In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, things are not as they seem. She and her first-person narrator tell readers that from the novel’s very beginning: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Nor is the valley’s Dragon a dragon — “he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man” — but he still claims a girl every ten years, and the people of the valley see both sides of that coin. “He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”
The narrator is clear on how the price looks from the outside: “He doesn’t devour them really; it only feels that way. He takes a girl to his tower, and ten years later he lets her go, but by then she’s someone different. Her clothes are too fine and she talks like a courtier … they don’t want to marry anyone. They don’t want to stay at all.” They’ve been uprooted.
The narrator, Agnieszka, was born in a year that meant that when she turns seventeen, the Dragon would choose someone from her cohort as the next girl to come to his tower. “There aren’t so many villages in the valley that the chances are very low … There were eleven girls to choose from in my year, and that’s worse odds than dice. Everyone says you love a Dragon-born girl differently as she gets older; you can’t help it, knowing you so easily might lose her. But it wasn’t like that for me, for my parents. By the time I was old enough to understand that I might be taken, we all knew he would take Kasia.” So the story opens, with Agnieszka at seventeen telling her story, and by the way filling in some of the background of the valley with its villages, all overshadowed by the likelihood that at the next festival she will lose her closest friend to the sorcerous lord and his closed tower.
Agnieszka does not have the womanly virtues that her village society esteems, and she has seen nothing else of the world so she barely questions that judgement. “My parents wouldn’t have feared for me, very much, even if there hadn’t been Kasia [who was all the things thought best]. At seventeen I was still a too-skinny colt of a girl with big feet and tangled dirt-brown hair, and my only gift, if you could call it that, was I would tear or stain or lose anything put on me between the hours of one day. My mother despaired of me by the time I was twelve … ‘You’ll have to marry a tailor,’ my little Agnieszka, my [woodcutter] father would say, laughing, when he came home from the forest at night and I went running to meet him, grubby-faced, with at least one hole about me, and no kerchief.” Novik has set up the first opposition of the book — Agnieszka and the expectations of those around her — with the Dragon’s choice soon to tear her best friend away, and lurking in the background whatever it is about the Wood (as opposed to the forest where her father works) that earns its capitalization and the need for the Dragon’s protection.