by Naomi Novik
Grey smoke billowed up around me and into my nose and mouth, choking me, stilling me. It stung in my eyes, and I couldn’t blink, I couldn’t reach up to rub them, my arms refusing to answer. The coughs caught in my throat and stopped; my whole body froze slowly into place, still in a crouch on the floor. But I didn’t feel afraid anymore, and after a moment not even uncomfortable. I was somehow at once endlessly heavy and weightless, distant. I heard the Dragon’s footsteps very faintly and far-off as he came and stood over me, and I didn’t care what he would do.
He stood there looking down at me with cold impatience. I didn’t try to guess what he would do; I could neither think nor wonder. The world was very grey and still.
“No,” he said after a moment, “—no, you can’t possibly be a spy.”
He turned and left me there, for some time—I couldn’t have told you how long, it could have been an hour or a week or a year, though later I learned it had been only half a day. Then at last he returned, with a displeased set look to his mouth. He held up a small raggedy thing that had once been a piglet, knitted of wool and stuffed with straw, before I had dragged it behind me through the woods for the first seven years of my life. “So,” he said, “no spy. Only a witling.”
Then he laid his hand on my head and said, “Tezavon tahozh, tezavon tahozh kivi, kanzon lihush.”
He didn’t so much recite the words as chant them, almost like a song, and as he spoke color and time and breath came back into the world; my head came free and I shied out from under his hand. The stone was slowly fading out of my flesh. My arms came loose, flailing for a grip on anything while my still-stone legs held me locked in place. He caught my wrists, so when I finally came loose all the way I was held by his hand, with no chance of flight.
I didn’t try to run, though. My suddenly free thoughts ran around in a dozen directions, as though they were catching up with lost time, but it seemed to me he might have just left me stone, if he’d wanted to do something terrible to me, and at least he had stopped thinking me some sort of spy. I didn’t understand why he thought anyone would have wanted to spy on him, much less the king; he was the king’s wizard, wasn’t he?
“And now you’ll tell me: what were you doing?” he said. His eyes were still suspicious and cold and glittering.
“I only wanted a book to read,” I said. “I didn’t—I didn’t think there was any harm—”
“And you happened to take Luthe’s Summoning off the shelf for a little reading,” he said, cuttingly sarcastic, “and merely by chance—” until perhaps my alarmed and blank look convinced him, and he halted and looked at me with unconcealed irritation. “What an unequaled gift for disaster you have.”
Then he scowled down, and I followed his look to the shards of the glass jar around our feet: he hissed his breath out between his teeth and said abruptly, “Clean that up, and then come to the library. And don’t touch anything else.”
He stalked away, leaving me to go hunt out some rags from the kitchens to pick up the glass with, and a bucket: I washed the floor as well, though there wasn’t a trace of anything spilled, as though the magic had burned off like the liquor on a pudding. I kept stopping and lifting my hand up from the stone floor to turn it over front and back, making sure the stone wasn’t creeping back up my fingertips. I couldn’t help but wonder why he had a jar of that on his shelf, and whether he’d ever used it on someone else—someone who had become a statue somewhere, standing with fixed eyes, time eddying past them; I shuddered.
I was very, very careful not to touch anything else in the room.
The book I’d taken was back upon the shelf when at last I girded myself and went into the library. He was pacing, his own book on its small table thrust aside and neglected, and when I came in he scowled at me again. I looked down: my skirt was marked with wet tracks from the mopping, and it had been too short to begin with, barely halfway down my calves. The sleeves of my shift were worse: I’d got some egg on the ends that morning, making his breakfast, and had singed the elbow a little getting the toast off before it burned.
“We’ll begin with that, then,” the Dragon said. “I needn’t be offended every time I have to look at you.”
I shut my mouth on apologies: if I began to apologize for being untidy, I’d be apologizing the rest of my life. I could tell from only a few days in the tower that he loved beautiful things. Even his legions of books were none of them exactly alike: their leather bindings in different colors, their clasps and hinges of gold and sometimes even dotted with small chips of jewels. Anything that anyone might rest their eyes on, whether a small blown-glass cup upon the window-sill here in the library, or the painting in my room, was beautiful, and set aside in its own place where it might shine without distractions. I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.
He beckoned me over, impatiently, and I took a wary step towards him; he took my hands and crossed them over my chest, fingertips on each opposite shoulder, and said, “Now: vanastalem.”
I stared at him in mute rebellion. The word when he said it rang in my ears just like the other spell he’d used me for. I could feel it wanting to come into my mouth, to drain away my strength.
He caught me by the shoulder, his fingers gripping painfully hard; I felt the heat of each one penetrating through my shirt. “I may have to put up with incompetence; I won’t tolerate spinelessness,” he said. “Say it.”
I remembered being stone; what else could he do to me? I trembled and said, very soft, as if whispering could keep it from taking hold of me, “Vanastalem.”
My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path. I sank to the ground gasping in strangely vast skirts of rustling silk, green and russet brown. They pooled around my waist and swamped my legs, endless. My head bowed forward on my neck under the weight of a curved headdress, a veil spilling down my back, lace picked out with flowers in gold thread. I stared dully at the Dragon’s boots, the tooled leather of them: there were curling vines embossed upon them.
“Look at you, and over a nothing of a spell again,” he said over me, sounding exasperated with his own handiwork. “At least your appearance is improved. See if you can keep yourself in a decent state from now on. Tomorrow, we’ll try another.”
The boots turned and walked away from me. He sat down in his chair, I think, and went back to his reading; I don’t know for certain. After a while I crawled out of the library on my hands and knees, in that beautiful dress, without ever lifting my head.
The next few weeks blurred into one another. Every morning I woke a little before dawn and lay in my bed while my window brightened, trying to think of some way to escape. Every morning, having failed, I carried his breakfast tray to the library, and he cast another spell with me. If I hadn’t been able to keep myself neat enough—usually I hadn’t—he used vanastalem upon me first, and then a second spell, too. All my homespun dresses were vanishing one after another, and the unwieldy elaborate dresses dotted my bedroom like small mountains, so heavy with brocade and embroidery that they half stood up without me inside them. I could barely writhe my way out from under the skirts at bedtime, and the awful boned stays beneath them squeezed in my breath.
The aching fog never left me. After each morning, I crept shattered back to my chamber. I suppose the Dragon got his own dinner, because I certainly did nothing for him. I lay on my bed until supper-time, when usually I was able to creep back downstairs and get a simple meal, driven more by my own hunger than any concern for his needs.
The worst of it was not understanding: why was he using me this way? At night, before drowning in sleep, I imagined all the worst out of tales and fairy-stories, vampyrs and incubi drinking the life out of maidens, and swore in terror that in the morning I would find a way out. Of course, I never did. My only comfort was that I wasn’t the first: I told myself he’d d
one this to all those other girls before me, and they had come through it. It wasn’t much comfort: ten years seemed to me forever. But I grasped at any thought that could ease my misery even a little.
He gave me no comfort himself. He was irritated with me every time I came into his library, even on the few days that I managed to keep myself in good order: as though I were coming to annoy and interrupt him, instead of him tormenting and using me. And when he had finished working his magic through me and left me crumpled on the floor, he would scowl down at me and call me useless.
One day I tried to keep away entirely. I thought if I left his meal early, he might forget about me for a day. I laid his breakfast as dawn broke, then hurried away and hid in the back of the kitchens. But promptly at seven, one of his wisp-things, the ones I’d sometimes seen floating down the Spindle towards the Wood, came gliding down the stairs. Seen close, it was a misshapen soap-bubble thing, rippling and shifting, almost invisible unless the light caught on its iridescent skin. The wisp went bobbing in and out of corners, until at last it reached me and came to hover over my knees insistently. I stared up at it from my huddle and saw my own face looking back in ghostly outline. Slowly I unfolded myself and followed the wisp back up to the library, where he set aside his book and glared at me.
“As happy as I would be to forgo the very doubtful pleasure of watching you flop about like an exhausted eel over the least cantrip,” he bit out, “we’ve already seen the consequences of leaving you to your own devices. How much of a slattern have you made yourself today?”
I’d been making a desperate effort to keep myself tidy so I could at least avoid the first spell. Today I had only acquired a few small smudges making breakfast, and one streak of oil. I held a fold of my dress shut around that. But he was looking at me with distaste anyway, and when I followed the line of his gaze I saw to my dismay that while I had been hiding in the back of the kitchens, I had evidently picked up a cobweb—the one cobweb in all the tower, I suppose—which was now trailing from the back of my skirt like a thin ragged veil.
“Vanastalem,” I repeated with him, dully resigned, and watched a riotously beautiful wave of orange and yellow silk come sweeping up from the floor to surround me, like leaves blown down an autumn path. I swayed, breathing heavily, as he sat down again.
“Now then,” he said. He had set a stack of books upon the table, and with a shove he toppled them over into a loose and scattered heap. “To order them: darendetal.”
He waved his hand at the table. “Darendetal,” I mumbled along with him, and the spell came strangling out of my throat. The books on the table shuddered, and one after another lifted and spun into place like unnatural jeweled birds in their bindings of red and yellow and blue and brown.
This time, I didn’t sink to the floor: I only gripped the edge of the table with both hands and leaned against it. He was frowning at the stack. “What idiocy is this?” he demanded. “There’s no order here—look at this.”
I looked at the books. They were piled into a single stack neatly enough, with like colors next to each other—
“—color?” he said, his voice rising. “By color? You—” He was as furious with me as if it had been my fault. Maybe it did something to his magic, when he pulled strength from me to fuel it? “Oh, get out!” he snarled, and I hurried away full of resentful secret delight: oh, I was glad if I was spoiling his magic somehow.
I had to stop halfway up the stairs to catch my breath inside the stays, but when I did, I realized abruptly that I wasn’t crawling. I was still tired, but the fog hadn’t descended. I even managed to climb the rest of the way to the top of the stairs without another pause, and though I fell onto my bed and drowsed away half of the day, at least I didn’t feel like a mindless husk.
The fog lifted more and more as the next few weeks passed, as though practice was making me stronger, better able to bear whatever he was doing to me. The sessions began little by little to be—not pleasant, but not terrifying; only a tiresome chore, like having to scrub pots in cold water. I could sleep at night again, and my spirit began to recover, too. Every day I felt better, and every day more angry.
I couldn’t get back into the ridiculous gowns in any kind of reasonable way—I’d tried, but I couldn’t even reach the buttons and laces in the back, and I usually had to burst threads and crumple the skirts even to get out of them. So every night I shoved them into a piled-up heap out of the way, and every morning I would put on another of the homespun ones and try and keep as tidy as I could, and every few days he would lose patience with my untidiness and change that one, too. And now I had reached the last of my homespun gowns.
I held that last gown of plain undyed wool in my hands, feeling like it was a rope I was clinging to, and then in a burst of defiance I left it on my bed, and pulled myself into the green-and-russet gown.
I couldn’t fasten the buttons in back, so I took the long veil from the headdress, wound it twice around my waist and made a knot, just barely good enough to keep the whole thing from falling off me, and marched downstairs to the kitchens. I didn’t even try to keep myself clean this time: I carried the tray up to the library defiantly bespattered with egg and bacon-grease and splotches of tea, my hair in snarls, looking like some sort of mad noblewoman who’d run off to the woods from a ball.
Of course, it didn’t last long. As soon as I resentfully said vanastalem along with him, his magic seized me and shook off my stains, squashed me back into stays, piled my hair back upon my head, and left me once again looking like a doll for some princess to play with.
But I felt happier that morning than I had in weeks, and from then on it became my private defiance. I wanted him to be bitterly annoyed every time he looked at me, and he rewarded me with every incredulous scowl. “How do you do this to yourself?” he asked me, almost marveling, one day when I wandered in with a clump of rice pudding on top of my head—I had accidentally hit a spoon with my elbow and flung some into the air—and a huge red streak of jam going all the way down my front of beautiful cream silk.
The last homespun dress, I kept in my dresser. Every day after he had done with me, I went upstairs. I would wrestle my way out of the ballgown, drag my hair out of the nets and headdresses, scattering jeweled pins on the floor, and then I would put on the soft well-worn letnik and the homespun smock, which I kept washed and clean by hand. And then I went down to the kitchens to make my own bread, and I rested by the warm fireplace while it baked, careless of a few smudges of ash and flour on my skirts.
I began to have enough energy for boredom once again. I didn’t even think of taking another book from the library, though. Instead, I went for a needle, much as I loathed to sew. As long as I was going to be drained to the belly every morning to make dresses, I thought I might as well tear them apart and make something less useless of them: sheets, perhaps, or handkerchiefs.
The mending-basket had stood untouched inside the box in my room: there was nothing in the castle to mend but my own clothes, which until now I had been sullenly glad to leave torn. But when I opened it, I found tucked inside a single scrap of paper, written on with a bit of stubby charcoal: the hand of my friend from the kitchen.
You are afraid: don’t be! He won’t touch you. He will only want you to make yourself handsome. He won’t think to give you anything, but you can take a fine dress from one of the guest chambers and make it over to fit you. When he summons you, sing to him or tell him a story. He wants company but not much of it: bring his meals and avoid him when you can, and he will ask nothing more.
How priceless those words would have been to me, if I had opened the mending-basket and found them that first night. Now I stood holding the note, shaking with the memory of his voice overlaid on my halting one, dragging spells and strength out of me, draping me in silks and velvet. I had been wrong. He hadn’t done any of this to the other women at all.
Chapter 3
I huddled in my bed all that night without sleeping, desperate all over ag
ain. But getting out of the tower didn’t become easier just because I wanted it more. I did go to the great doors the next morning, and tried for the first time to lift the enormous bar across them, no matter how ridiculous the attempt. But of course I couldn’t budge it a quarter of an inch.
Down in the pantry, using a long-handled pot for a lever, I pried up the great iron cap that covered the refuse-pit and looked down. Deep below a fire gleamed; there was no escape there for me. I pushed the iron lid back into place with an effort, and then I searched all along the walls with both my palms, into every dark corner, looking for some opening, some entry. But if there was one, I didn’t find it; and then morning was spilling down the stairs behind me, an unwelcome golden light. I had to make the breakfast and carry the tray up to my doom.
As I laid the food out, the plate of eggs, the toast, the preserves, I looked over and looked over again, at the long steel-gleaming butcher’s knife with its handle jutting out of the block towards me. I had used it to cut meat; I knew how quick it was. My parents raised a pig every year. I’d helped at butchering-time, held the bucket for the pig’s blood, but the thought of putting a knife into a man was something else, unimaginable. So I didn’t imagine it. I only put the knife on the tray, and went upstairs.
When I came into the library, he was standing by the window-sill with his back to me and his shoulders stiff with irritation. I mechanically put out the dishes, one after another, until there was nothing left but the tray, the tray and the knife. My dress was splattered with oatmeal and egg; in a moment he would say—
“Finish with that,” he said, “and go upstairs.”
“What?” I said, blankly. The knife was still under its napkin, drowning out all my other thoughts, and it took a moment for me to understand I’d been reprieved.