Uprooted (43 page)

Two heavy bolts flew into its side with solid, meaty thumps: it twisted, snarling. Behind it, Marek threw aside a crossbow; a terrified gawky young equerry at his side had pulled a spear down off the wall for him and was clutching it, gaping at the monster; he barely remembered to let go as Marek snatched it out of his hands. “Go raise the guard!” he shouted at the boy, who flinched and ran. Marek jabbed the spear at the monster’s head.

The doors to a chamber hung crazily open behind him, white and black flagstones splattered with blood and three men sprawled dead, nobles in slashed clothes. The white, frightened face of an old man stared out from beneath the table in the room: the palace secretary. Two palace guards lay dead farther back along the hallway, as if the monster had come bounding from deeper inside the castle and had smashed open the doors to get at the men inside.

Or perhaps to get at one man, in particular: it snarled at the poking spear, but then it turned away from Marek; it swung its heavy head around, teeth baring, deliberate, towards Solya. He was staring at the ceiling still, his eyes dazed, his fingers slowly scrabbling over the stone floor as though trying to find a grip on the world.

Before the thing could pounce, Kasia flung herself past me in one enormous leap down the stairs, stumbling and thudding into the wall and righting herself. She grabbed another spear off the wall and pushed it into the beast’s face. The dog-thing snapped at the spear’s haft, then bellowed: Marek had sunk his spear into its flanks. There were boots, shouts coming, more guards running and the cathedral bells ringing suddenly in warning; the page had raised the alarm.

I saw all of those things, and could say afterwards that they happened, but I didn’t feel them happening in the moment. There was only the hot stinking breath of the monster coming up the staircase, and blood, and my heart jumping; and knowing I had to do something. The beast howled and turned back to Kasia and Solya, and I stood up on the stairs. The bells were ringing and ringing. I heard them above my head, where a high window looked out from the stairwell onto a narrow slice of sky, the bright pearl-grey haze of a cloudy summer day.

I stretched up my hand and called,
“Kalmoz!”
Outside the clouds squeezed together into a dark knot like a sponge, a cloudburst that blew water in spattering on me, and a bolt of lightning cracked in through the window and jumped into my hands like a bright hissing snake. I clutched it, blinded, white light and a high singing whine all around me; I couldn’t breathe. I flung it down the stairs towards the beast. Thunder roared around me and I went flying back, sprawling painfully across the landing, smoke and a bitter sharp smell crackling.

I lay flat, shaking all over, tears running out of my eyes. My hands were stinging and painful, and smoke was coming off them like morning fog. I couldn’t hear anything. When my eyes cleared, the two maids were bending over me, terrified, their mouths moving soundlessly. Their hands spoke for them, gentle, helping me up. I staggered up to my feet. At the foot of the stairs, Marek and three guards were at the monster’s head, prodding it warily. It lay smoking and still, a blasted outline charred black against the walls around its body. “Put a spear in its eye to be sure,” Marek said, and one of the guards thrust his in deep into the one round eye, already milky. The body didn’t twitch.

I limped down the stairs, one hand on the wall, and sank shakily down on the steps above its head. Kasia was helping Solya to his feet; he put the back of his hand to his face and wiped away the maze of blood over his mouth, panting, staring down at the beast.

“What the hell is that thing?” Marek demanded. It looked even more unnatural, dead: limbs that didn’t fit with one another hanging askew from the body, as if some mad seamstress had sewn together bits of different dolls.

I stared at it from above, the dog-muzzle shape, the sprawled loose legs, the thick serpent’s body, and a memory slowly crept in, a picture I’d seen yesterday, out of the corner of my eye, trying not to read. “A tsoglav,” I said. I stood up again, too fast, and had to catch myself on the wall. “It’s a tsoglav.”

“What?” Solya said, looking up at me. “What is a—”

“It’s from the bestiary!” I said. “We have to find Father Ballo—” I stopped and looked at the beast, the one last filmy staring eye, and suddenly I knew we weren’t going to find him. “We have to find the book,” I whispered.

I was swaying and sick. I scrambled and half-fell over the body getting into the hall. Marek caught my arm and held me up, and with the guards holding spears ready we went down to the Charovnikov. The great wooden doors were hanging askew over the opening, splintered, bloodstained. Marek tipped me against the wall like a wobbly ladder, then jerked a head to one of the guardsmen: together they seized one of the heavy broken doors and lifted it out of the way.

The library was a ruin, lamps broken, tables overturned and smashed, only a few dim lights shining. Bookcases lay toppled over on heaps of the volumes they had held, disemboweled. In the center of the room, the massive stone table had cracked down the middle both ways and fallen in on itself. The bestiary lay open in the very center atop stone dust and rubble, one last lamp shining down on the unmarred pages. There were three bodies scattered on the floor around it, broken and discarded, mostly lost in the shadows, but next to me Marek went deeply and utterly still; halted.

And then he sprang forward, shouting, “Send for the Willow! Send for—” sliding to his knees next to the farthest body; he stopped as he turned it over and the light fell on the man’s face: on the king’s face.

The king was dead.

Chapter 23

T
here were people everywhere shouting: guards, servants, ministers, physicians, all crowding around the body of the king as close as they could get. Marek had set the three guards to watch him and vanished. I was pushed up to the side of the room like flotsam on the tide, my eyes closing as I sagged against a bookcase. Kasia pushed through to my side. “Nieshka, what should I do?” she asked me, helping me to sit on a footstool.

I said, “Go and get Alosha,” instinctively wanting someone who would know what to do.

It was a lucky impulse. One of Ballo’s assistants had survived: he’d fled and pulled himself up into the stone chimney of the library’s great fireplace to escape. A guard noticed the claw marks on the hearth and the ashes of the fire all raked out over the floor, and they found him still up there, shaking and terrified. They brought him out and gave him a drink, and then he stood up and pointed at me and blurted, “It was her! She was the one who found it!”

I was dizzy and ill and still shaking with thunder. They all began shouting at me. I tried to tell them about the book, how it had been hiding in the library all this time; but they wanted someone to blame more than they wanted someone to explain. The smell of pine needles came into my nostrils. Two guards seized me by the arms, and I think they would have dragged me to the dungeons in a moment, or worse: someone said, “She’s a witch! If we let her get her strength back again—”

Alosha made them stop: she came into the room and clapped her hands three times, each clap making a noise like a whole troop of men stamping. Everyone quieted long enough to listen to her. “Put her down in that chair and stop behaving like fools,” she said. “Take hold of Jakub instead. He was here in the middle of it. Didn’t any of you have the wits to suspect he’d been touched with corruption, too?”

She had authority: they all knew her, especially the guards, who went as stiff and formal as if she were a general. They let go of me and caught poor protesting Jakub instead; they dragged him up to Alosha still bleating, “But she did! Father Ballo said she found the book—”

“Be quiet,” Alosha said, taking out her dagger. “Hold his wrist,” she told one of the guards, and had them pin the apprentice’s arm to a table by the wrist, palm up. She muttered a spell over it and nicked his elbow, then held the blade beside the bleeding cut. He squirmed and struggled in their grip, moaning, and then thin black wisps of smoke came seeping out with the blood, and rose to catch on the glowing blade. She rotated the dagger slowly, collecting up the wisps like thread on a bobbin until the smoke stopped coming. Alosha held the dagger up and looked at it with narrowed eyes, said,
“Hulvad elolveta,”
and blew on it three times: the blade grew brighter and brighter with every breath, glowing hot, and the smoke burned off with a smell of sulfur.

The room had emptied considerably by the time she was done, and everyone left had backed away to the walls, except the pale unhappy guards still holding the apprentice. “All right, give him some bandages. Stop shouting, Jakub,” she said. “I was there when she found it, you idiot: the book was here in our own library for years, lurking like a rotting apple. Ballo was going to purge it. What happened?”

Jakub didn’t know: he’d been sent to fetch supplies. The king hadn’t been there when he’d left; when he’d come back, carrying more salt and herbs, the king and his guards had been standing by the podium with blank faces, and Ballo was reading the book aloud, already changing: clawed legs coming from beneath his robe, and two more sprouting from his sides, tearing their way out, his face lengthening into a snout, the words still coming even as they garbled and choked in his throat—

Jakub’s voice rose higher and higher as he spoke, until it broke and stopped. His hands were shaking.

Alosha poured more nalevka into a glass for him to drink. “It’s stronger than we thought,” she said. “We have to burn it at once.”

I struggled up off my footstool, but Alosha shook her head at me. “You’re overspent. Go sit on the hearth, and keep watch on me: don’t try to do anything unless you see it’s taking me.”

The book still lay placidly on the floor between the shattered pieces of the stone table, illuminated and innocent. Alosha took a pair of gauntlets from one of the guards and picked it up. She took it to the hearth and called fire:
“Polzhyt, polzhyt mollin, polzhyt talo,”
and on further from there, a long incantation, and the dull ashes in the hearth roared up like the blaze of her forge. The fire licked at the pages and gummed them, but the book only flung itself open in the fire and its pages ruffled like flags in a high wind, snapping, pictures of beasts trying to catch the eye, illuminated with firelight behind them.

“Get back!” Alosha said sharply to the guards: a few of them had been about to take a step closer, their eyes vague and caught. She reflected firelight into their faces from the flat of her dagger, and they blinked and then startled back, pale and afraid.

Alosha watched with a wary eye until they moved farther away, then turned back and kept chanting her fire spell, over and over, her arms spread wide to hold the fire in. But the book still hissed and spat on the hearth like wet green wood, refusing to catch; the fresh smell of spring leaves crept into the room, and I could see veins standing out on Alosha’s neck, strain showing in her face. She had her eyes fixed on the mantelpiece, but they kept drifting downwards towards the glowing pages. Each time, she pressed her thumb against the edge of her dagger. Blood dripped. She lifted her gaze back up.

Her voice was going hoarse. A handful of orange sparks landed on the carpet and smoldered. Sitting tired on the footstool, I looked at them and slowly I began to hum the old song about the spark on the hearth, telling its long stories:
Once there was a golden princess, loved a simple player; the king gave them a splendid wedding, and the story ends there! Once there was old Baba Jaga, house made out of butter; and in that house so many wonders—tsk! The spark is gone now.
Gone, taking the story with it. I sang it once through softly and said, “
Kikra, kikra,
” and then sang it again. The flying sparks began to drop onto the pages like rain, each one darkening a tiny spot before they went out. They fell in glowing showers, and when they fell in clusters, thin plumes of smoke went up.

Alosha slowed and stopped. The fire was catching at last. The pages were curling in on themselves at the edges like small animals huddling to die, with a burnt-sugar smell of sap in the fire. Kasia took my arm gently, and we backed away from the fire while it slowly ate the book up like someone forcing herself to eat stale bread.

“How did this bestiary come to your hands?” one minister bellowed at me, seconded by half a dozen more. “Why was the king there?” The council chamber was full of nobles shouting at me, at Alosha, at one another, afraid, demanding answers that weren’t to be had. Half of them still suspected me of having set a trap for the king, and talked of throwing me in the dungeon; some others decided, on no evidence at all, that shivering Jakub was a Rosyan agent who’d lured the king to the library and tricked Father Ballo into reading the book. He began to weep and make protests, but I didn’t have the strength to defend myself against them. My mouth stretched into an involuntary yawn instead, and made them angrier.

I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t think. My hands were still stinging with lightning and my nose was full of smoke, of burning paper. None of it seemed real to me yet. The king dead, Father Ballo dead. I had seen them barely an hour ago, walking away from the war-conference, whole and healthy. I remembered the moment, too vividly: the small worried crease in Father Ballo’s forehead; the king’s blue boots.