Uprooted

Every ten years the wizard called the Dragon takes a seventeen year old girl from the valley. She serves in his tower for a decade and comes back changed, unwilling to stay, and gone to the city within a year. Nobody knows what he does with them, and the valley pays because he is the only thing standing between them and the Wood.

The Wood is the reason. It is a corrupted forest that takes people, and what comes back out of it is worse than dead: contaminated, patient, and able to spread. Whole villages have been swallowed.

Everyone expects him to take Kasia, who is beautiful and brave and has been raised for it. He takes Agnieszka, who is clumsy, filthy within minutes of any clean dress, and has a kind of magic that works nothing like his: intuitive, improvised, closer to cooking than to Latin.

The novel escalates hard. What begins as a girl and a difficult tutor in a tower becomes a court intrigue, a war with the neighbouring kingdom, a possessed queen, and finally the question of what the Wood actually wants, which turns out to be grief rather than malice.

Kasia is the reason it holds together. The friendship between the plain girl and the beautiful one, who both know exactly which of them was supposed to be chosen, is treated with more seriousness than the romance.

Around four hundred and forty pages, fast, immersive and built from Polish folklore rather than the usual western European stock, with magic that feels grown rather than designed.

Note that the relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon involves a considerable age and power gap and a good deal of him shouting at her, which some readers find charged and others find unpleasant. Best for readers who want a standalone fairy tale with real teeth.