by Naomi Novik
At the end of the room there was a strangely cold place, where I found meat hanging up: a whole venison and two great hares; there was a box of straw full of eggs. There was a fresh loaf of bread already baked wrapped in a woven cloth on the hearth, and next to it I discovered a whole pot of rabbit and buckwheat and small peas all together. I tasted it: like something for a feast day, so salty and a little sweet, and meltingly tender; another gift from the anonymous hand in the book.
I didn’t know how to make food like that at all, and I quailed thinking that the Dragon would expect it. But I was desperately grateful to have the pot ready nonetheless. I put it back on the shelf above the fire to warm—I splashed my dress a little as I did—and I put two eggs in a dish in the oven to bake, and found a tray and a bowl and a plate and a spoon. When the rabbit was ready, I set it out on the tray and cut the bread—I had to cut it, because I had torn off the end of the loaf and eaten it myself while I waited for the rabbit to heat up—and put out butter. I even baked an apple, with the spices: my mother had taught me to do that for our Sunday supper in winter, and there were so many ovens I could do that at the same time as everything else cooked. I even felt a little proud of myself, when everything was assembled on the tray together: it looked like a holiday, though a strange one, with just enough for one man.
I took it up the stairs carefully, but too late I realized I didn’t know where the library was. If I’d thought about it a little, I might have reasoned out that it wouldn’t be on the lowest floor, and indeed it wasn’t, but I didn’t find that out until I’d wandered around carrying the tray through an enormous circular hall, the windows draped with curtains and a heavy throne-like chair at the end. There was another door at the far end, but when I opened that I found only the entry hall and the huge doors of the tower, three times the height of my head and barred with a thick slab of wood in iron brackets.
I turned and went back through the hall to the stairs, and up another landing, and here found the marble floor covered in soft furry cloth. I’d never seen a carpet before. That was why I hadn’t heard the Dragon’s footsteps. I crept anxiously down the hall, and peered through the first door. I backed out hastily: the room was full of long tables, strange bottles and bubbling potions and unnatural sparks in colors that came from no fireplace; I didn’t want to spend another moment inside there. But I managed to catch my dress in the door and tear it, even so.
Finally the next door, across the hall, opened on a room full of books: wooden shelves up and up from floor to ceiling crammed with them. It smelled of dust, and there were only a few narrow windows throwing light in. I was so glad to find the library that I didn’t notice at first that the Dragon was there: sitting in a heavy chair with a book laid out on a small table across his thighs, so large each page was the length of my forearm, and a great golden lock hanging from the open cover.
I froze staring at him, feeling betrayed by the advice in the book. I’d somehow assumed that the Dragon would conveniently keep out of the way until I’d had a chance to put down his meal. He hadn’t raised his head to look at me, but instead of just going quietly with the tray to the table in the center of the room, laying it out, and scurrying away, I hung in the doorway and said, “I’ve—I’ve brought dinner,” not wanting to go in unless he told me to.
“Really?” he said, cuttingly. “Without falling into a pit along the way? I’m astonished.” He only then looked up at me and frowned. “Or did you fall into a pit?”
I looked down at myself. My skirt had one enormous ugly stain, from the vomit—I’d wiped it off best as I could in the kitchen, but it hadn’t really come out—and another from where I’d blown my nose. There were three or four dripping stains from the stew, and some more spatters from the dish-pan where I’d wiped the pots. The hem was still muddy from this morning, and I’d torn a few other holes in it without even noticing. My mother had braided and coiled my hair that morning and pinned it up, but the coils had slid mostly down off my head and were now a big snarled knot of hair hanging half off my neck.
I hadn’t noticed; it wasn’t anything out of the usual for me, except that I was wearing a nice dress underneath the mess. “I was—I cooked, and I cleaned—” I tried to explain.
“The dirtiest thing in this tower is you,” he said—true, but unkind anyway. I flushed and with my head low went to the table. I laid everything out and looked it over, and then I realized sinkingly that with all the time I’d taken wandering around, everything had gone cold, except the butter, which was a softened runny mess in its dish. Even my lovely baked apple was all congealed.
I stared down at it in dismay, trying to decide what to do; should I take it all back down? Or maybe he wouldn’t mind? I turned to look and nearly yelped: he was standing directly behind me peering over my shoulder at the food. “I see why you were afraid I might roast you,” he said, leaning over to lift up a spoonful of the stew, breaking the layer of cooling fat on its top and dumping it back in. “You would make a better meal than this.”
“I’m not a splendid cook, but—” I started, meaning to explain that I wasn’t quite so terrible at it, I’d only not known my way, but he snorted, interrupting me.
“Is there anything you can do?” he asked, mockingly.
If only I’d been better trained to serve, if only I’d ever really thought I might be chosen and had been more ready for all of it; if only I’d been a little less miserable and tired, and if only I hadn’t felt a little proud of myself in the kitchen; if only he hadn’t just twitted me for being a rag, the way everyone who loved me did, but with malice instead of affection—if any of those things, and if only I hadn’t run into him on the stairs, and discovered that he wasn’t going to fling me into a fire, I would probably have just gone red, and run away.
Instead I flung the tray down on the table in a passion and cried, “Why did you take me, then? Why didn’t you take Kasia?”
I shut my mouth as soon as I’d said it, ashamed of myself and horrified. I was about to open my mouth and take it back in a rush, to tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean he should go take Kasia instead; I would go and make him another tray—
He said impatiently, “Who?”
I gaped at him. “Kasia!” I said. He only looked at me as though I was giving him more evidence of my idiocy, and I forgot my noble intentions in confusion. “You were going to take her! She’s—she’s clever, and brave, and a splendid cook, and—”
He was looking every moment more annoyed. “Yes,” he bit out, interrupting me, “I do recall the girl: neither horse-faced nor a slovenly mess, and I imagine would not be yammering at me this very minute: enough. You village girls are all tedious at the beginning, more or less, but you’re proving a truly remarkable paragon of incompetence.”
“Then you needn’t keep me!” I flared, angry and wounded—horse-faced stung.
“Much to my regret,” he said, “that’s where you’re wrong.”
He seized my hand by the wrist and whipped me around: he stood close behind me and stretched my arm out over the food on the table. “Lirintalem,” he said, a strange word that ran liquidly off his tongue and rang sharply in my ears. “Say it with me.”
“What?” I said; I’d never heard the word before. But he pressed closer against my back, put his mouth against my ear, and whispered, terrible, “Say it!”
I trembled, and wanting only for him to let me go said it with him, “Lirintalem,” while he held my hand out over the meal.
The air rippled over the food, horrible to see, like the whole world was a pond that he could throw pebbles in. When it smoothed again, the food was all changed. Where the baked eggs had been, a roast chicken; instead of the bowl of rabbit stew, a heap of tiny new spring beans, though it was seven months past their season; instead of the baked apple, a tartlet full of apples sliced paper-thin, studded with fat raisins and glazed over with honey.
He let go of me. I staggered with the loss of his support, clutching at the edge
of the table, my lungs emptied as if someone had sat on my chest; I felt like I’d been squeezed for juice like a lemon. Stars prickled at the edge of my sight, and I leaned over half-fainting. I only distantly saw him looking down at the tray, an odd scowl on his face as though he was at once surprised and annoyed.
“What did you do to me?” I whispered, when I could breathe again.
“Stop whining,” he said dismissively. “It’s nothing more than a cantrip.” Whatever surprise he might have felt had vanished; he flicked his hand at the door as he seated himself at the table before his dinner. “All right, get out. I can see you’ll be wasting inordinate amounts of my time, but I’ve had enough for the day.”
I was glad to obey that, at least. I didn’t try to pick up the tray, only crept slowly out of the library, cradling my hand against my body. I was still stumbling-weak. It took me nearly half an hour to drag myself back up all the stairs to the top floor, and then I went into the little room and shut the door, dragged the dresser before it, and fell onto the bed. If the Dragon came to the door while I slept, I didn’t hear a thing.
Chapter 2
I didn’t see the Dragon for another four days. I spent them in the kitchen morning until night: I had found a few cookbooks there and was working through every recipe in them one after another, frantically, trying to become the most splendid cook anyone had ever heard of. There was enough food in the larder that I didn’t care what I wasted; if anything was bad, I ate it myself. I followed the advice and got his meals to the library exactly five minutes to the hour, and I covered the dishes and hurried. He was never there again when I came, so I was content, and I heard no complaints from him. There were some homespun clothes in a box in my room, which fit me more or less—my legs were bare from the knee down, my arms from the elbow down, and I had to tie them around my waist, but I was as tidy as I had ever been.
I didn’t want to please him, but I did want to keep him from ever doing that to me again, whatever that spell had been. I’d woken from dreams four times a night, feeling the word lirintalem on my lips and tasting it in my mouth as though it belonged there, and his hand burning hot on my arm.
Fear and work weren’t all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn’t see my mother and my father for ten years, that I’d never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon’s girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn’t recognize at the end of it. At least while I was chopping and sweltering away in front of the ovens, I didn’t have to think about any of that.
After a few days, when I realized that he wouldn’t come and use that spell on me at every meal, I stopped my frenzy of cooking. But then I found I had nothing else to do, even when I went looking for work. As large as the tower was, it didn’t need cleaning: no dust had gathered in the corners or the window-sills, not even on the tiny carved vines on the gilt frame.
I still didn’t like the map-painting in my room. Every night I imagined I heard a faint gurgle coming from it, like water running down a gutter, and every day it sat there on the wall in all its excessive glory, trying to make me look at it. After scowling at it, I went downstairs. I emptied out a sack of turnips in the cellar, ripped the seams, and used the cloth to cover it up. My room felt better at once with the gold and splendor of it hidden away.
I spent the rest of that morning looking out the window across the valley again, lonely and sick with longing. It was an ordinary work-day, so there were men in the fields gathering in the harvest and women at the river doing their washing. Even the Wood looked almost comforting to me, in its great wild impenetrable blackness: an unchanged constant. The big herd of sheep that belonged to Radomsko was grazing on the lower slopes of the mountains at the northern end of the valley; they looked like a wandering white cloud. I watched them roam awhile, and had a small weep, but even grief had its limits. By dinner-time I was horribly bored.
My family weren’t either poor or rich; we had seven books in our house. I’d only ever read four of them; I had spent nearly every day of my life more out-of-doors than not, even in winter and rain. But I didn’t have many other choices anymore, so when I brought the dinner tray to the library that afternoon, I looked over at the shelves. Surely there could be no harm in my taking one. The other girls must have taken books, since everyone always said how well read they were when they came out of service.
So I boldly went to a shelf and picked out a book that nearly called out to be touched: it was beautifully bound in a burnished leather the color of wheat that glowed in the candle-light, rich and inviting. Once I’d taken it out, I hesitated: it was bigger and heavier than any of my family’s books, and besides that the cover was engraved with beautiful designs painted in gold. But there was no lock on it, so I carried it away with me up to my room, half-guilty and trying to convince myself I was being foolish for feeling that way.
Then I opened it and felt even more foolish, because I couldn’t understand it at all. Not in the usual way, of not knowing the words, or not knowing what enough of them meant—I did understand them all, and everything that I was reading, for the first three pages, and then I paused and wondered, what was the book about? And I couldn’t tell; I had no idea what I’d just read.
I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense—better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I’d always known and just hadn’t ever put into words, or of explaining clearly and plainly something I’d never understood. I was nodding with satisfaction, going along well, and this time I got to the fifth page before I realized again that I couldn’t have told anyone what was on the first page, or for that matter the page before.
I glared down at the book resentfully, and then I opened it to the first page again and started to read out loud, one word at a time. The words sang like birds out of my mouth, beautiful, melting like sugared fruit. I still couldn’t keep the train of it in my head, but I kept reading, dreamily, until the door smashed open.
I’d stopped barring my door with furniture by then. I was sitting on my bed, which I’d pushed under the window for the light, and the Dragon was directly across the room from me framed in the doorway. I froze in surprise and stopped reading, my mouth hanging open. He was furiously angry: his eyes were glittering and terrible, and he held out a hand and said, “Tualidetal.”
The book tried to jump out of my hands, to fly across the room to him. I blindly clutched after it from some badly misguided instinct. It wriggled against me, trying to go, but stupidly obstinate I gave it a jerk and managed to yank it back into my arms. He gaped at me and grew even more wildly angry; he stormed across the tiny chamber, while I belatedly tried to scramble up and back, but there was nowhere for me to go. He was on me in an instant, thrusting me flat down against my pillows.
“So,” he said, silkily, his hand pressed down upon my collarbone, pinning me easily to the bed. It felt as though my heart was thumping back and forth between my breastbone and my back, each beat shaking me. He plucked the book away with a hand—at least I wasn’t stupid enough to keep trying to hold on to it anymore—and tossed it with an easy flip so it landed upon the small table. “Agnieszka, was it? Agnieszka of Dvernik.”
He seemed to want an answer. “Yes,” I whispered.
“Agnieszka,” he murmured, bending low towards me, and I realized he meant to kiss me. I was terrified, and yet half-wanting him to do it and have it over with, so I wouldn’t have to be so afraid, and then he didn’t at all. He said, bent so close I could see my eyes reflected in his, “Tell me, dear Agnieszka, where are you really from? Did the Falcon send you? Or perhaps even the king himself?”
I stopped staring in terror at his mouth and darted my eyes towards his. “I—what?” I said.
“I will find out,” he said. “Howev
er skillful your master’s spell, it will have holes in it. Your—family—” He sneered the word. “—may think they remember you, but they won’t have all the things of a child’s life. A pair of mittens or a worn-out cap, a collection of broken toys—I won’t find those things in your house, will I?”
“All my toys were broken?” I said helplessly, seizing on the only part of this I even understood at all. “They’re—yes? All my clothes were always worn out, our rag-bag is all them—”
He shoved me hard against the bed and bent low. “Don’t dare lie to me!” he hissed. “I will tear the truth out of your throat—”
His fingers were resting on my neck; his leg was on the bed, between mine. In a great gulp of terror I put my hands on his chest and shoved with all my body against the bed, and heaved us both off it. We fell heavily together to the ground, him beneath me, and I was up like a rabbit scrambling off him and running for the door. I fled for the stairs. I don’t know where I thought I was going: I couldn’t have gotten out the front door, and there was nowhere else to go. But I ran anyway: I scrambled down two flights, and as his steps pursuing me came on, I flung myself into the dim laboratory, with all its hissing fumes and smoke. I crawled away desperately under the tables into a dark corner behind a high cabinet, and pulled my legs in towards me.
I’d closed the door behind me, but that didn’t seem to keep him from knowing where I’d gone. He opened it and looked into the room, and I saw him over the edge of one table, his cold and angry eye between two beakers of glass, his face painted in shades of green by the fires. He came with a steady unhurried step around the table, and as he rounded the end I darted forward scrambling the other way, trying for the door—I had some thought of locking him in. But I jarred the narrow shelf against the wall. One of the stoppered jars struck my back, rolled off, and smashed on the floor at my feet.