by Naomi Novik
“Yes,” he said shortly as we heaved her up the long spiraling stairs: even with his own peculiar strength, every step was a struggle, as though we were trying to carry a fallen log between our hands, and we were both weary. “The Summoning would have shown us otherwise.” He said nothing more until we had taken her upstairs to the guest chamber, and then he stood by the side of the bed looking down at her, his brow drawn, and then he turned and left the room.
I had little time to think of him. Kasia lay feverish and sick for a month. She would start up half-awake and lost in nightmares, still in the Wood, and she could throw even the Dragon off her and nearly across the room. We had to tie her down in the heavy postered bed, with ropes and finally with chains. I slept curled up on the rug at the foot, leaping up to give her water whenever she cried out, and to try and press a few morsels of food into her mouth: she couldn’t keep down more than a bite or two of plain bread, at first.
My days and nights ran into each other, broken with her wakings—every hour at first, and ten minutes to settle her, so I could never sleep properly, and I staggered dazed through the hours. It was only after the first week that I began to be sure she would live, and I stole a few moments to scribble a note to Wensa to let her know that Kasia was free, that she was getting well. “Will she keep it to herself?” the Dragon demanded, when I asked him to send it; and I was too drained to ask why he cared; I only opened the letter and scribbled on a line, Tell no one yet, and handed it to him.
I should have asked; he should have pressed me harder to be cautious. But we were both frayed like worn cloth. I didn’t know what he was working on, but I saw his light burning in the library late at night, as I stumbled down to the kitchens for more broth and back up again, and loose pages covered with diagrams and inscriptions stacked into heaps on his table. One afternoon, following the smell of smoke, I found him asleep in his laboratory, the bottom of an alembic flask blackening over a candle in front of him, already run dry. He jumped when I woke him, and he knocked the whole thing over and started a fire with what for him was wholly uncharacteristic clumsiness. We had to scramble to put it out together, and his shoulders were as stiff as a cat’s, disliking the insult to his dignity.
Three weeks later, though, Kasia woke after a full four hours of sleep and turned her head to me and said, “Nieshka,” exhausted but herself, her dark brown eyes warm and clear. I cupped her face in my hands, smiling through tears, and she managed to close her claw-like hands around mine and smile back.
From then she began to recover quickly. Her strange new strength made her clumsy at first, even once she could stand up. She blundered into furniture and fell all the way down the stairs the first time she tried to make her own way down to the kitchens, once when I was downstairs cooking more soup. But when I whirled from the fire and flew to her calling in alarm, I found her at the foot of the stairs unhurt, not even bruised, and only struggling to get back onto her feet again.
I took her to the great hall to learn how to walk again, and tried to steady her as we went slowly around the room, although more often than not she knocked me down by accident instead. The Dragon was coming down the stairs to get something from the cellars. He stood and watched our awkward progress for a little while from the archway, his face hard and unreadable. After I got her back upstairs and she crawled carefully into bed and fell asleep again, I went down to the library to speak to him. “What’s wrong with her?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” the Dragon said flatly. “As far as I can tell, she is uncorrupted.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased.
I didn’t understand. I wondered if it bothered him to have someone else staying in the tower. “She’s already better,” I said. “It won’t be for long.”
He looked at me with bright irritation. “Not for long?” he said. “What do you mean to do with her?”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. “She’ll—”
“Go home?” the Dragon said. “Marry a farmer, if she can find one who won’t mind his wife is made of wood?”
“She’s still flesh, she’s not made of wood!” I said, protesting, but I was already realizing, quicker than I wanted to, that he was right: there was no more place for Kasia back in our village than there was for me. I sat slowly down, my hands braced on the table. “She’ll—take her dowry,” I said, fumbling for some answer. “She’ll have to go away—to the city, to University, like the other women—”
He had been about to speak; he paused and said, “What?”
“The other chosen ones, the other ones you took,” I said, without thinking anything of it: I was too worried for Kasia: what could she do? She wasn’t a witch; at least people understood what that was. She was simply changed, dreadfully, and I didn’t think she could conceal it.
He broke in on my thoughts. “Tell me,” he bit out, caustic, and I startled and looked up at him, “did all of you assume I forced myself on them?”
I only gaped at him, while he glared at me, his face hard and offended. “Yes?” I said, bewildered at first. “Yes, of course we did. Why wouldn’t we? If you didn’t, why wouldn’t you—why don’t you just hire a servant—” Even as I said it, I began to wonder if that other woman, the one who’d left me the letter, had been right. That he just wanted a little human company—but only a little, on his own terms; not someone who could leave him when they liked.
“Hired servants were inadequate,” he said, irritable and evasive; he didn’t say why. He made an impatient gesture, not looking at me; if he had seen my face, perhaps he would have stopped. “I don’t take puling girls who want only to marry a village lover, or ones who cringe from me—”
I stood straight up, the chair clattering back over the floor away from me. Slow and late and bubbling, a ferocious anger had risen in me, like a flood. “So you take the ones like Kasia,” I burst out, “the ones brave enough to bear it, who won’t hurt their families worse by weeping, and you suppose that makes it right? You don’t rape them, you only close them up for ten years, and complain that we think you worse than you are?”
He stared up at me, and I stared back, panting. I hadn’t even known those words were in me to be spoken; I hadn’t known they were in me to be felt. I would never have thought of speaking so to my lord, the Dragon: I had hated him, but I wouldn’t have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn’t a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.
But he had stepped down from that plane; he had given me real kindness. He’d let his magic mingle with my own again, that strange breathtaking intimacy, all to save Kasia with me. I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human.
“It’s not right,” I said loudly. “It’s not right!”
He stood up and for a moment we faced each other across the table, both of us furious, both of us, I think, equally shocked; then he turned and walked away from me, bright angry streaks of red color in his cheeks, his hand gripping hard on the window-sill as he stared out of the tower. I flung myself out of the room and ran upstairs.
For the rest of the day, I stayed by Kasia’s bedside while she slept, perched on the bed with her thin hand in mine. She was still warm and alive, but he hadn’t misspoken. Her skin was soft, but beneath it her flesh was unyielding: not like stone but like a smooth-polished piece of amber, hard but flowing, with the edges rounded away. Her hair shone in the deep golden cast of the candle-glow, curling into whorls like the knots of a tree. She might have been a carved statue. I had told myself she wasn’t so altered, but I knew I was wrong. My eyes were too loving: I looked and only saw Kasia. Someone who didn’t know her would see a strangeness in her at once. She had always been beautiful; now she was unearthly so, preserved and shining.
She woke and looked at me. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Are you hung
ry?”
I didn’t know what to do for her. I wondered if the Dragon would let her stay here: we could share my room, upstairs. Perhaps he would be glad of a servant who could never leave, since he disliked training a new one. It was a bitter thought, but I couldn’t think of anything else. If a stranger had come into our village looking like her, we’d have thought them corrupted for sure, some new kind of monstrosity put forth by the Wood.
The next morning, I made up my mind to ask him to let her stay, despite everything. I went back to the library. He was at the window with one of his wisp-creatures floating in his hands. I stopped. Its gently undulating surface held a reflection, like a still pool of water, and when I edged around beside him I could see that it reflected not the room but trees, endless deep and dark, moving. The reflection changed gradually as we watched: showing where the wisp had been, I guessed. I held my breath as a shadow moved over the surface: a thing like a walker moving by, but smaller, and instead of the stick-like legs, it had broad silvery grey limbs, veined like leaves. It stopped and turned a strange faceless head towards the wisp. In its forelegs it held a ragged bundle of green torn-up seedlings and plants, roots trailing: for all the world like a gardener who had been weeding. It turned its head from side to side, and then continued onward into the trees, vanishing.
“Nothing,” the Dragon said. “No gathering of strength, no preparations—” He shook his head. “Move back,” he said over his shoulder to me. He prodded the floating wisp back outside the window, then picked up what I had imagined to be a wizard’s staff from the wall, lit the end in the fireplace, and thrust it out directly into the middle of the wisp. The whole floating shimmer of it caught fire in one startling blue burst, burned up, and was gone; a faint sweet smell came through the window: like corruption.
“They can’t see them?” I asked, fascinated.
“Very occasionally one doesn’t come back: I imagine they catch them sometimes,” the Dragon said. “But if they touch it, the sentinel only bursts.” He spoke abstractly; frowning.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What were you expecting? Isn’t it good that the Wood isn’t preparing an attack?”
“Tell me,” he said, “did you think she would live?”
I hadn’t, of course. It had seemed like a miracle, and one I’d longed for too badly to examine. I hadn’t let myself think about it. “It let her go?” I whispered.
“Not precisely,” he said. “It couldn’t keep her: the Summoning and the purge were driving it out. But I’m certain it could have held on long enough for her to die. And the Wood is hardly inclined to be generous in such cases.” He was tapping his fingers against the window-sill in a pattern that felt oddly familiar; I recognized it as the rhythm of our Summoning chant at the same time he did. He stilled his hand at once. He demanded stiffly, “Is she recovered?”
“She’s better,” I said. “She climbed all the stairs this morning. I’ve put her in my room—”
He made a dismissive flick of his hand. “I thought her recovery might have been meant as a distraction,” he said. “If she’s already well—” He shook his head.
After a moment, his shoulders went back and squared. He dropped his hand from the sill and turned to face me. “Whatever the Wood intends, we’ve lost enough time,” he said, grimly. “Get your books. We need to begin your lessons again.”
I stared at him. “Stop gaping at me,” he said. “Do you even understand what we’ve done?” He gestured to the window. “That wasn’t by any means the only sentinel I sent out. Another of them found the heart-tree that had held the girl. It was highly notable,” he added dryly, “because it was dead. When you burned the corruption out of the girl’s body, you burned the tree itself, too.”
Even then, I still didn’t understand his grimness, and still less when he went on. “The walkers have already torn it down and replanted a seedling, but if it were winter instead of spring, if the clearing had been closer to the edges of the Wood—if we’d only been prepared, we might have gone in with a party of axemen, to clear and burn back the Wood all the way to that clearing.”
“Can we—” I blurted out, shocked, and couldn’t quite make myself even put the idea into words.
“Do it again?” he said. “Yes. Which means that the Wood must make an answer, and soon.”
I began finally to catch his urgency. It was like his worry about Rosya, I suddenly understood: we were in a war against the Wood as well, and our enemy knew that we now had a new weapon we might turn against them. He’d been expecting the Wood to attack not simply for revenge, but to defend itself.
“There’s a great deal of work to do before we can hope to repeat the effects,” he added, and gestured to the table, littered with still more pages. I looked at them properly and realized for the first time that they were notes about the working—our working. There was a sketched diagram: the two of us reduced to blank figures at the farthest possible corners of the Summoning tome, Kasia opposite us reduced to a circle and labeled CHANNEL, and a line drawn back to a neatly rendered picture of a heart-tree. He tapped the line.
“The channel will offer the greatest difficulty. We can’t expect to conveniently obtain a victim ripped straight out of a heart-tree on every occasion. However, a captured walker might serve instead, or even a victim of lesser corruption—”
“Jerzy,” I said suddenly. “Could we try it with Jerzy?”
The Dragon paused and pressed his lips together, annoyed. “Possibly,” he said.
“First, however,” he added, “we must codify the principles of the spell, and you need to practice each separate component. I believe it falls into the category of fifth-order workings, wherein the Summoning provides the frame, the corruption itself provides the channel, and the purging spell provides the impulse—do you remember absolutely nothing I’ve taught you?” he demanded, seeing me bite my lip.
It was true I hadn’t bothered to remember much of his insisted-on lessons about the orders of spells, which were mostly for explaining why certain spells were more difficult than others. As far as I could see, it all came down to the obvious: if you put together two workings to make a new spell, usually it would be harder than either one of those alone; but beyond that, I didn’t find the rules very useful. If you put together three workings, it would be harder than any one of them alone, but at least when I tried it, that didn’t mean it would be harder than either two: it all depended on what you were trying to do, and in what order. And his rules didn’t have anything to do with had happened down there in the chamber.
I didn’t want to speak of it, and I knew he didn’t, either. But I thought of Kasia, struggling towards me while the Wood tore at her; and of Zatochek, on the edge of the Wood, one attack away from being swallowed. I said, “None of that matters, and you know it.”
His hand tightened on the papers, crumpling pages, and for a moment I thought he would start to shout at me. But he stared down at them and didn’t say a word. After a moment, I went for my spellbook and dug out the illusion spell we’d cast together, in winter, all those long months ago. Before Kasia.
I pushed away the heap of papers enough to clear some room before us, and set the book down in front of me. After a moment, without a word, he went and took another volume off the shelf: a narrow black book, whose cover glimmered faintly where he touched it. He opened it to a spell covering two pages, written in crisp letters, with a diagram of a single flower and every part of it attached to a syllable of the spell somehow. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s begin.” And he held his hand out to me across the table.
It was harder to take it this time, to make that deliberate choice, without the useful distraction of desperation. I couldn’t help but think about the strength of his clasp, the long graceful lines of his fingers closed around my hand, the warm callused tips brushing my wrist. I could feel his pulse beating against my own fingers, and the heat of his skin. I stared down at my book and tried to make sense of the letters, my cheeks hot, while
he began to cast his own spell, his voice clipped. His illusion started taking shape, another single perfectly articulated flower, fragrant and beautiful and thoroughly opaque, and the stem nearly covered in thorns.
I began in a whisper. I was trying desperately not to think, not to feel his magic against my skin. Nothing whatsoever happened. He didn’t say anything to me: his eyes were fixed determinedly on a point above my head. I stopped and gave myself a private shake. Then I shut my eyes and felt out the shape of his magic: as full of thorns as his illusion, prickly and guarded. I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it. I heard him draw a sharp breath, and the sharp edifice of his spell began grudgingly to let mine in. The rose between us put out long roots all over the table, and new branches began to grow.
It wasn’t the jungle of the first time we’d cast the spell: he was holding back his magic, and so was I, both of us letting only a thin stream of power feed the working. But the rosebush took on a different kind of solidity. I couldn’t tell it was an illusion anymore, the long ropy roots twisting together, putting fingers into the cracks of the table, winding around the legs. The blossoms weren’t just the picture of a rose, they were real roses in a forest, half of them not open yet, the other half blown, petals scattering and browning at the edges. The thick fragrance filled the air, too sweet, and as we held it, a bee came hovering in through the window and crept into one of the flowers, prodding it determinedly. When it couldn’t get any nectar out, it tried another, and another, small legs scrabbling at the petals, which gave way exactly as if they could bear the weight of a bee.
“You won’t get anything here,” I told the hovering bee, and blew at it, but it only tried again.
The Dragon had stopped staring over my head, any awkwardness falling before his passion for magic: he was studying our twined spells with the same fierce intent look he bent on his most complicated workings, the light of the spell bright in his face and his eyes; he was hungry to understand. “Can you hold it alone?” he demanded.