by Naomi Novik
“Try not to be stupid,” the Dragon said. “You said you didn’t seduce him, so he came up here of his own intention. When was that intention formed? Merely tonight as he already lay in his bed? Or was he thinking of it along the road—a warm bed, welcoming arms—yes, I realize yours weren’t; you’ve provided sufficient evidence to the contrary,” he snapped, when I would have protested. “For all we know, he meant to do it even before he set out—a calculated sort of insult.”
I remembered the prince speaking of the Dragon’s “usual line”—as though he had thought of it beforehand, as though he’d planned it almost. “To insult you?” I said.
“He supposes I take women to force them to whore for me,” the Dragon said. “Most of those courtiers do: they’d do as much themselves if they had the chance. So I imagine he thought of it as cuckolding me. He would have been delighted to spread it around the court, I’m sure. It’s the sort of thing the Magnati waste their time caring about.”
He spoke disdainfully, but he’d certainly been angry enough when he came storming into the room. “Why would he want to insult you?” I timidly asked. “Didn’t he come to—to ask you for some magic?”
“No, he came to enjoy the view of the Wood,” the Dragon said. “Of course he came for magic, and I sent him about his business, which is hacking at enemy knights and not meddling in things he scarcely understands.” He snorted. “He’s begun to believe his own troubadours: he wanted to try and get back the queen.”
“But the queen is dead,” I said, confused. That had been the start of the wars. Crown Prince Vasily of Rosya had come to visit Polnya on an embassy, nearly twenty years ago now. He’d fallen in love with Queen Hanna and they’d run away together, and when the king’s soldiers had drawn near on their trail they’d fled into the Wood.
That was the end of the story: no one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves. Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.
The queen and Prince Vasily hadn’t come out at all. The king of Polnya blamed Rosya’s heir for abducting her, the king of Rosya had blamed Polnya for his heir’s death, and since then we’d had one war after another, broken only by occasional truces and a few short-lived treaties.
Here in the valley, we shook our heads over the story; everyone agreed it had all been the Wood’s doing from the start. The queen, with two small children, to run away? To start a war with her own husband? Their own courtship had been famous; there had been a dozen songs of their wedding. My mother had sung me one of them, the parts she remembered; none of the traveling singers would perform them anymore, of course.
The Wood had to be behind it. Perhaps someone had poisoned the two of them with water taken from the river just where it went into the Wood; perhaps some courtier traveling along the mountain pass to Rosya had accidentally spent a night under the dark trees near the edge, and gone back to the court with something else inside him. We knew it was the Wood, but that didn’t make a difference. Queen Hanna was still gone, and she’d gone with the prince of Rosya, and so we were all at war and the Wood crept a little farther into both realms every year, feeding on their deaths and all the deaths since then.
“No,” the Dragon said, “the queen’s not dead. She’s still in the Wood.”
I stared at him. He sounded matter-of-fact, certain, although I’d never heard of anything like it. But it was enough of a horror for me to believe it: to be trapped in the Wood, for twenty years, imprisoned endlessly in some way—it was the kind of thing the Wood would do.
The Dragon shrugged and waved a hand at the prince. “There’s no getting her out again, and he’d only start something worse by going in, but he won’t hear it.” He snorted. “He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero.”
None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.
“In any case,” the Dragon said, “I suppose he does feel aggrieved; lords and princes loathe magic anyway, and all the more for how badly they need it. Yes: some petty revenge of that sort is the most likely.”
I could easily believe it, and I did grasp the Dragon’s point. If the prince had meant to enjoy the Dragon’s companion, whoever that girl might be—I felt a surge of indignation, thinking of Kasia in my place, without even unwanted magic to save her—then he wouldn’t have simply gone to bed. That memory wouldn’t fit neatly into his head, like a wrong puzzle piece.
“However,” the Dragon added, in a tone of mild condescension, as if I were a puppy that had managed not to chew a shoe, “it’s not an entirely useless idea: I ought to be able to alter his memory in the other direction.”
He raised a hand, and, puzzled, I said, “The other direction?”
“I’ll give him a memory of enjoying your favors,” the Dragon said. “Full of suitable enthusiasm on your part and the satisfaction of making a fool of me. I’m sure he won’t have any difficulty swallowing that.”
“What?” I said. “You’ll have him—no! He’ll—he’ll—”
“Do you mean to tell me you care what he thinks of you?” the Dragon demanded, an eyebrow rising.
“If he thinks I’ve lain with him, what’s to stop him from—from wanting it again!” I said.
The Dragon waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll make it an unpleasant memory—all elbows and shrill maidenly giggling, over quickly. Or do you have any better notions?” he added, waspish. “Perhaps you’d rather he woke up remembering you doing your best to murder him?”
So the next morning, I had the deeply wretched experience of seeing Prince Marek stop outside the tower doors to look up to my window and blow me a cheerful and indiscreet kiss. I’d been watching only to be sure he actually left; it took nearly all the caution left in me not to throw something down at his head, and I don’t mean a token of my regard.
But the Dragon hadn’t been wrong to be wary: even with such a comfortable memory written into his head, the prince hesitated on the carriage steps and looked back up at me with a slight frown, as though something troubled him, before at last he ducked inside and allowed himself to be bundled off. I stood at the window watching the dust of his carriage recede along the road until it really and truly vanished behind the hills, and only then did I step away, and feel like I was safe again—an absurd feeling to have, in an enchanted tower with the dark wizard and magic lurking under my own skin.
I pulled on the gown of russet and green, and went slowly down the stairs to the library. The Dragon was back at his chair, the book open on his lap, and he turned to look at me. “Very well,” he said, sour as always. “Today we’ll try—”
“Wait,” I interrupted him, and he paused. “Can you tell me how to make this something I can wear?”
“If you haven’t grasped vanastalem by now, there is nothing I can possibly do to help you,” he snapped. “In fact, I’m inclined to believe you mentally defective.”
“No! I don’t want—that spell,” I said, hastily avoiding even saying the word. “I can’t even move in one of these dresses, or lace it for myself, or clean anything—”
“Why wouldn’t you just use the cleaning cantrips?” he demanded. “I’ve taught you at least five.”
I’d done my best to forget them all. “It tires me less to scrub!” I said.
“Yes, I can see you’ll be making a mark on the firmament,” he said, irritably; but that hadn’t any power to wound me: any magic was bad enough, I didn’t feel the least desire to be a great and powerful witch. “What a strange creature you are: don’t all peasant girls dream of princes and ballgowns? Try to degrade it, then.”
“What?” I said.
“Drop part of the word,” he said. “Slur it, mumble it, something of the sort—”
“Just—any part?” I said doubtfully, but t
ried it: “Vanalem?”
The shorter word felt better in my mouth: smaller and more friendly somehow, although perhaps that was just my imagination. The gown shuddered and the skirts deflated all around me into a fine letnik of undyed linen stopping at the shin, and over it a simple brown dress with a green sash to draw it snug. I pulled in a glad deep breath: no dragging weight pulling me down from shoulders to ankles, no strangling corsets, no endless train: plain and comfortable and easy. Even the magic hadn’t dragged out of me so horribly. I didn’t feel tired at all.
“If you’ve arranged yourself to your satisfaction,” the Dragon said, his voice dripping sarcasm. He held out his hand, and summoned a book flying over from the shelf. “We’ll begin with syllabic composition.”
Chapter 4
As little as I liked having magic, I was glad not to be so afraid all the time. But I was no prize pupil: when I didn’t just forget the spell-words he taught me, they went wrong in my mouth. I slurred and mumbled and muddled them together, so a spell that ought to have set a dozen ingredients neatly out for a pie—“I am certainly not trying to train you on potions,” he had said, caustically—instead mixed them into a solid mess that couldn’t even be saved for my supper. Another that should have neatly banked the fire in the library, where we were working, instead seemed to do nothing at all—until we heard a distant and ominous crackling, and we ran upstairs to find green-tinged flames leaping out of the fireplace in the guest chamber directly above, and the embroidered bedcurtains going up.
He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers—“My father’s a woodcutter,” I said—“Of axe-swinging lummocks!” he snarled. But even so, I wasn’t afraid anymore. He only spluttered himself into exhaustion and then sent me away, and I didn’t mind his shouting at all, now I knew there were no teeth in it to rend me.
I was almost sorry not to be better, for now 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. I could see, as he made me examples of higher workings, great intricate interweavings of gesture and word that went on like songs, that he loved the work: his eyes grew glittering and dazzled in the spell-light, his face almost handsome with a kind of transcendence. He loved his magic, and he would have shared that love with me.
But I was just as happy to mumble my way through a few cantrips, take my inevitable lecture, and go cheerfully downstairs to the cellars and chop onions for dinner by hand. It maddened him to no end, not without some justice. I know I was being foolish. But I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as anyone important. I’d always been able to glean more nuts and mushrooms and berries than anyone, even if a patch of forest had been picked over half a dozen times; I could find late herbs in autumn and early plums in spring. Anything, my mother used to say, that involved getting as dirty as possible: if I had to dig for it or push through brambles or climb a tree to get at it, I would come back with a basketful, to bribe her into sighs of tolerance instead of cries of dismay at my clothing.
But that was as far as my gifts went, I’d always thought; nothing that mattered except to my own family. Even now it hadn’t occurred to me to think of what magic might mean, besides making absurd dresses and doing small chores that I would just as soon do by hand. I didn’t mind my own lack of progress, or how much it maddened him. I was even able to settle into a kind of contentment, until the days rolled past and Midwinter came.
I could look out my window and see the candle-trees lit up in the squares of every village, small shining beacons dotting the dark valley all the way to the edge of the Wood. In my house, my mother was basting the great ham with lard, and turning the potatoes in the dripping-pan beneath. My father and brothers would be hauling great loads of firewood for the holiday to every house, with fresh-cut pine boughs atop; they would have cut down our village’s candle-tree, and it would be tall and straight and full-branched.
Next door, Wensa would be cooking chestnuts and dried plums and carrots, with a slab of tender beef, to bring over, and Kasia—Kasia would be there, after all. Kasia would be rolling the beautiful fine senkach cake on its spindle before the fireplace, pouring on the next layer of batter at each turn to make the pine-tree spikes. She had learned to make it when we were twelve: Wensa had traded away the lace veil she had been married in, twice her height, to a woman in Smolnik, in exchange for teaching Kasia the recipe. So that Kasia would be ready to cook for a lord.
I tried to be glad for her. I was mostly sorry for myself. It was hard to be alone and cold in my high tower room, locked away. The Dragon didn’t mark the holiday; for all I knew, he didn’t even know what day it was. I went to the library the same as always, and droned through another spell, and he shouted for a while and then dismissed me.
Trying to cure my loneliness, I went down to the kitchens and made myself a small feast—ham and kasha and stewed apples—but when I put together the plate, it still felt so plain and empty that for the first time, I used lirintalem for myself, aching for something that felt like a celebration. The air shimmered, and suddenly I had a lovely platter of roast pork, hot and pink and running with juice; my very favorite wheat porridge cooked thick with a ladleful of melted butter and browned bread crumbs in the middle; a heap of brand-new fresh peas that no one in my village would be eating until spring; and a taigla cake that I had only ever tasted once, at the headwoman’s table, the year that it was my family’s turn to be her guests at harvest-time: the candied fruits like colored jewels, the knots of sweet dough a perfect golden brown, the hazelnuts small and pale, and all of it glazed and shining with honey-syrup.
But it wasn’t Midwinter dinner. There was no eager ache of hunger in my belly from the long day of cooking and cleaning without a pause; there was no joyful noise of too many people crammed in around the table, laughing and reaching for the platters. Looking down at my tiny feast only made me feel more desperately lonely. I thought of my mother, cooking all alone without even my clumsy pair of hands to help her, and my eyes were stinging when I put them into my pillow, with my untouched tray on my table.
I was still heavy-eyed and grieving, more awkward even than usual, two days later. That was when the rider came, an urgent scramble of hooves and a pounding on the gates. The Dragon put down the book he was attempting to teach me from, and I trailed him down the stairs; the doors swung open of their own accord before him, and the messenger nearly fell inside: he wore the dark yellow surcoat of the Yellow Marshes, and his face was streaked with sweat. He knelt, swallowing and pale, but he did not wait for the Dragon to give him permission to speak. “My lord baron begs you to come at once,” he said. “There is a chimaera come upon us, out of the mountain pass—”
“What?” the Dragon said, sharply. “It’s not the season. What sort of beast is it exactly? Has some idiot called a wyvern a chimaera, and been repeated by others—”
The messenger was shaking his head back and forth like a weight on a string. “Serpent’s tail, bat’s wings, goat’s head—I saw it with my own eyes, lord Dragon, it’s why my lord sent me—”
The Dragon hissed under his breath with annoyance: how dare a chimaera inconvenience him, coming out of season. For my part, I didn’t understand in the least why a chimaera would have a season; surely it was a magic beast, and could do as it pleased?
“Try not to be a complete fool,” the Dragon said as I trotted at his heels back to the laboratory; he opened a case and ordered me to bring him this vial and that. I did so unhappily, and very carefully. “A chimaera is engendered through corrupt magic, that doesn’t mean it’s not still a living beast, with its own nature. They’re spawned of snakes, mainly, because they hatch from eggs. Their blood is cold. They spend the winters keeping still and lying in the sun as much as they can. They fly in summer.”
“So why has th
is one come now?” I said, trying to follow.
“Most likely it hasn’t, and that gasping yokel below frightened himself fleeing a shadow,” the Dragon said, but the gasping yokel hadn’t looked at all a fool to me, or a coward, and I thought even the Dragon didn’t quite believe his own words. “No, not the red one, idiot girl, that’s fire-heart; a chimaera would drink it up by the gallon if it had the chance, and become next kin to a real dragon, then. The red-violet, two farther on.” They both looked red-violet to me, but I hastily swapped potions and gave him the one he wanted. “All right,” he said, closing the case. “Don’t read any of the books, don’t touch anything in this room, don’t touch anything in any room if you can help it, and try if you can not to reduce the place to rubble before I return.”
I realized only then that he was leaving me here; I stared at him in dismay. “What am I going to do here alone?” I said. “Can’t I—come with you? How long will you be?”
“A week, a month, or never, if I grow distracted, do something particularly clumsy, and get myself torn in half by a chimaera,” he snapped, “which means the answer is no, you may not. And you are to do absolutely nothing, so far as possible.”
And then he was sweeping out. I ran to the library and stared down from the window: the doors swung shut behind him as he came down the steps. The messenger leapt to his feet. “I’m taking your horse,” I heard the Dragon say. “Walk down to Olshanka after me; I’ll leave it there for you and take a fresh one.” And then he swung up and waved an imperious hand, murmuring words: a small fire blazed up before him in the snowbound road and rolled away like a ball, melting a clear path down the middle for him. He was trotting off at once, despite the horse’s flattened-ear unease. I suppose the spell which let him leap to Dvernik and back didn’t work over so long a distance, or perhaps he could only use it within his own lands.
I stood in the library and kept watching until he was gone. It wasn’t as though he ever made his company pleasant for me, but the tower felt echoingly empty without him. I tried to enjoy his absence as a holiday, but I wasn’t tired enough. I did a little desultory sewing on my quilt, and then I just sat by my window and looked out at the valley: the fields, the villages, and the woods I loved. I watched cattle and flocks going to water, wood-sleds and the occasional lone rider traveling the road, the scattered drifts of snow, and at last I fell asleep leaning against the window-frame. It was late when I woke with a start, in the dark, and saw the line of beacon-fires burning in the distance almost the full length of the valley.