Uprooted(95)
The royal secretary was almost crouched before Marek, speaking in a tremulous voice, holding a heavy law-book in front of himself as if it could make a shield. I couldn’t blame him for cowering. Marek stood not two paces from him like a figure stepped out of a song: encased in armor of bright, polished steel, with a sword in his hand that could have cut down an ox and a helm under his arm. He stood before the secretary like a figure of avenging justice, shining with violence.
“In cases—in cases of corruption,” the secretary stammered, “the right of trial by combat is not—is expressly revoked, by the law of Boguslav the—” He fell back with a choked sound. Marek had swept the sword up barely inches from his face.
Marek continued the movement, swung the sword around all the room, turning: the breathless crowd drew back from the point. “The queen of Polnya has the right to a champion!” he shouted. “Let any wizard stand forth and show any sign of corruption in her! You there, Falcon,” he said, whirling and pointing up the stairs, and the whole court’s eyes turned towards us, “lay a spell upon her now! Let all the court look and see if there is any spot upon her—” The whole court made a sound together, a sigh that rose and fell, ecstatic: archdukes and serving-maids as one.
I think that was why the king didn’t stop it right away. The crowd on the stairs parted to make way for us, and the Falcon swept forward, his long sleeves trailing down the staircase, and coming to the floor made the king an elegant bow. He had obviously made ready for this moment: he had a large pouch full of something heavy, and he crooked his finger and brought four of the high spell-lamps down from the ceiling, to stand around the queen. And then he opened the pouch and flung a wave of blue sand up into the air over her head, speaking softly.
I couldn’t hear the incantation, but a hot white light came crackling out of his fingers and ran through the falling sand. There was a smell of melting glass, thin wisps of smoke escaping: the sand dissolved away entirely as it came down, and a faintly blue distortion formed in the air instead, so that it seemed I saw the queen and Kasia through a thick pane of glass with mirrors all around them. The spell-lamps’ light shone blazing through the distortion, brightening as it passed through. I could see the bones of Kasia’s hand through her flesh, where it rested on the queen’s shoulder, and the faint outline of her skull and her teeth.
Marek reached out and took the queen’s hand, leading her in a circle on display. The nobles hadn’t seen the archbishop’s trial, Jadwiga’s veil. They stared avidly at the queen in her white gown, her very blood vessels a faint tracework of shining lines inside her, everything glowing; her eyes were lamps and her parted lips breathing a glowing haze: no shadow, no smudge of darkness. The court was murmuring even before the light slowly faded out of her.
The glass shattered apart and fell in a chiming shower, dissolving back into blue wisps of smoke as it reached the ground. “Let her be examined further,” Marek shouted over the rising noise of conversation, almost aglow himself with righteousness. “Call any witness: let the Willow come forth, and the archbishop—”
The room was plainly Marek’s for the moment; even I could see a thousand rumors of murder beginning here if the king refused, if he ordered the queen taken away, and put her to death later. The king saw it, too. He looked around at all his courtiers and then gave a short, hard jerk of his chin to his chest; he sat back in the throne. So Marek had managed to force his father’s hand this far, even without sorcery: whether the king had wanted to call a trial or not, the trial was effectively begun.
But I had seen the king three times, now. I would have called him—not pleasant, exactly; there were too many lines drawn deep in his face, frowning, to imagine him gentle or kind. But if I’d been asked to describe him in a word, I would have said worried. Now I would have said angry, cold as a winter storm, and he was still the one who had to pass judgment in the end.
I wanted to run out and break up the trial, to tell Marek to take it back, but it was too late. The Willow had already stepped forward to testify, pillar-straight in a silver gown. “I have found no corruption, but I will not swear there is none,” she said coolly, speaking directly up to the king and ignoring Marek’s clenched jaw and the scrape of his gauntleted hand upon his sword-hilt. “The queen is not herself. She has spoken not a word, and she shows no signs of recognition. Her flesh is wholly changed. There is nothing left of her mortal sinew or bone. And while flesh may be turned to stone or to metal without carrying corruption, this change has certainly been carried out by a corrupt agency.”
“And yet if her altered flesh carried corruption,” the Falcon broke in, “would you not have expected to observe it beneath my spell?”
The Willow didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge him; he had evidently spoken out of turn. She only inclined her head to the king, who nodded once and moved his fingers in a slight gesture to dismiss her.
The archbishop was just as equivocal. He would only say that he had tried the queen on all the holy relics of the cathedral, not that she wasn’t corrupt. They neither of them cared to be proven wrong afterwards, I imagine.
Only a few other witnesses came forward to speak in the queen’s favor, physicians whom Marek had brought to see her. None of them spoke about Kasia at all. She wasn’t even an afterthought to them, but she would live or die on their words. And the queen stood silent and inert next to her. The glow had faded out now and left her blank-faced, empty, for all the court to see.