Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

her laugh was like a song that made you want to sing it.

Even the Wood looked almost comforting to me, in its great wild impenetrable blackness: an unchanged constant.

I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.

“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”

Magic is alive within us all

Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song.

There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage.

His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.

truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.

The creaking was every song I’d ever heard about war and battle; the horses clopping along, the drumbeat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

I hated her; I wanted her to burn, the way so many of the corrupted had burned, because she’d put her hold on them. But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain. The people of the tower had walled her up, then she’d struck them all down. She’d raised up the Wood to devour us; now we’d give her to the fire-heart, and choke all this shining clear water with ash. None of that seemed right. But I didn’t see anything else we could do.

She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow.