Uprooted (4 page)

There were stores all over: barrels of apples packed in straw, potatoes and carrots and parsnips in sacks, long ropes of onions braided. On a table in the middle of the room I found a book standing with an unlit candle and an inkstand and a quill, and when I opened it I found a ledger with records of all the stores, written in a strong hand. At the bottom of the first page there was a note written very small; when I lit the candle and bent down to squint I could just make it out:

Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, supper at seven. Leave the meal laid in the library, five minutes before, and you need not see him
—no need to say who—
all the day. Courage!

Priceless advice, and that
Courage!
was like the touch of a friend’s hand. I hugged the book against me, feeling less alone than I had all day. It seemed near midday, and the Dragon hadn’t eaten at our village, so I set about dinner. I was no great cook, but my mother had kept me at it until I could put together a meal, and I did do all the gathering for my family, so I knew how to tell the fresh from the rotten, and when a piece of fruit would be sweet. I’d never had so many stores to work with: there were even drawers of spices that smelled like Midwinter cake, and a whole barrel full of fresh soft grey salt.

At the end of the room there was a strangely cold place, where I found meat hanging up: a whole venison and two great hares; there was a box of straw full of eggs. There was a fresh loaf of bread already baked wrapped in a woven cloth on the hearth, and next to it I discovered a whole pot of rabbit and buckwheat and small peas all together. I tasted it: like something for a feast day, so salty and a little sweet, and meltingly tender; another gift from the anonymous hand in the book.

I didn’t know how to make food like that at all, and I quailed thinking that the Dragon would expect it. But I was desperately grateful to have the pot ready nonetheless. I put it back on the shelf above the fire to warm—I splashed my dress a little as I did—and I put two eggs in a dish in the oven to bake, and found a tray and a bowl and a plate and a spoon. When the rabbit was ready, I set it out on the tray and cut the bread—I had to cut it, because I had torn off the end of the loaf and eaten it myself while I waited for the rabbit to heat up—and put out butter. I even baked an apple, with the spices: my mother had taught me to do that for our Sunday supper in winter, and there were so many ovens I could do that at the same time as everything else cooked. I even felt a little proud of myself, when everything was assembled on the tray together: it looked like a holiday, though a strange one, with just enough for one man.

I took it up the stairs carefully, but too late I realized I didn’t know where the library was. If I’d thought about it a little, I might have reasoned out that it wouldn’t be on the lowest floor, and indeed it wasn’t, but I didn’t find that out until I’d wandered around carrying the tray through an enormous circular hall, the windows draped with curtains and a heavy throne-like chair at the end. There was another door at the far end, but when I opened that I found only the entry hall and the huge doors of the tower, three times the height of my head and barred with a thick slab of wood in iron brackets.

I turned and went back through the hall to the stairs, and up another landing, and here found the marble floor covered in soft furry cloth. I’d never seen a carpet before. That was why I hadn’t heard the Dragon’s footsteps. I crept anxiously down the hall, and peered through the first door. I backed out hastily: the room was full of long tables, strange bottles and bubbling potions and unnatural sparks in colors that came from no fireplace; I didn’t want to spend another moment inside there. But I managed to catch my dress in the door and tear it, even so.

Finally the next door, across the hall, opened on a room full of books: wooden shelves up and up from floor to ceiling crammed with them. It smelled of dust, and there were only a few narrow windows throwing light in. I was so glad to find the library that I didn’t notice at first that the Dragon was there: sitting in a heavy chair with a book laid out on a small table across his thighs, so large each page was the length of my forearm, and a great golden lock hanging from the open cover.

I froze staring at him, feeling betrayed by the advice in the book. I’d somehow assumed that the Dragon would conveniently keep out of the way until I’d had a chance to put down his meal. He hadn’t raised his head to look at me, but instead of just going quietly with the tray to the table in the center of the room, laying it out, and scurrying away, I hung in the doorway and said, “I’ve—I’ve brought dinner,” not wanting to go in unless he told me to.

“Really?” he said, cuttingly. “Without falling into a pit along the way? I’m astonished.” He only then looked up at me and frowned. “Or
did
you fall into a pit?”

I looked down at myself. My skirt had one enormous ugly stain, from the vomit—I’d wiped it off best as I could in the kitchen, but it hadn’t really come out—and another from where I’d blown my nose. There were three or four dripping stains from the stew, and some more spatters from the dish-pan where I’d wiped the pots. The hem was still muddy from this morning, and I’d torn a few other holes in it without even noticing. My mother had braided and coiled my hair that morning and pinned it up, but the coils had slid mostly down off my head and were now a big snarled knot of hair hanging half off my neck.

I hadn’t noticed; it wasn’t anything out of the usual for me, except that I was wearing a nice dress underneath the mess. “I was—I cooked, and I cleaned—” I tried to explain.

“The dirtiest thing in this tower is
you,
” he said—true, but unkind anyway. I flushed and with my head low went to the table. I laid everything out and looked it over, and then I realized sinkingly that with all the time I’d taken wandering around, everything had gone cold, except the butter, which was a softened runny mess in its dish. Even my lovely baked apple was all congealed.

I stared down at it in dismay, trying to decide what to do; should I take it all back down? Or maybe he wouldn’t mind? I turned to look and nearly yelped: he was standing directly behind me peering over my shoulder at the food. “I see why you were afraid I might roast you,” he said, leaning over to lift up a spoonful of the stew, breaking the layer of cooling fat on its top and dumping it back in. “You would make a better meal than this.”

“I’m not a splendid cook, but—” I started, meaning to explain that I wasn’t quite so terrible at it, I’d only not known my way, but he snorted, interrupting me.

“Is there anything you
can
do?” he asked, mockingly.

If only I’d been better trained to serve, if only I’d ever really thought I might be chosen and had been more ready for all of it; if only I’d been a little less miserable and tired, and if only I hadn’t felt a little proud of myself in the kitchen; if only he hadn’t just twitted me for being a rag, the way everyone who loved me did, but with malice instead of affection—if any of those things, and if only I hadn’t run into him on the stairs, and discovered that he
wasn’t
going to fling me into a fire, I would probably have just gone red, and run away.

Instead I flung the tray down on the table in a passion and cried, “Why did you take me, then? Why didn’t you take Kasia?”

I shut my mouth as soon as I’d said it, ashamed of myself and horrified. I was about to open my mouth and take it back in a rush, to tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean he should go take Kasia instead; I would go and make him another tray—

He said impatiently, “Who?”

I gaped at him. “Kasia!” I said. He only looked at me as though I was giving him more evidence of my idiocy, and I forgot my noble intentions in confusion. “You were going to take her! She’s—she’s clever, and brave, and a splendid cook, and—”

He was looking every moment more annoyed. “Yes,” he bit out, interrupting me, “I do recall the girl: neither horse-faced nor a slovenly mess, and I imagine would not be yammering at me this very minute: enough. You village girls are all tedious at the beginning, more or less, but you’re proving a truly remarkable paragon of incompetence.”

“Then you needn’t keep me!” I flared, angry and wounded—
horse-faced
stung.

“Much to my regret,” he said, “that’s where you’re wrong.”

He seized my hand by the wrist and whipped me around: he stood close behind me and stretched my arm out over the food on the table. “
Lirintalem,
” he said, a strange word that ran liquidly off his tongue and rang sharply in my ears. “Say it with me.”

“What?” I said; I’d never heard the word before. But he pressed closer against my back, put his mouth against my ear, and whispered, terrible, “
Say it!
”

I trembled, and wanting only for him to let me go said it with him, “
Lirintalem,
” while he held my hand out over the meal.

The air rippled over the food, horrible to see, like the whole world was a pond that he could throw pebbles in. When it smoothed again, the food was all changed. Where the baked eggs had been, a roast chicken; instead of the bowl of rabbit stew, a heap of tiny new spring beans, though it was seven months past their season; instead of the baked apple, a tartlet full of apples sliced paper-thin, studded with fat raisins and glazed over with honey.

He let go of me. I staggered with the loss of his support, clutching at the edge of the table, my lungs emptied as if someone had sat on my chest; I felt like I’d been squeezed for juice like a lemon. Stars prickled at the edge of my sight, and I leaned over half-fainting. I only distantly saw him looking down at the tray, an odd scowl on his face as though he was at once surprised and annoyed.

“What did you do to me?” I whispered, when I could breathe again.

“Stop whining,” he said dismissively. “It’s nothing more than a cantrip.” Whatever surprise he might have felt had vanished; he flicked his hand at the door as he seated himself at the table before his dinner. “All right, get out. I can see you’ll be wasting inordinate amounts of my time, but I’ve had enough for the day.”

I was glad to obey that, at least. I didn’t try to pick up the tray, only crept slowly out of the library, cradling my hand against my body. I was still stumbling-weak. It took me nearly half an hour to drag myself back up all the stairs to the top floor, and then I went into the little room and shut the door, dragged the dresser before it, and fell onto the bed. If the Dragon came to the door while I slept, I didn’t hear a thing.

Chapter 2

I
didn’t see the Dragon for another four days. I spent them in the kitchen morning until night: I had found a few cookbooks there and was working through every recipe in them one after another, frantically, trying to become the most splendid cook anyone had ever heard of. There was enough food in the larder that I didn’t care what I wasted; if anything was bad, I ate it myself. I followed the advice and got his meals to the library exactly five minutes to the hour, and I covered the dishes and hurried. He was never there again when I came, so I was content, and I heard no complaints from him. There were some homespun clothes in a box in my room, which fit me more or less—my legs were bare from the knee down, my arms from the elbow down, and I had to tie them around my waist, but I was as tidy as I had ever been.

I didn’t want to please him, but I did want to keep him from ever doing that to me again, whatever that spell had been. I’d woken from dreams four times a night, feeling the word
lirintalem
on my lips and tasting it in my mouth as though it belonged there, and his hand burning hot on my arm.

Fear and work weren’t all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn’t see my mother and my father for ten years, that I’d never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon’s girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn’t recognize at the end of it. At least while I was chopping and sweltering away in front of the ovens, I didn’t have to think about any of that.

After a few days, when I realized that he wouldn’t come and use that spell on me at every meal, I stopped my frenzy of cooking. But then I found I had nothing else to do, even when I went looking for work. As large as the tower was, it didn’t need cleaning: no dust had gathered in the corners or the window-sills, not even on the tiny carved vines on the gilt frame.

I still didn’t like the map-painting in my room. Every night I imagined I heard a faint gurgle coming from it, like water running down a gutter, and every day it sat there on the wall in all its excessive glory, trying to make me look at it. After scowling at it, I went downstairs. I emptied out a sack of turnips in the cellar, ripped the seams, and used the cloth to cover it up. My room felt better at once with the gold and splendor of it hidden away.

I spent the rest of that morning looking out the window across the valley again, lonely and sick with longing. It was an ordinary work-day, so there were men in the fields gathering in the harvest and women at the river doing their washing. Even the Wood looked almost comforting to me, in its great wild impenetrable blackness: an unchanged constant. The big herd of sheep that belonged to Radomsko was grazing on the lower slopes of the mountains at the northern end of the valley; they looked like a wandering white cloud. I watched them roam awhile, and had a small weep, but even grief had its limits. By dinner-time I was horribly bored.