I must have looked absurd to them in my dusty ragged peasant clothes, like a sparrow piping at a pack of hunting tomcats; they couldn’t see the magic in my belly, ready to come roaring out of me.

But however insignificant I looked, I was still part of the triumph, of the queen’s rescue, and anyway they weren’t inclined to cruelty. The chief guard, a man with the most enormous mustaches I had ever seen, the tips waxed into stiff curls, said to me kindly enough, “Are you her maid? Don’t fret; we’re to take her to be with the queen herself, in the Grey Tower, with the Willow to look after them. Everything’s to be done right and by the law.”

That wasn’t much comfort: by the law, Kasia and the queen should both have been put to death at once. But Kasia whispered, “It’s all right, Nieshka.” It wasn’t, but there wasn’t anything else to do. The guards put her among them, four men before and four men after, and marched her away into the palace.

I stared after them hollowly for a moment, and then I realized I’d never find her again in this enormous place if I didn’t see where they took her. I jumped and darted after them. “Here, now,” a door guard said to me as I tried to follow them inside, but I told him, “Param param,” humming it like the song about the tiny fly that no one could catch, and he blinked and I was past him.

I trailed after the guards like a dangling thread, keeping my hum going to tell everyone I passed that I was too small to notice, nothing important. It wasn’t hard. I felt as small and insignificant as could be imagined. The corridor went on and on. There were doors everywhere, heavy wood and hung with iron. Servants and courtiers bustled in and out of enormous rooms hung with tapestries, full of carven furniture and stone fireplaces bigger than my front door. Glittering lamps full of magic hung from the ceilings, and in the hallways, racks of tall white candles stood, burning without melting.

Finally the corridor ended in a small iron door, guarded again. The guards nodded to Kasia’s escort, and let them and rag-tag me through into a narrow circling stairway, their eyes sliding over me. We climbed and climbed, my tired legs struggling to push me up each step, until at last we came crowding onto a small round landing. It was dim and smoky: there wasn’t any window, and only an ordinary oil lamp stood set in a rough niche in the wall. It shone on the dull grey of another heavy iron door, a big round knocker upon it shaped like the head of a hungry imp, the knocker’s ring held in its wide open mouth. A strange chill came off the iron, a cold wind lapping at my skin, even though I was pressed up against the wall in the corner behind the tall guards.