(Nebula 2015) Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Author:Naomi Novik [Novik, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

I didn’t do very well at following his advice.

We were a week and a day riding to the capital, and my horse jerked her head the entire way: step, step, step, and a sudden nervous thrust forward against the bit, pulling my reins and my arms forward, until my neck and my shoulders were hard as stone. I always lagged to the back of our little caravan, and the big iron-bound wagon-wheels kicked up a fine cloud of dust in front of me. My horse added regular sneezing pauses to her gait. Even before we passed Olshanka I was coated in pale grey, sweat clumping the dust into thick brown lines under my fingernails.

The Dragon had written me a letter for the king in the last few minutes we’d had together. It was only a few lines hastily scribbled on cheap paper with thin ink borrowed from the villagers, telling him I was a witch, and asking him for men. But he had folded it over, and cut his thumb with a knife and wiped a little blood across the edge, and then he’d written his name through the smear: Sarkan in strong black letters that smoked at the edges. When I took it out of my skirt pocket and touched the letters with my fingers, the whisper of smoke and beating wings came near. It was a comfort and a frustration at the same time, as every day’s miles took me farther from where I should have been, helping to hold back the Wood.

“Why are you insisting on taking Kasia?” I said to Marek, one last try as we camped the first night at the foot of the mountains, near the shallow eddy of a stream hurrying off to join the Spindle. I could see the Dragon’s tower to the south, lit orange by the last of the sunset. “Take the queen if you insist on it, and let us go back. You’ve seen the Wood, you’ve seen what it is—”

“My father sent me here to deal with Sarkan’s corrupted village girl,” he said. He was sluicing his head and neck down with water. “He’s expecting her, or her head. Which would you prefer I took with me?”

“But he’ll understand about Kasia once he sees the queen,” I said.

Marek shook off the water and raised his head. The queen still sat blank and unmoving in the wagon, staring ahead, as the night closed around her. Kasia was sitting next to her. They were both changed, both strange and straight and unwearied even by a full day of travel; they both shone like polished wood. But Kasia’s head was turned back looking towards Olshanka and the valley, and her mouth and her eyes were worried and alive.

We looked at them together, and then Marek stood up. “The queen’s fate is hers,” he said to me flatly, and walked away. I hit at the water in frustration, then I cupped water and washed my face, rivulets black with dirt running away over my fingers.

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