Naomi Novik: Uprooted

“Are you Baba Jaga?” she asked, interestedly.

“No,” I said. “But you might call her a friend of mine.”

Now I had woken up enough to know where I was, I turned back westward right away. The Rosyans had sent soldiers to patrol the borders of the Wood on their side, and I didn’t want to distress them. They were still uneasy about me popping out on their side now and then, even after I’d sent back some of their lost villagers, and I couldn’t really blame them. All the songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways, and I suspected that the bards weren’t bringing the most outrageous ones to my side of the valley at all. A man had been booed out of Olshanka tavern a few weeks ago, I’d heard, for trying to sing one where I’d turned into a wolf-beast and eaten up the king.

But my step was lighter anyway: meeting the little girl and her cow had lifted some of the grey weight from my shoulders. I sang Jaga’s walking-song and hurried away, back towards home. I was hungry, so I ate a fruit from my basket as I walked. I could taste the forest in it, the running magic of the Spindle caught in roots and branches and fruit, infused with sunlight to become sweet juice on my tongue. There was an invitation in it, too, and maybe one day I would want to accept; one day when I was tired and ready to dream a long dream of my own. But for now it was only a door standing open on a hill in the distance, a friend waving to me from afar, and the grove’s deep sense of peace.

Kasia had written me from Gidna: the children were doing as well as could be hoped. Stashek was still very quiet, but he had stood up and spoken to the Magnati, when they had been summoned to vote, well enough to persuade them to crown him with his grandfather as his regent. He’d also agreed to be betrothed to the Archduke of Varsha’s daughter, a girl of nine who had evidently impressed him a great deal by being able to spit across a garden plot. I was a little dubious about this as a foundation for marriage, but I suppose it wasn’t much worse than marrying her because her father might have stirred up rebellion, otherwise.

There had been a tourney to celebrate Stashek’s coronation, and he’d asked Kasia to be his champion, much to his grandmother’s dismay. It had turned out halfway for the best, because the Rosyans sent a party of knights, and after Kasia knocked them all down, it made them wary about invading us in revenge for the battle at the Rydva. Enough soldiers had escaped the siege of the tower to carry tales of the invulnerable golden warrior-queen, slaughtering and unstoppable; and people had mixed her up with Kasia. So Rosya had grudgingly accepted Stashek’s request for a renewed truce, and our summer had ended in a fragile peace, with time for both sides to mend.

Stashek had also used Kasia’s triumph to name her captain of his guard. Now she was learning how to fight with a sword properly, so she didn’t knock into the other knights and tumble them over accidentally while they were all drilling together. Two lords and an archduke had asked her to marry them, and so, she wrote to me in outrage, had Solya.

Can you imagine? I told him I thought he was a lunatic, and he said he would live in hope. Alosha laughed for ten minutes without stopping except to cough when I told her, and then 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. I almost wanted to go and tell him I’d have him after all, just to see him squirm, but I was too afraid he’d decide to go through with it for some reason or another, and he’d find some way not to let me out.

Alosha’s better every day, and the children are doing well, too. They go sea-bathing together every morning: I come along and sit on the beach, but I can’t swim anymore: I just sink straight to the bottom, and the salt water feels all wrong on my skin, even if I just put my feet into it. Send me another jug of river-water, please! I’m always a little thirsty, here, and it’s good for the children, too. They never have the nightmares about the tower if I let them have a sip of it before they sleep.

I’ll come for a real visit this winter, if you think it’s safe for the children. I thought they’d never want to come back, but Marisha asked if she could come and play at Natalya’s house again.

I miss you.

I took one last blurred hop-step to come to the Spindle, and the clearing where my own little tree-cottage stood, coaxed out of the side of an old drowsy oak. On one side of my doorway, the oak’s roots made a big hollow that I had lined with grass. I tried to keep it full of grove-fruit for the walkers to take. It was emptier than when I’d left, and on the other side of my doorway, someone had filled my wood-box.

I put the rest of my gathered fruit into the hollow and went inside for a moment. The house didn’t need tidying: the floor was soft moss and the grass coverlet turned itself back over the bed without my help after I climbed out in the mornings. I did need tidying, badly, but I’d wasted too much time wandering grey and tired this morning. The sun was climbing past noon, and I didn’t want to be late. I only picked up my reply for Kasia and the corked jug of Spindle-water, and put them in my basket, so I could give them to Danka to post for me.

I went back out onto the riverbank and took three more big steps going west to come out of the Wood at last. I crossed the Spindle at Zatochek bridge, in the shade of the tall young heart-tree growing there.

The Wood-queen had made a final furious push at the same time as Sarkan and I were floating down the river to find her, and the trees had half swallowed Zatochek before we stopped her. People fleeing the village met me on the road as I walked away from the tower. I ran the rest of the way and found the handful of desperate defenders about to chop down the newly planted heart-tree.

They’d stayed behind to buy time for their families to escape, but they’d done it expecting to be taken, corrupted; they were wild-eyed and terrified even in their courage. I don’t think they would have listened to me if it hadn’t been for my ragged flapping clothes, my hair in snarls and blackened with soot, and my feet bare in the road: I couldn’t easily have been anything but a witch.

Even then, they weren’t quite sure whether to believe me when I told them the Wood had been defeated, defeated for good. None of us had imagined such a thing ever happening. But they’d seen the mantises and the walkers go fleeing suddenly back into the Wood, and they were all very tired by then. In the end they stood back and let me work. The tree hadn’t been even a day old: the walkers had bound the village headman and his three sons into it, to make it grow. I was able to bring the brothers out, but their father refused: a hot coal of pain had been burning slowly in his belly for a year.

“I can help you,” I’d offered, but the old man shook his head, his eyes half-dreaming already, smiling, and the hard knobs of his bones and body trapped beneath the bark melted away suddenly beneath my hands. The crooked heart-tree sighed and straightened up. It dropped all its poisonous blooms at once; new flowers budded on the branches instead.

We all stood together for a moment under the silver branches, breathing in their faint fragrance, nothing like the overwhelming rotten sweetness of the corrupt flowers. Then the defenders noticed what they were doing, shifted nervously and backed away. They were as afraid to accept the heart-tree’s peace as Sarkan and I had been, in the grove. None of us knew how to imagine something that came from the Wood and wasn’t evil and full of hate. The head-man’s sons looked at me helplessly. “Can’t you bring him out, too?” the eldest asked.