by Naomi Novik
They held the Spring Festival in the valley before the planting began, the great bonfire in Olshanka a tall heap of seasoned wood so large I could see it plainly from the tower. I was alone in the library when I heard a faint snatch of the music drifting on the wind, and looked out to see the celebration. It seemed to me that the entire valley had burst into life, early shoots prodding their way out of all the fields, the forests bursting into pale and misty green around every village. And far down those cold stone stairs, Kasia was in her tomb. I turned away and folded my arms on the table and put my head down on them and sobbed.
When I lifted my head again, blotchy and tearstained, he was there, sitting near me, looking out of the window, his face bleak. His hands were folded in his lap, the fingers laced, as though he had held himself back from reaching out to touch me. He had laid a handkerchief on the table before me. I took it up and wiped my face and blew my nose.
“I tried, once,” he said abruptly. “When I was a young man. I lived in the capital, then. There was a woman—” His mouth twisted slightly, self-mocking. “The foremost beauty of the court, naturally. I suppose there’s no harm anymore in saying her name now she’s forty years in the grave: Countess Ludmila.”
I nearly gaped at him, not sure what confused me the most. He was the Dragon: he had always been in the tower and always would be, a permanent fixture, like the mountains in the west. The idea that he had ever lived somewhere else, that he had ever been a young man, seemed perfectly wrong; and yet at the same time, I stumbled just as much over the idea that he’d loved a woman forty years dead. His face was familiar to me now, but I looked at him startled all over again. There were those lines at the corners of his eye and mouth, if I looked for them, but that was all that betrayed his years. In everything else, he was a young man: the still-hard edges of his profile, his dark hair untouched with silver, his pale smooth unweathered cheek, his long and graceful hands. I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind—he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely noblewoman—and there my imagination stumbled. He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.
“She—became corrupted?” I asked, helplessly.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not her. Her husband.” He paused, and I wondered if he would say anything more. He had never spoken of himself to me at all, and he’d said nothing of the court but to disparage it. After a moment he went on, however, and I listened, fascinated.
“The count had gone to Rosya to negotiate a treaty, across the mountain pass. He came back with unacceptable terms and a thread of corruption. Ludmila had a wise-woman at her house, her nursemaid, who knew enough to warn her: they locked him up in the cellar and barred the door with salt, and told everyone he was ill.
“No one in the capital thought anything of a beautiful young wife making a scandal of herself while her older husband ailed out of sight; least of all myself, when she made me the object of her pursuit. I was still young and foolish enough at the time to believe myself and my magic likely to elicit admiration instead of alarm, and she was clever and determined enough to take advantage of my vanity. She had me thoroughly on a string before she asked me to save him.
“She had a particularly deft understanding of human nature,” he added, dryly. “She told me that she couldn’t leave him in such a state. She professed herself willing to give up her place at court, her title, her reputation, but so long as he was corrupted, honor demanded she remain chained to his side; only by saving him could I free her to run away with me. She tempted my selfishness and my pride at once: I assure you I thought of myself as a noble hero, promising to save my lover’s husband. And then—she let me see him.”
He fell silent. I hardly breathed, sitting like a mouse under an owl’s tree so he would go on talking. His gaze was turned inward, bleak, and I felt a kind of recognition: I thought of Jerzy laughing dreadfully at me out of his sickbed, of Kasia below with the terrible brightness in her eyes, and knew that same look lived in my own face.
“I spent half a year trying,” he said finally. “I was already accounted the most powerful wizard of Polnya by then; I was certain there was nothing I couldn’t do. I ransacked the king’s library and the University, and brewed a score of remedies.” He waved towards the table, where Jaga’s book lay shut. “That was when I bought that book, among other less wise attempts. Nothing served.”
His mouth twisted again. “Then I came here.” He indicated the tower with one finger, circling. “There was another witch here guarding the Wood then, the Raven. I thought she might have an answer. She was growing old at last, and most of the wizards at court avoided her carefully; none of them wanted to be sent to replace her when she finally died. I wasn’t afraid of that: I was too strong to be sent away from court.”
“But—” I said, startled into speaking, and bit my lip; he looked at me for the first time, one of those sarcastic eyebrows raised. “But you were sent here, in the end?” I said uncertainly.
“No,” he said. “I chose to stay. The king at the time wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about my decision: he preferred to keep me under his eye, and his successors have often pressed me to return. But she—persuaded me.” He looked away from me again, out the window and over the valley towards the Wood. “Have you ever heard of a town called Porosna?”
It sounded only vaguely familiar. “The baker in Dvernik,” I said. “Her grandmother was from Porosna. She made a kind of bun—”
“Yes, yes,” he said, impatient. “And do you have any idea where it is?”
I groped helplessly: I barely knew the name. “Is it in the Yellow Marshes?” I offered.
“No,” he said. “It was five miles down the road from Zatochek.”
Zatochek was not two miles from the barren strip that surrounded the Wood. It was the last town in the valley, the last bastion before the Wood; so it had been all my life. “The Wood—took it?” I whispered.
“Yes,” the Dragon said. He rose and went for the great ledger I had seen him write in, the day that Wensa had come to tell us about Kasia being taken, and he brought it to the table and opened it. Each of the great pages was divided into neat lines, rows and columns, careful entries like an account-book: but in each row stood the name of a town, names of people, and numbers: this many corrupted, this many taken; this many cured, this many slain. The pages were thick with entries. I reached out and turned the pages back, the parchment unyellowed, the ink still dark: there was a faint clinging magic of preservation on them. The years grew thinner and the numbers smaller as I went back. There had been more incidents lately, and larger ones.
“It swallowed Porosna the night the Raven died,” the Dragon said. He reached out and turned a thick sheaf of pages to where someone else, less orderly, had been keeping the records: each incident was merely written out like a story, the writing larger and the lines a little shaky.
Today a rider from Porosna: they have a fever there with seven sick. He did not stop in any towns. He was sickening too. A woodbane infusion eased his fever, and Agata’s Seventh Incantation was effective at purifying the root of the sickness. Sevenweight of silver worth of saffron consumed in the incantation, and fifteen for the woodbane.
It was the last entry in that hand.
“I was on my way back to the court by then,” the Dragon said. “The Raven had told me the Wood was growing—she asked me to stay. I refused, indignantly; I thought it beneath me. She told me there was nothing to be done for the count, and I resented it; I told her grandly I would find a way. That whatever the Wood’s magic had done, I could undo. I told myself she was an old weak fool; that the Wood was encroaching because of her weakness.”
I hugged myself as he spoke, staring down at the implacable ledger, the blank page beneath that entry. I wished now he would stop speaking: I didn’t want to hear any more. He was trying to be kind, baring his own failure to me, and all I could think was Kasia, Kasia, a cry inside me.
“So far as I could lea
rn, afterwards—a frantic messenger caught me on the road—she went to Porosna, taking her stores with her, and wore herself out healing the sick. That, of course, was when the Wood struck. She managed to fling a handful of children to the next town—I imagine your baker’s grandmother was among them. They told a story of seven walkers coming, carrying a seedling heart-tree.
“I was still able to make it through the trees when I came, half a day later. They had planted the heart-tree in her body. She yet lived, if you can call it that. I managed to give her a clean death, but that was all I could do before I had to flee. The village was gone, and the Wood had pushed its borders out.
“That was the last great incursion,” he added. “I halted the advance by taking her place, and I’ve held it since then—more or less. But it’s always trying.”
“And if you hadn’t come?” I said.
“I’m the only wizard in Polnya strong enough to hold it back,” the Dragon said, without any particular arrogance: a statement of fact. “Every few years it tests my strength, and once a decade or so makes a serious attempt—like this last assault on your own village. Dvernik is only one village out from the edge of the Wood. If it had managed to kill or corrupt me there, and establish a heart-tree—by the time another wizard came, the Wood would have swallowed up both your village and Zatochek, and been on the doorstep of the eastern pass to the Yellow Marshes. And it would continue on from there, if given the chance. If I’d allowed them to send a weaker wizard when the Raven died, by now the whole valley would have been taken over.
“That’s what’s happening on the Rosyan side. They’ve lost four villages in the last decade, and two before that. The Wood will reach the southern pass to Kyeva Province in the next, and then—” He shrugged. “We’ll learn whether it can spread itself over a mountain pass, I suppose.”
We sat in silence. In his words I saw a vision of the Wood marching slow but implacable over my home, over all the valley, over all the world. I imagined looking down from the tower windows at endless dark trees, besieged; a whispering hateful ocean in every direction, moving with the wind, not another living thing in sight. The Wood would strangle all of them, and drag them down under its roots. Like it had with Porosna. Like it had with Kasia.
Tears were sliding down my face, a slow trail, not hard weeping. I was too desolate to cry anymore. The light outside was growing dim; the witch-lanterns hadn’t yet lit. His face had settled into abstraction, unseeing, and in the dusk his eyes were impossible to read. “What happened to them?” I asked to fill the silence, feeling hollow. “What happened to her?”
He stirred. “Who?” he said, surfacing from his reverie. “Oh, Ludmila?” He paused. “After I came back to the court for the last time,” he said finally, “I told her there was nothing to be done for her husband. I brought two other wizards from the court to attest his corruption was incurable—they were quite appalled that I’d allowed him to live so long in the first place—and I let one of them put him to death.” He shrugged. “They tried to make hay of it, as it happens—there’s more than a little envy among enchanters. They suggested to the king that I ought to be sent here for punishment, for having concealed the corruption. They meant the king to refuse that punishment, but settle on something else, some small or petty wrist-slapping, I suppose. It rather deflated them when I announced I was going, no matter what anyone else thought of it.
“And Ludmila—I didn’t see her again. She tried to claw my eyes out when I told her we had to put him to death, and her remarks at the time rather quickly disillusioned me as to the real nature of her feelings for me,” he added, dryly. “But she inherited the estate and remarried a few years later to a lesser duke; she bore him three sons and a daughter, and lived to the age of seventy-six as a leading matron of the court. I believe the bards at court made me the villain of the piece, and her the noble faithful wife, trying to save her husband at any cost. Not even false, I suppose.”
That was when I realized that I already knew the story. I had heard it sung. Ludmila and the Enchanter, only in the song, the brave countess disguised herself as an old peasant woman and cooked and cleaned for the wizard who had stolen her husband’s heart, until she found it in his house locked inside a box, and she stole it back and saved him. My eyes prickled with hot tears. No one was enchanted beyond saving in the songs. The hero always saved them. There was no ugly moment in a dark cellar where the countess wept and cried out protest while three wizards put the count to death, and then made court politics out of it.
“Are you ready to let her go?” the Dragon said.
I wasn’t, but I was. I was so tired. I couldn’t bear to keep going down those stairs, down to the thing wearing Kasia’s face. I hadn’t saved her at all. She was still in the Wood, still swallowed up. But fulmia still shuddered in my belly deep down, waiting, and if I said yes to him—if I stayed here and buried my head in my arms and let him go away, and come back and tell me it was done—I thought it might come roaring out of me again, and bring the tower down around us.
I looked at the shelves, all around them, desperately: the endless books with their spines and covers like citadel walls. What if one of them still held the secret, the trick that would set her free? I stood and went and put my hands on them, gold-stamped letters meaningless beneath my blind fingers. Luthe’s Summoning caught me again, that beautiful leather tome that I’d borrowed so long ago, and enraged the Dragon by taking, before I’d ever known anything of magic, before I’d known how much and how little I could do. I put my hands on it, and then I said abruptly, “What does it summon? A demon?”
“No, don’t be absurd,” the Dragon said, impatiently. “Calling spirits is nothing but charlatanry. It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal. The Summoning does nothing so trivial. It summons—” He paused, and I was surprised to see him struggling for words. “Truth,” he said finally, with half a shrug, as though that was inadequate and wrong, but as close as he could come. I didn’t understand how you could summon truth, unless he meant seeing past something that was a lie.
“But why were you so angry that I had started reading it, then?” I demanded.
He glared at me. “Does that seem to you a trivial working? I thought you’d been set on to an impossible task by some other enchanter at court—with the intention, on their part, of blasting the roof off the tower when you’d spent all your strength and your working fell in on itself, and thereby making me look an incompetent fool not to be trusted with an apprentice.”
“But that would have killed me,” I said. “You thought someone from court would—?”
“Spend the life of a peasant with half an ounce of magic to score a victory over me—perhaps to see me ordered back to court, humiliated?” the Dragon said. “Of course. Most courtiers set peasants one degree above cows, and somewhat below their favorite horses. They’re perfectly delighted to spend a thousand of you in a skirmish with Rosya for some minor advantage on the border; they’d hardly blink at this.” He waved the viciousness of it aside. “In any case, I certainly didn’t expect you to succeed.”
I stared at the book on the shelf under my hands. I remembered reading it, that sense of sure satisfaction, and abruptly I pulled the book off the shelf and turned to him, clutching it to my body. He eyed me warily. “Could it help Kasia?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth to deny it, I could tell; but then he hesitated. He looked at the book, frowning and silent. Finally he said, “I doubt it. But the Summoning is—a strange work.”
“It can’t hurt anything,” I said, but that won me an irritated look.
“Certainly it can hurt,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to what I just said? The entire book must be invoked in a single sitting to make the spell, and if you haven’t the strength to do it, the whole edifice of the spell will collapse, disastrously, when you exhaust yourself. I’ve seen it cast only once, by three witches together, each having taught the next younger, passing the book
from one to another to read. It almost killed them, and they were by no means weak.”
I looked down at the book, heavy and golden in my hands. I didn’t doubt him. I remembered how I’d liked the taste of it on my tongue, the way it had pulled at me. I drew a deep breath and said, “Will you cast it with me?”
Chapter 10
We chained her first. The Dragon carried down heavy iron manacles and with an incantation thrust one end of them deep into the stone walls of the chamber while Kasia—the thing inside Kasia—stood back and watched us, unblinking. I held a ring of fire around her, and when he was done, I herded her over, and with another spell he forced her arms into the manacles. She resisted, more to have the pleasure of putting us to the trouble than out of any worry, I thought—her expression remained that same inhuman blankness all along, and her eyes never left my face. She was thinner than she had been. The thing ate only sparingly. Enough to keep Kasia alive, not enough to keep me from watching her wear away, her body growing gaunt and her face hollow-cheeked.
The Dragon conjured a narrow wooden stand and set the Summoning upon it. He looked at me. “Are you ready?” he asked me, in stiff and formal tones. He had dressed in fine garments of silk and leather and velvet in endless layers, and he wore gloves; as though armoring himself against anything like what had happened the last time we’d cast a working together. It seemed to me as long ago as a century and as distant as the moon. I was untidy in homespun, my hair pulled into a haphazard knot just to keep it out of my eyes. I reached down and opened the cover, and began to read aloud.
The spell caught me up again almost at once, and by now I knew enough of magic to feel it drawing on my strength. But the Summoning didn’t insist on tearing away chunks of me: I tried to feed it as I did most of my spells, with a steady measured stream of magic instead of a torrent, and it permitted me to do so. The words no longer felt so impenetrable. I still couldn’t follow the story, or remember one sentence to the next, but I began to have the feeling that I wasn’t meant to. If I could have remembered, at least some of the words would have been wrong: like hearing again a half-remembered favorite tale from childhood and finding it unsatisfying, or at least not as I’d remembered it. And that was how the Summoning made itself perfect, by living in that golden place of vague and loving memory. I let it flow through me, and when I finished the page I stopped, and let the Dragon take it up: he’d insisted grimly he would read two to my one, when I wouldn’t be dissuaded from trying.