Uprooted(88)

Footsteps came running across the floor to me, and Kasia was at my side. “Nieshka, are you all right?”

The shouting was from the next room: Marek, standing fists clenched in the middle of the floor and roaring at the Willow, who stood ramrod-stiff and white with anger. Neither of them paid much attention to my falling in through the door; they were too busy being furious at each other.

“Look at her!” Marek flung an arm out at the queen. She still sat by the same window as before, listless and unmoved. If she heard the shouting, she didn’t so much as flinch. “Three days without a word from her lips, and you call yourself a healer? What use are you?”

“None, evidently,” the Willow said icily. “All I have done is everything that could be done, as well as it could be done.” She did take notice of me then, finally: she turned and looked down her nose at me on the floor. “I understand this is the miracle-worker of the kingdom. Perhaps you can spare her from your bed long enough to do better. Until then, tend her yourself. I am not going to stand here to be howled at for my efforts.”

She marched past me, twitching her skirts to one side so they wouldn’t even brush up against mine, as if she didn’t care to be contaminated. The bar lifted itself at a flick of her hand. She swept out, and the heavy iron door clanged shut behind her, scraping on the stone like an axe-blade coming down.

Marek turned on me, his temper still unspent. “And you! You’re meant to be the foremost witness, and you’re wandering the castle looking like a kitchen slut. Do you think anyone is going to believe a word out of your mouth? Three days since I got you on the list—”

“You got me!” I said indignantly, wobbling up to my feet with the support of Kasia’s arm.

“—and all you’ve done is persuade the entire court you’re a useless bumpkin! Now this? Where is Solya? He was supposed to be showing you how to go on.”

“I don’t want to go on,” I said. “I don’t care what any of these people think of me. What they think doesn’t matter!”

“Of course it matters!” He seized me by the arm and dragged me out of Kasia’s hands. I stumbled with him, trying to gather together a spell to knock him away, but he pulled me to the window-sill and pointed down to the castle courtyard. I paused and looked down, puzzled. There didn’t seem to be anything alarming happening. The red-sashed ambassador was just going into the building with Crown Prince Sigmund.

“That man with my brother is an envoy from Mondria,” Marek said, low and savage. “Their prince consort died last winter: the princess will be out of mourning in six months. Now do you understand?”

“No,” I said, baffled.

“She wants to be queen of Polnya!” Marek shouted.

“But the queen’s not dead,” Kasia said, and then we understood.

I stared at Marek, cold, horrified. “But the king—” I blurted. “He loved—” I stopped.

“He’s putting the trial off to buy time, do you understand?” Marek said. “Once memories of the rescue have faded, he’ll get the nobility to look the other way, and then he can put her quietly to death. Now are you going to help me, or do you want to keep blundering around the castle until the snow flies and they burn her—and your beloved friend here—once it’s too cold for anyone to come out and watch?”

I curled my fingers tight around Kasia’s stiff hand, as if I could protect her that way. It felt too cruel and hollow to imagine: that we could have won Queen Hanna free, brought her out of the Wood, all so the king could cut off her head and marry someone else. Just to add a principality to the map of Polnya, another jewel to his crown. “But he loved her,” I said again, a protest I couldn’t help making—stupidly I suppose. Yet that story, the story of the lost beloved queen, made more sense to me than the one Marek was telling me.

“And you think that would make him forgive being made a fool?” Marek said. “His beautiful wife, who ran away from him with a Rosyan boy who sang her charming songs in the garden. That’s what they said of her, until I was old enough to kill men for saying it. They told me not to even mention her name to him, when I was a boy.”

He was staring down at Queen Hanna in her chair, where she sat blank as waiting paper. In his face, I could see him as he’d been, a child hiding in his mother’s deserted garden to escape that same crowd of poisonous courtiers—all of them smirking and whispering about her, shaking their heads and pretending at sorrow while they gossiped that they’d known it all along.

“And you think we can save her and Kasia by dancing to their music?” I said.

He lifted his gaze from the queen and looked at me. For the first time ever, I think he really listened to me. His chest rose and fell, three times. “No,” he said finally, agreeing. “They’re all just vultures, and he’s the lion. They’ll shake their heads and agree it’s a shame, and pick at the bones he throws them. Can you force my father to pardon her?” he demanded, as easily as if he wasn’t asking me to ensorcell the king, and take someone’s will away from them, as dreadful as the Wood.

“No!” I said, appalled. I looked at Kasia. She stood with a hand resting on the back of the queen’s chair, straight and golden and steady, and she shook her head to me. She wouldn’t ask that of me. She wouldn’t even ask me to run away with her, to abandon our people to the Wood—even if it meant the king would murder her, just so he could kill the queen, too. I swallowed. “No,” I said again. “I won’t do that.”