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Naomi Novik: Uprooted

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Naomi Novik Uprooted

Uprooted: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood. The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows— knows — that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose.

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I didn’t want to please him, but I did want to keep him from ever doing that to me again, whatever that spell had been. I’d woken from dreams four times a night, feeling the word lirintalem on my lips and tasting it in my mouth as though it belonged there, and his hand burning hot on my arm.

Fear and work weren’t all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn’t see my mother and my father for ten years, that I’d never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon’s girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn’t recognize at the end of it. At least while I was chopping and sweltering away in front of the ovens, I didn’t have to think about any of that.

After a few days, when I realized that he wouldn’t come and use that spell on me at every meal, I stopped my frenzy of cooking. But then I found I had nothing else to do, even when I went looking for work. As large as the tower was, it didn’t need cleaning: no dust had gathered in the corners or the window-sills, not even on the tiny carved vines on the gilt frame.

I still didn’t like the map-painting in my room. Every night I imagined I heard a faint gurgle coming from it, like water running down a gutter, and every day it sat there on the wall in all its excessive glory, trying to make me look at it. After scowling at it, I went downstairs. I emptied out a sack of turnips in the cellar, ripped the seams, and used the cloth to cover it up. My room felt better at once with the gold and splendor of it hidden away.

I spent the rest of that morning looking out the window across the valley again, lonely and sick with longing. It was an ordinary work-day, so there were men in the fields gathering in the harvest and women at the river doing their washing. Even the Wood looked almost comforting to me, in its great wild impenetrable blackness: an unchanged constant. The big herd of sheep that belonged to Radomsko was grazing on the lower slopes of the mountains at the northern end of the valley; they looked like a wandering white cloud. I watched them roam awhile, and had a small weep, but even grief had its limits. By dinner-time I was horribly bored.

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.

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