"Uprooted"

[fiefoe]

I gave up on this one a long time ago because the narrator's clumsy voice -- Sarken's verbal abuse sounds even worse than it reads -- but this time I held my nose. The first half before Nieszka went to court moved swiftly and I would rate it as high as "Spinning Silver", but excitement leaked out of the second half and was replaced by a lot of grimness. That said, I should give Naomi Novik props for writing an honest-to-goodness sex scene in a fantasy novel.

• Everyone says you love a Dragon-born girl differently as she gets older; you can’t help it, knowing you so easily might lose her.
• my mother only sighed a little: what parent could really be sorry, to have a few faults in a Dragon-born girl?
• After a moment, he said, in almost marveling tones, “Are you deranged?” “I thought you were going to throw me in the oven,” I said, still dazed, and then I started to laugh.
• “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 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.”
• 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.
• 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,
• I held that last gown of plain undyed wool in my hands, feeling like it was a rope I was clinging to,
• Power shuddered out of me. Crusted pearls and whalebone closed up beneath his hands like armor, and he jerked his hands off me and stepped back as a wall of velvet skirts fell rustling between us.
• haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he— While he taught me magic.
• Try to degrade it, then.” “What?” I said. “Drop part of the word,” he said. “Slur it, mumble it, something of the sort—” “Just—any part?” I said doubtfully, but tried it: “Vanalem?” The shorter word felt better in my mouth: smaller and more friendly somehow, although perhaps that was just my imagination. The gown shuddered and the skirts deflated all around me
• He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers—“My father’s a woodcutter,” I said—“Of axe-swinging lummocks!” he snarled.
• 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,
• 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,
• 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.
• Stone rolled over his body like a wave, and then it was done, and I was shaking with relief and horror mingled: a statue lay tied down upon the bed, a statue only a madman would have carved, the face twisted with inhuman rage.
• Everything was suddenly growing like a year crammed into a minute, beans and hops and pumpkins sprawling out across the ground and growing absurdly huge. They blocked the way towards us even while the wolves fought and snapped and tore at them.
• We stared up at him, and he glared down at me, stiff and furious, and snarled, “Of all the idiotic things you might have done, you monstrously half-witted lunatic of a girl—” “Look out!” Kasia cried, too late:
• There was only the easy movement of the song, the memory of faces gathered around a table laughing. And then finally the magic flowed, but not the same way as when the Dragon’s spell-lessons dragged it in a rush out of me. Instead it seemed to me the sound of the chanting became a stream made to carry magic along, and I was standing by the water’s edge with a pitcher that never ran dry, pouring a thin silver line into the rushing current.
• He stared at the spell, turned the book to see the spine as if he didn’t quite believe his own eyes, and then he spluttered at me, “You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?”
• He wanted exact syllables and repetitions, he wanted to know how close I had been to his arm, he wanted the number of rosemary twigs and the number of peels. I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong,
• I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.”
• His expression was as sour as milk left out in midsummer. “If anyone could say so when you’ve poured out fifty years’ worth of my most valuable potions in less than a day.
• “But we’re not at war!” I protested. “We will be in the spring,” he said, “if they hear a song of fire-heart and stone-skin and profligacy, and think they might have gained a real advantage.” He paused, and then he added heavily, “Or if they hear a song of a healer strong enough to purge corruption, and think that soon the balance will tip in our favor, instead, when you are trained.”
• Contrary to popular imagination, she is dead, and whatever time-wandering she may have done beforehand, I assure you she would have had a larger purpose than to run around eavesdropping on gossip about herself.
• It was very strange watching him, like a delayed and flattering mirror: he did everything exactly the way I had done, but more gracefully, with perfect precision, enunciating every syllable I had slurred, but he wasn’t halfway through before I could tell it wasn’t working.
• “There are no hedges!” he roared. “It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.” He ordered me from the room in stiff fury.
• He warned me of all the dangers of higher workings: of the spell slipping out of your hands midway and thrashing around wild; of losing yourself in magic, and wandering through it like a dream you could touch, while your body died of thirst; of attempting a spell past your limits and having it drain away strength you didn’t have.
• He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.
• If the Wood was here in Kasia—if it knew what we were doing, and knew that the Dragon had been injured, some great part of his strength drained—it would strike again, right away. It would come again for Dvernik, or maybe just Zatochek, settling for a smaller gain. In my desperation to save Kasia, in his pity for my grief, we had just handed the Wood a gift.
• He resisted at first, holding for a moment to the clean precision of his own working, but my own magic was offering his an invitation, and little by little he began to read—not any less sharply, but to the beat I gave. He was leaving room for my improvisations, giving them air. We turned the page together and kept on without a pause, and halfway down the page a line flowed out of us that was music, his voice crisply carrying the words while I sang them along, high and low, and abruptly, shockingly, it was easy.
• The Summoning didn’t bring forth any beast or object, or conjure up some surge of power; there was no fire or lightning. The only thing it did at all was fill the room with a clear cool light, not even bright enough to be blinding. But in that light everything began to look, to be different. The stone of the walls grew translucent, white veins moving like rivers, and when I gazed at them, they told me a story: a strange deep endless story unlike anything human, so much slower and farther away that it felt almost like being stone again myself.
• I had to see her, bare before me, and that hurt even worse: because she’d hated me, too. She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn’t set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn’t forced me to go three hours’ walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn’t turned her back to me when I’d cried, and told me I had to be brave.
• she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love—oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.
• I would never have thought of speaking so to my lord, the Dragon: I had hated him, but I wouldn’t have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn’t a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence. But he had stepped down from that plane; he had given me real kindness. He’d let his magic mingle with my own again, that strange breathtaking intimacy, all to save Kasia with me. I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human.
• He was tapping his fingers against the window-sill in a pattern that felt oddly familiar; I recognized it as the rhythm of our Summoning chant at the same time he did. He stilled his hand at once.
• “Do it again?” he said. “Yes. Which means that the Wood must make an answer, and soon.” I began finally to catch his urgency. It was like his worry about Rosya, I suddenly understood: we were in a war against the Wood as well, and our enemy knew that we now had a new weapon we might turn against them. He’d been expecting the Wood to attack not simply for revenge, but to defend itself.
• The Dragon didn’t deny it, but bit out, “I’ll admit that you’re a far more extravagant fool than I gave you credit for being, if you intend to lend yourself to this lunacy.” “I would hardly call it extravagant to make every reasonable attempt to rescue the queen,” the Falcon said.
• “To a point,” he said. “The Wood might have done whatever it could to preserve a heart-tree, exactly as a general would to preserve a stronghold. But once the tree was lost—and it was surely already too far gone, whether the girl lived or died—then of course it would try to find a way to turn the loss to good account.” We wrangled it back and forth. It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong; it seemed exactly the twisted sort of thing the Wood would do, turning love into a weapon.
• “There’s a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste,” he said.
• I understood perfectly well that it was a threat, not a bribe: he was telling me he’d have Kasia put to death if I refused. I hated him even more, and yet at the same time I couldn’t hate him entirely. I had lived three dreadful months with that desperation scrabbling at me from inside; he’d lived with it since he was a child, mother torn from him, told she was gone and worse than dead and forever beyond his reach.
• I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t care if all the world was watching. The Summoning flowed around us easily as a river: his voice a rippling chant that I filled with waterfalls and leaping fish, and the light dawned bright and brilliant as an early sunrise around us.
• The Dragon’s spell settling on my shoulders felt like putting on a heavy coat in front of the fireplace: it left me itchy and uncomfortable, and thinking too much about why I was going to need it. I hummed my protection spell along with his chant, imagining that I was bundling up the rest of the way against the heart of winter:
• Its boughs were laden with pale silver-green leaves and small golden fruits with a horrible stink, and beneath the bark looking at us was a human face, overgrown and smoothed out into a mere suggestion, with two hands crossed across the breast like a corpse.
• I crept away into a corner with Kasia and drank too many cups of beer, washing misery and smoke and the taste of the purging-elixir out of my mouth, until finally we leaned against each other and wept softly; I had to hold on to her, because she didn’t dare grip me tight.
• His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales. He eyed me and said stiffly, “Don’t land yourself into a boiling-pot, and as difficult as you may find it, try and present a respectable appearance.”
• Even the mountains, my constants, had disappeared. Of course I’d known there were parts of the country with no mountains, but I’d imagined I would still see them somewhere in the distance, like the moon. But every time I looked behind me, they were smaller and smaller, until finally they disappeared with one final gasp of rolling hills.
• And just like that—the play was ended. The noise inside the courtyard climbed back up to a roar to match the crowd outside, everyone talking to everyone else, across all three stories of the courtyard. The bright heady feeling ran out of me like I’d been unstoppered and turned over. Too late I remembered I wasn’t here for a triumph. Kasia sat in the wagon in her white prisoner’s shift, alone, condemned; Sarkan was a hundred leagues away, trying to hold the Wood off from Zatochek without me; and I had no idea how I was going to fix either of those things.
• his thumbs, one after another. “The Dragon—Sarkan—” I found myself grateful for the small lift I felt, from the thunder of his name on my tongue. “—he thought the Wood gave her to me for the chance of setting a trap.”
• the Falcon—he still seemed determined to be amused by everything to do with me—said lightly, “Perhaps our new witch should choose a name for herself.”
• Even if it had, I wouldn’t have imagined she’d been looking for a target for malice. We weren’t stupidly cruel to each other in Dvernik.
• But when harvest came, your neighbors came to help you gather and thresh, and when the shadow of the Wood stole over us, we knew better than to make it any darker. And none of us would’ve been rude to a witch no matter what. “I would have thought even a noblewoman
• “What I want,” Alosha said, “is to keep the kingdom safe. You and Marek: all you worry about is your own sorrows. You’re too young to be as strong as you are, that’s the trouble of it; you haven’t let go of people. When you’ve seen a century of your own go by, you’ll have more sense.”
• when did witches even die? I wouldn’t grow old; I’d just keep going, always the same, while everyone around me withered and fell away, like the outer stalks of some climbing vine going up and up away from them.
• “Yes,” she said. “Rivers flow to the sea, to lakes or marshland, not to forests. Where does that one go? It’s fed every year by the snows of a thousand mountains. It doesn’t simply sink into the earth. Think,” she added, with a bite, “instead of going on blindly wanting. There is some power deep in your valley, some strangeness beyond mortal magic that draws men in, plants roots in them—and not only men. Whatever thing it is that lives in the Wood, that puts out corruption, it’s come to live there and drink from that power like a cup.
• I missed home like the ache of hunger, something in me left empty. I’d missed it every day since we crossed out of the valley, going over the mountains. Roots—yes. There were roots in my heart, as deep as any corruption could go.
• Decision was settling over him like snowfall, the first thin dusting that would build and build. The rest of the witnesses would speak, but he wouldn’t hear them. He’d already decided.
• As soon as I let myself remember that, the illusion spell went slithering straight out of my grasp. The tree burned away into the air; the fire at its roots swept up along the trunk and took all the rest of the Wood along with it. The corpses sank down through the ground, one last glimpse of their faces, all their faces, before the white marble floor closed over them. I watched them with tears running down my face. I hadn’t known I remembered the soldiers well enough to make so many of them.
• “If we take half the army south to your valley, they’ll come pouring over the Rydva themselves while our backs are turned, and sack Kralia itself. That’s probably why they leagued with the Wood in the first place. They wanted us to do just that. The Wood doesn’t have an army. It’ll stay where it is until we’ve dealt with Rosya.”
• But a tree isn’t a woman; it doesn’t bear a single seed. It scatters as many of them as it can, and hopes for some of them to grow. That book was one; the queen was one. She should have been sent away at once, and you with her.” She turned back to the forge. “Too late to mend that now.”
• The rose was cupped in my hands. I looked at Sarkan on the other side of the petals, and let myself feel his hands cupped around mine, the places where his fingertips just barely brushed against my skin and where the heels of my palms rested in his. I let myself remember the alarming heat of his mouth, the crush of his silk and lace between our bodies, his whole length against me. And I let myself think about my anger, about everything I’d learned, about his secrets and everything he’d hidden; I let go of the rose and gripped the edges of his coat to shake him, to shout at him, to kiss him—
• “Corruption isn’t the only tool the Wood has,” Sarkan said. “Ordinary torment can break a person just as well. It might have let her go deliberately, broken to its service but untainted to any magical sight. Or it might have planted something on her instead, or nearby. A fruit, a seed—”
• I had a feeling the Summoning wasn’t really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.
• She saw the misery on my face, and with rough kindness added, “You learn to feel it less, child; or you learn to love other things. Like poor Ballo,” she said, with a kind of dusty, wistful regret, not strong enough to call grief.
• I thought of my brothers growing old, of my little nephew Danushek bringing me his ball with his frowning little serious face; that face becoming an old man’s, tired and folded and worn with years. Everyone I knew buried, and only their children’s children left to love. But better that than no one left at all. Better those children running in the forest, safe to run there. If I was strong, if I’d been given strength, I could be a shield for them:
• We’d moved too quickly. My heart was racing, still back there under the raining arrows, still in desperate flight, and not on a quiet deserted riverbank with waterbugs jumping over the ripples we’d made, mud staining my skirts. I’d been so long inside the castle, people and stone walls everywhere. The riverbank almost didn’t seem real.
• He began to gather the chips up and with his long fingers pressed them into the walls I’d built. He recited a spell of repairing as he worked, a spell of mending cracks and patching stone. His magic came running through the clay, vivid and bright where it brushed against mine. He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.
• He was staring down at the dough trying to keep his scowl, and flushed at the same time with the high transcendent light that he brought to his elaborate workings: delighted and also annoyed, trying not to be.
• That was a story, too; they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren’t alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves.
• It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.
• “Sarkan,” I said, holding the smoke and thunder of his name in my mouth like a prize, and slid onto him. His eyes shut tight, clenched; he looked almost in pain. My whole body felt wonderfully heavy, pleasure still going through me in widening ripples, a kind of tight ache.
• But the fire in the trench was still burning. I kept throwing rain, but it was hard work making rain out of handfuls of water, and it got harder as I went along. The air around me went dry and parched and my skin and hair winter-crackly, as if I was stealing every bit of moisture around me, and the torrents only struck one part of the fire at a time.
• The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.
• The sword-blade sliced into the queen’s throat and stuck there, halfway through. A hollow roaring noise began, my ear bones crackling and the whole room darkening. The queen’s face stilled. The sword began to drink and drink and drink, endlessly thirsty, wanting more. The noise climbed higher. It felt like a war between two endless things, between a bottomless chasm and a running river. We all stood, frozen, watching, hoping.
• In the back we swayed with the wheels like sacks of grain. The creaking was every song I’d ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.
• remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn’t have been able to just sneak up on me. It didn’t seem real even to be sitting here at all, much less talking of thrones and murder, quite seriously, as if those were themselves real things and not just bits out of songs.
• I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she’d put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain.
• This time I knew what was going to happen, but that didn’t mean I was ready for it: there wasn’t a way to be ready for it. The lightning took away the world again, that single terrible moment of blind white silence everywhere around me, and then it jumped away
• Mingled with my horror, I felt Linaya’s pity moving in me, deep and slow: pity and sorrow and regret. The Wood-queen saw it, too, and it held her still before me, trembling. “I stopped them,” she said, her voice the scrape of a branch against the window-pane at night, when you imagine some dark thing is outside the house scratching to get in. “I had to stop them.”
• she said he’d done it knowing I’d say no, just to demonstrate to the court that he’s loyal to Stashek now. I said I wouldn’t go bragging of someone asking me to marry them, and she said just watch, he’d spread it around himself. Sure enough, half a dozen people asked me about it the next week.