Uprooted (10 page)

Borys had offered to drive me: a kind of guilt I understood without a word. I had been taken—not his girl, not his daughter. She was safe at home, perhaps courting or already betrothed. And I had been taken not four months ago, and here I was already unrecognizable.

“Do you know what’s happened in Dvernik?” I asked him, huddled in the back under a heap of blankets.

“No, no word yet,” he answered over his shoulder. “The beacon-fires were only just lit. The rider will be on the road, if—” He stopped. If there were a rider left to send, he had meant to say. “We’ll meet him halfway, I’d guess,” he finished instead.

With my father’s heavy horses and his big wagon, in summertime, it was a long day’s drive to Dvernik from Olshanka, with a break in the middle. But the midwinter road was packed with snow a foot deep, frozen almost solid with a thin dusting atop, and the weather was clear, the horses shod in hard ice shoes. We flew on through the night, and a few hours before dawn we changed horses at Vyosna village without stopping properly: I didn’t even climb out of the sleigh. They didn’t ask any questions. Borys said only, “We’re on the way to Dvernik,” and they looked at me with interest and curiosity but not the least doubt, and certainly no recognition. As they harnessed the fresh horses, the stableman’s wife came out to me with a fresh meat pie and a cup of hot wine, clutching a thick fur cloak around herself. “Will you warm your hands, my lady?” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, awkwardly, feeling like an imposter and halfway to a thief. I didn’t let it keep me from devouring the pie in ten bites, though, and after that I swallowed the wine mostly because I couldn’t think what else to do with it that wouldn’t be insulting.

It left me light-headed and a little muzzy, the world gone soft and warm and comfortable. I felt a great deal less worried, which meant I had drunk too much, but I was grateful anyway. Borys drove faster, with the fresh horses, and an hour’s drive onward with the sun lightening the sky ahead of us, we saw in the distance a man slogging down the road, on foot. And then we drew closer, and it wasn’t a man at all. It was Kasia, in boy’s clothes and heavy boots. She came straight for us: we were the only ones going towards Dvernik.

She grabbed onto the side of the sleigh, panting, dropped a curtsy, and without a pause said, “It’s in the cattle—it’s taken all the cattle, and if they get their teeth in a man, it takes him, too. We’ve got them mostly penned, we’re holding them, but it’s taking every last man—” and then I had pulled myself forward out of the heap of blankets and reached for her.

“Kasia,” I said, choking, and she stopped. She looked at me, and we stared at each other in perfect silence for a long moment, and then I said, “Quick, hurry and get in, I’ll tell you as we go.”

She climbed in and sat next to me under the pile of sleigh blankets: we made a ridiculously unlikely pair, her in dirty rough homespun, a pig-boy’s clothes, with her long hair stuffed up under a cap and a thick sheepskin jacket, and me in my finery: together we looked like the fairy godmother descending on Masha sweeping cinders from the hearth. But our hands still gripped each other tight, truer than anything else between us, and as the sleigh dashed onwards I blurted out a disjointed set of bits and scraps of the whole story—those early days grubbing miserably, the long fainting weeks when the Dragon had first begun to make me do magic, the lessons since then.

Kasia never let go my hand, and when I at last, haltingly, told her I could do magic, she said, startling the breath out of me, “I should have known,” and I gawked at her. “Strange things always happened to you. You’d go into the forest and come back with fruit out of season, or flowers no one else had ever seen. When we were little, you always used to tell me stories the pines told you, until one day your brother sneered at you for playing make-believe, and you stopped. Even the way your clothes were always such a mess—you couldn’t get so dirty if you tried, and I knew you weren’t trying, you were never trying. I saw a branch reach out and snag your skirt once, really just reach out—”

I flinched away, made a noise of protest, and she stopped. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want her to tell me that the magic had been there all along, and therefore inescapable. “It’s not much good for anything besides keeping me a mess, if that’s what it does,” I said, trying to speak lightly. “I only came because
he’s
gone. Now tell me, what’s happened?”

Kasia told me: the cattle had sickened almost overnight. The first few had borne bite marks as if some strange enormous wolves had set teeth to them, although no wolves had been seen anywhere near, all winter. “They were Jerzy’s. He didn’t put them down right away,” Kasia said soberly. I nodded.

Jerzy should have known better—he should have pulled them out of the herd and cut their throats at once, the moment he saw them wolf-bitten and left among the other animals. No ordinary wolf would have done anything like that. But—he was poor. He had no fields, no trade, nothing but his cows. His wife had come and quietly begged flour of us more than once, and whenever I’d come home from the woods with gleanings enough to spare, my mother would send me to their house with a basket. He had struggled for years to save enough to get a third cow, which would mean an escape from poverty, and only two years ago he had managed it. His wife Krystyna had worn a new red kerchief trimmed in lace at the harvest, and he a red waistcoat, both of them with pride. They’d lost four children before their namings; she was expecting another one. So he hadn’t put the cattle down quickly enough.

“They bit him and they got into the other cattle,” Kasia said. “Now they’ve all gone vicious, and they’re too dangerous to even go near, Nieshka. What are you going to do?”

The Dragon might have known a way to purge the sickness from the cattle. I didn’t. “We’ll have to burn them,” I said. “I hope he’ll make it right, after, but I don’t know anything else to do.” To tell the truth, despite the horror and the waste of it, I was glad, desperately glad. At least this wasn’t fire-breathing monsters or some deadly plague, and I did know
something
I could do. I pulled out the fire-heart potion, and showed Kasia.

No one argued with the idea when we got to Dvernik. Our headwoman Danka was as surprised as Kasia or the men in Olshanka when I came scrambling down from the sleigh, but she had bigger things to worry about.

Every healthy man, and the stronger women, was working in shifts to keep the poor tormented beasts penned up, using pitchforks and torches, slipping on ice and their hands going numb with cold. The rest of our village were trying to keep them from freezing or starving. It was a race whose strength would give out the first, and our village was losing. They had already tried a burning themselves, but it was too cold. The wood hadn’t caught quickly enough before the cattle tore apart the piles. As soon as I told Danka what the potion was, she was nodding and sending everyone not already working around the pen to get ice-picks and shovels, to make a fire-break.

Then she turned to me. “We’ll need your father and brothers to haul in more firewood,” she said bluntly. “They’re at your house: they worked all night. I could send you for them, but it may hurt you and them worse, when you have to go back to the tower after. Do you want to go?”

I swallowed. She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything but yes. Kasia still gripped my hand, and as we ran across the village to my house together, I said, “Will you go in first, and warn them?”

So my mother was already crying when I came through the door. She didn’t see the gown at all, only me, and we were crumpled into a heap of velvet on the floor, hugging each other, when my father and brothers came staggering out of the back rooms, confused with sleep, and found us. We wept all together even while we told each other there was no time for weeping, and through my tears I told my father what we were going to do. He and my brothers went dashing out to hitch up our horses, which had thankfully been safe in their own heavy stable next to the house. I snatched those last few moments and sat at the kitchen table with my mother. She smoothed her hands over my face over and over, her own tears still running. “He hasn’t touched me, Mamusha,” I told her, and didn’t say anything about Prince Marek. “He’s all right.” She didn’t answer, just stroked my hair again.

My father put his head in and said, “We’re ready,” and I had to go. My mother said, “Wait a moment,” and vanished into the bedroom. She came out with a bundle made up, my own clothes and things. “I thought someone from Olshanka might take it to the tower for you,” she said, “in the spring, when they bring him gifts from the festival.” She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go. It did hurt more. It did.

My father went to every house in the village, and my brothers leapt down and robbed every woodshed of every last stick they’d once hauled in, heaving great armloads onto the sled with its tall poles. When it was full, they drove out to the pens, and I saw the poor cattle at last.

They didn’t even look like cows anymore, their bodies swollen and misshapen, horns grown huge and heavy and twisted. Here and there one of them sprouted arrows or even a couple of spears, thrust deep into their bodies and jutting out like horrible spikes. Things that came out of the Wood often couldn’t be killed, except with fire or beheading; wounds only maddened them worse. Many of them had forelegs and chests blackened where they had stamped out the earlier fires. They were lunging against the heavy wooden fence of the pen, swinging their heavy unnatural horns and lowing in their deep voices, a dreadfully ordinary sound. There was a knot of men and women gathered to meet them, a bristling forest of pitchforks and spears and sharpened stakes, prodding the cattle back.

Some women were already hacking at the ground, mostly bare of snow here near the pens, raking away the dead matted grass. Danka was overseeing the work; she waved my father over, our horses whuffling uneasily as they drew nearer and smelled the corruption on the wind. “All right,” she said. “We’ll be ready before noon. We’ll heave wood and hay over, in among them, and then light torches with the potion and throw them in. Save as much of it as you can, in case we have to try a second time,” she added to me. I nodded.

More hands were coming as people were woken from their rest early to help in the final great effort. Everyone knew the cattle would try and stampede out when they were burning: everyone who could hold even a stick took a place in the line to hold them back. Others began to heave over bales of hay into the pen, the bindings broken so they smashed apart as they landed, and my brothers began throwing over the bundles of firewood. I stood anxiously beside Danka, holding the flask and feeling the magic in it swirling and hot beneath my fingers, pulsing as though it knew soon it would be set loose to do its work. Finally Danka was satisfied with the preparations, and held out to me the first bundle to be fired: a long dry log split halfway down the center, twigs and hay stuffed inside the crack and tied around it.

The fire-heart tried to roar up and out of the bottle as soon as I broke the seal: I found I had to hold the stopper in place. The potion fell back sullenly, and I whipped out the stopper and poured a drop—the least, the slightest drop—on the very end of the bundled log. The log went up in flames so quickly that Danka had scarcely a moment to throw it over the fence, hastily, and afterwards turned and thrust her hand into a snowbank, wincing: her fingers were already blistered and red. I was busy jamming the stopper back in, and by the time I looked up, half the pen was engulfed, the cattle bellowing furiously.

We were all taken aback by the ferocity of the magic, though we’d all heard tales of fire-heart—it figured in endless ballads of warfare and siege, and also in the stories of its making, how it required a thousandweight of gold to make a single flask, and had to be brewed in cauldrons made of pure stone, by a wizard of surpassing skill. I carefully hadn’t mentioned to anyone that I didn’t have
permission
to take the potions from the tower: if the Dragon was going to be angry with anyone, I meant for him to be angry with me alone.

But hearing stories about it wasn’t the same as seeing it in front of our faces. We were unprepared, and the sickened cattle were already in a frenzy. Ten of them clumped together and bore down on the back wall, smashing against it heedless of the waiting stakes and prods. And all of us were terrified of being gored or bitten, even of touching them; the Wood’s evil could spread so easily. The handful of defenders fell back, and Danka was shouting furiously as the fence began to give way.

The Dragon had taught me, with endless labor and grim determination, several small spells of mending and fixing and repair, none of which I could cast very well. Desperation made me try: I climbed up onto my father’s empty sled and pointed at the fence and said,
“Paran kivitash farantem, paran paran kivitam!”
I had missed a syllable somewhere, I knew it, but I must have been close enough: the largest bar, splintering, jumped back whole into place and suddenly put out twigs with new leaves, and the old iron cross-braces straightened themselves out.

Old Hanka, who alone had held her ground—“I’m too sour to die,” she said afterwards, by way of dismissing credit for her bravery—had been holding only the stump of a rake, the head of it already broken off and jammed between the horns of one of the oxen. Her stubby stick turned into a long sharpened rod of bright metal, steel, and she jabbed it at once straight into the open bellowing maw of the cow pushing on the fence. The spear pierced through and through and came out the back of the cow’s skull, and the huge beast fell heavily against the fence and sagged dead to the ground, blocking the others from coming at it.