Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

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

He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.

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

My eyes prickled with hot tears. No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.

He was tapping his fingers against the window-sill in a pattern that felt oddly familiar; I recognized it as the rhythm of our Summoning chant at the same time he did. He stilled his hand at once.

“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.

I had a feeling the Summoning wasn’t really meant to be cast alone: as if 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.

“Sarkan,” I said, holding the smoke and thunder of his name in my mouth like a prize,

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.

But wanting cruelty felt like another wrong answer in an endless chain.

Happiness was bubbling up through me, a bright stream laughing. He’d come back.