by Naomi Novik
“Valloditazh aloito, kes vallofozh,” he said, a hard bitter sound that curled into me like fishhooks, and then he made a quick jerk of one finger, and my hands rose up from the table and clapped themselves together three times. It wasn’t like having no control, the involuntary lurch of coming out of a dream of falling. I could feel the deliberation behind the movement, the puppet-strings digging into my skin. Someone had moved my arms, and it hadn’t been me. I nearly reached for some spell to strike at him, and then he crooked his finger again and the fishhook came loose and the line slithered back out of me.
I was up on my feet, halfway across the room from him, panting, before I could stop myself. I glared, but he didn’t offer me an apology. “When the Wood does it,” he said, “you won’t feel the hook. Try again.”
It took me an hour to work out an incantation. None of the ones came out right, not the way they were on paper. I had to try them all on my tongue, rolling them this way and that, before I finally realized that some of the letters weren’t meant to sound the same way I thought they did. I tried changing them until I stumbled over a syllable that felt right in my mouth; then another, and another, until I had put it together. He made me practice it over and over for hours more. I breathed in pine smoke and breathed out the words, and then he prodded at my mind with one unpleasant twisting of a spell and another.
He finally let me stop for a rest at noon. I crumpled into a chair, hedgehog-prickled and exhausted; the barriers had held, but I felt very much as though I’d been jabbed repeatedly with sharp sticks. I looked down at the old vellum, so carefully sealed away, with the strange-shaped letters; I wondered how old it was.
“Very old,” he said. “Older than Polnya: it might even be older than the Wood.”
I stared at him; it hadn’t occurred to me even to think, before then, that the Wood hadn’t always been here, always been what it was.
He shrugged. “For all we know, it has. It’s certainly older than Polnya and Rosya: it was here before this valley was ever settled by either of us.” He tapped the parchment in the glass. “These were the first people who lived in this part of the world, so far as we know, some thousand years ago. Their sorcerer-kings brought the tongue of magic west with them, from the barren lands on the far side of Rosya, when they first settled this valley. And then the Wood rolled over them, brought their fortresses low and laid their fields waste. There’s little left of their work now.”
“But,” I said, “if the Wood wasn’t here when they first settled the valley, where did it come from?”
The Dragon shrugged. “If you go to the capital, you’ll find any number of troubadours who will be happy to sing you the rising of the Wood. It’s a popular subject among them, at least when they have an audience that knows less about it than they do: it offers them enormous scope for creativity. I suppose there’s a chance one of them has hit on the true story. Light the fire and let’s begin again.”
It wasn’t until late that evening, as the light was failing, that he was satisfied with my work. He tried to send me to bed, but I wouldn’t have it. Wensa’s words still grated and scraped in the back of my head, and it occurred to me that perhaps he’d wanted me exhausted so he could put me off for another day. I wanted to see Kasia with my own eyes; I wanted to know what I was facing, this corruption I had to find a way to fight. “No,” I said. “No. You said I could see her when I could protect myself.”
He threw up his hands. “All right,” he said. “Follow me.”
He led me to the bottom of the stairs, and into the cellars past the kitchen. I remembered searching all those walls in desperation, when I’d thought he was draining my life; I had run my hands over every wall, poked my fingers into every crack, and tugged on every worn brick, trying to find a way out. But he led me to a smooth-polished part of the wall, a single entire slab of pale white stone unbroken by any mortar. He touched it lightly with the fingers of one hand and crooked them up like a spider; I felt the faint thrill of his magic working. The whole slab swung back into the wall, revealing a stairwell of the same pale stone, shining dimly, that bent steeply downwards.
I followed him down the passage. It was different from the rest of the tower: older and more strange. The steps were hard-edged on either side but worn in the middle to softness, and letters had been carved in a line running along the base of both walls, a script neither ours nor Rosyan: very much like the shape of the letters on the parchment with the protection spell. We seemed to go down for a long time, and I was increasingly aware of the weight of stone around us, of silence. It felt like a tomb.
“It is a tomb,” he said. We had reached the bottom of the stairs, coming into a small round room. The very air seemed thicker. The writing came off one wall of the stairwell, continued all around it in an unbroken line that circled to the opposite side, went up the wall in a tall curve that drew an arch, and then came back and went up the other side of stairs. There was a small patch of lighter stone inside the arch, towards the bottom—as though the rest of the wall had been built, and then had been closed up afterwards. It looked perhaps the size for a man to crawl through.
“Is—is someone still buried here?” I asked, timidly. My voice came out hushed.
“Yes,” the Dragon said. “But even kings don’t object to sharing once they’re dead. Listen to me now,” he said, turning to me. “I’m not going to teach you the spell to walk through the wall. When you want to see her, I’ll take you through myself. If you try to touch her, if you let her come in arm’s reach of you, I’ll take you out again at once. Now lay on your protections, if you insist on doing this.”
I lit the small handful of pine needles on the floor and made the chant, putting my face in their smoke, and then I put my hand in his, and let him draw me through the wall.
He’d made me fear the worst: Kasia as tormented as Jerzy, foaming-mouthed and tearing at her own skin; Kasia full of those slithering corrupted shadows, eating away at everything inside her. I was prepared for anything; I braced myself. But when he brought me through the wall, she was only sitting huddled and small in the corner on a thin pallet, her arms around her knees. There was a plate of food and water on the floor next to her, and she’d eaten and drunk; she’d washed her face, her hair was neatly plaited. She looked tired and afraid, but still herself, and she struggled up to her feet and came to me, holding out her hands. “Nieshka,” she said. “Nieshka, you found me.”
“No closer,” the Dragon said flatly, and added, “Valur polzhys,” and a sudden line of hot flame leapt up across the floor between us: I’d been reaching towards her without being able to help it.
I dropped my hands to my sides and clenched them into fists—and Kasia stepped back, too, staying behind the fire; she nodded obediently to the Dragon. I stood staring at her, helplessly, full of involuntary hope. “Are you—” I said, and my voice choked in my throat.
“I don’t know,” Kasia said, her voice trembling. “I don’t—remember. Not anything after they took me into the Wood. They took me into the Wood and they—they—” She stopped, her mouth open a little. There was horror in her eyes, the same horror I’d felt when I’d found her in the tree, buried beneath the skin.
I had to stop myself reaching out to her. I was in the Wood again myself, seeing her blind, choked face, her pleading hands. “Don’t speak of it,” I said, thick and miserable. I felt a surge of anger at the Dragon for holding me back this long. I had already made plans in my head: I would use Jaga’s spell to find where that corruption had taken root in her; then I would ask the Dragon to show me the purging spells he’d used on me. I would look through Jaga’s book and find others like it, and drive it out of her. “Don’t think of it yet, just tell me, how do you feel? Are you—sick, or cold—”
I finally looked around at the room itself. The walls were of that same polished bone-white marble, and in a deep niche at the back a heavy stone box lay, longer than the height of a man, carved along the top in the same letters and other designs
on the sides: tall flowering trees and vines curling over each other. A single blue flame burned on top of it, and air flowed in from a thin slit in the wall. It was a beautiful room, but utterly cold; it wasn’t a place for any living thing. “We can’t keep her here,” I said to the Dragon fiercely, even as he shook his head. “She needs sun, and fresh air—we can lock her into my room instead—”
“Better here than the Wood!” Kasia said. “Nieshka, please tell me, is my mother all right? She tried to follow the walkers—I was afraid they’d take her, too.”
“Yes,” I said, wiping my face, taking a deep breath. “She’s all right. She’s worried for you—she’s so worried. I’ll tell her you’re all right—”
“Can I write her a letter?” Kasia asked.
“No,” the Dragon said, and I wheeled on him.
“We can give her a stub of pencil and some paper!” I said angrily. “It’s not too much to ask.”
His face was bleak. “You aren’t this much a fool,” he said to me. “Do you think she was buried in a heart-tree for a night and a day and came out talking to you, ordinarily?”
I stopped, silent, afraid. Jaga’s rot-finding spell hovered on my lips. I opened my mouth to cast it—but it was Kasia. It was my own Kasia, who I knew better than anyone in the world. I looked at her and she looked back at me, unhappy and afraid, but refusing to weep or cower. It was her. “They put her in the tree,” I said. “They saved her for it, and I brought her out before it got a hold—”
“No,” he said flatly, and I glared at him and turned back to her. She smiled at me anyway, a struggling valiant smile.
“It’s all right, Nieshka,” she said. “As long as Mama’s all right. What—” She swallowed. “What’s to happen to me?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. “I’ll find a way to cleanse you,” I said, half-desperate, and didn’t look at the Dragon. “I’ll find a spell to be sure you’re all right—” but those were just words. I didn’t know how I could ever prove to the Dragon that Kasia was well. He plainly didn’t want to be convinced. And if I couldn’t persuade him somehow, he would keep Kasia down here the rest of her life if need be, entombed with this ancient king and without a scrap of sunlight—never to see anyone she loved, never to live at all. He was as great a danger to Kasia as the Wood—he hadn’t wanted me to rescue her at all.
And even before then, it occurred to me in a flash of bitterness, he had meant to steal her for himself—he’d meant to take her as much as the Wood had, to devour her in his own way. He hadn’t cared about uprooting her life before, making her a prisoner in a tower, only to serve him—why would he care now, why would he ever risk letting her out?
He stood a few steps behind me, farther from the fire and from Kasia. His face was closed, yielding nothing, his thin mouth pressed hard. I looked away and tried to smooth out my face and hide my thoughts. If I could find a spell to let me pass through the wall, I would only have to find a way to evade his notice. I could try and put a spell of sleep on him, or I could put something in his cup with his dinner: Wormwood brewed with yew berries, cook the juice down to a paste, put in three drops of blood and speak an incantation, and it will make a quick poison with no taste—
The sudden sharp pungent smell of burning pine needles came back into my nose, and the thought took on a strange bitter edge that made the wrongness of it leap out. I flinched away from it, startled, and I took a step back from the line of fire, trembling. On the other side, Kasia was waiting for me to speak: her face resolute, clear-eyed, full of trust and love and gratitude—and a little fear and worry, but nothing but ordinary human feeling. I looked at her, and she looked back at me anxiously, still herself. But I couldn’t speak. The smell of pine was still in my mouth, and my eyes stung with smoke.
“Nieshka?” Kasia said, her voice wavering with growing fear. I still said nothing. She was staring at me across the line of fire, and her face through the haze seemed to be first smiling and then unhappy, her mouth trembling through one shape and another, trying—trying different expressions. I took another step back, and it grew worse. Her head tilted, eyes fixed on my face, widening a little. She shifted her weight, a different stance. “Nieshka,” she said, not sounding afraid anymore, only confident and warm, “it’s all right. I know you’ll help me.”
The Dragon, beside me, was silent. I dragged in a breath. I still said nothing. My throat was shut. I managed, on a whisper, “Aishimad.”
A pungent, bitter smell rose in the air between us. “Please,” Kasia said to me. Her voice suddenly broke on a sob, an actor in a play moving from one act to the next. She lifted her hands towards me, came a little closer to the fire, her body leaning in. She came a little too close. The smell grew stronger: like greenwood burning, full of sap. “Nieshka—”
“Stop it!” I cried. “Stop it.”
She stopped. For a moment still Kasia stood there, and then it let her arms drop to her sides, and her face emptied out. A wave of rotting-wood smell rolled over the room.
The Dragon raised a hand. “Kulkias vizhkias haishimad,” he said, and a light shone out of his hand and onto her skin. Where it played over her I saw thick green shadows, mottled like deep layers of leaves on leaves. Something looked at me out of her eyes, its face still and strange and inhuman. I recognized it: what looked out at me was the same thing I had felt in the Wood, trying to find me. There was no trace of Kasia left at all.
Chapter 9
He was half-supporting me as he pulled me through the wall and out into the antechamber of the tomb again. When we were through I slid to the floor next to my small heap of pine-needle ashes and stared at them, hollow. I almost hated them for stealing the lie from me. I couldn’t even cry; it was worse than if Kasia were dead. He stood over me. “There’s a way,” I said, looking up at him. “There’s a way to get it out of her.” It was a child’s cry, a plea. He said nothing. “That spell you used on me—”
“No,” he said. “Not for this. The purging spell barely worked even on you. I warned you. Did it try to persuade you to harm yourself?”
I shivered all over horribly, remembering the ashen taste of that horrible thought creeping through my head: Wormwood and yew berries, a quick poison. “You,” I said.
He nodded. “It would have liked that: persuade you to kill me, then find some way to lure you back to the Wood.”
“What is it?” I said. “What is that—thing inside her? We say the Wood, but those trees—” I was abruptly sure of it. “—those trees are corrupted, too, as much as Kasia. That’s where it lives, not what it is.”
“We don’t know,” he said. “It was here before we came. Perhaps before they were,” he added, gesturing to the walls with their strange foreign inscription. “They woke the Wood, or made it, and they fought it awhile, and then it destroyed them. This tomb is all that’s left. There was an older tower here. Little of it remained except bricks scattered on the earth by the time Polnya claimed this valley and roused the Wood again.”
He fell silent. I remained sunk in on myself, curled up around my knees on the floor. I couldn’t stop shivering. Finally he said, heavily, “Are you ready to let me end this? Most likely there’s nothing left of her to rescue.”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted that thing gone, destroyed—the thing that wore Kasia’s face, that used not only her hands but everything in her heart, in her mind, to destroy those she loved. I almost didn’t care if Kasia was in there. If she was, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than to be trapped in her own body, that thing dangling her like a monstrous puppet. And I couldn’t persuade myself to doubt the Dragon anymore when he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.
But I had saved him, when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too. And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another. I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked. “Not yet,” I whispered. “Not yet.”
If I had been an indi
fferent student before, now I was dreadful in a wholly different way. I turned ahead in books and took ones he didn’t give me down from the shelves if he didn’t catch me. I looked into anything and everything I could find. I would work spells out halfway, discard them, and go onward; I would throw myself into workings without being sure I had the strength. I was running wild through the forest of magic, pushing brambles out of my way, heedless of scratches and dirt, paying no attention where I was going.
At least every few days I would find something with enough faint promise that I would convince myself it was worth trying. The Dragon took me down to Kasia to try whenever I asked, which was far more often than I managed to find anything really worth trying. He let me tear apart his library, and said nothing when I spilled oils and powders across his table. He didn’t press me to let Kasia go. I hated him and his silence ferociously: I knew he was only letting me convince myself there was nothing to be done.
She—the thing inside her—didn’t try to pretend anymore. She watched me with bird-bright eyes, and smiled occasionally when my workings did nothing: a horrible smile. “Nieshka, Agnieszka,” she sang softly, over and over, sometimes, if I was trying an incantation, so I had to stumble on through it while listening to her. I would come out feeling bruised and sick to my bones, and climb the stairs again slowly, with tears dripping from my face.
Spring was rolling over the valley by then. If I looked from my window, which I did now only rarely, every day I could watch the Spindle running riotous white with melted ice, and a band of open grass widening from the lowlands, chasing the snow up into the mountains on either side. Rain swept over the valley in silver curtains. Inside the tower I was parched as barren ground. I had looked at every page of Jaga’s book, and the handful of other tomes that suited my wandering magic, and any other books the Dragon could suggest. There were spells of healing, spells of cleansing, spells of renewal and life. I had tried anything with any promise at all.