Uprooted

“[H]e scowled. ‘Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would have been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.’”

Up to this point, Agnieszka has believed that the Dragon is casting spells on or through her. Now, he explains that he is teaching them to her. He also explains that he did not want to choose her but was required to once he sensed her magical potential. This exchange alters the dynamic between the characters and shifts the Dragon’s role from antagonist to mentor. The Dragon’s words also touch on the Wood’s ability to absorb the powers of those it infects, which is key to its depiction as a symbol of The Corrupting Influence of Power.

“[N]ow I could tell his frustration was that of the lover of beauty and perfection. He hadn’t wanted a student, but, having been saddled with me, he wanted to make a great and skillful witch of me, to teach me his art. […] He loved his magic, and he would have shared that love with me.”

Agnieszka gains a better understanding of the Dragon’s character over the course of their magic lessons, revealing that his short temper stems from a desire for perfection and a genuine love for the exacting nature of magic. Their interactions over the next few chapters allow Agnieszka to see the Dragon as more human and less removed and terrifying, paving the way for their eventual romantic relationship.

“‘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.’”

As Agnieszka and the Dragon try to work together, it becomes clear that their styles of magic are vastly different. The Dragon’s is rigid and exacting, almost scientific in nature, while Agnieszka’s is wild and intuitive. Agnieszka suggests that the Dragon’s lack of understanding comes from a lifetime of locking himself away with books and losing his connections with people and nature.

“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.”

This scene is important for two reasons. First, it establishes that Agnieszka and the Dragon can weave their magic together, becoming more powerful in the process. This is important to the plot later and is vital to their success against the Wood. This moment also shows another shift in their relationship, hinting at the romantic subplot developing between them.

“I saw my own face reflected in her wide glassy eyes, and my own secret jealousies, how I had wanted all her gifts, if not the price she would have to pay for them. Tears crept into my eyes; it felt like Wensa haranguing me all over again, and this time there was no escape. All the times I’d felt like nothing, the girl who didn’t matter, that no lord would ever want; all the times I’d felt myself a gangly tangled mess beside her.”

The light of Luthe’s Summoning reveals Agnieszka’s and Kasia’s inner truths. Agnieszka faces her own feelings of envy but is shocked to realize that Kasia is similarly envious of her. This moment contributes to the theme of Overcoming envy to Reach Self-Acceptance, as they can only reach fulfillment and happiness if they accept themselves as they are.

“Slow and late and bubbling, a ferocious anger had risen in me, like a flood. ‘So you take the ones like Kasia,’ I burst out, ‘the ones brave enough to bear it, who won’t hurt their families worse by weeping and you suppose that makes it right? You don’t rape them, you only close them up for ten years, and complain that we think you worse than you are?’”

Agnieszka confronts and rebukes the Dragon for the first time, demonstrating that she now views him as a human capable of change rather than an untouchable lord far above her. This moment is crucial to her development because she has long held back her anger and now decides to speak her mind. Crucially, this moment also leads to character development for the Dragon, who becomes aware of his own callousness and actively works to change it.

“I didn’t properly think about what was happening even as I kissed him back, my laughter spilling into his mouth and making stutters of my kisses. I was still bound up with him, our magic snarled up into great messy tangled knots. I didn’t have anything to compare that intimacy to.”

The romantic subplot between Agnieszka and the Dragon grows in this scene, spurred on by the intimacy of their magic tangled together. However, this romantic subplot does not develop further until the final chapters of the novel, in part due to the confusion and ambivalence this passage suggests. Her metaphor likening their magic to “knots” suggests the complexity of the relationship, while the comparison of their kisses to “stutters” suggests they are miscommunicating.

“[T]he Dragon rose deliberately from his chair. The hall darkened around him with sudden, frightening speed, shadows creeping over and swallowing the tall candles, the shining magical lights. He came down from the dais, each step striking like the deep terrible ring of some great bell, one after another. Prince Marek and the Falcon backed away involuntarily; the prince gripped the hilt of his sword. ‘If I had fallen to the Wood,’ the Dragon said, ‘what did you imagine you would do, here in my tower?’”

In this confrontation between the Dragon and the Falcon, the extent of the Dragon’s power and his position among the wizards becomes more apparent. This is the first time he wields that power with the specific aim of intimidating someone, and tellingly, both the Falcon and Marek fear him. This demonstration also invites comparison of how each person uses their power. While the Dragon uses his power to protect the valley, the Falcon and Marek use power to threaten, manipulate, and take what they want.

“I understood perfectly well that it was a threat, not a bribe: he was telling me he’d have Kasia put to death if I refused. I hated him even more, and yet at the same time I couldn’t hate him entirely. I had lived three dreadful months with that desperation scrabbling at me from inside; he’d lived with it since he was a child, mother torn from him, told she was gone and worse than dead and forever beyond his reach. I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I understood him.”

Agnieszka compares herself to Marek, understanding that they are foils in their shared desire to save a loved one from the Wood. Just as she worked tirelessly to purge Kasia of the Wood’s corruption, she sees Marek’s desperation to save his mother. They are both willing to risk danger and death for these goals, highlighting the theme of What One Will Risk for Love, but where Agnieszka generally risks only her own safety, Marek jeopardizes everyone around him.

“[T]his awful half-life left to her seemed worse than dying. She wasn’t ill or delirious, the way Kasia had been those first few days after purging. There just didn’t seem to be enough left of her to feel or think.”

Though the group successfully rescues Queen Hanna from the Wood, they discover her completely unresponsive. This moment foreshadows the truth of the queen’s fate, though none of the characters are aware of it yet. Agnieszka’s description of her emptied-out state is more accurate than she realizes; the body is only an empty husk controlled by the Wood.

“She shook her head. ‘And so does pity lead straight to disaster. Well, I’m surprised to hear it of Sarkan; but better men than he have lost their heads over a girl not half their age.’

I didn’t know what to say: I wanted to protest, to say That’s not it, there’s nothing like that, but the words stuck in my throat.”

Agnieszka’s first meeting with the wizards at court reveals them to be callous, judgmental, and dismissive. They are all convinced that Agnieszka could only be there because the Dragon, Sarkan, is in love with her. The wizards continue to treat her like an undeserving outsider even after she passes their test, marking her as an outsider, and Agnieszka does not yet have the self-confidence to navigate the situation adroitly.

“In his face, I could see him as he’d been, a child hiding in his mother’s deserted garden to escape that same crowd of poisonous courtiers—all of them smirking and whispering about her, shaking their heads and pretending at sorrow while they gossiped that they’d known it all along.”

Again, Agnieszka sees and understands Marek’s torment over his mother. Though he is cruel and manipulative, she empathizes with his situation because she knows how powerfully love can motivate a person to do dangerous or reckless things. Moreover, she has now experienced the treachery of the court firsthand. Her comparison of the courtiers to “poison” subtly links the environment to the Wood, suggesting that Marek’s behavior stems partly from a “corrupted” upbringing.

“‘I don’t want more sense!’ I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. ‘Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?’”

In her conversation with Alosha and Ballo, Agnieszka becomes angry with their callous disregard for human life and the distance they place between themselves, as powerful immortal wizards, and the humans around them. She argues that love and human connection are the only things about life worth holding on to, and the novel’s resolution—from her confrontation with the Wood-queen to her relationship with Sarkan—proves her right.

“I stared at him and the faint fine lines at the corner of his eyes, all his days spent with dusty books, loving nothing else; him and Alosha, who spoke as easily of putting people in the fire as she did books. 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.”

Agnieszka finally understands fully the corruption of the wizards. The more powerful and long-lived they are, the more distant, inhumane, and cruel they become. This explains why Sarkan could take girls from their families without seeming to understand the pain he caused. Alosha, who is much older than Sarkan, is even more callous, willing to kill people without remorse.

“The room was plainly Marek’s for the moment; even I could see a thousand rumors of murder beginning here if the king refused, if he ordered the queen taken away, and put her to death later. The king saw it, too.”

Marek is willing to risk everything, including his reputation, his place in the family, and (in threatening the king) death, to save his mother from execution. This moment also highlights Agnieszka’s growth—specifically, her improved understanding of court politics, as she notes that Marek has backed the king into a corner.

“I could give them what they really wanted. And then I realized I knew what that was, after all. They wanted to know. They wanted to see what it had been like. They wanted to feel themselves a part of it, of the queen’s rescue; they wanted to be living in a song. That wasn’t truth, anything like it, but it might convince them to spare Kasia’s life.”

Invoking the motif of stories, Agnieszka decides that what the trial audience wants is to feel involved in a heroic story. However, she understands even then that the story she presents, even factually recreated in an illusion, is not the same as truth; a story may be accurate but still be wielded in a way designed to manipulate, as this one is. In her desperation to save Kasia, Agnieszka capitulates to the audience’s desires, but this comes at a cost: She also saves the queen, who turns out to be a puppet of the Wood.

“I felt almost desperate. Great-great-grandchildren, half of them lost and the rest of them so distant that she could sigh over Ragostok, and feel nothing more than a mild irritation. They didn’t seem enough to keep her rooted to the world.”

Agnieszka reflects on what she has learned about Alosha’s life, using the symbolism of roots to think about her lack of human connections. Agnieszka continues to believe that human connection is vital to life and the best remedy to the corrupting influence of power that makes wizards so distant and inhumane.

“I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent.”

Marek wields great power, both politically and militarily, and uses that power to throw away the lives of hundreds of men under his command on a misguided mission to secure the throne. Agnieszka realizes here that his ambition, in concert with his devotion to his mother, makes it impossible to reason with him.

“[T]he queen’s fear rattled against the inside of my ribs like a bird beating itself against walls. Shut away from the sun, shut away from water, shut away from air. And she still couldn’t die. She hadn’t died. […] She’d won free, and then she’d—killed them? She’d killed them, and not only them, but their lovers and children and all their people; she’d devoured them, become as monstrous as they had been. She’d made the Wood.”

Luthe’s Summoning reveals the truth of Queen Hanna’s fate and the identity of the true antagonist, the Wood-queen. The Wood-queen embodies the corrupting influence of power. As her power grows, she becomes monstrous and violent, killing everyone in her path, innocent or not. However, she is also a complex villain because of the betrayal that set her on her path of bloody revenge.

“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.”

Agnieszka again references the motif of stories, observing that songs about war always depict the glory and adventure but never show the moments afterward, when survivors must trudge home filled with death and grief. This again highlights stories’ potential to mislead and to present an incomplete picture of humanity; it also recalls Agnieszka’s “story” of the queen’s rescue during the trial, which similarly focused only on heroism and romance.

“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.”

As Agnieszka and Sarkan face their final confrontation with the Wood-queen, Agnieszka reflects on the “endless chain” of violence that has led her here. Though the Wood-queen is corrupted, malevolent, and dangerous, Agnieszka fears that killing her will not end the violence but perpetuate it, her contrasting word choices suggesting a cascade of actions and reactions (for example, “striking down” as a response to “walling up”). This echoes the folktale that inspired the novel, which warns against fear and hatred of foreigners, and leads Agnieszka to make a different decision.

“When the sorcerer-king came with his people, my sister let them come into the valley. She thought they could teach us to remember. She thought we could be renewed, and teach them in turn; we could give each other life. But they were afraid. They wanted to live, they wanted to grow stronger, but they didn’t want to change. They learned the wrong things.”

The story Linaya shares with Agnieszka about the Wood-queen and the fate of tree-people opens Agnieszka’s eyes to the truth and allows her to understand and connect with the Wood-queen. Like the original folktale, Linaya’s story also underscores the way fear and hatred of difference lead to cruelty and violence.

“For a moment, through the winding smoke between us, I might have been the daughter she’d hoped for, the child halfway between the tower-people and her own; she might have been my teacher and my guide, like Jaga’s book showing me the way. We might never have been enemies at all.”

Agnieszka approaches the Wood-queen with greater understanding and empathy after her vision inside the heart-tree, offering help rather than violence. This moment shows the effectiveness of genuine human connection to counteract the corrupting influence of power. Agnieszka learns to accept the Wood-queen, freeing them both from the chain of violence.