Uprooted(85)

The footman offered her a hand to step out onto the stairs of the house, but then he went back to his place. She paused on the lower step looking up at me. I asked her doubtfully, “Do you need help?” She didn’t stand as though she had a bad leg, but I couldn’t tell what was beneath her skirts, and I couldn’t imagine any other reason she would have shut herself up into such a bizarre thing.

But she only stared at me, and then two more of the chairs came up behind her, discharging more guests behind her. It was just how they went from place to place. “Do none of you ever walk?” I asked, baffled.

“And how do you keep from getting all over mud?” she said.

We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today’s skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace.

“I don’t,” I said glumly.

That was how I met Lady Alicja of Lidzvar. We walked into the house and were immediately interrupted by our hostess, who appeared in the hall between us, greeted Lady Alicja very perfunctorily, then seized my arms and kissed me on both cheeks. “My dear Lady Agnieszka,” she said, “how lovely that you were able to come, and what a charming gown: you are sure to start a new fashion.” I stared at her beaming face in dismay. Her name had gone completely out of my head. But it didn’t seem to matter. Even while I mumbled something polite and grateful, she twined her perfumed arm around mine and drew me into the sitting-room where her guests were gathered.

She paraded me around to everyone there, while I silently and fervently hated Solya all the more, for being right. Everyone was so very glad to make my acquaintance, everyone was scrupulously polite—at first, anyway. They didn’t ask me for magic. What they did want was gossip about the queen’s rescue. Their manners were too nice to ask questions outright, but each of them said something like, “I’ve heard that there was a chimaera guarding her … ,” letting the words trail off expectantly, inviting me to correct them.

I could have said anything. I could have passed it off in some clever way, or claimed any number of marvels: they were plainly ready to be impressed with me, to let me assume a heroic role. But I recoiled from the memory of that dreadful slaughter all around me, of blood watering the earth into mud. I flinched and blundered, answering with a flat “No” or saying nothing at all, and dropping one conversation after another into an awkward hole of silence. My disappointed hostess finally abandoned me in a corner near a tree—there was an orange tree growing inside the house, in a pot—and went to smooth over the ruffled feathers of her other guests.

It was perfectly clear to me that if there was any good I could have done Kasia here, I’d just done the opposite. I was grimly wondering if I should swallow my reluctance and go find Solya after all when Lady Alicja appeared at my elbow. “I didn’t realize you were the new witch,” she said, taking my arm and leaning in conspiratorially. “Of course you don’t need a sedan chair. Do tell me, do you travel by turning yourself into an enormous bat? Like Baba Jaga—”

I was glad to talk about Jaga, about anything besides the Wood, and even more glad to find someone other than Solya willing to show me how to go on. By the time we finished dinner, I had agreed to go with Lady Alicja to a breakfast and a card party and a dinner the next day. I spent the next two days almost entirely in her company.

I didn’t think us friends, exactly. I wasn’t in a mood to make friends. Every time I trudged back and forth from the castle to yet another party, I had to pass by the barracks of the royal guard, and in the middle of their courtyard stood the stark iron block, scorched and black, where they beheaded the corrupted before they burned their corpses. Alosha’s forge stood nearby, and more often than not her fire was roaring, her silhouette raising showers of orange sparks with a hammer made of shadow.

“The only mercy you can give the corrupted is a sharpened blade,” she had said, when I’d tried to persuade her to at least visit Kasia once herself. I couldn’t help but think maybe she was working on the headman’s axe right then, while I sat in stuffy rooms and ate fish eggs on toast with the crusts cut off, and tea sweetened with sugar, and tried to talk to people I didn’t know.

But I did think Lady Alicja was kind, taking a clumsy peasant girl under her wing. She was only a year or two older than me, but already married to a rich old baron who spent most of his days at card-parties. She seemed to know everyone. I was grateful, and determined to be grateful, and I felt half-guilty for not being better company or understanding the manners of the court. I didn’t know what to say when Lady Alicja insisted on paying me loud and intensely fervent compliments on the excessive lace on my gown, or on the way I mangled the steps of a courtly dance when she persuaded some poor goggle-eyed young nobleman to take me on, much to the dismay of his toes and the amused stares of the room.

I didn’t realize she was mocking me all the time until the third day. We’d planned to meet at an afternoon music party held at the house of a baroness. There was music at all the parties, so I didn’t understand what made this one especially a music party; Alicja had just laughed when I’d asked her. But I dutifully tramped over after lunch, trying my best to hold up my long silver-frost train and balance the matching headdress, a long curved heavy swoop over my head that wanted to fall either backwards or forwards, either way as long as it didn’t stay in place. Coming into the room, I caught the train in the doorway and stumbled, and the headdress went sliding back over my ears.