by Naomi Novik
“When I sang it long enough, it made the magic flow,” I said. “I sang it to ‘Many Years,’ ” I added. He went even more red and indignant.
He spent the next hour interrogating me as to every particular of how I had cast the spell, growing ever more upset: I could scarcely answer any of his questions. He wanted exact syllables and repetitions, he wanted to know how close I had been to his arm, he wanted the number of rosemary twigs and the number of peels. I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong, and finally I blurted out, as he wrote angrily on his sheets, “But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just—a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.”
I finished triumphantly, pleased to have found an explanation which felt so satisfyingly clear. He only flung down his pen and slumped angrily back in his chair. “That’s nonsense,” he said, almost plaintively, and then stared down at his own arm with an air of frustration: as though he would rather have the corruption back, instead of having to consider that he might be wrong.
He glared at me when I said as much—I was beginning to be in something of a temper by then myself, thirsty and ravenously hungry, still wearing Krystyna’s ragged homespun dress that hung off my shoulder and didn’t keep me warm. Fed up, I stood, ignoring his expression, and announced, “I’m going down to the kitchen.”
“Fine,” he snapped, and stormed off to his library, but he couldn’t bear an unanswered question. Before my chicken soup had even finished cooking, he appeared at the kitchen table again, carrying a new volume of pale blue leather tooled in silver, large and elegant. He set it down on the table next to the chopping block and said firmly, “Of course. It’s that you’ve an affinity for healing, and it led you to intuit the true spell—even though you can’t remember the particulars accurately anymore. That would explain your general incompetence: healing is a particularly distinct branch of the magical arts. I expect you will progress considerably better going forward, once we devote our attention to the healing disciplines. We’ll begin with Groshno’s minor charms.” He lay a hand on the tome.
“Not until I’ve eaten lunch, we won’t,” I said, not pausing: I was chopping carrots.
He muttered something under his breath about recalcitrant idiots. I ignored him. He was happy enough to sit down, and to eat the soup when I gave him a bowl, with a thick slice of peasant bread that I’d made—the day before yesterday, I realized; I had only been out of the tower for a day and a night. It seemed a thousand years. “What happened with the chimaera?” I asked around my spoon as we ate.
“Vladimir’s not a fool, thankfully,” the Dragon said, wiping his mouth with a conjured napkin. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking of the baron. “After he sent his messenger, he baited the thing close to the border by staking out calves and having his pikemen harry it from every other direction. He lost ten of them, but he managed to get it not an hour’s ride from the mountain pass. I was able to kill it quickly. It was only a small one: scarcely the size of a pony.”
He sounded strangely grim about it. “Surely that’s good?” I said.
He looked at me in annoyance. “It was a trap,” he bit out, as though that was obvious to any sensible person. “I was meant to be kept away until the corruption had overrun all of Dvernik, and worn down before I came.” He looked down at his arm, opening and closing his fist. He’d changed his shirt for one of green wool, clasped with gold at the wrist. It covered his arm; I wondered if there were a scar beneath.
“Then,” I ventured, “I did well to go?”
His expression was as sour as milk left out in midsummer. “If anyone could say so when you’ve poured out fifty years’ worth of my most valuable potions in less than a day. Did it never occur to you that if they could be so easily spent, I would give half a dozen flasks to every village headman, and save myself the trouble of ever setting foot in the valley?”
“They can’t be worth more than people’s lives,” I fired back.
“A life before you in the moment isn’t worth a hundred elsewhere, three months from now,” he said. “Listen, you simpleton, I have one bottle of fire-heart in the refining now: I began it six years ago, when the king could afford to give me the gold for it, and it will be finished in another four. If we spend all my supply before then, do you suppose Rosya will generously refrain from firing our fields, knowing that we’ll have starved and sued for peace before we can return the favor? And there are likewise costs for every other vial you spent. All the more because Rosya has three master-wizards who can brew potions, to our two.”
“But we’re not at war!” I protested.
“We will be in the spring,” he said, “if they hear a song of fire-heart and stone-skin and profligacy, and think they might have gained a real advantage.” He paused, and then he added heavily, “Or if they hear a song of a healer strong enough to purge corruption, and think that soon the balance will tip in our favor, instead, when you are trained.”
I swallowed and looked down at my bowl of soup. It was unreal when he spoke of Rosya declaring war because of me, because of things I’d done or what they would imagine I might do. But I remembered again the terror I’d felt on seeing the beacons lit with him gone, knowing just how little I could do to help those I loved. I still wasn’t at all sorry to have taken the potions, but I couldn’t pretend anymore that it mattered nothing whether I ever learned a single spell.
“Do you think I could help Jerzy, once I’ve been trained?” I asked him.
“Help a man already fully corrupted?” The Dragon scowled at me. But then he said, a grudging admission, “You shouldn’t have been able to help me.”
I picked up my bowl and drank the rest of the soup down, and then I put it aside and looked at him across the scarred and pitted kitchen table. “All right,” I said, grimly. “Let’s get on with it.”
Unfortunately, the willingness to learn magic wasn’t the same thing as being any good at it. Groshno’s minor charms stymied me thoroughly, and the conjurations of Metrodora remained resolutely unconjured. After another three days of letting the Dragon set me at healing spells, all of which felt as awkward and wrong as ever, I marched down to the library the next morning with the little worn journal in my hand and put it down on the table before him as he scowled. “Why won’t you teach me from this?” I demanded.
“Because it’s unteachable,” he snapped. “I’ve barely managed to codify the simplest cantrips into any usable form, and none of the higher workings. Whatever her notoriety, in practice it’s worth almost nothing.”
“What do you mean, notoriety?” I said, and then I looked down at the book. “Who wrote this?”
He scowled at me. “Jaga,” he said, and for a moment I stood cold and still. Old Jaga had died a long time ago, but there weren’t very many songs about her, and bards mostly sang them warily, only in summer, at midday. She had been dead and buried five hundred years, but that hadn’t stopped her turning up in Rosya only forty years ago, at the baptism of the newborn prince. She’d turned six guards who tried to stop her into toads, put two other wizards to sleep, then she’d gone over to the baby and peered frowning down at him. Then she’d straightened up and announced in irritation, “I’ve fallen out of time,” before vanishing in a great cloud of smoke.
So being dead wasn’t a bar to her sudden return to claim her spellbook back, but the Dragon only grew even more annoyed at my expression. “Stop looking like a solemn six-year-old. Contrary to popular imagination, she is dead, and whatever time-wandering she may have done beforehand, I assure you she would have had a larger purpose than to run around eavesdropping on gossip about herself. As for that book, I spent an inordinate amount of money and trou
ble to get it, and congratulated myself on the acquisition until I realized how infuriatingly incomplete it was. She plainly used it only to jog her memory: it has no details of real spellwork.”
“The four I’ve tried have all worked perfectly well,” I said, and he stared at me.
He didn’t believe me until he’d made me throw half a dozen of Jaga’s spells. They were all alike: a few words, a few gestures, a few bits of herbs and things. No particular piece mattered; there was no strict order to the incantations. I did see why he called her spells unteachable, because I couldn’t even remember what I did when I cast them, much less explain why I did any one step, but for me they were an inexpressible relief after all the stiff, overcomplicated spells he’d set me. My first description held true: I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There’s an easy way through the brambles on the left. She didn’t care how I got to the blueberries: she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet.
He hated it so very much I almost felt sorry for him. He finally resorted to standing over me while I cast the final spell, noting down every small thing I did, even the sneeze from breathing in too deep over the cinnamon, and when I was finished he tried it again himself. It was very strange watching him, like a delayed and flattering mirror: he did everything exactly the way I had done, but more gracefully, with perfect precision, enunciating every syllable I had slurred, but he wasn’t halfway through before I could tell it wasn’t working. I twitched to interrupt him. He shot me a furious look, so I gave up and let him finish working himself into a thicket, as I thought of it, and when he was done and nothing whatsoever had happened, I said, “You shouldn’t have said miko there.”
“You did!” he snapped.
I shrugged helplessly: I didn’t doubt that I had, though to be perfectly honest I didn’t remember. But it hadn’t been an important thing to remember. “It was all right when I did it,” I said, “but when you did it, it was wrong. As though—you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it—”
“There are no hedges!” he roared.
“It comes, I suppose,” I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, “of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.”
He ordered me from the room in stiff fury.
I must give him this credit: he sulked for the rest of the week, and then he dug out a small collection of other spellbooks from his shelves, dusty and unused, full of untidy spells like the ones in Jaga’s book. They all came to my hands like eager friends. He picked through them and consulted dozens of references in his other books, and with that knowledge laid out a course of study and practice for me. He warned me of all the dangers of higher workings: of the spell slipping out of your hands midway and thrashing around wild; of losing yourself in magic, and wandering through it like a dream you could touch, while your body died of thirst; of attempting a spell past your limits and having it drain away strength you didn’t have. Though he still couldn’t understand how the spells that suited me worked at all, he made himself a ferocious critic of my results, and demanded that I tell him beforehand what I meant to happen, and when I couldn’t properly predict the outcome, he forced me to work that same spell over and over again until I could.
In short, he tried to teach me as best he could, and to advise me in my blundering through my new forest, though it was foreign country to him. He did still resent my success, not from jealousy but as a matter of principle: it offended his sense of the proper order of things that my slapdash workings did work, and he scowled as much when I was doing well as when I had made some evident mistake.
A month into my new training, he was glaring at me while I struggled to make an illusion of a flower. “I don’t understand,” I said—whined, if I tell the truth: it was absurdly difficult. My first three attempts had looked like they were made of cotton rags. Now I had managed to put together a tolerably convincing wild rose, as long as you didn’t try to smell it. “It’s far easier just to grow a flower: why would anyone bother?”
“It’s a matter of scale,” he said. “I assure you it is considerably easier to produce the illusion of an army than the real thing. How is that even working?” he burst out, as he sometimes did when pressed past his limits by the obvious dreadfulness of my magic. “You aren’t maintaining the spell at all—no chanting, no gesture—”
“I’m still giving it magic. A great deal of magic,” I added, unhappily.
The first few spells that didn’t yank magic out of me like pulling teeth had been so purely a relief that I had half-thought that was the worst of it over: now that I understood how magic ought to work—whatever the Dragon said on that subject—everything would be easy. Well, I soon learned better. Desperation and terror had fueled my first working, and my next few attempts had been the equivalent of the first cantrips he’d tried to teach me, the little spells he had expected me to master effortlessly. So I had indeed mastered those effortlessly, and then he had unmercifully set me at real spells, and everything had once again become—if not unbearable in the same way, at least exceedingly difficult.
“How are you giving it magic?” he said, through his teeth.
“I already found the path!” I said. “I’m just staying on it. Can’t you—feel it?” I asked abruptly, and held my hand cupping the flower out towards him; he frowned and put his hands around it, and then he said, “Vadiya rusha ilikad tuhi,” and a second illusion laid itself over mine, two roses in the same space—his, predictably, had three rings of perfect petals, and a delicate fragrance.
“Try and match it,” he said absently, his fingers moving slightly, and by lurching steps we brought our illusions closer together until it was nearly impossible to tell them one from another, and then he said, “Ah,” suddenly, just as I began to glimpse his spell: almost exactly like that strange clockwork on the middle of his table, all shining moving parts. On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around. “What are you—” he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow.
And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. Flowers were blooming everywhere: flowers I had never seen, strange blooms dangling and others with sharp points, brilliantly colored, and the room was thick with their fragrance, with the smell of crushed leaves and pungent herbs. I looked around myself alight with wonder, my magic still flowing easily. “Is this what you meant?” I asked him: it really wasn’t any more difficult than making the single flower had been. But he was staring at the riot of flowers all around us, as astonished as I was.
He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.
Chapter 7
I avoided him all the next day, stupidly, and realized too late that my success in doing so meant he had avoided me, too, when he had never let me miss a lesson before. I didn’t care to think why. I tried to pretend it meant nothing, that we had both simply wanted a holiday from my laborious training. But I passed a restless night, and went down to the lib
rary the next morning sandy-eyed and nervous. He didn’t look at me as I came in; he said shortly, “Begin with fulmkea, on page forty-three,” a wholly different spell, and he kept his head bent over his own book. I gladly dived for the safety of my work.
We lasted four days in near-silence and might have gone a month without exchanging more than a few words a day, I suppose, left to our own devices. But on the morning of the fourth day, a sledge drew up to the tower, and when I looked out of the window it was Borys, but not alone; he was driving Kasia’s mother Wensa, and she was huddled small in the sleigh, her pale round face looking up at me from under her shawl.
I hadn’t seen anyone from Dvernik since the beacon night. Danka had sent the fire-heart back to Olshanka, with an escort gathered grimly from every village of the valley as it passed through with the message. They had come in force to the tower four days after I had transported the Dragon and myself back. It was brave of them, farmers and craftsmen, coming to face a worse horror than any of us could even have imagined; and they had been wary of believing that the Dragon was healed.
The mayor of Olshanka had even had the courage to demand that the Dragon show the wound to the town physician: he grudgingly obliged, rolling up his sleeve to show the faint white scar, all that was left of the wound, and even told the man to draw some blood from his fingertip: it sprang out clean red. But they had also brought the old priest in his full purple gown to say a blessing over him, which infuriated him to no end. “What on earth are you lending yourself to this nonsense for?” he demanded of the priest, whom he evidently knew a little. “I’ve let you shrive a dozen corrupted souls: did any of them sprout the purple rose, or suddenly announce themselves saved and purified? What possible good do you imagine saying a blessing over me would do, if I were corrupted?”
“So you are well, then,” the priest had said dryly, and they at last allowed themselves to believe, and the mayor had handed over the fire-heart with great relief.