Uprooted(83)

Ragostok said, “I think it more appropriate we choose a name for her.”

I knew better than to let him have any part in picking my name: surely I’d end up as the Piglet or the Earthworm. But it all felt wrong to me, anyway. I’d gone along with the elaborate dance of the thing, but I knew abruptly I didn’t want to change my name for a new one that trailed magic around behind it, any more than I wanted to be in this fancy gown with its long dragging train that picked up dirt from the hallways. I took a deep breath and said, “There’s nothing wrong with the name I already have.”

So I was presented to the court as Agnieszka of Dvernik.

I half-regretted my refusal during the presentation. Ragostok had told me, I think meaning to be nasty, that the ceremony would only be a little thing, and that the king didn’t have much time to spare for such events when they came out of the proper season. It seems ordinarily new wizards were put onto the list in the spring and the fall, at the same time as the new knights. If he was telling the truth, I could only be grateful for it, standing at the end of that great throne room with a long red carpet like the lolling tongue of some monstrous beast stretched out towards me, and crowds of glittering nobility on either side of it, all of them staring at me and whispering to one another behind their voluminous sleeves.

I didn’t feel like my real self at all; I would almost have liked another name on me then, a disguise to go with my clumsy, wide-skirted dress. I set my teeth and picked my way down the endless hall until I came to the dais and knelt at the king’s feet. He still looked weary, as he had in the courtyard when we’d come. The dark gold crown banded his forehead, and it must have been an enormous weight, but it wasn’t that simple kind of tiredness. His face beneath his brown-and-grey beard had lines like Krystyna’s, the lines of someone who couldn’t rest for worrying about the next day.

He put his hands around mine, and I squeaked out the words of the oath of fealty, stumbling over them; he answered me with long and easy practice, took his hands back, and nodded for me to go.

A page began making little beckoning motions at me from the side of the throne, but I realized belatedly that this was the first and just as likely only chance I had to ask the king anything.

“Your Majesty, if you please,” I said, trying hard to ignore the looks of puffing indignation from everyone near enough the throne to hear me, “I don’t know if you read Sarkan’s letter—”

One of the tall strong footmen by the throne almost at once got my arm, bowing to the king with a fixed smile on his face, and tried to tug me away. I planted my feet, muttering a sliver of Jaga’s earth spell, and ignored him. “We have a real chance to destroy the Wood, now,” I said, “but he hasn’t any soldiers, and—yes, I’ll go in a moment!” I hissed at the footman, who’d now got me by both my arms and was trying to rock me off the dais. “I only need to explain—”

“All right, Bartosh, stop breaking your back on her,” the king said. “We can give our newest witch a moment.” He was really looking at me now, for the first time, and sounding faintly amused. “We have indeed read the letter. It could have used a few more lines. Not least about you.” I bit my lip. “What would you ask of your king?”

My mouth trembled on what I really wanted to ask. Let Kasia go! I wanted to cry out. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. That was selfishness: I wanted that for me, for my own heart’s sake, and not for Polnya. I couldn’t ask that of the king, who hadn’t even let his own queen go without facing trial.

I dropped my eyes from his face to the tips of his boots, gold-embossed and just curling from underneath the fur trim of his robes. “Men to fight the Wood,” I whispered. “As many as you can spare, Your Majesty.”

“We cannot easily spare any,” he said. He held up a hand when I drew breath. “However, we will see what can be done. Lord Spytko, look into the matter. Perhaps a company can be sent.” A man hovering by the side of the throne bowed acknowledgment.

I tottered away suffused with relief—the footman eyed me narrowly as I went past him—and through a door behind the dais. It let me into a smaller antechamber, where a royal secretary, a severe older gentleman with an expression of strong disapproval, stiffly asked me to spell my name. I think he had heard some of the scene I’d created outside.

He wrote my name down in an enormous leather-bound tome at the heading of a page. I watched closely to be sure he put it down right, and ignored the disapproval, too glad and grateful to care: the king didn’t seem at all unreasonable. Surely he would pardon Kasia at the trial. I wondered if perhaps we might even ride out with the soldiers, and join Sarkan at Zatochek together to start the battle against the Wood.

“When will the trial begin?” I asked the secretary when he had finished writing my name.

He only gave me an incredulous stare, lifted from the letter he’d already turned his attention to. “I surely cannot say,” he said, and then sent his stare from me to the door leading out of the room, the hint as pointed as a pitchfork.

“But isn’t there—it must start soon?” I tried.

He had already looked back down at his letter. This time he raised his head even more slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I was still there. “It will begin,” he said, with awful enunciated precision, “whenever the king decrees.”