Uprooted(82)

“Well, this has been a waste of time,” Ragostok said. He hadn’t any right to complain about that, though: he hadn’t stopped working once, and by now his jeweled piece had become a tall circlet with a large socket in the middle waiting for a larger gemstone. It hummed faintly with trapped sorcery. “Pushing out a handful of cantrips isn’t enough magic to make her worthy of the list, now or ever. Alosha had it right in the first place, what’s happened to Sarkan.” He eyed me up and down. “Without much excuse, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

I was mortified, and angry, and afraid even more than angry: for all I knew, the trial might start in the morning. I dragged in a breath against the hard whalebone grip of the corsets, pushed back my chair and stood, and under my skirts I stamped my foot on the ground and said, “Fulmia.” My heel came down jarring against the stone, a blow that rang through me and back out on a wave of magic. All around us the castle shuddered like a sleeping giant, a tremor that made the hanging jewels on the lamp above our heads chime softly against one another, and brought books thumping down off the shelves.

Ragostok had jerked up to his feet, his chair going over, his circlet clattering out of his hands onto the table. Father Ballo stared around at the corners of the room with startled blinking confusion before he transferred his astonishment to me, as if surely there had to be some other explanation. I stood panting with my hands clenched at my sides, still ringing head-to-foot, and said, “Is that magic enough to put me on the list? Or do you want to see more?”

They stared at me, and in the silence I heard shouts outside in the courtyard, running feet. The guards were looking in with their hands on their sword-hilts, and I realized I’d just shaken the king’s castle, in the king’s city, and shouted at the highest wizards of the land.

They did, after all, put me on the list. The king had demanded an explanation for the earthquake, and been told it was my fault; after that, they couldn’t very well also say I wasn’t much of a witch. But they weren’t very happy about it. Ragostok seemed to have taken offense enough to build a grudge on, which I thought was unreasonable: he’d been the one insulting me. Alosha regarded me with even more suspicion, as if she imagined I’d been hiding my power for some devious reason, and Father Ballo just disliked having to admit me on the grounds of my being outside his experience. He wasn’t unkind, but he had all Sarkan’s obsessive hunger for explanation, with none of his willingness to bend. If Ballo couldn’t find it in a book, that meant it couldn’t be so, and if he found it in three books, that meant it was the unvarnished truth. Only the Falcon smiled at me, with that irritating air of secret amusement, and I could have done very well without his smiles.

I had to face them in the library again the very next morning for the naming ceremony. With the four of them around me I felt lonelier than in those early days in the Dragon’s tower, cut away from everything I’d known. It was worse than being alone to feel that none of them were my friend, or even wished me anything good at all. If I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, they would have been relieved, or at least not distressed. But I was determined not to care: the only thing that really mattered was being able to speak in Kasia’s defense. I knew by now that no one else here would give her a moment’s thought: she didn’t matter.

The naming itself seemed more like another test than a ceremony. They set me at a worktable and put out a bowl of water, three bowls of different powders in red and yellow and blue, a candle, and an iron bell inscribed around in letters of gold. Father Ballo placed the naming spell on a sheet of parchment in front of me: the incantation was nine long tangled words, with detailed annotations that gave precise instructions on the pronunciation of every syllable, and how one ought to stress each word.

I muttered it over to myself, trying to feel out the important syllables, but they sat inert on my tongue: it just didn’t want to come apart. “Well?” Ragostok said, impatiently.

I slogged my awkward tongue-twisted way through the entire incantation and started to put the powder in the water, a pinch here and there. The magic of the spell gathered sluggish and reluctant. I made a brownish mess of the water, spilled some of all three kinds of powder on my skirts, and finally gave up trying to make anything better. I lit the powder, squinted through the cloud of smoke, and groped for the bell.

Then I let the magic go, and the bell clanged in my hand: a long deep note that came strangely out of so small a bell; it sounded like the great church bell in the cathedral that rang matins every morning over the city, a sound that filled the room. The metal hummed beneath my fingers as I put it down and looked around expectantly; but the name didn’t write itself on the parchment, or appear in letters of flame, or anywhere at all.

The wizards were all looking annoyed, although for once not at me; Father Ballo said to Alosha in some irritation, “Was that meant for a joke?”

She was frowning; she reached out to the bell and picked it up and turned it over: there wasn’t a clapper inside it at all. They all stared into it, and I stared at them. “Where will the name come from?” I asked.

“The bell should have sounded it,” Alosha said shortly. She put it down; it clanged again softly, an echo of that deep note, and she glared at it.

No one knew what to do with me, after that. After they all stood in silence for a moment while Father Ballo made noises about the irregularity, the Falcon—he still seemed determined to be amused by everything to do with me—said lightly, “Perhaps our new witch should choose a name for herself.”