Uprooted

“Can I write her a letter?” Kasia asked.

“No,” the Dragon said, and I wheeled on him.

“We can give her a stub of pencil and some paper!” I said angrily. “It’s not too much to ask.”

His face was bleak. “You aren’t this much a fool,” he said to me. “Do you think she was buried in a heart-tree for a night and a day and came out talking to you, ordinarily?”

I stopped, silent, afraid. Jaga’s rot-finding spell hovered on my lips. I opened my mouth to cast it—but it was Kasia. It was my own Kasia, who I knew better than anyone in the world. I looked at her and she looked back at me, unhappy and afraid, but refusing to weep or cower. It was her. “They put her in the tree,” I said. “They saved her for it, and I brought her out before it got a hold—”

“No,” he said flatly, and I glared at him and turned back to her. She smiled at me anyway, a struggling valiant smile.

“It’s all right, Nieshka,” she said. “As long as Mama’s all right. What—” She swallowed. “What’s to happen to me?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. “I’ll find a way to cleanse you,” I said, half-desperate, and didn’t look at the Dragon. “I’ll find a spell to be sure you’re all right—” but those were just words. I didn’t know how I could ever prove to the Dragon that Kasia was well. He plainly didn’t want to be convinced. And if I couldn’t persuade him somehow, he would keep Kasia down here the rest of her life if need be, entombed with this ancient king and without a scrap of sunlight—never to see anyone she loved, never to live at all. He was as great a danger to Kasia as the Wood—he hadn’t wanted me to rescue her at all.

And even before then, it occurred to me in a flash of bitterness, he had meant to steal her for himself—he’d meant to take her as much as the Wood had, to devour her in his own way. He hadn’t cared about uprooting her life before, making her a prisoner in a tower, only to serve him—why would he care now, why would he ever risk letting her out?

He stood a few steps behind me, farther from the fire and from Kasia. His face was closed, yielding nothing, his thin mouth pressed hard. I looked away and tried to smooth out my face and hide my thoughts. If I could find a spell to let me pass through the wall, I would only have to find a way to evade his notice. I could try and put a spell of sleep on him, or I could put something in his cup with his dinner: Wormwood brewed with yew berries, cook the juice down to a paste, put in three drops of blood and speak an incantation, and it will make a quick poison with no taste—

The sudden sharp pungent smell of burning pine needles came back into my nose, and the thought took on a strange bitter edge that made the wrongness of it leap out. I flinched away from it, startled, and I took a step back from the line of fire, trembling. On the other side, Kasia was waiting for me to speak: her face resolute, clear-eyed, full of trust and love and gratitude—and a little fear and worry, but nothing but ordinary human feeling. I looked at her, and she looked back at me anxiously, still herself. But I couldn’t speak. The smell of pine was still in my mouth, and my eyes stung with smoke.

“Nieshka?” Kasia said, her voice wavering with growing fear. I still said nothing. She was staring at me across the line of fire, and her face through the haze seemed to be first smiling and then unhappy, her mouth trembling through one shape and another, trying—trying different expressions. I took another step back, and it grew worse. Her head tilted, eyes fixed on my face, widening a little. She shifted her weight, a different stance. “Nieshka,” she said, not sounding afraid anymore, only confident and warm, “it’s all right. I know you’ll help me.”

The Dragon, beside me, was silent. I dragged in a breath. I still said nothing. My throat was shut. I managed, on a whisper, “Aishimad.”

A pungent, bitter smell rose in the air between us. “Please,” Kasia said to me. Her voice suddenly broke on a sob, an actor in a play moving from one act to the next. She lifted her hands towards me, came a little closer to the fire, her body leaning in. She came a little too close. The smell grew stronger: like greenwood burning, full of sap. “Nieshka—”

“Stop it!” I cried. “Stop it.”

She stopped. For a moment still Kasia stood there, and then it let her arms drop to her sides, and her face emptied out. A wave of rotting-wood smell rolled over the room.

The Dragon raised a hand. “Kulkias vizhkias haishimad,” he said, and a light shone out of his hand and onto her skin. Where it played over her I saw thick green shadows, mottled like deep layers of leaves on leaves. Something looked at me out of her eyes, its face still and strange and inhuman. I recognized it: what looked out at me was the same thing I had felt in the Wood, trying to find me. There was no trace of Kasia left at all.

Chapter 9

He was half-supporting me as he pulled me through the wall and out into the antechamber of the tomb again. When we were through I slid to the floor next to my small heap of pine-needle ashes and stared at them, hollow. I almost hated them for stealing the lie from me. I couldn’t even cry; it was worse than if Kasia were dead. He stood over me. “There’s a way,” I said, looking up at him. “There’s a way to get it out of her.” It was a child’s cry, a plea. He said nothing. “That spell you used on me—”

“No,” he said. “Not for this. The purging spell barely worked even on you. I warned you. Did it try to persuade you to harm yourself?”

I shivered all over horribly, remembering the ashen taste of that horrible thought creeping through my head: Wormwood and yew berries, a quick poison. “You,” I said.

He nodded. “It would have liked that: persuade you to kill me, then find some way to lure you back to the Wood.”

“What is it?” I said. “What is that—thing inside her? We say the Wood, but those trees—” I was abruptly sure of it. “—those trees are corrupted, too, as much as Kasia. That’s where it lives, not what it is.”

“We don’t know,” he said. “It was here before we came. Perhaps before they were,” he added, gesturing to the walls with their strange foreign inscription. “They woke the Wood, or made it, and they fought it awhile, and then it destroyed them. This tomb is all that’s left. There was an older tower here. Little of it remained except bricks scattered on the earth by the time Polnya claimed this valley and roused the Wood again.”