by Naomi Novik
Solya came out of the pavilion with the others. He seized one of the spell-lamps out of the ground and held it up with a sharp word that brightened it. The ground between the tower and the encampment was heaved and hunched up like some complaining lazy beast getting to its feet. Stone and earth began to rear themselves into three high walls around the tower, made of fresh-quarried stone laced full of white veins and jagged edges. Marek had to give orders for his men to pull the cannon back quickly, the rising walls pulling the ground out from under their feet.
The ground settled, sighing out. A few final tremors shuddered away from the tower, like ripples, and died away. Small showers of dirt and pebbles ran off the walls. Marek’s face in the light was baffled and furious. For one moment he looked up straight at me, glaring; I glared right back. Sarkan dragged me away from the window.
“You won’t persuade Marek to listen any sooner by provoking him into a high rage,” he said when I wheeled on him, forgetting to be embarrassed in my anger.
We were standing very close. He noticed the same moment that I did. He let go of me abruptly and stepped back. He looked aside and put up his hand to wipe a trickle of sweat from the side of his forehead. He said, “We’d better go down and tell Vladimir that he needn’t worry, we aren’t planning to drop him and all his soldiers into the center of the earth.”
“You might have warned us ahead of time,” the baron said dryly when we came outside, “but I won’t complain too much. We can make him pay for these walls, more than he can afford—as long as we can move between them ourselves. The stones are cutting up our ropes. We need a way through.”
He wanted us to make two tunnels at opposite ends of the walls from each other, so he could make Marek fight the whole length of the walls to get through each one. Sarkan and I went to the northern end to begin. The soldiers were already laying pikes along the wall by torch-light, with the points bristling upwards; they had draped cloaks over the poles to make small tents to sleep under. A few of them were sitting around small campfires, soaking dried meat in boiling water, stirring kasha into the broth to cook up. They cleared hastily out of our way without our even having to say a word, afraid. Sarkan seemed not to notice, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry and strange and wrong.
One of the soldiers was a boy my own age, industriously sharpening pike-heads one by one with a stone, skillfully: six strokes for each one and done as quick as the two men putting them along the wall could come back for them. He must have put himself to it, to learn how to do it so well. He didn’t look sullen or unhappy. He’d chosen to go for a soldier. Maybe he had a story that began that way: a poor widowed mother at home and three young sisters to feed, and a girl from down the lane who smiled at him over the fence as she drove her father’s herd out into the meadows every morning. So he’d given his mother his signing-money and gone to make his fortune. He worked hard; he meant to be a corporal soon, and after that a sergeant: he’d go home then in his fine uniform, and put silver in his mother’s hands, and ask the smiling girl to marry him.
Or maybe he’d lose a leg, and go home sorrowful and bitter to find her married to a man who could farm; or maybe he’d take to drink to forget that he’d killed men in trying to make himself rich. 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 snorted. “What good would it do them for you to roam around asking them questions, so you know that one’s from Debna, and this one’s father is a tailor, and the other one has three children at home? They’re better served by your building walls to keep Marek’s soldiers from killing them in the morning.”
“They’d be better served by Marek not trying in the first place,” I said, impatient with him for refusing to understand. The only way we could make Marek bargain was to make the walls too costly to breach, so he wouldn’t want to pay. But it still made me angry, at him, at the baron, at Sarkan, at myself. “Have you got any family left?” I asked him abruptly.
“I couldn’t say,” he said. “I was a three-year-old beggar child when I set fire to Varsha, trying to stay warm on the street one winter’s night. They didn’t bother to hunt up my family before they packed me off to the capital.” He spoke indifferently, as if he didn’t mind it, being unmoored from all the world. “Don’t make mournful faces at me,” he added. “That was a century and a half ago, and five kings have breathed their last since then—six kings,” he amended. “Come here and help me find a crack to open.”
It was full dark by then, and no way of finding any crack except by touch. I put my hand on the wall and almost jerked it back again. The stone murmured so strangely under my fingers, a chorus of deep voices. I looked closer. We had turned up more than bare rock and earth: there were broken pieces of carved blocks jutting from the dirt, the bones of the old lost tower. Ancient words were carved upon them in places, faint and nearly worn away, but still there to be felt even if not seen. I took my hands away and rubbed them against each other. My fingers felt dusty, dry.
“They’re long gone,” Sarkan said, but the echoes lingered. The Wood had thrown down that last tower; the Wood had devoured and scattered all those people. Maybe it had happened like this for them, too: maybe they’d been turned and twisted into weapons against one another, until all of them were dead and the roots of the Wood could quietly creep over their bodies.
I put my hands back on the stone. Sarkan had found a narrow crack in the wall, barely wide enough for fingertips. We took hold of it on opposite sides and pulled together. “Fulmedesh,” I said, as he made a spell of opening, and between us the crack widened with a sound like plates breaking on a stone floor. A crumbling waterfall of pebbles came pouring out.
The soldiers dug out the loose stones with their helmets and their gauntleted hands while we pulled the crack still wider. When we were done, the tunnel was just big enough for a man in armor to get through, if he stooped. Inside the faint gleams of silvery blue letters shone here and there out of the dark. I scurried through the mouse-hole of it as quickly as I could, trying not to look at them. The soldiers began working in the trench behind us while we walked all the long curve of the wall to the southern end, to make the second opening.
By the time we finished the second tunnel, Marek’s men had begun to try the outer wall, not very seriously yet: they were lobbing over burning rags soaked in lamp-oil, small thorny bits of iron with spikes pointing in every direction. But that almost made the baron’s soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well.
There wasn’t a place for us among them; we were only in their way. I didn’t try to speak to any of them, after all; I silently followed the Dragon back to the tower.
He shut the great doors behind us, the thump of the bar falling into the iron braces echoing against the marble. The entry and the great hall were unchanged, the unwelcoming narrow wooden benches standing against the walls, the hanging lamps above. Everything as stiff and formal as the first day I’d come wandering through here with my tray of food, so frightened and alone. Even the baron preferred to sleep outside with his men in the warm weather. I could hear their voices outside through the arrow-slit windows, but only faintly, as if they came from far away. Some of the soldiers were singing a song together, a bawdy song probably, but full of glad working rhythm. I couldn’t make out the words.
“We’ll have a little quiet, at least,” Sarkan said, turning from the doors, towards me. He wiped a hand across his forehead, streaking a clean
line through the fine layer of grey stone dust clinging to his skin; his hands were stained with green powder and iridescent traces of oil that shone in the lamp-light. He looked down at them with a grimace of distaste, at the loose sleeves of his work-shirt coming unrolled.
For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.
“They’ll most likely attack at the first light of morning,” he said too quickly, cutting me off before I could say anything more. His face was as closed up as the doors. He stepped back from me and gestured at the stairs. “The best thing you can do at the moment is get some sleep.”
Chapter 27
What perfectly sensible advice. It sat in my stomach, an indigestible lump. I went down to the cellars to lie down with Kasia and the children, and curled up quietly seething around it. Their small even breaths came behind me. The sound should have been comforting; instead it just taunted me: They’re asleep and you aren’t! The cellar floor couldn’t cool my feverish skin.
My body remembered the endless day; I’d woken up that morning on the other side of the mountains, and I still felt the echoes of hoofbeats on stone behind me, coming closer, the strain of my panicked breaths struggling against my ribs as I’d run with Marisha in my arms. I had bruises where her heels had banged against the sides of my legs. I should have been spent. But magic was still alive and shivering in my belly, too much of it with nowhere to go, as if I were an over-ripe tomato that wanted to burst its skin for relief, and there was an army outside our doors.
I didn’t think Solya had spent the evening preparing defenses and sleep spells. He’d fill our trenches with white fire, and tell Marek where to point the cannon so they would kill the most men. He was a war-wizard; he’d been at dozens of battles, and Marek had the entire army of Polnya behind him, six thousand men to our six hundred. If we didn’t stop them; if Marek came through the walls we’d built and smashed the doors, killed us all and took the children—
I threw off the covers and got up. Kasia’s eyes opened just briefly to see me, and then closed again. I slipped away to sit by the ashes in the hearth, shivering. I couldn’t stop thinking in circles about how easy it would be to lose, about the Wood rolling dark and terrible over the valley, a green swallowing wave. I tried not to see it, but in my mind’s eye a heart-tree rose up in the square in Dvernik, sprawling and monstrous as that terrible tree in Porosna behind the borders of the Wood, and everyone I loved was tangled beneath its grasping roots.
I stood and fled from my own imagining, up the stairs. In the great hall, the arrow-slit windows were dark; there wasn’t even a snatch of song outside to drift in. All the soldiers were sleeping. I kept climbing, past the laboratory and the library, green and violet and blue lights still flickering behind their doors. But they were empty; there was no one there for me to shout at, no one to snap back at me and tell me I was being a fool. I went up another flight and stopped at the edge of the next landing, near the fringed end of the long carpet. A faint gleam showed from underneath the farthest door, at the end of the hallway. I had never gone that way, towards Sarkan’s private bedroom. It had been an ogre’s chamber, once.
The carpet was thick and dark, with a pattern woven into it with golden-yellow thread. The pattern was all one line: it began in a tight spiral like the curl of a lizard’s tail. The golden line grew thicker as it unwound, and then went twisting back and forth along the length of the rug almost like a pathway, leading into the shadows down the hallway. My feet sank deep in the soft wool. I followed the golden line as it broadened beneath my feet and took on a pattern like scales, faintly gleaming. I passed the guest chambers, two doors opposite one another, and beyond them the hallway darkened around me.
I was walking past a kind of pressure, a wind blowing against me. The pattern in the carpet was forming into clearer shapes. I walked over one great ivory-clawed limb, over the sweep of pale golden wings veined in dark brown.
The wind grew colder. The walls disappeared, fading into part of the dark. The carpet widened until it filled all the hallway I could see and stretched away beyond. It didn’t feel like wool anymore. I stood on warm lapping scales, soft as leather, rising and falling beneath my feet. The sound of breathing echoed back from cavern walls out of sight. My heart wanted to hammer with instinctive terror. My feet wanted to turn and run.
I shut my eyes instead. I knew the tower by now, how long the hallway should have been. I took three more steps along the scaled back, and then I turned and put out my hand, reaching for the door I knew was there. My fingers found a doorknob, warm metal beneath my fingers. I opened my eyes again and I was back in the hallway, looking at a door. A few steps farther on, the hall and the carpet ended. The golden pattern turned back on itself, and a gleaming green eye looked up at me from a head filled with rows of silver teeth, waiting for anyone who didn’t know where to turn.
I opened the door. It swung silently. The room wasn’t large. The bed was small and narrow, canopied and curtained in with red velvet; a single chair stood before the fireplace, beautifully carved, alone; a single book on the small table beside it with a single cup of wine, half-drunk. The fire was banked down to glowing coals, and the lamps were out. I went to the bed and drew aside the curtain. Sarkan was sleeping stretched across the bed still in his breeches and his loose shirt; he’d only thrown off his coat. I stood holding the curtain. He blinked awake at me unguarded for a moment, too startled to be indignant, as if he’d never imagined anyone could barge in on him. He looked so baffled I didn’t want to shout at him anymore.
“How did you,” he said, pushing himself up on an elbow, indignation finally dawning, and I pushed him back down and kissed him.
He made a noise of surprise against my mouth and gripped me by the arms, holding me off. “Listen, you impossible creature,” he said, “I’m a century and more older than—”
“Oh, be quiet,” I said impatiently; of all the excuses he might have used. I scrambled up the tall side of the bed and climbed in on top of him, the thick featherbed yielding. I glared down. “Do you want me to go?”
His hands tightened on my arms. He didn’t look me in the face. For a moment he didn’t speak. Then harshly he said, “No.”
And then he pulled me down to him instead, his mouth sweet and feverish-hot and wonderful, obliterating. I didn’t have to think anymore. The heart-tree blazed up with a crackling roar and was gone. There was only the heat of his hands sliding over my chilled bare arms, making me shiver all over again. He had one arm around me, gripping tight. He caught at my waist and pulled up my loose falling-off blouse. I ducked my head through and my arms free of the sleeves, my hair spilling over my shoulders, and he groaned and buried his face into the tangled mess of it, kissing me through it: my throat, my shoulders, my breasts.
I clung to him, breathless and happy and full of uncomplicated innocent terror. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would—his tongue slid over my nipple and drew it into his mouth, and I flinched a little and clutched at his hair, probably painfully. He drew away, the sudden cold a bright shock on my skin, and he said, “Agnieszka,” low and deep with an almost despairing note, as if he still wanted to shout at me and couldn’t.
He rolled us over in the bed and dumped me in the pillows beneath him. I gripped fistfuls of his shirt and pulled, frantic. He sat up and threw it off, over his head, and I threw my head back and stared at the canopy while he pushed up the maddening heap of my skirts. I felt desperately greedy, urgent for his hands. I’d tried not to remember that one shocking, perfect moment, the slide of his thumb between my legs, for so long; but oh, I remembered. He brushed his
knuckles against me and that sweet jolting went through me again. I shuddered all over, hugely, and I closed my thighs tight around his hand, instinctive. I wanted to tell him to hurry, to go slow, to do both at the same time.
The curtain had fallen shut again. He was leaning over me, his eyes only a gleam in the dark close room of the bed, and he was ferociously intent, watching my face. He could still rub his thumb against me, just a little. He stroked just once. A noise climbed the back of my throat, a sigh or a moan, and he bent down and kissed me like he wanted to devour it, to catch it in his own mouth.
He moved his thumb again, and I stopped clenching shut. He gripped my thighs and moved them apart, lifted my leg around his waist; he was still watching me hungrily. “Yes,” I said, urgently, trying to move with him; but he kept stroking me with his fingers. “Sarkan.”
“Surely it’s not too much to ask a little patience,” he said, his black eyes glittering. I glared at him, but then he stroked me again, gently, dipped his fingers into me; he drew a long line between my thighs again and again, circling at the top. He was asking me a question I didn’t know the answer to, until I did; I clenched up suddenly, wrung-out and wet against his hands.
I fell back shaking against the pillows; I put my hands up into my snarled mess of hair and pressed them against my damp forehead, panting. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“There,” he said, smugly pleased with himself, and I sat up and pushed him backwards the other way on the bed.