by Naomi Novik
His voice sounded the words a little differently than I had, with crisper edges and less of a running rhythm, and it didn’t feel quite right to me at first. The working continued to build without any difficulty as far as I could tell, and by the end of his two pages, his own reading did sound well to me after all—as though I were hearing a gifted storyteller tell a different version of a tale than the one I loved, and he had overcome my instinctive annoyance at hearing it told differently. But when I had to begin again myself, I struggled to pick up the thread of it, and it was a greater effort than the first page had been. We were trying to tell the story together, but pulling in different ways. I realized in dismay even as I read that it wasn’t going to be enough that he was my teacher: those three witches he’d seen cast the spell must have been more like one another, in their magic and their working, than he and I were.
I kept reading, pushing onward, and I managed to reach the end of the page. When I had finished it, the story was flowing smoothly for me again—but only because it had become my story again, and when the Dragon began to read this time, the jarring was even worse. I swallowed against my dry parched mouth and looked up from the podium—and Kasia was looking at me from the wall where she was chained, smiling with a hideous light in her face,with delight. She could tell as easily as I could that it wasn’t good enough—that we couldn’t complete the working. I looked at the Dragon reading grimly on, intently focused on the page, his brows drawn hard together. He had warned me he would halt the working before we went too deep if he thought we couldn’t succeed; he would try and collapse the spell as safely as he could, and control the damage it would do. He had only agreed to try when I had agreed to accept his judgment, and to stop my part of the working and keep out of his way if he felt it necessary to do so.
But the working was already strong, full of power. We’d both had to exert ourselves just to keep going. There might already be no safe way. I looked at Kasia’s face, and remembered the feeling I’d had, that the presence in the Wood, whatever it was, was in her; that it was the same presence. If the Wood was here in Kasia—if it knew what we were doing, and knew that the Dragon had been injured, some great part of his strength drained—it would strike again, right away. It would come again for Dvernik, or maybe just Zatochek, settling for a smaller gain. In my desperation to save Kasia, in his pity for my grief, we had just handed the Wood a gift.
I groped for something to do, anything, and then I swallowed my own hesitation and reached out with a shaking hand to cover his where he held the page down. His eyes darted towards me, and I took a breath and began to read along.
He didn’t stop, although he glared at me ferociously—What do you think you’re doing?—but after a moment he understood and caught the idea of what I was trying to do. Our voices sounded terrible at first when we tried to bring them together, off-key and grating against each other: the working wobbled like a child’s tower made of pebbles. But then I stopped trying to read like him and simply read with him instead, letting instinct guide me: I found myself letting him read the words off the page, and with my own voice almost making a song of them, choosing a single word or line to chant over again twice or three times, sometimes humming instead of words, my foot tapping to give a beat.
He resisted at first, holding for a moment to the clean precision of his own working, but my own magic was offering his an invitation, and little by little he began to read—not any less sharply, but to the beat I gave. He was leaving room for my improvisations, giving them air. We turned the page together and kept on without a pause, and halfway down the page a line flowed out of us that was music, his voice crisply carrying the words while I sang them along, high and low, and abruptly, shockingly, it was easy.
No—not easy; that wasn’t even an adequate word. His hand had closed on mine, tightly; our fingers were interlaced, and our magic also. The spell came singing out of us, effortless as water running downhill. It would have been harder to stop than to keep going.
And I understood now why he hadn’t been able to find the right words, why he hadn’t been able to tell me whether the spell would help Kasia or not. The Summoning didn’t bring forth any beast or object, or conjure up some surge of power; there was no fire or lightning. The only thing it did at all was fill the room with a clear cool light, not even bright enough to be blinding. But in that light everything began to look, to be different. The stone of the walls grew translucent, white veins moving like rivers, and when I gazed at them, they told me a story: a strange deep endless story unlike anything human, so much slower and farther away that it felt almost like being stone again myself. The blue fire that danced in its stone cup was in an endless dream, a song circling on itself; I looked into its flickering and saw the temple where that fire had come from, a long way from here and long since fallen into ruin. But nevertheless I knew suddenly where that temple stood, and how I could cast that very spell and make a flame that would live on after me. The carved walls of the tomb were coming alive, the inscriptions shining. If I looked at them long enough, I would be able to read them, I was sure.
The chains were rattling. Kasia was struggling against them now, furiously, and the noise of the iron links against the wall would have been a horrible noise, if the spell had left room for it. But the scraping was muffled into a mild rattling, somewhere far away, and it didn’t distract me from the spell. I didn’t dare look at her, not yet. When I did—I would know. If Kasia was gone, if there was nothing left of her, I would know. I stared at the pages, too afraid to look, while we kept on chanting. He lifted each one halfway; I took it and carefully finished turning it. The sheaf of pages under my hand grew and grew, and still the spell poured out of us, and finally I lifted my head, my belly tight, to look at her.
The Wood stared back at me out of Kasia’s face: an endless depth of rustling leaves, whispering hatred and longing and rage. But the Dragon paused; my hand had clenched on his. Kasia was there, too. Kasia was there. I could see her, lost and wandering in that dark forest, her hands groping ahead of her, her eyes staring without seeing as she flinched away from branches that slapped in her face, thorns that drank blood from deep scratches on her arms. She didn’t even know she wasn’t in the Wood anymore. She was still trapped, while the Wood tore at her little by little, drinking up her misery.
I let go of him and stepped towards her. The working didn’t fail: the Dragon kept on reading, and I kept feeding my magic to the spell. “Kasia,” I called, and cupped my hands before her face. The light of the spell pooled in them: a brilliant sharp terrible white light, hard to bear. I saw my own face reflected in her wide glassy eyes, and my own secret jealousies, how I had wanted all her gifts, if not the price she would have to pay for them. Tears crept into my eyes; it felt like Wensa haranguing me all over again, and this time there was no escape. All the times I’d felt like nothing, the girl who didn’t matter, that no lord would ever want; all the times I’d felt myself a gangly tangled mess beside her. All the ways she’d been treated specially: a place set aside for her, gifts and attention lavished, everyone taking the chance to love her while they could. There had been times I had wanted to be the special one, the one everyone knew would be chosen. Not for long, never for long, but now that seemed like cowardice: I’d enjoyed a dream of being special and nursed a secret seed of envy against her, though I’d had the luxury of putting it aside whenever I chose.
But I couldn’t stop: the light was reaching her. She turned towards me. Lost in the Wood, she turned towards me, and in her face I saw her own deep anger, an anger years long. She’d known all her life she was going to be taken, whether she wanted it or not. The terror of a thousand long nights stared back out at me: with her lying in the dark, wondering what would happen to her, imagining a terrible wizard’s hands on her and his breath on her cheek, and behind me I heard the Dragon draw in a sharp breath; he stumbled over the words, and halted. The light pooled in my hands flickered.
I threw a desperate look back at him, bu
t even as I did, he took up the spell again, his voice rigidly disciplined, his eyes fixed on the page. The light shone through him entirely: as though he’d somehow made himself clear as glass, emptied himself of thought and feeling to carry on the spell. Oh, how I wanted to do that; I didn’t think I could. I had to turn back to Kasia full of all my messy tangled thoughts and secret wishes, and I had to let her see them, see me, like an exposed pale squirming worm from under an overturned log. I had to see her, bare before me, and that hurt even worse: because she’d hated me, too.
She’d hated me for being safe, for being loved. My mother hadn’t set me to climb too-tall trees; my mother hadn’t forced me to go three hours’ walk every day back and forth to the hot sticky bakery in the next town, to learn how to cook for a lord. My mother hadn’t turned her back to me when I’d cried, and told me I had to be brave. My mother hadn’t brushed my hair three hundred strokes a night, keeping me beautiful, as though she wanted me taken; as though she wanted a daughter who would go to the city, and become rich, and send back money for her brothers and sisters, the ones she let herself love—oh, I hadn’t even imagined that secret bitterness, as sour as spoiled milk.
And then—and then she’d even hated me for being taken. She hadn’t been chosen after all. I saw her sitting at the feast afterwards, out of place, everyone whispering; she had never imagined herself here, left behind in a village, in a house that hadn’t meant to welcome her back. She’d made up her mind to pay the price, and be brave; but now there was nothing left to be brave for, no glittering future ahead. The older village boys smiled at her with a kind of strange, satisfied confidence. Half a dozen of them had spoken to her during the feast: boys who’d never said a word to her, or had only looked at her from afar as though they didn’t dare to touch, now came and spoke to her familiarly, as if she had nothing to do but sit there and be chosen by someone else instead. And I’d come back in silk and velvet, my hair caught in a net of jewels, my hands full of magic, the power to do as I liked, and she’d thought, That should be me, it should have been me, as though I was a thief who’d taken something that belonged to her.
It was unbearable, and I saw her recoil from it, too; but somehow we had to bear it. “Kasia!” I called to her, choked out, and held the light steady for her to see. I saw her stand there hesitating a moment longer, and then she came stumbling towards me, hands reaching forward. The Wood tore at her as she came, though, branches clawing and vines tangling around her legs, and I could do nothing. I could only stand there and hold the light while she fell and struggled up again, and fell again, terror rising in her face.
“Kasia!” I cried. She was crawling now, still coming, her jaw set with determination, leaving a bloody trail on the fallen leaves and dark moss behind her. She grabbed at roots and pulled herself forward, even while the branches lashed her back, but she was still so far away.
And then I looked back up at her body, at the face inhabited by the Wood, and it smiled at me. She couldn’t escape. The Wood was deliberately letting her try, feasting on her very courage, on my own hope. It could drag her back at any moment. It would let her come close enough to see me, maybe even to feel her own body, the air on her face, and then vines would spring up and lash around her, a storm of falling leaves would shroud her, and the Wood would close up around her again. I moaned a protest, and I almost lost the thread of the spell, and then the Dragon said behind me, his voice strange and remote, as though he spoke from far away, “Agnieszka, the purging. Ulozishtus. Try it. I can finish alone.”
I carefully drew my magic back from the Summoning, carefully, carefully, like tipping up a bottle without letting it drip down the neck. The light held, and I whispered, “Ulozishtus.” It was one of the Dragon’s spells, not the kind that came to me easily; I didn’t remember the rest of the words he’d said over me. But I let the word roll over my tongue, shaping it carefully, and remembered the feeling of it—the fire that had burned in my veins, the terrible sweetness of the potion on my tongue. “Ulozishtus,” I said again, drawing it out slowly, “Ulozishtus,” and made each syllable a small spark struck on tinder, a scrap of magic flying out. And inside the Wood, I saw a thin trail of smoke going up from one patch of the undergrowth closing around Kasia; I whispered “Ulozishtus,” to it, and to another thread of smoke that rose ahead of her, and when I did it to a third, a tiny struggling yellow flame bloomed near her grasping arm.
“Ulozishtus,” I said to it again, giving it another bit of magic, like laying scraps of kindling to a new fire in a dead hearth. The flame grew stronger, and where it touched the vines recoiled, pulling back. “Ulozishtus, ulozishtus,” I chanted, feeding it, building it higher, and as it climbed I took burning branches from it and set the rest of the Wood alight.
Kasia staggered up, pulling her arms free of smoking vines, her own flesh marked pink with the heat. But she could move quicker again, and she came towards me through the smoke, through the crackling leaves, running as the trees went up, as scorching branches fell around her. Her hair was burning, and her torn clothing, tears running down her face as her skin reddened and blistered. Her body before me was jerking in the manacles, writhing in a scream of rage, and I wept and shouted, “Ulozishtus!” again. The fire was growing, and I knew that just as the Dragon might have killed me, purging me of the shadows, Kasia might die here now, might burn to death at my hands.
I was grateful now for the long terrible months trying to find something, anything; I was grateful for all the failures, for every minute I had spent here in this tomb with the Wood laughing at me. It gave me the strength to keep the spell going. The Dragon’s voice was steady behind me, an anchor, chanting to the end of the Summoning. Kasia was coming nearer, and all around her the Wood was burning. I could see very little of the trees now—she was close enough that she was looking out of her own eyes, and there were flames licking at her skin, roaring, crackling. Her body arched against the stone, thrashing. Her fingers stiffened, going wide, and suddenly her veins ran brilliant green in her arms.
Drops of sap burst trickling from her eyes and nose in rivulets down her face like tears, the bright fresh sweet smell horribly wrong. Her mouth hung open in a silent round cry, and then tiny white rootlets crept out from beneath her nails, like an oak-tree growing overnight. They climbed with sudden horrible speed all over the manacles, hardening into grey wood even as they went, and with a noise like ice breaking in midsummer, the chains broke.
I did nothing. There was no time to do anything: it happened quicker than I could even see it. One moment Kasia was chained, the next she was leaping for me. She was impossibly strong, flinging me to the ground. I caught her shoulders and held her off with a scream. Sap was running from her face, staining her dress, and it fell on me with a pattering like rain. It crawled over my skin, beading up against my protection spell. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. Her hands closed around my throat like brands, hot, burning hot, and those strangling rootlets began to crawl over me. The Dragon was chanting faster, running through the final words, racing to the end of the spell.
I strangled out, “Ulozishtus!” again, looking up into the Wood and into Kasia’s face, twisting half in rage and half in agony, as her hands tightened. She stared down at me. The light of the Summoning was brightening, filling every corner of the room, impossible to evade, and we looked full into each other, every secret petty hate and jealousy laid open, and tears were mingling with the sap on her face. I was weeping, too, tears sliding from my eyes even as she pressed the air out of me and darkness started to creep in over my sight.
She said, strangled, “Nieshka,” in her own voice, shuddering with determination, and one by one she forced her fingers open and away from my throat. My vision cleared, and looking into her face I saw the shame falling away. She looked at me with fierce love, with courage.
I sobbed again, once. The sap was running dry, and the fire was consuming her. The little rootlets had withered and crumbled to ash. Another purging would kill
her. I knew it: I could see it. And Kasia smiled at me, because she couldn’t speak again, and lowered her head in a single slow nod. I felt my own face crumpling and ugly and wretched, and then I said, “Ulozishtus.”
I looked up into Kasia’s face, hungry for one last sight of her, but the Wood looked out of her eyes at me: black rage, full of smoke, burning, roots planted too deep to uproot. Kasia still held her own hands away from my throat.
And then—the Wood was gone.
Kasia fell upon me. I screamed with joy and threw my arms around her, and she clutched at me shaking, sobbing. She was still feverish, her whole body trembling, and she vomited onto the floor even as I held her, crying weakly. Her hands hurt me: they were scorching hot and hard, and she clung to me too tight, my ribs creaking painfully under my skin. But it was her. The Dragon closed the book with a final heavy thump. The room was full of blazing light: there was nowhere for the Wood to hide. It was Kasia, and only Kasia. We had won.
Chapter 11
The Dragon was strange and silent afterwards, as we wrestled Kasia slowly and wearily up the stairs. She was almost insensible, jerking out of a daze only to claw the air before subsiding again. Her limp body was unnaturally heavy: heavy as solid oak, as though the Wood had somehow left her transmuted and changed. “Is it gone?” I said to him, desperately. “Is it gone?”