Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

“If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly,”

As little as I liked having magic, I was glad not to be so afraid all the time. But I was no prize pupil: when I didn’t just forget the spell-words he taught me, they went wrong in my mouth. I slurred and mumbled and muddled them together, so a spell that ought to have set a dozen ingredients neatly out for a pie—“I am certainly not trying to train you on potions,” he had said, caustically—instead mixed them into a solid mess that couldn’t even be saved for my supper. Another that should have neatly banked the fire in the library, where we were working, instead seemed to do nothing at all—until we heard a distant and ominous crackling, and we ran upstairs to find green-tinged flames leaping out of the fireplace in the guest chamber directly above, and the embroidered bedcurtains going up. He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers—“My father’s a woodcutter,” I said—“Of axe-swinging lummocks!” he snarled.

“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.”

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.

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

Time ran out. We didn’t.