by Naomi Novik
Kasia didn’t run. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up and back towards the nearest house—Eva’s house. The wolves howled with one terrible voice in protest, nosing cautiously at the two statues, and then one of them yelped and they fell in. They turned and came loping at us together.
Kasia pulled us through the gate of Eva’s front garden, and slammed it: the wolves leapt the fence as lightly as springing deer. I didn’t dare throw fire-heart with no protection against its spreading, not after what I’d seen that day: it would have burned all our village, and maybe all our valley, and certainly the two of us. I drew out the small green vial instead, hoping for enough distraction to get us inside the house. “It grows grass,” the Dragon had said, dismissively, when I’d asked: the warm healthy color of it had looked friendly to me, like none of the other strange cold enchantments in his laboratory. “And an inordinate number of weeds; it’s useful only if you’ve had to burn a field clean.” I’d thought I might use it after the fire-heart to renew our grazing meadow. I wrenched open the stopper with shaking hands, and the potion spilled over my fingers: it smelled wonderful, good and clean and fresh, pleasantly sticky like crushed grass and leaves in spring full of juice, and I threw it out of my cupped hands over the snowbound garden.
The wolves were running at us. Vines erupted like leaping snakes out of the dead vegetable beds, brilliant green, and flung themselves onto the wolves, wrapping thick coils around their legs, and pulled them to the ground scarcely inches away from us. Everything was suddenly growing like a year crammed into a minute, beans and hops and pumpkins sprawling out across the ground and growing absurdly huge. They blocked the way towards us even while the wolves fought and snapped and tore at them. The vines kept growing even larger, sprouting thorns the size of knives. One wolf was crushed in a swelling green twist as thick around as a tree, and a pumpkin fell smashing onto another, so heavy it struck the wolf down to the ground as it burst.
Kasia reached for me as I gawked, and I turned and stumbled on with her. The front door of the house wouldn’t open, though Kasia wrenched on it. We turned for the small empty stable, really only a shelter for pigs, and slammed inside. There was no pitchfork there; it had been taken to the pens. The only thing left like a weapon was a small axe for chopping wood. I seized it in desperation while Kasia braced the door. The rest of the wolves had fought their way out of the bursting garden, and they were coming at us again. They reared up and clawed at the door, snapping at it, and then ominously they stopped. We heard them moving, and then one of them howled on the other side of the stable, outside the small high window. As we turned in alarm, three of them came flowing through it, one after another leaping. And others howled back, on the other side of the door.
I was empty. I tried to think of any charm, any spell I’d been taught, anything that might help against them. Maybe the potion had renewed me, like the garden, or else panic had done it: I didn’t feel fainting-weak any longer, and I could imagine casting some spell again, if I could only have thought of one that would be of any use. I wondered wildly whether vanastalem could summon up armor, and then I said, “Rautalem?”—groping, muddling it up with a spell for sharpening kitchen knives—as I grabbed up the old water-dish made of battered tin. I had no very good idea what it would do, but I hoped. Perhaps the magic was trying to save me and itself, because the dish flattened out and turned into an enormous shield, of heavy steel. Kasia and I crouched behind it into a corner as the wolves leapt for us.
She grabbed the axe from me and chopped at their claws and muzzles as they scrabbled around the edges, trying to tear it down or away from us. We were both hanging on to the shield’s handles for life, desperate, and then to my horror one of the wolves—a wolf!—went deliberately to the barred door of the stable, and with its nose it nudged the bar up and open.
The rest of the pack crowded in towards us. There was nowhere else to run, no trick left in my satchel. Kasia and I clung to each other, held on to our shield, and then abruptly the entire wall of the shed ripped away from behind us. We fell backwards into the snow at the Dragon’s feet. The wolf pack leapt for him as one, howling, but he raised a hand and sang out a long impossible line without a pause for breath. All at the same time the wolves broke, in midair, a dreadful sound like snapping twigs. They fell huddled dead into the snow.
Kasia and I were still clinging to each other as the wolf corpses thumped down around us one after another. We stared up at him, and he glared down at me, stiff and furious, and snarled, “Of all the idiotic things you might have done, you monstrously half-witted lunatic of a girl—”
“Look out!” Kasia cried, too late: one last limping wolf, its fur stained orange with pumpkin, flung itself over the garden wall, and though the Dragon snapped out a spell even as he turned, the beast caught his arm with one raking claw as it fell dying. Three bright drops of blood stained the snow crimson at his feet.
He sank to his knees, gripping his arm at the elbow. The black wool of his jerkin was torn and gaping. His flesh was already turning green with corruption around the scratch. The sickly color halted where his fingers gripped the arm, a faint glow of light limning his fingers, but the veins of his forearm were swelling. I fumbled for the elixir in my satchel. “Pour it on,” he said with clenched teeth, when I would have given it to him to drink. I poured the liquid on, all of us holding our breath, but the black stain didn’t recede: it only stopped spreading as quickly.
“The tower,” he said. Sweat had sprung out across his forehead. His jaw was locked almost beyond speech. “Listen: Zokinen valisu, akenezh hinisu, kozhonen valisu.”
I stared: he couldn’t mean to trust me to do it, to spell us back? But he didn’t say anything else. All his strength was too plainly going to hold back the corruption, and I remembered too late what he’d told me, how if the Wood had taken me, untrained and useless witch though I was, it could have made some truly dreadful horror out of me. What would it make of him, the foremost wizard of the realm?
I turned to Kasia and dug out the bottle of fire-heart and pressed it into her hands. “Tell Danka she has to send someone to the tower,” I said, flat and desperate. “If we don’t both come out and say everything’s all right, if there’s any doubt—burn it to the ground.”
Her eyes were full of worry for me, but she nodded. I turned to the Dragon and knelt in the snow beside him. “Good,” he said to me, very briefly, with a quick dart of his eyes towards Kasia. I knew then that my worst fears weren’t wrong. I gripped his arm and closed my eyes and thought of the tower room. I spoke the words of the spell.
Chapter 6
I helped the Dragon stagger down the hall the short distance to my small bedroom. The rope of silk dresses still dangling out the window. There was no hope of getting him down to his own room; he was deadweight even as I lowered him to the bed. He was still gripping his arm, holding back the corruption somehow, but the glow about his hand was growing ever fainter. I eased him back on the pillows and stood anxiously hovering over him a moment, waiting for him to say something, to tell me what to do, but he didn’t speak; his eyes saw nothing, fixed on the ceiling. The small scratch had swollen up like the worst kind of spider bite. He was breathing in quick pants, and his forearm below where he gripped it was all that dreadful sickly green—the same color that had stained Jerzy’s skin. The fingernails at the end of his hand were blackening.
I ran down to the library skidding down the steps badly enough to scrape my shin bloody. I didn’t even feel it. The books stood in their neat elegant rows as always, placid and untroubled by my need. Some of them had become familiar to me by now: old enemies I would have called them, full of charms and incantations that would invariably go wrong inside my mouth, their very pages tingling unpleasantly when I touched the parchment. I went up the ladder and pulled them off the shelves anyway, opened them one after another, paging through lists, all for nothing: the distillation of essence of myrtle might be highly useful in all sorts of workings, but it would
n’t do me any good now, and it was enraging to spend even a moment looking at six recipes for forming a proper seal upon a potion-bottle.
But the uselessness of the effort slowed me long enough to let me think a little better. I realized I couldn’t hope to find the answer to something this dreadful in the spellbooks he had tried to teach me from: as he’d told me himself, repeatedly, they were full of cantrips and trivialities, things that any witling wizard should have been able to master almost at once. I looked uncertainly at the lower shelves, where he kept the volumes he read himself, and which he had stringently warned me away from. Some were bound in new unbroken leather, tooled in gold; some were old and nearly crumbling; some tall as the length of my arm, others small enough for the palm of my hand. I ran my hands over them and on impulse pulled out a smaller one that bristled with inserted sheets of paper: it had a worn-smooth cover and plain stamped letters.
It was a journal written in a tiny crabbed hand, almost impossible to read at first and full of abbreviations. The sheets were notes in the Dragon’s hand, one or more of them inserted between almost every leaf, where he had written out different ways to cast each spell, with explanations of what he was doing: that at least seemed more promising, as if his voice might speak to me from the paper.
There were a dozen spells for healing and for cleansing wounds—of sickness and gangrene, not of enchanted corruption, but at least worth the trying. I read over one spell, which advised lancing the poisoned wound, packing it with rosemary and lemon-peel, and doing something which the writer called putting breath on it. The Dragon had written four crammed-close pages on the subject and drawn up lines in which he noted down nearly five dozen variations: this much rosemary, dry or fresh; that much lemon, with pith on or without; a steel knife, an iron one, this incantation and another.
He hadn’t written down which of the attempts had worked better and which worse, but if he had gone to so much effort, it had to be good for something. All I needed right now was to do him enough good to let him speak even a handful of words to me, give me some direction. I flew down to the kitchens and found a great bundle of hanging rosemary and a lemon. I took a clean paring knife and some fresh linens and hot water in a pot.
Then I hesitated: my eye had fallen on the great cleaver, lying on its chopping stone. If I couldn’t do anything else, if I couldn’t give him the strength to speak—I didn’t know if I could do it, if I could cut off his arm. But I saw Jerzy on his bed, cackling and monstrous, far away from the quiet, sad man who had always nodded to me in the lane; I saw Krystyna’s hollowed-out face. I swallowed and picked up the cleaver.
I honed both the knives, resolutely thinking of nothing, and then I carried my things upstairs. The window and door stood open, but even so the terrible stink of corruption had begun to gather in my small room. It turned my stomach with dread as much as physically. I didn’t think I could bear to see the Dragon corrupted, all his crisp edges rotted away, his sharp tongue reduced to howling and snarls. His breath was coming shorter, and his eyes were half-closed. His face was terribly pale. I lay the linens under his arm and tied them on with some twine. I peeled off wide strips of the lemon’s skin, tore rosemary leaves off the stems, crushing them all and throwing them into the hot water so that the sweet strong smell rose up and drove out the stink. Then I bit my lip, and, steeling myself, slashed open the swollen wound with the paring knife. Green tarry bile spurted out of it. I poured cup after cup of the hot water over the wound until it was clean. I caught fistfuls of the steeped herbs and lemon and packed them down tight.
The Dragon’s notes said nothing of what it meant to put breath on the wound, so I bent down and breathed out the incantations over it, trying one and then another, my voice breaking. They all felt wrong in my mouth, awkward and hard-edged, and nothing was happening. Wretched, I looked back at the crabbed original writing again: there was a line that said Kai and tihas, sung as seems good, will have especial virtue. The Dragon’s incantations all had variants of those syllables, but strung round with others, built up into long elaborate phrases that tangled on my tongue. Instead I bent down and sang Tihas, tihas, kai tihas, kai tihas, over and over, and found myself falling into the sound of the birthday song about living a hundred years.
That sounds absurd, but the rhythm of it was easy and familiar, comforting. I stopped having to think about the words: they filled my mouth and spilled over like water out of a cup. I forgot to remember Jerzy’s mad laughter, and the green vile cloud that had drowned the light inside him. There was only the easy movement of the song, the memory of faces gathered around a table laughing. And then finally the magic flowed, but not the same way as when the Dragon’s spell-lessons dragged it in a rush out of me. Instead it seemed to me the sound of the chanting became a stream made to carry magic along, and I was standing by the water’s edge with a pitcher that never ran dry, pouring a thin silver line into the rushing current.
Under my hands, the sweet fragrance of rosemary and lemon was rising strong, overpowering the stench of corruption. More and more of the bile began to flow from the wound, until I would have worried except that the Dragon’s arm kept looking better: the dreadful greenish cast was fading, the darkened and swollen veins shrinking back.
I was running out of breath; but besides that, I felt somehow that I was finished, that my work was done. I brought my chanting to a simple close, going up and down a note: I had only really been humming anyway by the end. The shining glow where he held his arm at the elbow was growing stronger now, brighter, and abruptly thin lines of light shot away from his grip, running down his veins and spreading out through them like branches. The rot was disappearing: the flesh looked healthy, his skin restored—to his usual unhealthy sunless pallor, but nevertheless his own.
I watched it holding my breath, hardly daring to hope, and then his whole body shifted. He drew one longer, deeper breath, blinking at the ceiling with eyes that were aware again, and his fingers one after another let go their iron grip around his elbow. I could have sobbed with relief: incredulous and hopeful, I looked up at his face, a smile working its way onto my mouth, and found him staring at me with an expression of astonished outrage.
He struggled up from the pillows. He stripped his arm clean of the rosemary and lemon packing and held it in his fist with a look of incredulity, then leaned over and seized the tiny journal from the coverlet over his legs: I had put it there so I could look at it while I worked. He stared at the spell, turned the book to see the spine as if he didn’t quite believe his own eyes, and then he spluttered at me, “You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?”
I sat back on my heels in some indignation: this, when I had just saved not only his life, but everything he might be, and all the kingdom from whatever the Wood might have made from him. “What ought I have done?” I demanded. “And how was I to know to do it? Besides, it worked, didn’t it?”
For some reason, this only made him nearly incoherent with fury, and he levered himself up from my cot, threw the book across the room, all the notes flying everywhere, and flung himself out into the hallway without another word. “You might thank me!” I shouted after him, outraged myself, and his footsteps had vanished before I recalled that he had been wounded at all in saving my life—that he had surely pressed himself to terrible lengths to come to my aid at all.
That thought only made me feel more sulky, of course. So, too, did the slogging work of cleaning my poor little room and changing my bed; the stains wouldn’t come out, and everything smelled foul, though without the terrible wrongness. Finally I decided, for this, I would use magic after all. I began to use one of the charms the Dragon had taught me, but then I instead went and dug up the journal from the corner. I was grateful to that little book and the past wizard or witch who had written it, even if the Dragon wasn’t to me, and I was happy to find, near the beginning, a charm for freshening a room: Tishta, sung up and down, with work to show the way. I warbled it half in
my head while I turned out all the damp, stained ticking. The air grew cold and crisp around me, but without any unpleasant bite; by the time I had finished, the bedclothes were clean and bright as though they were new-washed, and my ticking smelled like it was fresh from a summer haystack. I assembled my bed again, and then I sat down upon it very heavily, almost surprised, as the last dregs of desperation left me, and with them all my strength. I fell down on the bed and barely managed to drag my coverlet over me before I slept.
I woke slowly, peacefully, serenely, with sunlight coming in the window over me, and only gradually became aware that the Dragon was in my room.
He was sitting by the window, in the small work-chair, glaring at me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and glared back. He held up the tiny book in his hand. “What made you pick this up?” he demanded.
“It was full of notes!” I said. “I thought it must be important.”
“It is not important,” he said, although for how angry he seemed over it, I didn’t believe him. “It is useless—it has been useless, for all five hundred years since it was written, and a century of study has not made it anything other than useless.”
“Well, it wasn’t useless today,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.
“How did you know how much rosemary to use?” he said. “How much lemon?”
“You used all sorts of amounts, in those tables!” I said. “I supposed it didn’t much matter.”
“The tables are of failures, you blundering imbecile!” he shouted. “None of them had the least effect—not in any parts, not in any admixture, not with any incantation—what did you do?”
I stared at him. “I used enough to make a nice smell, and steeped them to make it stronger. And I used the chant on the page.”
“There is no incantation here!” he said. “Two trivial syllables, with no power—”