Uprooted

by Naomi Novik

I remembered Sarkan in his tower, plucking girls out of the valley, and his coldness when I’d first come, as though he couldn’t remember how to think and feel like an ordinary person.

for one brief moment, he wasn’t illusion at all, not just illusion. He frowned back at me startled; his eyes said, What are you doing, you idiot? and it was him, somehow; really him—then the purging-fire boiled up between us, and he was gone; he was only illusion again, and burning.

Something held me like the instinct of a mouse in a hole, hearing the breath of the owl’s wing overhead.

Magic ran whispering and slow over rocks, deep inside me.

He brought the stone into the spell, laying the deep foundations beneath, lifting me and my working higher: like putting steps beneath me, so I could take the walls up into clear air.

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.

I wanted to rub handprints through his dust.

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.

They weren’t enemies anymore; they hadn’t really been enemies to begin with. Even Marek’s men had thought they were saving the royal children. They’d all just been put on opposite sides of a chessboard by the Wood-queen, so she could sit to the side and watch them taken off by one another.

They looked the way a snarl sounds.

I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me.