Uprooted (5 page)

My family weren’t either poor or rich; we had seven books in our house. I’d only ever read four of them; I had spent nearly every day of my life more out-of-doors than not, even in winter and rain. But I didn’t have many other choices anymore, so when I brought the dinner tray to the library that afternoon, I looked over at the shelves. Surely there could be no harm in my taking one. The other girls must have taken books, since everyone always said how well read they were when they came out of service.

So I boldly went to a shelf and picked out a book that nearly called out to be touched: it was beautifully bound in a burnished leather the color of wheat that glowed in the candle-light, rich and inviting. Once I’d taken it out, I hesitated: it was bigger and heavier than any of my family’s books, and besides that the cover was engraved with beautiful designs painted in gold. But there was no lock on it, so I carried it away with me up to my room, half-guilty and trying to convince myself I was being foolish for feeling that way.

Then I opened it and felt even more foolish, because I couldn’t understand it at all. Not in the usual way, of not knowing the words, or not knowing what enough of them meant—I
did
understand them all, and everything that I was reading, for the first three pages, and then I paused and wondered, what was the book about? And I couldn’t tell; I had no idea what I’d just read.

I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense—better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I’d always known and just hadn’t ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I’d never understood. I was nodding with satisfaction, going along well, and this time I got to the fifth page before I realized again that I couldn’t have told anyone what was on the first page, or for that matter the page before.

I glared down at the book resentfully, and then I opened it to the first page again and started to read out loud, one word at a time. The words sang like birds out of my mouth, beautiful, melting like sugared fruit. I still couldn’t keep the train of it in my head, but I kept reading, dreamily, until the door smashed open.

I’d stopped barring my door with furniture by then. I was sitting on my bed, which I’d pushed under the window for the light, and the Dragon was directly across the room from me framed in the doorway. I froze in surprise and stopped reading, my mouth hanging open. He was furiously angry: his eyes were glittering and terrible, and he held out a hand and said,
“Tualidetal.”

The book tried to jump out of my hands, to fly across the room to him. I blindly clutched after it from some badly misguided instinct. It wriggled against me, trying to go, but stupidly obstinate I gave it a jerk and managed to yank it back into my arms. He gaped at me and grew even more wildly angry; he stormed across the tiny chamber, while I belatedly tried to scramble up and back, but there was nowhere for me to go. He was on me in an instant, thrusting me flat down against my pillows.

“So,” he said, silkily, his hand pressed down upon my collarbone, pinning me easily to the bed. It felt as though my heart was thumping back and forth between my breastbone and my back, each beat shaking me. He plucked the book away with a hand—at least I wasn’t stupid enough to
keep
trying to hold on to it anymore—and tossed it with an easy flip so it landed upon the small table. “Agnieszka, was it? Agnieszka of Dvernik.”

He seemed to want an answer. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Agnieszka,” he murmured, bending low towards me, and I realized he meant to kiss me. I was terrified, and yet half-wanting him to do it and have it over with, so I wouldn’t have to be so afraid, and then he didn’t at all. He said, bent so close I could see my eyes reflected in his, “Tell me, dear Agnieszka, where are you really from? Did the Falcon send you? Or perhaps even the king himself?”

I stopped staring in terror at his mouth and darted my eyes towards his. “I—what?” I said.

“I
will
find out,” he said. “However skillful your master’s spell, it will have holes in it. Your—
family
—” He sneered the word. “—may think they remember you, but they won’t have all the things of a child’s life. A pair of mittens or a worn-out cap, a collection of broken toys—I won’t find those things in your house, will I?”

“All my toys were broken?” I said helplessly, seizing on the only part of this I even understood at all. “They’re—yes? All my clothes were always worn out, our rag-bag is all them—”

He shoved me hard against the bed and bent low. “Don’t dare lie to me!” he hissed. “I will tear the truth out of your throat—”

His fingers were resting on my neck; his leg was on the bed, between mine. In a great gulp of terror I put my hands on his chest and shoved with all my body against the bed, and heaved us both off it. We fell heavily together to the ground, him beneath me, and I was up like a rabbit scrambling off him and running for the door. I fled for the stairs. I don’t know where I thought I was going: I couldn’t have gotten out the front door, and there was nowhere else to go. But I ran anyway: I scrambled down two flights, and as his steps pursuing me came on, I flung myself into the dim laboratory, with all its hissing fumes and smoke. I crawled away desperately under the tables into a dark corner behind a high cabinet, and pulled my legs in towards me.

I’d closed the door behind me, but that didn’t seem to keep him from knowing where I’d gone. He opened it and looked into the room, and I saw him over the edge of one table, his cold and angry eye between two beakers of glass, his face painted in shades of green by the fires. He came with a steady unhurried step around the table, and as he rounded the end I darted forward scrambling the other way, trying for the door—I had some thought of locking him in. But I jarred the narrow shelf against the wall. One of the stoppered jars struck my back, rolled off, and smashed on the floor at my feet.

Grey smoke billowed up around me and into my nose and mouth, choking me, stilling me. It stung in my eyes, and I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t reach up to rub them, my arms refusing to answer. The coughs caught in my throat and stopped; my whole body froze slowly into place, still in a crouch on the floor. But I didn’t feel afraid anymore, and after a moment not even uncomfortable. I was somehow at once endlessly heavy and weightless, distant. I heard the Dragon’s footsteps very faintly and far-off as he came and stood over me, and I didn’t care what he would do.

He stood there looking down at me with cold impatience. I didn’t try to guess what he would do; I could neither think nor wonder. The world was very grey and still.

“No,” he said after a moment, “—no, you can’t possibly be a spy.”

He turned and left me there, for some time—I couldn’t have told you how long, it could have been an hour or a week or a year, though later I learned it had been only half a day. Then at last he returned, with a displeased set look to his mouth. He held up a small raggedy thing that had once been a piglet, knitted of wool and stuffed with straw, before I had dragged it behind me through the woods for the first seven years of my life. “So,” he said, “no spy. Only a witling.”

Then he laid his hand on my head and said, “
Tezavon tahozh, tezavon tahozh kivi, kanzon lihush
.”

He didn’t so much recite the words as chant them, almost like a song, and as he spoke color and time and breath came back into the world; my head came free and I shied out from under his hand. The stone was slowly fading out of my flesh. My arms came loose, flailing for a grip on anything while my still-stone legs held me locked in place. He caught my wrists, so when I finally came loose all the way I was held by his hand, with no chance of flight.

I didn’t try to run, though. My suddenly free thoughts ran around in a dozen directions, as though they were catching up with lost time, but it seemed to me he might have just left me stone, if he’d wanted to do something terrible to me, and at least he had stopped thinking me some sort of spy. I didn’t understand why he thought anyone would have wanted to spy on him, much less the king; he was the king’s wizard, wasn’t he?

“And now you’ll tell me: what were you doing?” he said. His eyes were still suspicious and cold and glittering.

“I only wanted a book to read,” I said. “I didn’t—I didn’t think there was any harm—”

“And you happened to take
Luthe’s Summoning
off the shelf for a little reading,” he said, cuttingly sarcastic, “and merely by chance—” until perhaps my alarmed and blank look convinced him, and he halted and looked at me with unconcealed irritation. “What an unequaled gift for disaster you have.”

Then he scowled down, and I followed his look to the shards of the glass jar around our feet: he hissed his breath out between his teeth and said abruptly, “Clean that up, and then come to the library. And
don’t
touch anything else.”

He stalked away, leaving me to go hunt out some rags from the kitchens to pick up the glass with, and a bucket: I washed the floor as well, though there wasn’t a trace of anything spilled, as though the magic had burned off like the liquor on a pudding. I kept stopping and lifting my hand up from the stone floor to turn it over front and back, making sure the stone wasn’t creeping back up my fingertips. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had a jar of that on his shelf, and whether he’d ever used it on someone else—someone who had become a statue somewhere, standing with fixed eyes, time eddying past them; I shuddered.

I was very, very careful not to touch anything else in the room.

The book I’d taken was back upon the shelf when at last I girded myself and went into the library. He was pacing, his own book on its small table thrust aside and neglected, and when I came in he scowled at me again. I looked down: my skirt was marked with wet tracks from the mopping, and it had been too short to begin with, barely halfway down my calves. The sleeves of my shift were worse: I’d got some egg on the ends that morning, making his breakfast, and had singed the elbow a little getting the toast off before it burned.

“We’ll begin with
that,
then,” the Dragon said. “I needn’t be offended every time I have to look at you.”

I shut my mouth on apologies: if I began to apologize for being untidy, I’d be apologizing the rest of my life. I could tell from only a few days in the tower that he loved beautiful things. Even his legions of books were none of them exactly alike: their leather bindings in different colors, their clasps and hinges of gold and sometimes even dotted with small chips of jewels. Anything that anyone might rest their eyes on, whether a small blown-glass cup upon the window-sill here in the library, or the painting in my room, was beautiful, and set aside in its own place where it might shine without distractions. I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.

He beckoned me over, impatiently, and I took a wary step towards him; he took my hands and crossed them over my chest, fingertips on each opposite shoulder, and said, “Now:
vanastalem
.”

I stared at him in mute rebellion. The word when he said it rang in my ears just like the other spell he’d used me for. I could feel it wanting to come into my mouth, to drain away my strength.

He caught me by the shoulder, his fingers gripping painfully hard; I felt the heat of each one penetrating through my shirt. “I may have to put up with incompetence; I won’t tolerate spinelessness,” he said.
“Say it
.
”

I remembered being stone; what else could he do to me? I trembled and said, very soft, as if whispering could keep it from taking hold of me,
“Vanastalem
.
”

My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path. I sank to the ground gasping in strangely vast skirts of rustling silk, green and russet brown. They pooled around my waist and swamped my legs, endless. My head bowed forward on my neck under the weight of a curved headdress, a veil spilling down my back, lace picked out with flowers in gold thread. I stared dully at the Dragon’s boots, the tooled leather of them: there were curling vines embossed upon them.

“Look at you, and over a nothing of a spell again,” he said over me, sounding exasperated with his own handiwork. “At least your appearance is improved. See if you can keep yourself in a decent state from now on. Tomorrow, we’ll try another.”

The boots turned and walked away from me. He sat down in his chair, I think, and went back to his reading; I don’t know for certain. After a while I crawled out of the library on my hands and knees, in that beautiful dress, without ever lifting my head.

The next few weeks blurred into one another. Every morning I woke a little before dawn and lay in my bed while my window brightened, trying to think of some way to escape. Every morning, having failed, I carried his breakfast tray to the library, and he cast another spell with me. If I hadn’t been able to keep myself neat enough—usually I hadn’t—he used
vanastalem
upon me first, and then a second spell, too. All my homespun dresses were vanishing one after another, and the unwieldy elaborate dresses dotted my bedroom like small mountains, so heavy with brocade and embroidery that they half stood up without me inside them. I could barely writhe my way out from under the skirts at bedtime, and the awful boned stays beneath them squeezed in my breath.